Why do highly educated people accept 100 hour a week jobs?

In My Humble Opinion
221

I am near the end of my career, 5+ years to go. When I started out of university, I took a job with an international firm, that required 80-100 hours a week, especially in the first 4-5 years. The money wasn’t that great but it was at market, and I wasn’t in one of the top 5 metropolitan cities in the US. It was considered paying your dues, and the experience I received was top notch. After my promotion into management after 5 years, the hours reduced to about 50-60 per week, and my pay was commensurate with market for my position. I left the firm after about 9 years and took a corporate management position, with the hours still about 50-60 per week, while my base pay was commensurate with market, my bonuses began to become outsized, and based upon my individual and group performance. For the last 15 years, I have been in a C-suite position, and my hours are still in the 50+ range. I have very little stress in my job, and the majority of my time is spent on developing the strategic direction for our company and mentoring people on my teams to become better leaders. I work for a large privately held family owned company and my goal is to ensure that our shareholders continue to earn a better return by investing in all of us as employees than by selling the company and passively investing in the equity markets.

My family life is great. Am able to spend quality time with my kids and spouse. Also, am able to focus time on several charity boards that I serve on.

The investment early on I made in becoming good at what I do, has paid off for me and my life goals I set out. YMMV.

222

It strikes me that in the medium to long run, this’ll bite companies in the ass, as people in their 30s and 40s end up retiring, as there won’t be that pool of trained 20 and 30 somethings coming up to take over.

In other words, this only works at the moment because there’s a large pool of trained workers right now, but if we (as a nation) aren’t training more constantly, that pool will eventually dry up. I mean, I’m 48, and it’s not like the places I’ve worked have been chock full of 20 and 30 somethings gunning for my job- for the most part, it’s been same-aged, or within 5-10 years of me on either side for the last 15 or so years.

223

Unfortunately companies seem to view it as “people switch jobs every few years, so why should we bother worrying about their future”. If they don’t get any training and/or burn out, who cares? That’s someone else’s problem to deal with. Of course this is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The other side of this, that most people know you can usually get a bigger raise by changing companies than you do by trying to advance in the company you’re in, to me must mean companies still think they can exploit some people’s unwillingness to move jobs. I guess some people are going to job-hop a ton and some people stick around in spite of not getting significant pay bumps so the ambiguity creates this situation where companies simultaneously view the employees as cogs but at the same time try to see if they can keep people accepting lower relative wages if they don’t move on.

224

I’ve heard HR people admit to accepting turnover to save money. The thing they don’t get is that the best people are most likely to leave, and the mediocre people are more likely to stay. And that if you’ve done good hiring, more than 5% of your staff is really good.
When I started only people with real problems got unsatisfactory ratings. Then I moved to Silicon Valley where they decided that the bottom 5% were unsatisfactory and should be pushed out, year after year.
Now I understand that the Netflix model is that everyone but the to 10% or so should be encouraged to leave.

225

Yeah I don’t know how much of it is trying to copycat the tech giants. Also I’d bet a company like Netflix can screw around like that and still be a big enough name that they retain some really good employees.

226

Here are the top counties by GDP
United States (GDP: 20.49 trillion)
China (GDP: 13.4 trillion)
Japan: (GDP: 4.97 trillion)
Germany: (GDP: 4.00 trillion)
United Kingdom: (GDP: 2.83 trillion)
France: (GDP: 2.78 trillion)
India: (GDP: 2.72 trillion)
Italy: (GDP: 2.07 trillion)
Brazil: (GDP: 1.87 trillion)
Canada: (GDP: 1.71 trillion)

We all know about the US
I have no idea about the work culture in China. Although this does include Hong Kong and Singapore which are major financial hubs.
Japan you mentioned the “salaryman” culture. A lot of it is ritual bullshit that does nothing to increase actual productivity. And the government supports many industries. Both of these factors have created a lot of economic problems since the 80s when “Japan was supposed to take over the world”.
EU countries like Germany, France, Italy as well as Canada have much better worker protections and work life balance than the US.
the UK is a (the) world financial hub (“City”) with hours similar to Wall Street
Brazil has it’s own particular problems these days. People are lucky to be working, let alone working crazy hours.

227

What drives this is the demands of Wall Street. Companies exist to make money for their shareholders, not to create fulfilling life-long careers for their employees. To quote Kevin Spacey in “The Big Kahuna”, the only reason they haven’t replaced employees with robots is because they haven’t invented them yet. They didn’t have robots when the film was made in 1999. Now they do.

So the point is, any large public company is driven by the demands of the shareholders, who are, as you may have guessed, mostly institutional investors (AKA investment banks, hedge funds, venture capitalists, private equity firms, asset management firms, etc where people work 100 hours a week to figure out how to squeeze every penny out of their investments).

In any company, the employees are usually the highest cost. So obviously the easiest way to cut costs is to cut employees. Or at the very least, cut things like training and other programs.

What’s interesting is that management jobs do not seem to be diminishing. If anything, they are proliferating. Read the book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. large corporations still have all these layers of VPs and Directors and whatnot to “lead” and “come up with innovative ideas”. But to me they mostly seem like nonsensical jobs. Unless they are sales, mostly the only thing they manage is a budget. They hire consultants and outsourcing firms to do all the work. I’ll go into these companies sometimes and be like (to myself) “why don’t any of these idiots know how any of this stuff works? I’ve been here a few weeks and I’ve figured it out”.

I think it’s different in sales, so long as you make your numbers. Or like my brother’s job at Proctor & Gamble where he does marketing analysis for a specific brand. So long as people buy toothpaste, his job won’t change all that much. Or functions like accounting or HR that are ongoing operations. The company needs to report earnings every quarter and they are always hiring and firing people.

But most IT jobs forget it. Generally companies need IT workers to build some system and then go away. As much as they can, they will want those systems outsourced or hosted in the cloud. And the technology constantly changes, so why do they want to keep people around for years to become experts in platforms as they become obsolete?

228

There are three countervailing forces I can think of here, particularly for larger companies.

  • Companies that have decided, for some work, not to go with cloud-native apps, because their operations are too idiosyncratic (or actually, not everything is in the cloud yet)
  • Cloud-native apps still needing a lot of modification
  • Other application development, particularly customer-facing apps/tools…in my experience, the desire for additional app dev is much larger than actual budget, meaning there’s work for years and years

I do agree that the era of (say) Joe leading a five-year project to build a billing system, and then having twenty years of a guaranteed serving-watering job, are gone.

229

So I fully expect every company to act in its self-interest.

The dynamic that is interesting is that companies are willing to pay people a lot of money to change companies but aren’t willing to give people a comparable pay bump to retain them. I think this is probably mostly rational on their part because while employees job hop way more than they used to, there are still enough that will accept the 1% raise every year that the company can still get away with it.

EDIT: I do think that investor behavior is going to incentivize a lot of short-term decisions even if they’re detrimental in the long-term.

230

That’s the problem. If you aren’t considered a top 10% “rock star” whatever that means, then as far as the company is concerned, you can fuck off. For a “rock star” the company will practically invent a position for you to be successful at. Any mistakes will be considered “learning opportunities”. For non-rock stars, you can do your job as asked and they will be up your ass regardless for not coming up with 50 ways to do it better.

231

One dynamic that often comes into play is whether Sr. Management is trying to ‘build’ something to live in for the rest of their lives, or if they’re trying to pretty something up to flip it.

Think about the investments and design decisions you might make if you intended your new house to be one your family lived in for generations.

Now imagine the house you’re just trying to flip within 90 days for a 35% profit.

In other words: everything is different if a certain profit metric is your only goal, and it’s a short-term goal, than if you’re building a brand that your grandkids will inherit.

It’s even worse if earnings per share (EPS) is your basic objective, or if you’re trying to create financials that will look good in a public offering (or thereafter).

And almost everything about how that company operates will flow from that basic first principle: its true objective.

Including the marching orders that the C-Suite gives Middle Management, explaining no end of seemingly inexplicable decisions made by middle managers (“shit rolls downhill,” and “you can’t do anything other than what the organization will support.”)

I would guess that @Omar_Little found something of an old school company. I would also guess that (S)he knows the type of company that I’m talking about.

In companies with a short term (and purely pecuniary) goal, employees are generally viewed as necessary evils. In some companies, HR is effectively chartered to be prison guards, primarily tasked with keeping riots at bay and the natives reasonably mollified.

Rock stars are held close, and compensated well, but one slip and they tend to be vaporized, too. “You’re only as good as your last deal.”

As our society tends to lean more toward Social Darwinism, Corporate America is never far behind. Arguably, in some cases they lead the charge.

232

The problem I’ve seen is that companies typically don’t publish what constitutes a “rock star” either. At one place, it may be sheer ability to do your job, and at another your actual job ability may be tangential to that, and your ability to talk the talk and play the game is paramount.

233

QFT. I’ve seen this happen more than once.

234

No, because then everyone and their brother would try and charter the same career path.

To take an absurd example, I give you former Heinz CFO David Knopf, who took on the role at age 29.

What sort of lunacy drives a Fortune 500 company to place someone with maybe 5 years of work experience in the highest financial role in the company? I don’t care if he went to Princeton and worked at Goldman Sachs. Unless he’s taking those pills from Limitless, no one is that smart.

I remember reading this with one of the associates at the consulting firm where I worked at the time. He was also a Princeton grad around the same age. I jokingly told him “after reading this, as your performance coach, I’m kind of disappointed with you now.” But the fact is, my coworker was in the sort of job I’d expect of a typical 28 year old Ivy League grad - a couple years in working at a management consulting firm before deciding to go off to get an MBA or maybe a non-C level management position.

The point is, these “100 hour a week” jobs in big law firms, investment banks, and the Mckinsey/Bain/BCG firms are focusing on very different things than your typical “come to work, build your IT project and hope my boss likes me” jobs.

It’s also a reason companies don’t care about their employees (best or otherwise). They are just line items on some strategic analysis

235

Definitely. Plus it incentivizes things easy to measure. Staffing and salaries are easy to measure and minimize. The impact of turnover is harder to measure, and so gets ignored.
An anecdote - my daughter used to work for an airline company in Hong Kong. About the time she left, voluntarily, they decided to replace all Western employees with Chinese ones who worked for less. Big savings, right. However they lost the knowledge of the people they fired.
It turned out that their website was hosted in the US, and that requires that some form be filed every year. The replacements had no idea that this was needed, and their website went dark just when they were planning to do a big sale for a high travel time. Golden week, IIRC. They lost a ton of money thanks to that. Guess that saving really paid off.

236

Some companies offer voluntary buyouts to reduce staff but what may happen is the best employees take the offer and get a better job somewhere else, while the lesser employees remain.

237

I have met some absolutely incredible employees who stuck around getting overworked and underpaid on a sinking ship for years. I don’t think it’s as straightforward as that all the time. I also do think companies are rational enough that if it were that simple there would be more of an attempt at retention at least to some degree.

238

AT&T did that during the trivestiture. I left, but they didn’t offer the package to a few of the people they considered to be top. They all left in six months anyway. 1/3 of my entire center left at once (it was the beginning of the Bubble) and the place was never the same.

239

Same thing happened when my company offered an early retirement package. It was so generous, that they had way waaaaay more people apply for it…and the wrong people. It was all “no, we didn’t mean you.” They had to do so many post hoc qualifications that it caused a lot of bad feelings. And a ton of knowledge went out the door with them.

240

This thread is really interesting and I’ve found all the anecdotes and theories to be illuminating. I wanted to add an academic perspective that is entirely NOT in my field, so please bear with me, but I’m reading a great book called “Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History” by Peter Turchin, which presents and explains (with lots of data) “structural demographic theory,” which deals with why societies tend to become more or less cohesive in a cyclical fashion. One of the concepts he discusses is “elite overproduction,” which is when a small number of people own a great proportion of the country’s wealth (as is true at the present time in the US). He says that in a state of elite overproduction, elites become competitive for elite positions because losing the competition would cause very serious downward mobility. He also says that in this scenario that the elite class splits into diametrically opposed political factions (as is true now).

Anyhow, like I said, it’s not my field but it’s really interesting and I recommend the book which offers a more structural analysis (ass opposed to anecdotes) that addresses the OP’s question.