Excellent point. When I started almost no one had a computer at home, and when we got computers we couldn’t call in for our email. Life was much better - our time was our own. Though checking email from home was much better than doing it by staying later.
Even when I retired I didn’t have my phone hooked into work email. That seems even worse.
One director I had gained a reputation for calling people at home, which was considered weird at the time. (Though he was a good guy.) No go-getters work all night.
I believe they didn’t fire him because it would be a pain to replace him. I don’t believe he ever got a raise.I think I mentioned above that in one review the only guy who left work on time got rated unsatisfactory though he got his work done just fine.
Hell, between dinner and leaving time of 9 pm people mostly messed around and got little work done. A guy who worked for me planned his honeymoon, which was fine with me. The whole thing was to make the project look better to the higher ups.
That was my experience in consulting. In fact, rarely did anyone ever say “you need to work 80 hour weeks”. Usually it’s “this is due Monday” and the rest just sorts itself out naturally. But on a typical project, I might only really be working from 8:30am to 6 or 7pm. Then we go get dinner. Then maybe an hour of checking email or last minute edits to a report due in the morning.
And as I moved up to “management”, I found a lot less time was spent doing “work” and more spent on managing relationships and making sure other people were getting their work done.
Really what drives it is the need to curry favor from managers and partners so they staff you on projects and advocate for you during review time. On paper you only need to bill like 35-40 hours a week
That’s kinda the way it is in some law firms. Yeah, there is a minimum number of billing hours. But if you just hit that number, you are told that any number of your colleagues are exceeding it. At its more extreme, you keep a clean shirt in your office.
Then there is the paradoxical element that you are entitled to unlimited leave. Just take it whenever you have the time!
Actually you might not get paid poorly, but you’re pretty likely to get paid quite a bit less for what you do in particular (for folks like those in the skilled trades it is much closer to a wash). But the trade-off in stability is worth it for many.
The company had a requirement that 5% of the staff be rated unsatisfactory - a very popular strategy in silicon valley. That everyone might be doing a fine job was specifically not a reason to violate this rule.
You might be overestimating the rights of employees in the US. There were no absolute standards for rating what we did, so no real basis for protesting. Of course this person was not told why he was in trouble.
BTW I started the process for extricating myself from the group and then the company right after this meeting.
That’s the unpaid leave scam. It probably results in less leave being taken, as well as removing the leave owed to you which gets cashed out if you leave.
At my last job a large amount of vacation was taken to reduce your hours when you hit the max and no longer accrued it. That was a good excuse to take it which no longer works if you have unlimited time.
That all goes back to an old performance rating system IIRC invented by McKinsey and embraced by Jack Welch at GE. Basically you have A, B, and C performers. A’s are your superstars. B is most people. Cs are everyone you want to get rid of.
In the big consulting firms where I worked previously, we just ranked everyone. No grades. Just a straight ranking of “best” to “worst”. Above a certain threshold, you might be eligible for raises and promotions. Below a certain threshold, you probably should look for a new job.
Keep in mind it was basically based on the opinions of managers and partners. Not based on the number of hours you billed. So it ends up being very arbitrary, political, and petty. Really the opposite. What was explained to me was that you want to get into an orbit around the right rainmakers so they constantly feed you work so you can maintain your hours.
But everyone couple of months, suddenly someone would be gone for some ambiguous “performance reasons”, whatever that means.
Oh, I wasn’t so much bitching that I dislike SQL,- far from it! Between the programmer/analyst stretch and the business analyst stretch, I did a job that was about 60% SQL development by design. I got pretty good at it.
It was more that in terms of things that are not in the usual realm of Business Analyst tasks, developing a whole ETL package in SSIS with a bunch of associated SQL stored procedures and queries is right up there with the best of them. It was something I ended up doing because I happened to have the education and experience to do it, not because it was something that was typically in the BA skillset.
I don’t dislike SQL. I started my career in the 90s as a combination developer, programmer/analyst, consultant (with some BA and PM in there as well) up until and while getting my MBA. Mostly 90s client server and basic web stuff like PowerBuilder, Oracle PL/SQL, SQL Server, Access, Visual Basic, some HTML and Java. I learned pretty quickly I didn’t want to have my head buried in code all day.
I mean the whole reason I went to business school was to do more strategy/management consulting. But for years after business school, I got stuck being “the SQL guy”. I wouldn’t care so much, but I got stuck doing so much SQL that I didn’t get any experience doing anything else. It’s not like these companies need a “Senior VP of Writing SQL” or “Partner / Head of SQL”
Although, in all fairness, SQL did eventually get me into a firm where it helped propel me into management and all that.
The pay is also not so bad when you calculate in the 0% of your career spend unemployed. If you are in a highly cyclical, lay-off prone industry, those periods of unemployment translate to a pretty big paycut, overall. My dad worked for defense contractors, and I have vivid memories of stressful interludes when a contract ended and he got laid off.
Yeah, that’s where it came from. My boss at Bell Labs had what he called natural rankings. You ranked everyone in order, but if two managers argued too long about the relative rankings of people, they went into a bucket.
I left those meetings not feeling dirty, which was a real plus.
People who pursue “100 hour a week” careers tend to not be the sort of people who are interested in steady, safe, stable careers. Or maybe they look at it a different way. “Safe and stable” comes from being a high achiever, working for top-tier companies that will give you exposure to the right skills, experience, connections, etc, and a high earning potential.
And are we talking about a government job at the DMV or something a bit more prestigious? I’ve met plenty of people who have left high stress jobs in finance or law to take jobs at the SEC or other agencies. And vice versus - left the public sector to take jobs in consulting or law firms.
I am just specifically referring to the idea that long stretches of unemployment have an adverse impact on lifetime earnings.
It’s like a landlord failing to take into account stretches of unoccupied units when forecasting revenue. People remember the good times and forget the bad.
I’ve just skimmed the thread, probably read 80 of 134 posts, but. It seems the assumption is people mostly work ungodly hours for some later reward. What if work is the reward?
In my 20’s and 30’s, I wrote code for Windows and Mac apps. High performance image processing stuff. I loved what I did, and willingly worked 100 hour weeks because it was fun! Seriously! I loved making things that someone would use. I loved making those things easier to use/performant. It was awesome. Around 1998, I started a consulting company and worked those same hours, and billed all those hours, and suddenly the more I worked, the more I made! I billed almost $500k in 2000.
Then me and partner had a kid, and things changed; I took a regular job and worked kinda regular hours because I still liked making cool things but now there were other priorities. Now I miss those days when I could seize on a software problem like a terrier, in my 20’s and 30’s.
A person’s intensely creative years are a limited span. It seems quite understandable to me that people spend that span creating, yes at crazy weekly hours.
Your situation is a bit of an exception. If your work is your passion/play/entertainment then yeah, working 80-100 hours may be fun and something you do voluntarily.
However, I don’t think everyone working those hours is doing it because they enjoy what they do quite that much.
I was one of those people who was working crazy hours (yes sometimes over 100, mostly ~70) because I got a high out of solving problems. I didn’t realize at the time what kind of damage I was doing to my team with my 24X7 “always on” mentality. I gave people bad reviews because they didn’t respond to messages sent at 10pm by 6am.
I was 25-30 at the time. Most of the people on my team were older than me, had kids or just other interests. Probably a mistake by my bosses to promote me over them so quickly (I was promoted three times in five years).
Funny thing is many of these team members remember me fondly from those days, and have provided nice recommendations on LinkedIn. Because I was so passionate, results driven and demanding in those days it was as infectious as it was maddening. But who knows what kind of wreckage I left in my wake.
Subsequent to that I’ve had periods of 1-2 years when I’ve effectively had two jobs and put in a lot of hours. But I was a lot better at understanding that this was my choice and shouldn’t change expectations of others.
Yeah, I think this is very common in tech where people often have a strong passion for coding / tech work, combined with an almost cult-like atmosphere at a lot of tech companies. I’ve worked at enough of those companies where I just know to be successful you need to have this “irrational exuberance”.
It was always kind of a mix for me. The hours and travel I didn’t so much mind, in and of themselves. Usually it is work that just needs to get done. Like if I have to spend a couple of hours at night updating a report or slide deck for tomorrow, I barely consider that “work”.
What I did hate was getting involved in these “death march” projects where, for some reason, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. And usually there’s some impetus that it HAS to get done, otherwise everyone gets fucked.
I don’t think that’s true at all. It’s a common fiction at tech companies that young people are somehow “more creative” or “smarter” (even though most startups are, in fact, founded by more experienced people in their 40s).
The reason tech companies hire so many young people is that a) they are super-eager to work crazy hours, b) they don’t have a lot of other responsibilities and c) they are cheaper. It’s why they create campus-like environments and hold happy hours and whatnot. To create a similar experience to being in college. College students accept that they have hours and hours of homework after a full day of classes. They eat meals and socialize with their classmates. Their identity is often tied to the school. So they tend not to think of it as “working 70,80, 100 hour weeks”. It’s just their “life”.
It only tends to become a problem when they get a bit older and start thinking about wanting to have a family.
I’m sure it depends on the person, but I stand by what I said. I’m approaching 60, and there’s no way in heck I have the drive, attention span, and ability to absorb new things that I did when I was in my 20’s and 30’s. At 20, I wrote a MIDI sequencer with a graphical interface, a lot of it in assembly language, just to accompany my guitar playing. Just for me. For fun. I could do that now but it would be a huge effort and not fun and take a long time. Back in the day it was exhilarating and I could crank out that much code with little effort. A person slows down with age.
