Many years ago I was working for a small consulting firm and had a stretch of time with a lot of overtime; aka "crunch time". Since these were billable hours, time was tracked daily, even if they weren't all actually billed. The tracked hours varied over the ~6 month span, but ranged from 55 hours a week to 93 for one week. Of course not 100% of the time was spent on actual work but it was pretty close.
The 93 hour week was pretty much: go to work, eat meals at desk, go home, work from home until bed time, go to sleep, then repeat. But in general weird things happened during that time, probably due to a combination of stress and unhealthy habits. For example:
- I've never been a morning person and struggled to wake up before 9 all my life. During this time I woke up early to meet with the client early in the morning. After some time I'd habitually wake up 15 minutes before 6, which was when my alarm was set at. Also due to lack of sleep I'd always be pissed that I was missing out on 15 minutes of sleep too.
- I was sleep deprived but didn't feel sleepy at all during the day. Granted I did consume a lot of coffee, but still. Adrenaline?
- Got drunk really easily. Part of client facing work is drinks with clients every so often. I used to be able to drink 4-5 beers and not show much effect externally. Towards the end of this period 1-2 drinks and I'd be slurring.
- Perversely, things were often times "fun". The team got really close to each other and we actually looked forward to going to the client office to do "battle".
Definitely not sustainable nor healthy. I got pats on the back and some token raises / bonuses but I've since learned that going above and beyond like this is not worth it. The hit to mental and physical health is just not worth the small amount of extra money and (possibly) career advancement.
Very common to have an "in the trenches" mentality and to even miss it - the shared stress and common purpose drives people close together, but mostly for the wrong reasons.
I still am actively in contact with the people from "that job" and never made as strong of a bond with others, but I still wouldn't go back.
I agree and it's similar for me. The closest work friends I have are from this company and formed during this period. 5+ years later and we still have regular gatherings. Of course the topic of conversation inevitably drift back to when we worked together and specifically during this period.
A bit of silver lining in all this I guess, the friendships that have formed.
This is also the reason why sororities, military,.. do hazing.
Because the hardship makes forming a bond easier.
Its something that evolves naturally. Most people dont know why it works it just happens
As a parent who added a second child when my first was 2 and a half, I think you're doing it wrong.
A year later, both children are still extremely demanding. It's all about setting limits and knowing when to bend them, like last night when my daughter finally figured out how to wake herself up in the middle of the night to go poop. That's one of the rare sleepless nights that's worth it.
Otherwise, knowing how you sleep is also important. I fumble around in the dark, use extremely dim lights, and have no problem letting my kids sleep with me for an hour or two. A full night's sleep is vital. I'm really good at falling asleep after giving a bottle because I make them before going to bed, turn on no lights, and keep my eyes closed once I'm in the rocking chair.
> You have to add in a boss who spends 2/3rd of the time you're home screaming at you to the mix.
You really need to learn modern discipline techniques. We use 1-2-3 magic. When our toddler screams at us, it's usually an immediate "ONE!" If it's really bad, there's a time out with no counting. It really works.
I even help my wife learn by shouting "ONE!" "TWO!" ... when I'm out of the room and hear my toddler get tough. The 1-2-3 magic technique requires a lot of disciple to not get sucked into a toddler argument.
As a parent of multiple children (3+), your comment really rubs me the wrong way.
It comes off as judgemental ("you're doing it wrong", "you really need to learn to"), and you're generalizing your own children's behavior as if it applied to every child.
Every child is different, their sleep cycles, reactivity, personalities, etc.
I'm not even going to comment on the 1-2-3-timeout technique apart from saying I think it's disrespectful towards children; it is basically conditioning them to fear certain words you say and to force them to do something. Isolating them when they "misbehave".
You're free to raise your children how you want, but perhaps be mindful of how you.. "give advice"
Moreover, not all parents/families are the same. Some are heavy sleepers, some are light sleepers. Some get to sleep easily, some have difficulty getting to sleep. Some families have everyone on the same schedule, other families have everyone on shifted schedules. Some have generous parental leave or a non-working parent and can devote significant direct time/attention to kids, others are working full time with little parental leave and not much support. Some are extremely relaxed and are unfazed by noise or mess, while others are anxious and have trouble controlling physiological responses to stress. And so on.
The frequency of advice-giving usually is inversely proportional to the range of skill available. It's also inversely proportional to the degree to which skill is differentiable.
It's why parenting advice is so common. No one can evaluate parenting skills and exceptional parenting and good parenting don't have that much of a difference between them.
Though I guess poor parenting can be pretty bad with abuse and whatnot, so let's say we exclude the malicious things.
Look at this guy. He saw some limited effect size with a sample size of two and decided he's a guru.
The advice is interesting, but I don’t think warrant telling someone “they’re doing it wrong”.
Your extrapolating from your experience with 2 children. Children are difficult and often respond differently to the same techniques. However if you wanted to show that a particular technique is superior in the majority of cases, some data would be useful.
In general, the workload of parenting is underestimated. This is somewhat problematic in the tech industry (male dominated) when the majority of childcare is still performed by women [1]. It leads to a lack of understanding and devalues childcare work.
I think the real problem is that almost all parents have no experience in early childhood development. They sort of learn as they go and infer the good things that happened to them. Parents are by no means early childhood development experts. Just like you go to a medical doctor you can find professionals who can help.
As a parent of two kids, the older of whom is still a pain in the ass and woke us up 6 times last night and the younger of whom slept through from the start, every child is different and any blanket statements about children based on your own parenting experience (other than "they're all different") are wrong for most other parents.
None of those techniques work consistently. We plied out first kid with all the tricks and nothing worked. Second kid we just relaxed and accepted reality and he slept way better.
Lucky you. I have toddler twins, and one has learned to ignore all commands. what’s tricky was at some point he thought his name meant ‘other’ while he thought his name was his brother’s, or at least that his brother’s name meant ‘me’. Worse, it’s easy to accidently say the wrong name. Together you get all kinds of goofy conditioning.
Except that having a child is an optional activity that you choose to do, whereas going to work is (usually) required. Ideally that work doesn't include periods of extreme overwork, and lucky people are sometimes able to walk away from jobs that do, but many people just have to do it in order to put food on the table.
Work is optional. There are plenty of people who get by without it. Doesn't mean they're doing well or healthy. And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional.
> Work is optional. There are plenty of people who get by without it. Doesn't mean they're doing well or healthy.
Except if you don't have a kid, you have better chances of staying well and healthy. That's the whole point. That's what is meant with parenthood being optional and work not.
> And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional.
With the rate at which world population is increasing[1], I think the opposite is true. It wasn't that long ago that we reached a world population of 7 billion. Now, we're apparently more than halfway to 8 billion. How in the world can the earth support so many of us?
Yesterday, there was a post here that talked about the absolutely brutal conditions that we're raising livestock in[2]. We wouldn't need to be so god damn efficient in working livestock if we didn't have so many mouths to feed.
Second, ever single time someone has said that overpopulation was going to be the end of us, they've been wrong. To quote Wikipedia, which go so far back as Ancient Carthage and Greece:
Concern about overpopulation is an ancient topic. Tertullian was a resident of the city of Carthage in the second century CE, when the population of the world was about 190 million (only 3–4% of what it is today). He notably said: "What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint) is our teeming population. Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us.... In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race." Before that, Plato, Aristotle and others broached the topic as well. [1]
Finally, to answer your question of "How can the world support so many of us?", I would like to point at that with every new person born, that is a new person thinking of scientific advancements that can be made, producing stuff for others, for their kids, etc.
Each group is improving but mix of groups is changing.
High IQ populations have low fertility vs low IQ groups having high. South Korea with IQ 106 has TRF of 1.17. Nigeria IQ 84 has TRF of 5.53.
A gain of IQs within groups will be dwarfed by the change between groups.
If you think IQ tests are bogus we can use other metrics, eg Europe had 2x the population of Sub Saharan Africa in 1950, now Africa is bigger but has produced no hard science Nobel prizes and no new technology (like South Korea's smartphones)
Well, if everyone stopped having kids effective immediately, we could have the population issue solved very quickly. Along with all our other problems, too, after a few decades of suffering.
If the world population is 7 billion now and will be 1,000 billion around 2055, then by my math (142.9^(1/36)) that's a growth rate of 14.8% a year. Since the current growth rate is (based on the first few hits on Google) a little over 1%, I wonder why someone would expect it to go up that drastically. Especially with global warming and everything.
> Work is optional. There are plenty of people who get by without it.
You must live in a very different world than most people do if that's the norm among your peer group.
> And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional.
At a macro level, sure (though a slow, steady reduction in population over the next few generations might do the planet some good), but on the individual level, it's absolutely optional.
That's only if our current economic model stays the same. At the moment most developed countries rely on immigration to create growth by adding more consumers.
However, it is changing, as the world develops, fewer people are born and within a century our population growth will flatten and our global population will even decline to the 2000's level.
Children should not be made just to keep society going. That's quite a selfish reason to have a child, to be honest.
Children are literally the entities that make our shared future viable. If we don't reproduce at a sufficient rate we literally, as a species, will not be able to sustain our own existence. And considering how much more personally expensive (both in yes of resources and one's self) we have made raising children over the years it's the absolute opposite of selfish to have them.
How many people have you met that tell you that they're having children because they want to ensure the future of humanity? I'd bet not many, if any at all.
What you describe might be considered selfless, most parents have kids for fairly selfish reasons. There's (usually) nothing wrong with that, of course, but let's not try to paint a rosy picture that doesn't exist.
If the majority of people's stated reason for having children was to ensure the survival of the human race, maybe that argument would hold water.
But most people's desire to have children center around selfish things, like continuing their family line, or because their parents want grandkids, or because "that's just what you do to get to the next life stage", or because their religion pushes them to, or "John and Jane have such a beautiful child and I want one too", or because they want a small version of themselves that will love them, or truly foolish things like believing a child will save a bad marriage.
And I'm not even saying selfish acts are bad! People do selfish things all the time, and as long as those things don't harm anyone else, so what? But I wish people would give more thought to the social, financial, physical, emotional, and mental implications of having a child before doing so, rather than just taking it as a given that it's what they're supposed to do.
At least there are some people who have kids because they genuinely want to nurture, educate, and mentor a new human, but I'd be hard pressed to find someone who'd say "to ensure the future of humanity" is one of their top reasons for having children.
Having kids is not essential to society. Actually, society would be better off if we just maintained our current population level and learned to live with the resources at hand instead or ever expanding and depleting the ocean, the underground and the forests until there is nothing left.
If you consider having kids as an individual sacrifice, then maybe you are having kids for the wrong reasons.
People should not be forced to have kids to perpetuate society or because its good for the economy or because the government( of any country) says we should.
Could you please explain what happens in, say, 80 years (or so) if we collectively stopped having kids? The answer is this: human beings cease to exist. Now, that may be something you view as a goal to achieve, and in the absolutely trivial (and meaningless) sense that everything (including our existence as a species) is optional you'd have a point. Beyond that trivial and meaningless sense, however, you're simply arguing about how many children we should have.
Why is maintaining our current population level something we should shoot for? Arguably the world is already overpopulated, if you consider resource usage per person.
Let's not forget the most devastating aspect of overpopulation, more and more people around to spout the same unproven theories over the last 50 years about "forest" and "underground" depletion.
The last time I was reading on this topic, around 10% of kids are actually unwanted -- that is, one or both parents did not want to ever have kids, or did not want to have more kids. Most kids are planned to some degree. For the remainder that aren't, the couple does want to have kids at some point, but they didn't plan to have kids at that particular time.
Regardless, children are optional, full stop. There are certainly reasons why people who don't plan to have kids end up having them anyway, but that doesn't change the fact that it's an optional activity.
For the vast majority, life doesn't get that complicated. I think even 5% of the population being forced into parenthood is too much of an exaggeration.
A high percentage of children are not planned. They are a natural consequence of sex, which Mother Nature sneakily designed to be desirable in its own right, whether people wanted babies or not.
Most of human sexual morality seems to be rooted in this inconvenient, annoying fact of life.
Accidents happen, sure. Education, availability, and consistent use of contraception is nowhere near where it should be (and even where it is, it's not foolproof). And when contraception fails, access to abortion can be difficult depending on local regulation, and many people have an aversion to that option for various reasons. But none of that changes the fact that having a child is indeed optional.
Nobody should be forced to work 75 hrs to put food on the table, it's dehumanizing and we, as a society, have enough wealth to make sure everyone can live a minimally enjoyable life.
Having a child is optional for individuals, but not for society, and so it's really only "pseudo-optional" for individuals: there is some distributed portion of requirement on everyone.
I wish there was more discussion about how society should recognize and handle this. Much of modern society is orthogonal to parenting and raising children, I would love to see it addressed more in the public discourse -- maybe even "disrupted" by tech so we can be thrice better parents, citizens, and workers.
I mean, I see government having a role here. Both in developing pro child development resources and policies. Europe is way ahead of the US for example. Some US states are way better than others as well.
Small bits of crunch time can be fun. You really get to stay in the zone and it's really liberating. I enjoy an occasional crunch (it's very rare in my job) but after the crunch I'm done and productivity falls to near zero.
Likely cortisol as well. Cortisol is the bane of modern society. We evolved to benefit from short intense bursts of cortisol and adrenaline, but our health suffers tremendously from extended elevated levels. And practically everything in the way we have structured society maximizes cortisol levels, especially in the workplace. It's particularly destructive to cognitive abilities, which is why I hope that maybe it might eventually get some attention and be consciously avoided. It would benefit productivity as well as benefit the health and happiness of nearly everyone.
I just had this week last week. 12 hours of work straight through two weekends and a few drinks every night. It's like one super long day where you're locked in. Then I slept 12 hours and spent 5 full days home with kids.
In my experience, when a workplace has a perpetual crunch time culture, little if any additional work gets done that wouldn't have gotten done if everyone stuck to 40 hour weeks. I'm very curious how true this is in 996 places. When someone knows that they're going to spend 12 hours in the office regardless of how much work is actually required, that time gets padded out a LOT with non-work stuff, both to preserve their own sanity and out of resentment for the expectation of 12 hour days.
In my experience 996 is a scam to get compensated for doing tons of hours of work while often doing no more work than the employees on a regular schedule. I've seen plenty of people working two jobs who just do the needful and rest every minute they can who do far less work tha their "less hardworking" peers.
You CAN take a 40hr week worker, make them work extra, and their productivity will spike pretty hard. It's just that people eventually adapt by resting more at work. Employers end up seeing little additional work done even if they schedule somebody for an extra 20hrs a week.
The only jobs where more hours = more work sustainably are jobs like trucking where the work is actually very easy and its just a matter of staying awake at the wheel. Long work weeks are mostly a form of virtue signalling which you recieve money for doing. The only reason the 24/7 crunch time companies don't immediately go broke from sheer inefficiency is because they don't pay their staff overtime. Everybody would be better off in the long run with a culture that was focused on hiring a greater number of people to work more reasonable hours with strongly encouraged breaks. This 996 crap is a reflection of the egos of people like Jack Ma who would rather have employees with his work ethic rather than employees that get a lot of work done in little time.
> The only reason the 24/7 crunch time companies don't immediately go broke from sheer inefficiency is because they don't pay their staff overtime.
I think you also have to figure in the absurdly high value of the sort of work we're talking about. A company can launch a website after investing $2 million in its creation and have it pay for itself in a few days. That sort of return on investment is big enough to cover a multitude of grave sins of inefficiency. That's why companies can persist with open floor plan offices which over 1000 studies have shown destroy productivity, having high attrition on purpose so they can staff primarily with entry level candidates, and renting expensive office space that actually drains value rather than contributing any.
I know of two truckers personally who fell asleep at the wheel because of that attitude/culture/expectation, leading to crashes. They were okay but it was scary stuff.
Oh yeah but you legitimately can get more work done. It's just every now and again it causes a trucker to plow through a schoolbus because they're half awake at the wheel. This is why Truckers are hired as independant contractors to limit the liability of companies making them work unsafely. So they can argue they don't need to pay for little Billy's wheelchair.
Yet for the companies involved this arrangement is highly profitable. They don't pay any of the externalities. I'm not saying it's a good thing. It's merely a profitable thing.
I heard from people who work in that culture that it is more for show. Most people still browse YouTube/Reddit and stuff. When everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency.
I've worked in that environment, but without anyone goofing off. Fortunately, as a contractor, I did not have to come in on the weekends.
My coworkers were no more productive than me: IMNSHO, they would end up dragging as much busywork out of every problem as they could, simply because they were too overworked to think more than one step ahead.
To wit: we were running 10 AWS servers - to serve a mostly static website and handle a few hundred REST API calls each day.
I’ve worked in that environment as well. One of the problems is it’s a rollercoaster. You crash as soon as the emergency is over and you get nothing done until the next emergency. You just mentally shutdown. So now the quality of work when there is an emergency is shit because you’re rushing and the quality of work when there isn’t an emergency is shit because you’re recharging for the next emergency. Average output goes down even though peak output has gone up but the boss loves to see people putting in the long hours on his way out the door for a round of golf.
If you can bill $200 per hour for 75 hours a week for a year, though, maybe you'd be willing to do that for a year or so just in order to never have to do it, or any other work, ever again.
Of course, if the client actually has to pay $200 per hour you're present, it's exceedingly likely that the overtime culture will stop overnight. It's obvious that it isn't working already, once the company actually pays for it as well, it is bound to stop.
I was paid pretty well, but the period of burnout that followed cut my effective hourly rate in half.
The problem wasn't the long hours - it was that places that push long hours tend to get other, even more important things wrong as well, like product-market fit.
... and also consider that taxes (self-employment tax etc.) and expenses (health insurance) are higher when you're a contractor. You'll be lucky to see half that figure hit your bank account.
I'll give you that health insurance is more expensive as a contractor (though not enough to significantly cut into $750k), but if your taxes are also higher then you really need to talk to a good CPA. If you are doing it right, paying less in taxes is one of the BENEFITS of being self-employed.
Can’t agree more with your sentiment. It’s hard to get people to see that though. I spent so much time trying to help employees prioritize their work, the response was always everything is important. Some people almost thrive on everything being a crisis, because others reward that behavior. People can go take their “rockstars”, I’ll take the people who can function in a team and not spent time trying to suck everyone into their shit vortex.
Koreans have pushed back over the years, and it's much more reasonable now. It was a "trend" at one point, and now that the phase is over, the work-life balance is more favorable. I'm not sure what the situation looks like in Japan, but based on my experience living in Asia, China seems to be lagging behind Korean work culture -- so they will catch the 996 trend for short-lived amount of time, and then it will also normalize again as workers protest and the ill-effects become known.
Working as an engineer in a traditional japanese tech company(大企業), I can say that 996 is not a norm here. In fact at my workplace, working on two consecutive weekends is prohibited. A significant fraction follow 995 though.
I worked 60-70 hours a week for 6 months and destroyed by health (actually programming for 50+ of those hours, tracked time since it was billable hours for a consulting firm). Finished the project by the deadline I was hired for, but quit soon afterwards and within 2 months I was in the ICU, and then in and out of the hospital several times with some serious chronic health issues that I'm still recovering from 2 years later. I made a lot of money but spent the next year barely working and recovering my health. Doctor's weren't 100% sure it was stress/work related("possible" it contributed), but I was pretty sure. All things considered, it was a losing option despite the pay. I could have done it at age 25 but not at age 45.
Now I work 40-50 hours and week, make even more money(for where I live, average by SV standards), but it's still a high pressure job. I'd gladly work 25 hours a week for 1/3 the pay.
Why isn't there someone disrupting software development paying experienced people like me a low salary for 20-30 hours a week? I'd still get over half as much done as I do working 50 hours a week, I'm sure.
> Why isn't there someone disrupting software development paying experienced people like me a low salary for 20-30 hours a week? I'd still get over half as much done as I do working 50 hours a week, I'm sure.
I've seen many, many developers working 30 hours a week. It's generally not acknowledged openly or written into the contract, but it takes the form of coming in late in the morning, "working from home" at least one day a week. Or leaving work early "to beat traffic", pick up the kids etc.
The key in my experience is finding a manager who is willing to evaluate you on your performance rather than time spent at your desk, and to be a little flexible about accepting a job that doesn't pay top dollar. An experienced engineer should be able to get more done in 20-30 hours anyway than a junior engineer can in 50 hours. As long as you're reasonably productive and you don't cause trouble for anyone, I have seen people sustain jobs like that for more than a decade.
I'm in this situation. I spend about 30 hours on real development and 10 hours on self improvement (trying new stuff/learning new techniques) . I easily get as much done as my co-workers who go to every meeting and work overtime. Difference is I'm not burned out like the ones who try to look like "company men" by putting in 50 hours a week and attending every little corporate meeting and event that happens.
I think society needs to push more this part-time culture. There are many people who prefers part-time jobs but with additional free time. They may want to take care children or old folks. Or they want to pursue their dreams, like writing novels, building indie games, etc.
Maybe I should build a startup based on this premise. :)
You basically get _huge experience_ for 10-20 hours a week and you don't have to shell out that cost at 40 hours a week. I believe there are many people who don't mind working an extra 10-20 hours a week.
Yes, they may not be your Googlers, but there is still a lot of talent/experience you are able to access without breaking the bank.
(Yes, there are also non-compete agreements and various types of reasons why this doesn't work, but I maintain that many experienced devs wouldn't mind working on projects in their spare time and leading/learning/getting paid for it.)
>Why isn't there someone disrupting software development paying experienced people like me a low salary for 20-30 hours a week?
I've wondered this for quite awhile myself. Many companies would benefit from being able to keep software developers "on retainer" like a lawyer even. That sort of arrangement might mitigate the cycle of a product becoming excellent, and then immediately starting to go down hill because the company feels compelled to make the developers do something. I'm not confident it would help as you would still face managers who want to 'make a name for themselves' pioneering changes just to get some credit regardless of how beneficial the users would find it.
My personal theory on the matter is that it's a combination of "this is just how things are done", lingering influence of the Protestant Work Ethic, and managers who measure their personal and organizational value based upon how many people they control and how much they control them. It's always good to keep in mind that the 40 hour work week and the way work, offices, and much else in society is structured was optimized for very predictable constant physical labor in manufacturing. It was never meant to be used for mental labor or intellectual pursuits at all. We're still adapting to pure mental work being the most valuable sort of work to society. We haven't dealt with things like human beings having much different capacities for extended exertion between physical and mental types. We recognize an awful lot of problems (the destructive nature of interruptions, the diminished returns of long work days, etc) but there are very few organizations dedicating themselves to finding working solutions.
"Why isn't there someone disrupting software development paying experienced people like me a low salary for 20-30 hours a week? I'd still get over half as much done as I do working 50 hours a week, I'm sure."
That's what I do. I started out freelancing and eventually I found a client who eventually needed buy all my available time. 30/h a week, at a salary that feeds me fine.
For reference, I do PHP and linux admin for WordPress and some linux admin work. It's not super fun, but I work for a tiny company and have to look at all parts of a bunch of rando tech stacks (like, moodle, drupal, java applications, mail servers, etc and everything from firewalls to CSS for IE10).
It doesn't "scale". So there there is nothing to "disrupt". I just work with a couple of smart people who do good work, and if we tied to make the business grow substantially we'd probably just work more for the same amount of money, so we are just really selective about what jobs we take. I think. I don't have a great analysis of what makes it work cause I am in the middle of it.
This happened to me. I was working 40 hours per week but saying I was working 75 hours per week (without really measuring it). Then I got a second job which made it more important to manage my time effectively (including measuring my time). With the second job, I actually started working 72 hours per week and realized how hard it is to work that much time due to the necessities in life (sleeping, eating/shopping, bathing, commuting, ect) not to mention all the distractions that come up during work when you think you have more then 40 hours to complete all your work.
I recommend anyone try to work that much for a few months, it really puts perspective on how limited our time is and the value of time management.
I used to really work 70-100 hours of week. You would see me responding to Nagios emails at 3am. Mind we didn’t use PagerDuty. I enjoyed it because I had nothing to do outside of work. After three years I ended up choosing a different job and have a better wlb.
> And even if they do spend 75 hours at their workplace, they're probably spending far less than 40 actually working.
Interesting, in Europe the hours are less but you are expected to work every minute you are there. In America you are expected to physically stay longer but being on FB/Reddit is no big deal.
I still find it hard to believe that it's universal across all or even most companies in (for example) Germany. Do software shops there not have Playstation/table tennis/table football or whatever that people use to take a break during working hours?
If you are a programmer then work is different. Sure you are not on your feet all day at the beck and call of customers, however, if you are not working then your computer is. Waiting is not supposed to be part of the job. Learning on the job is also verboten. Very little time that is on the company clock is spent travelling.
I have colleagues in sales that do lots of travel, then, when they are back in the office they spend the morning filling in expenses. Sure this is all work that the company needs someone to do and someone has got to go on those planes. I also know from experience that time spent travelling is tiring, but is it strictly work?
On the plane they could have the laptop out and be working on spreadsheets. Or they could be playing Angry Birds. Would one activity count as working and the other not?
If you are a security guard and are mostly monitoring the TV and kettle, how does that compare to the secretary that occupies the same desk by day, juggling phone calls with a constant stream of people needing assistance?
Or if you are a taxi driver working with half the day spent waiting for a fare. You could easily put in long hours doing that but how much of this work is actual work and how much of it is reading the newspaper?
With every long hours job in the Western world there are these job-specific factors to consider. If someone is doing extra shifts in a factory where there is a production line then I am far more willing to believe claims of long hours worked.
> I also know from experience that time spent travelling is tiring, but is it strictly work?
If I'm someplace other than where I want to be, it's work.
A lot of comments in this thread don't seem to understand - even if you're free to read HN during downtime, if I need to be in by 9am and am unable to leave until 7pm, the period in between was work. If I would have suffered professionally if I'd left at 5 regardless of how much "work" was done, the performative behavior is also "work".
Labor law in the states uses "engaged to work" and similar language often, mostly in the context of hourly employees. You can't tell someone "you must show up to the jobsite and wait to see if you're needed" under threat of no future work... that's being engaged to work.
The confusion is because many of us work many days remote, and/or have flexible hours. For many of us, our entire existence is oriented around improving a bottom line...so when we have down time, we are recreationally reading about how to do that better, whether we are on the clock or not. So, if you are a remote worker, and you produce 3 proof of concepts for your company for fun, and none of them pan out, how many hours did you work? Nobody knows, including you.
Why does the concept of being salary always seem to go one way (more than 40)?
I worked in a place where people "worked long hours".
A typical day would go like this: around 4pm they'd declare they had a "conference call" and call a friend from a meeting room. Then they'd watch some Netflix til 7ish, then go out to dinner (probably with the friend they called), where they'd fire off several drafted emails. If someone actually responds, they'd draft a reply then send it while getting ready for bed.
When the definition of "good work" becomes subjective, "work" becomes art, specifically performance art.
I didn’t think I suggested this necessarily went “more than 40,” only that “on” time might be hard to differentiate from “off” time, and that some activities that look like “off” (having dinner with teammates) might have real value while others that look like “on” (researching some tech framework that is irrelevant to the problem you are trying to solve) might be worthless.
> I also know from experience that time spent travelling is tiring, but is it strictly work?
> On the plane they could have the laptop out and be working on spreadsheets. Or they could be playing Angry Birds. Would one activity count as working and the other not?
If the company put me in that plane, I can do whatever I want and it'll still count as work. I wouldn't be in that plane if it wasn't for the company. The time I'm in that plane, my little kid is not with his father and my wife needs to work extra hard to keep up with her job and then take care of the kid all by herself.
It's so simple I even wonder people would ask themselves questions like this.
Or you do your taxes, respond to emails, call friends/family, plan your next family trip, all that stuff that can be done remotely and that you otherwise would've done on sunny sundays and whatever and come back fully available ? Doesn't sound that simple to me.
It doesn't matter! I could be doing anything, ANYTHING, and it'd still count as working hours. If the company doesn't want you to waste time traveling, you shouldn't be traveling.
Work is every activity you take to further the goals of your employer. So, traveling is work, waiting for a build is work, learning new tech required for the job is work etc. The caveat is that not all work is equally demanding and tiring - so, if for example your job consists of a lot of travel, you could negotiate a lower hourly rate for the time you spend traveling.
I think this is a pretty good definition, except that in creative work (like developing a novel application), sleeping often produces some of the best epiphanies/solutions. The truth is this: we have patrons, and our value is not calculable by the hour.
Meanwhile, every day someone goes to work in an office, sharpens their pencils, and finds ways to eliminate those waiting times (unless they have a powerful union of course).
The taxi driver is replaced with a rideshare with none of that aimless driving looking for an uncalled fare.
The security guard has more cameras to review, or has more walkabouts that are tracked with their fob. Or replaced with remote monitoring of the camera feeds. But has to deal with a million Amazon packages (I wish they consolidated better...). I don’t know why there isn’t a locker where I scan my fob and the right door opens...
> Or if you are a taxi driver working with half the day spent waiting for a fare.
This is a good example. Suppose the driver spends 4 hours waiting for a fare out of total 8 hours working day. Now, they obviously cannot reschedule their time as to drive 4 hours non-stop and then take 4 hours off. In that sense waiting for a fare is also work.
I would define work as everything that holds you back from doing non-work.
I had a co-worker who negotiated having his commute home be counted as work. His reasoning was that he did a lot of thinking and problem solving during the drive. Working as a developer it was kinda hard for the company to argue that thinking wasn't in fact a large part of his job.
One of my old professors had an interesting story about this.
He had an management job at an larger European company and actually had a driver for his company car.
He complained to his boss that he doesn't need a driver, he could drive himself. The boss told him: you're not supposed to drive, you're supposed to be in the back and work.
After this experience he realized the management job wasn't for him and switched to a university career.
The old school "production lines" are pretty much automated away these days. Most production requiring human labor is custom or small batch jobs. And as a result the real amount of work done is relatively small.
So this is something you learn sooner or later. People lie. And I don't mean maliciously. I mean they lie to themselves and to other people. Some prime examples:
- How much they get paid. Honestly you need to see a W2 before you believe what anyone tells you.
- Commute times. "It's 15 minutes door to door". No, it's not. It's like 35. This isn't even a "perfect circumstances" type deal. I honestly don't know what this is but it's so common for me to hear outright falsehoods for this I just take any estimate and double it and then go from there.
- How much they work. Most people who work 70, 80 or 100 hours a week just don't. I mean they may work a lot but not that much. Kudos to this study for using a diary allocating time rather than self-reporting.
- The article mentions this one but I'd forgotten about it: how much people go to the gym and how long they spend there.
There's a weirdly large amount of self-delusion and presenting a particular image that honestly I could never be bothered with (which isn't to say I don't have my own foibles of course). Sometimes I wonder what I missed out on here in terms of social norms. But it just seems so exhausting and pointless.
Investment bankers will often claim this, while also lying about their salary.
I was often surprised by my colleagues claiming extra long work weeks, all while looking remarkable fresh. I couldn't work it out - I mean, if I worked a solid 14 hour day, you could see it clearly on my face, yet if they do it, they seem to develop a healthy glow. Turns out a lot of them were in the building, but not at their desk. Oftentimes they were in the gym/steam/sauna. That explained the healthy glow!
Investment banking interns have turned up dead from exhaustion. So some of them probably do work a lot. I can see it more so than engineering because deals are so time sensitive, you really can't slack off if there's a deal on. But agreed, most are probably full of shit :)
I agree with you. Interns and analysts run the banks. They really are made to slog it out. It's the VPs, Ds and MDs that claim to work a lot, but many don't actually (thanks to the interns).
Sounds like he is working an 8-hour day, just during non-traditional times of the day. If that works for him and his family, and management isn't pissed off, sounds like a win-win.
(Now if he claims he works 14-hour days, that's a bit dishonest.)
Yeah but butt in seat time is important! Once had a job where I was working 10am to 4pm with an hour lunch. Was fine for a long time until the company management became more OCD about their bean-counting and I got a new toxic "yes man/ass kisser to management" boss.
Suddenly my work hours were an issue. They started hard enforcing a department-wide policy where if you weren't seen at your desk, you're assumed to be not working. Under the threat of being fired, I was forced to sit at work from 9am to 7pm. I suspect managers also had "monitors" assigned to keep a watch over employees like me and hours we were at our desks.
It was a massive waste of my time as I was now spending a additional 20 hours a week at the office to do the same amount of work as before.
From my experience gym/steam/sauna is probably the only structured activity you have other than work, and probably "too weak vacation" if you are lucky. And those are just required to be physically functional. 5x12 in the office at PC/phone is absolute minimum, then one of the two weekends, usually Sunday, you catch up and prepare for the next week because during other days there is too much client work (in a general sense - both internal & external clients). So it gives you 72 hours minimum office/PC time, not average.
And then you are expected to be always online, even on rare vacations, and respond to emails very quickly. Plus work from remote desktop before bedtime and right after wake up to handle overnight emails and read news. So even if you are not in office you are constantly "ON" and the brain is always working, even on a treadmill in the gym... And then during IPO/initiation/reporting season it's actual 100-120 hours of actual office hours, but that are spikes, after which there is usually some relax time of only light 5x12 schedule. This is for research. Investment bankers in a narrow sense (IPOs, etc) just work in those spike/calm mode.
When I first saw the 996 story, my first reaction - given my background - was "whiner"... But in banking your monthly salary is just to cover your "costs of doing business" (but still high), only total annual compensation is a meaningful number, of which the fixed monthly part used to be less than half in good years. So in banking you kind of know why you are doing this. In programming bonuses are usually a much smaller fraction. Plus important thing - you could actually do 100 hours work if you do different work and are switching between tasks that load different parts of the brain. Financial modelling is comparable to programming (actually it is if we agree that Excel is the most used functional programming language) by cognitive load, but it takes a small share of total time. In the 996 case of constant coding it's very doubtful. I mostly do programming now and when I have 8 hours of uninterrupted clear mind spent on complex algos - that's a very productive lucky day. In the 6-8 hours range the focus and brain capacity usually drop so much that having good sleep & rest is much more important to have another good and deep 6-8 hours tomorrow.
But then you could write docs, add tests, do simple refactoring, setup backend & cloud, fight with configs - it takes hours and does not load brain as much as some concurrent lock-free data structure. Someone still needs to do that job and it could easily turn 6-8 hours into 10-14.
Was your experience as a junior? I concur that this can often be the routine for junior team members, who get sold a false sense of importance for the work they do.
Rarely is this the routine for senior team members. Many of the most senior people I worked with only showed up if something bad had happened, or they knew their seniors were going to be around. One member of the board that I reported to only turned up for a day in the entire year, and that was for a meeting with FINMA! That also happened to be the only time I saw his boss in the office... It seems everyone's just taking the piss wherever possible.
Yes, that's an analyst experience. More senior people just travel half of the time and do client facing work. But to my surprise our MD left office usually just 1-2 hours earlier that everyone else when he was not travelling and he was also available till very late for important tasks that required his attention even from us. He was also always ON and had a lot of different work, not monkey work at Excel/email.
I eventually became an MD. Yes I was always "on", but once I figured out the tricks, I didn't do very much real work at all. It was more about not rocking the boat, and keeping a nice set of senior allies who could support me as and when needed. Basically, politics.
I too was one of those unhealthy looking, overworked bankers. I was promoted at a young age and had a lot to prove, so I overdid it for a year or two. Then I understood the secret the other MDs had known for years - you just have to look busy, not actually be busy!
When I was working construction many years ago there was an urban legend about a guy that always looked busy running around with some tools, but no one ever saw him actually working. Turned out he used to find himself a hidden spot at the site and sleep there most of the day. Just making sure to walk across the site with tools once in a while.
Maybe I'm being suggestible because you raised it, but they all seem to have that shell-shocked, thousand yard stare that only comes after months of crunch time and no rest.
I recently started turning up at around 10 and leaving at 4:45 and I get just as much done as when I was in the office 9-6.
I've also started giving more fucks about work, which is amusing as I started showing up late and leaving early due to my lack of fucks.
So in my unsanctioned (and I'm sure time limited once someone complains) experiment with a sample size of one I can say shorter days definitely keep me more engaged and don't seem to slow down my work.
If you work in a large corporate, people will complain, especially if you get this done. It sorta highlights the inefficiencies of the punctual, yet less productive employees, and they don't like it.
Just a quick warning - I've heard plenty of people complain that once they ran out of their allotted fucks at work, they ended up getting promoted. Apparently speaking your mind does that sometimes.
When I got almost fired in one job, my consultancy firm asked me to return to the same client, same team, same job but in another program, I clocked the least (not giving a fuck), but I was the most productive (giving a fuck, does it make sense?:D ) and basically the program director was basing all decision on my feedbacks. It drove the previous team mad, and current one a bit speechless :D
I think selling time for money, more than anything, is why I don't want to be an employee forever. It's good for learning the ropes and knowing what it's like in the trenches, but ultimately there are only so many hours in the day and the human body evolved to require a good number of hours for self-maintenance.
The path to sustainable growth is through automation, increasing your market rates/prices/value, and owning capital (money and assets that generate more money/assets).
You can see this analogy play out on an international scale during the Cold War. The Soviet Union reached its peak during the 1970s, where it could not find any more resources (whether labor or raw materials) to use. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" is a famous Soviet joke. The U.S., by contrast, invented new blue oceans of productivity (e.g. computers) and increased GDP and GDP per capita. It played out in foreign policy; the U.S. invested in and traded with Western Europe to make it more productive; the Soviet Union cannibalized Eastern Europe for parts. The result was that the U.S. won the Cold War and the Soviet Union died.
At no scale does throwing more resources at a problem change the nature of the game. Devising more efficient ways to use the resources you have changes the game.
Actually working more than ~55 hours in a week is soul crushing and physically very hard. At a certain point you would need an escalation of stimulants or risk not being able to get out of bed if you actually worked 75 hours.
I can confirm. In the consulting world I've had several instances of either being doubled up on projects or having to hit extremely demanding deadlines for milestone payouts that required legitimate 60+ hour weeks. One week is doable, 2 is a stretch, beyond that people (myself included) generally had to turn to things like modafinil to keep going and there's a noticeable toll on general health and wellness.
On the flip side, people who say they work stupid hours are usually just at the office stupid hours, not necessarily working all the time. But so are people who say they work 40 hour weeks. From working with hundreds of "normal" employees at clients over the years, I'd say the average actual productive time per person is around 25 hours.
>But so are people who say they work 40 hour weeks. From working with hundreds of "normal" employees at clients over the years, I'd say the average actual productive time per person is around 25 hours
Agreed, I'd be surprised if I spent more than 25 hours a week actually actively working
In my personal and subjective experience, working beyond 55 hours in a week is very doable... But it's absolutely not sustainable. I've found that doing it for more than 2-3 weeks in a row will generally result in declining productivity and burnout after that, requiring 2-3 weeks of 0-30 hour work weeks afterwards to recover.
Some hard learned lessons that I now adhere to:
* Don't push past 50 hours a week regularly
* If you do, cut your hours down to below 40 the following week, or even take some days off
* Take at least one full weekend off at least once per month
Medicine is an interesting case. The prioritization isn't so much on the health of medical practitioners and nurses, but on patient safety.
It is argued that patients have higher survivability rates when patient handoffs/shift changes are kept to a minimum. The focus has never been on the health of doctors, nurses, X-Ray technicians, etc. but from a public health perspective.
Yes, I've heard that argument before. I've asked before if the research shows the problem is handoffs per se, or the protocol around them, but haven't had a good answer. There also doesn't seem to be good research into the longer term impact of these negative consequences on the practitioners.
I've worked around clinicians and clinical staff, and several times been surprised how much is left to personal memory and scheduling, including some inherently risky protocols/procedures that are at all functional only because the people doing them are careful ... some of these obviously easily improvable.
I have several friends who are doctors or nurses, and have talked with most of them about this. They all parrot the "doctor/nurse-patient continuity" line, but when pressed as to whether fewer handoffs actually outweigh the effects of exhaustion on outcomes, they all seem to take it as a given that it does, without being able to support it.
I suspect that, even if fewer handoffs does take an edge over exhaustion, the handoff process could be improved greatly; from what I'm told, handoff processes vary wildly, often aren't formalized, and even when they are, adherence to process is pretty lax, in part due to the effects of exhaustion.
It’s really interesting to do workflow analysis in clinical settings. It’s not uncommon to run into “we do it this way because that’s the way we’ve always done it” situations.
There is also a bit of machismo/pride for the shifts worked thing, which isn’t helpful.
The nurses may be working 12 hour shifts, but they’re unlikely to work more than 4 in a week. Overtime is expensive for employers, so they prefer to hire more or hire contract nurses where necessary.
Even the doctors usually cover 12 clinical 12hr shifts a month. They may do more work after another takes over, academic work, moonlight, or have admin work.
And having a good income allows you to buy your way out of most modern problems/work, like comparison shopping, cleaning, or even having and then raising their children for them.
A friend of mine who is a nurse tells me that she's at the hospital an hour before her shift starts (in order to prep) and is there a good hour after her shift ends (in order to help prep the next shift). So she's effectively working nearly 14 hours a day, even though she only works 3-4 consecutive days.
I stretches credibility to me that people can keep up a high quality of work for 14 hours straight, even with a 3 day break every 3-4 days.
> The nurses may be working 12 hour shifts, but they’re unlikely to work more than 4 in a week. Overtime is expensive for employers, so they prefer to hire more or hire contract nurses where necessary.
Or they're picking up more hours at a different hospital, so there's no overtime but they still make more.
I've just been reading Why we sleep by Matthew Walker. In it he mentions doctors will on average kill one patient during their residency due to sleep deprivation.
I have found that I have 35 hours of good code in me per week. I make sure that I average at least 1 hour a day for meetings just so I can hit my 40 hour mark (this isn't hard). I can work more hours for a couple weeks if needed, but my quality goes down a little each week.
I’m currently working legit 65-70 hours per week. We have a hard stop that costs millions if we miss. It basically means 6am-6pm Monday through Saturday. I’m not as productive as when I work less but there is a net win in productivity. I don’t think I can do this for much more than a few months. I can already tell it has markedly harmed my health. Being stressed for months at a time is hard.
People like to bring up the long hours that workers in Asian countries stay in the office or workplace for to justify long work weeks in North America and Europe when needed.
In practice, they drag out their work day (eat breakfast, take showers, go to the gym, go on their phone) and don't really work significant hours in the end. Their productivity in terms of economic value produced per hour is markedly lower than most western countries. [1]
Doing real work for 65-70 hours is markedly dissimilar and very detrimental to your health. Not even sure if most people could say they could last for a few more months.
You can't. After a few solid months of 70 hour weeks you start seeing some serious health effects (blood pressure spikes, nervous system issues triggered by high levels of persistent stress, insomnia, exhaustion, etc).
This is quite a generalization. It depends on how much you value and enjoy your work. And, every person's limit is different. There exist people on both extremes.
70+ hours of sustained work per week is unsustainable, the human body largely can't handle it. SV has a lot of dumb mythology around working non-stop (i.e. Musk claiming he works 100+ hours a week), but what people usually call 70 hours is 50 hours of work and 20 hours of dicking around 'working'.
It's a generalization that the data seems to support.
Sure, there are always outliers, but in general, 70+ hours per week over several weeks to months will severely damage your health.
Note that we're talking about 70 hours of actual work. Being in the office for 70 hours but only working 50 hours is what's more common, and doesn't cause the same hit to your health.
No shade here, but how can you possibly be on HN right now? Or do you consider this kind of commenting activity to be part of your job? I consider myself to work maybe 15 hr per week, but according to my contract I work 40, and sometimes my timesheet says 60. Nonetheless, I am “on-call” quite a bit, at my own discretion.
I just can’t imagine how I could stay in deep concentration and be “legit 65-70 hours per week,” unless I was also counting chatting on HN, Slack, meals with coworkers, research...ie the things that make my actual “work” time (of maybe 15 hours per week) truly productive.
I guess it would be totally reasonable to include some of those activities as “legit work time,” but then how do you decide what is and isn’t legit? I require a lot of adjacent “down” time to provide very high-value “on” time for my company, but how could you possibly know if 20 hours spent researching something you are excited about will have any value whatsoever for your company? Should it be “billable?” This is the unsung benefit of being a salaried worker: you don’t have to concern yourself about whether your research and exploratory development is “on task” or not, you just need to bring the benefits back to your company.
I actually posted this during a change management meeting. I was required to be there despite my portion of the meeting being 10 minutes of the hour. There are varying descriptions of "work", but my day usually lines up like so:
4:30am wake up
5:30 leave
6 arrive at the office
6-9 heads down coding
9-11 status, project, and various other meetings and help/administrative work
11-12 take lunch at the desk while I code
12-2 any follow up various other meetings
2-6 more code/tech work
Or course Im not 100% utilized. Nobody is. If I were to work 8, I would have no time to actually work on the project I have deliverables due on. Meetings are toxic, but also necessary, and Im manager and technical in this role so I have to split my time. Saturdays I usually get a solid 8-10 hours of work in with few interruptions.
I don't feel badly at all for posting here during billing hours, and if anything my invoices are conservative on real hours worked.
Oh, yes, I hear you on being present for 10 min of a 1 hr meeting. Your presence is absolutely valuable for the entirety of the hour meeting, even though it’s not clear from the outset where precisely during that time those 10 min will be valuable.
I guess that’s what I mean; it’s not necessarily obvious when is work time and when is not. Even as you’re posting on HN during your meeting as you understand it is not valuable for you to be 100% “present” and it would be more valuable to explore ideas and culture on HN as you listen, so it is also true that many will be working on ideas as they eat dinner with their families, solving problems while they sleep, and planning their dependency graph during their commute. I just don’t think “hours worked” is an honest metric any more than 4 years at college shows that you were anything more than present.
Those 4 years could have been rigorous and honest and intense and valuable with a B average to show for it, or you could have been partying and have an A for your effort. Time spent might be required, but it also doesn’t matter.
A pretty good hourly rate actually. I am definitely treating this as a sprint. And for the following 2 years I have lined up 35-40hour per week work. This will allow for a significant runway when the project ends as well. I’m hoping to have 12months salary in the bank.
To be clear- what I said leaves broad room for interpretation. I am by no means at deaths door. What I meant is a few things have happened for this sprint.
1) my stress level is higher
2) focus is harder
3) easier to make poor food choices
4) fatigue sets in towards the end of the week
That said Ive made adjustments that have helped
1) plan out the week of food on sunday and prepare as much as possible
2) forced excercise in the evening for 30-60 minutes
3) hard sleep boundaries.
It will fuck up your health. Also it will set the precedent that you are okay with working crazy hours for months on end for no additional benefit to yourself. I did it, it took me a couple years to lose the extra weight I gained. Just don't do it, your health ain't worth it.
In the last year, I had two jobs,one at the office, and one at a startup I was working with.
I managed to make more than 75h a weeks only 3 weeks of the year.
During these weeks, my life was, sleep, go to the gym, go to work, go to second work sleep, every weekday, and on week-ends gym + work.
75h per week is 11h per day EVERY day. when you do that, your body is tired, and if you want to be productive your have to sleep a lot, and you have no social life.
(I track my time with an app, so it is not fake numbers, my max is 78 hours)
There's something about work.. I always felt better at low level producing jobs (bakery, burgery) because I knew that my work was quantifiable (and predictable). It felt like a robot to many but to me it felt like the difference between superstition and arithmetic. There I couldn't say I worked N but in reality only worked M because there was no way to be confused; it was obvious and there were traces of my work that were function of time.
I met a couple subgroup of people that were weirdly proud of working a lot. And I caught a lot of them inflating their work hours (for example pretending they work 70 while they work a normal 40). To them it was a way to show off how important they supposedly are.
I really think that most people that pretend to work > 40 hours a week are not really working those hours. They might stay a lot at the office but are usually the least productive people ever
3) after 7 hours you make a 2-3h long break and do something completely different, like taking a walk outside, sunbathing, biking, sauna or whatever makes you happy
4) when you return, you work on another task/for another company, never the same stuff you worked on in the morning
5) you take only one day off, i.e. depending on your location/culture/religion one of Fri-Sun is strictly no-work
Why do you want to work 75+ hours? What are you working for - what value are you receiving from life?
These are serious questions, I've worked crazy overtime (defined by me as anything over 50 hours a week) and never want to return to it, consistently doing 10 hour days is draining and significantly lowered my productivity, it was just bad times all around.
I managed to work like that for ~9 months; when you work on some bleeding edge stuff like inventing some new Deep Learning method you can actually have fun and be eager to keep doing it. If it's just usual treadmill caused by silly decisions from the top and inability to push back to customer, then it's hell.
Sure. I summarized rules that helped me when I needed to do that. Somebody might find that useful (e.g. while starting their own business or going through exponential growth).
Personally if I was running my own business, single, and childless I think I would do that. But I would never do that just to make someone else rich, or to the detriment of important relationships
I have 2 jobs (say 55h away from home, but one being on duty even though on location, i get to sleep a bit) yet I still wish I could have more work or work more. For various reasons :
* if you have to work that much then you probably are doing something important, or your opinion is needed on various things. Either way you feel important and valued (even if it's complete bullshit in the end)
* keeps you from boredom. I wouldn't waste my time like I still manage to do.
* satisfies my own masochism. I just like to suffer, somehow
* take up the challenge. I am confident that I'm a rather quick thinker and that I could do it marginally faster than most.
* hopefully pay follows. And the experience is always valuable for later employment.
I really dream of drowning in emails and an elongated to do list. Alas none of it at 27 and I fear it's too late for me, and that I'll just be a mediocre unnecessary worker all my life.
A lot of these reasons are personal and fine but...
> hopefully pay follows. And the experience is always valuable for later employment.
I hope it doesn't, because if pay follows your self-destructive habit then other people will be forced into it if they want to receive similar compensation and it becomes a race to the bottom for our time. I value my personal leisure time, I need quiet brain time to unwrap my thoughts from the deep intricacies of the work I do on a daily basis - if your brain is more resilient and can keep going at 100% 24/7 that's great, enjoy it as it'd certainly be interesting to always be on - but I value my time and the more that working > 40 hrs becomes normalized, the more we workers lose our gained ground in minimizing the work week.
Lastly,
> Alas none of it at 27 and I fear it's too late for me, and that I'll just be a mediocre unnecessary worker all my life.
Don't worry, I've known forty and fifty year olds that have been balls of stress and anxiety, it's still well accomplishable, but! Unless your physiology really is different, being a ball of stress and anxiety - running constantly on adrenaline - it's the sort of action the human body can only sustain for so long. Never let that last point (money) convince you to sacrifice your physical well being either today or down the road - your life and what you're living is more precious than anything you'll ever produce, and that's true for everyone.
I have a hobby, I own a horse which takes 3 hours daily and is a very powerful stress relief. I’m not overly sensitive to stress in a professional setup anyways. That’s also why I think I have a decent profile for such niche requirements.
But it’s not enough yet especially on weekends, since my jobs do not follow me out of their walls, neither in thoughts nor in their missions.
No interest in volunteering. Not because of money but I’d rather learn something and/or enjoy myself, and selflessness or social missions help neither for me.
It doesn’t have to be the norm, but it can still be an advantage for the ones endowing it.
People like this generally consider seat and monitor warming as work. Is a butt keeping the seat warm and the mouse moving enough to keep the computer from going to sleep? If so, it is work.
I worked for a period of my life (around two years) a sustained 100+ hour workload (real work). I literally did nothing but work, eat and work, and sleep seven days a week. The only times I didn’t work was in the bathroom.
I didn’t get physically ill or burn out, but I slowly started to drift away from reality. The quality of my judgment calls started to decline and while never doing anything outright crazy, I did and said things that in hindsight were very strange.
One of the side effects of this is I had no idea what happened in the world in that time. To this day I am still learning about historical events that happened in that two year period that continue to amaze me.
I know my productivity plummets passed 7-8 hours of work. Many times I would say it becomes negative, I.e. I make a lot of sigbificant mistakes and/or break something. More work is rarely an actual solution.
That was the most interesting part of the Mother Jones article to me. If you compare people who average 43 hours a week (but claim they are averaging 50), the folks who think they are working 70 should be working about 20 hours more a week. But it's only 12. Pretty amazing.
But on average they died within 5 years because of stress/cardio incidends and mcdonald's cheese burger being their primary source of sustenance. So over a 10 year span the normies were 50% more productive.
- Those who don't work long hours will want to understate how many hours hard workers work (to avoid being labelled a slacker)
- Those who do work long hours will want to overstate how many hours they work (to accrue more perceived clout)
The reality is almost certainly in between. There are certainly people who both claim and do work 75+ hour weeks on a persistent basis. I've done this for 4.5 years straight as a founder.
When I got my first job, I did similar. 9 am to 2 am straight for 2 weeks with 6-days week. Reaching home back around 3.30 am. Then waking up at 7.30 am and reaching office again at 9 am.
I was replacement for senior dev, who was leaving on very short notice. Noticeably, I used to eat very little than usual. Caffeine and nicotine helped me go thr' it.
But now I feel like stupid for being so naive that time.
Seems to me that people tend to get anchored by their high-water marks rather than average... for example I will definitely have 110hr weeks and have the occasional 35hr weeks, my "generic" week is probably 55hrs, but not sure where the true average is (probably closer to the generic week), but the mean of my extremely good weeks and bad weeks is 72.5 hrs...
Some kinds of work are easier to do than others. At one point, I decided that 60 hr/wk of active work seemed the approximate sustainable limit for some typical mix of both hard&easy work, over a period of weeks or months. But even if you can schedule the hard&easy parts for fatigue, 60 hr/wk still has extra costs (e.g., stresses to health, outside relationships, outside activities, internal morale as people get irritable).
I've also done my share of all-nighters and 80-hour weeks, and it's rarely/never worth every hour. I've learned to manage projects and tasks better.
I also have some sense of how performance degrades severely by the 30 hours awake mark, and a sense that there's a ramp up to that impairment before it becomes obvious.
Most recently, I advised a developer to try for 40 productive hours of work per week, and to emphasize being sharp and non-fatigued for any task that would benefit from that. Almost all of their work required them to be sharp. Keep the 60-hour heroics in reserve for emergencies only. (Or for occasional easy flow work, like sketching out a UI skeleton in some new framework. But don't work all night on something easy, and then throw off your sleep cycle for a week when you need to be sharp for harder stuff.)
(The last time I did a weekend work marathon, which required some meticulous reverse-engineering-ish work that I think was already the work-smarter way and couldn't be sped up further, I imagined the focus and pace of an astronaut who was calm and all-business about solving some critical problem in time. That was both inspirational and also set a simple internal watchdog on my mood and how progress was going. Had I been burning stressful 60-hour weeks for months before, I might've been too fatigued/stressed to pull it off without error or poor decisions. Had I not had much experience with working long hours, I might not have appreciated how much discipline they require, and the costs.)
I recently starting using a training a productivity tracker that has a decent mix of tracking but keeping the data local. It's really amazing to see how time is spent in the office. If on a very unusual and rare day of say 10 hours, I might be lucky to get 6 hours of actual work (with maybe an hour of deep work in there).
Thanks this sounds like something I'd like to try - are there any others you considered whilst looking around as that is mac only and I'm Windows unfltunately ( or any one else in this thread do something similar )
I'm using Timeular which is an octahedron with erasable sides. It tracks whichever side is facing up. You just have to remember to flip it, which is a good way to notice 'hey, should I really be switching tasks'?
I've recently been working a lot, but not all of it has been desk time. I think it's fair to include time spent thinking about work as work time - once I've worked out how to solve a task I can churn it out, but something particularly complicated might take a few days of thinking (fast and slow) to work out.
A survey like the one in the article may be too simplistic because I could be in the gym while mulling over a problem, out for a walk, doing my shopping, playing games, etc. but in the background I'm still mulling things over. It's not pure relaxation time like when I'm not trying to work something out, but still leads to that "Aha!" moment, even if it happens in the shower or while doing the washing up.
I think it's reasonable to include all that thinking time as work time.
True, but then a lot of people in permanent jobs don't get paid extra for overtime anyway. I mean it more from the perspective of how much of your day you're "on", and that leisure/other activities aren't necessarily mutually exclusive to thinking about work related tasks, which can make you more productive during your usual paid hours.
> True, but then a lot of people in permanent jobs don't get paid extra for overtime anyway.
Can you specify what countr(y|ies) this applies to? It is most certainly not the case where I am.
> I mean it more from the perspective of how much of your day you're "on"
I'm firmly of the belief that if you spend a lot of your leisure time thinking about work, perhaps you have an unhealthy work/life balance. You are of course correct that it is possible to still do so. I don't agree with the point that this should be counted or even is work time. It is free time you have sacrificed to your job, without compensation. Work with no compensation doesn't satisfy the conditions for what I consider to be employment.
I used to be a practicing attorney, where we tracked our time meticulously. My craziest month was 360 hours. I remember it well, I didn't cheat on a single hour, if anything I may have under-reported. That was a hell-month, but I do think many other people could do it for one month.
I later started a company, where I also worked insanely hard, but did not keep track of my hours. The big difference is that with my startup, I loved every second of it. On countless nights, I would get upset whenever I saw the sun start to rise because it meant I probably ought to go to sleep soon. Five hours can go by without looking up from what you're doing.
All that said, without a time sheet, it's impossible to know for certain which job I worked more hours.
I've noticed quite a few very unproductive workers, send emails and pretend they are working at 11pm kind of hours. Worker output is the only thing that matters. The problem is in our field how do we measure this?
I have worked 75 hour weeks but only like a couple times a year, people who say they work that much are usually filling their time with worthless filler. I bet less that 1% of them actually do it. The rest is meetings, web surfing, wasting time on the phone. However business owners can easily do this when profits are down.
Isn't it weird to lie about how long you sit on your butt? I could understand lying about output of your work. But hours? The perception is that it doesn't matter what you did, but rather, how much you suffered for it.
50 hours? I work to live and value my free time. Avoid the water cooler talk and stick to 40 hours a week. Non work chatter with co-workers is what slows you up.
The 93 hour week was pretty much: go to work, eat meals at desk, go home, work from home until bed time, go to sleep, then repeat. But in general weird things happened during that time, probably due to a combination of stress and unhealthy habits. For example:
- I've never been a morning person and struggled to wake up before 9 all my life. During this time I woke up early to meet with the client early in the morning. After some time I'd habitually wake up 15 minutes before 6, which was when my alarm was set at. Also due to lack of sleep I'd always be pissed that I was missing out on 15 minutes of sleep too.
- I was sleep deprived but didn't feel sleepy at all during the day. Granted I did consume a lot of coffee, but still. Adrenaline?
- Got drunk really easily. Part of client facing work is drinks with clients every so often. I used to be able to drink 4-5 beers and not show much effect externally. Towards the end of this period 1-2 drinks and I'd be slurring.
- Perversely, things were often times "fun". The team got really close to each other and we actually looked forward to going to the client office to do "battle".
Definitely not sustainable nor healthy. I got pats on the back and some token raises / bonuses but I've since learned that going above and beyond like this is not worth it. The hit to mental and physical health is just not worth the small amount of extra money and (possibly) career advancement.