This is not what we usually hear about employment in the US. The reason many Europeans think American tech workers are working 60-80 hours per week is not copium, but simply because that's what many Americans tell us.
I will just add another +1 to say it's not common to work 60-80 hours per week in the US tech industry. It's not unheard of, and some companies (Amazon) are notorious for expecting that of their employees. But most of the time what you will see is that most people work 40ish hours (some weeks a bit more, some a bit less), and only a handful of colleagues with an unhealthy relationship to the job will work 50+ hours per week. Management doesn't generally expect people to do that, though of course bad managers do exist and can make your life miserable.
The only time I've ever been expected to put in those kinds of long hours was in case of an emergency. Stuff like, a natural disaster hit the company's primary data center so they needed to be all hands on deck to get services restored. But it's definitely not common day to day, and even in case of emergencies the company generally gives you a little something (extra time off, a bonus, whatever) to compensate you for the long hard hours you had to work.
How can you know that? Please don't assume stuff about others just to make a rhetorical point. If you say it's not that common as it's often made out to be, why wouldn't I believe you?
Though what would also help if you had an explanation for why we tend to hear these stories mostly from the US and not from other countries.
I see plenty of stories from Europe, and they too complain about work, but never about having to work 60-80 hours. Even if it's rare in the US, it still seems more common than in Europe. Similarly, I hear stories about working 3 jobs in the US which I don't hear from Europe. I do hear people complain about managers, pay, or office politics in Europe.
yes pbly more common that europe . even i worked two jobs at one point to double my income to like 700k/yr but it was very hard to sustain that beyond 1 yr. i know many ppl who've done it for years.
How much content you consume comes from the US vs other countries? The US has a full cultural supremacy in the west. That's why you speak english and read YC.
U.S. tech worker here. The only time I’ve ever worked 60-80 hour weeks was at a much smaller company, where for a month or two leading up to a trade show a whole bunch of work that had been put off was attempted to get crammed into the product. At my subsequent BigTech jobs I’ve never been asked/required to work more than 40 hours a week. I mean, nobody was tracking exact hours, but nobody was also pinging me at 8PM or on the weekend and expecting me to be working.
My experience is limited - I work in the UK for a US company and haven't spoken to US developers from a wide variety of companies. However I've not heard any US developers talking about working such long hours.
Closest thing I've heard is for devs to sometimes work over the core hours to build up time-in-lieu for extra vacation, over and above the paltry standard 2 week holiday allowance.
fascinating. I thought the meme was that FAANG tech workers were all day and lazy and didn't have to work that hard and were grossly overpaid, but that's as much a stereotype as the next one.
