How many hours a week should academics work? | Hacker News Reader

How many hours a week should academics work?

timeshighereducation.com

80 pointssamclemens38 comments

The only acceptable answer to this question is that the question makes no sense.

An academic work is a creative work. And as such it can't be counted in hours. When you do research, you can't really stop working, your brain has no off switch. That's why it is very important that academics loves what they do.

What you can count is hours spent actively doing stuff related to your job: writing papers, reviewing papers, emailing, preparing courses, etc.

And yet the correct answer will be "depends on the week". Some weeks (okay, very rarely) it can be as low as 20 hours, because your mind in too preoccupied by other stuff like your personal life. The good thing is that this is okay, because some other weeks (most weeks in practice), it will be a lot more. Typically if one has a deadline for a paper submission, the two weeks before, you can bet that 60 hours is a minimum. I didn't count but this week-end only I probably worked for more than 10 hours.

The question is funding driven. The funding is dependent on the question "are you working hard enough?", expressed as a bunch of output targets. Failing to meet the targets will result in not having the job. Not necessarily as simple as being fired as an individual; more like having your whole small department, institution, course or subject defunded.

Of course academic work is creative work, but saying "there's no off switch" is too simplistic. Academics are people too. They prepare meals, watch television, spend time with their kids and spouse, go grocery shopping, go out for drinks, and visit mindless entertainment websites just like the rest of us. They may happen to think about their work during those activities but ,if they do, it's only by accident. The question of how much time they spend in these "leisure" activities vs "work" activities is well-posed enough to have a useful answer. And of course it varies from week to week but that doesn't mean we can't talk about what the distribution looks like. A professor whose average workweek is 60 hours lives a different life than one whose average workweek is 40 hours.

>They may happen to think about their work during those activities but ,if they do, it's only by accident

This says so much about how we think about thinking

That most of us have times we dedicate to thinking about the things that make us money and times we dedicate to thinking about other things? I'm not sure what's wrong with that. Obviously we don't have the strict control to turn our thoughts completely on or off so this doesn't preclude what might be considered "background processing". Still, surely it is reasonable to dedicate some times to some things and other times to other things, even if the things in question are creative processes. For most people, deciding "I'll just work through this new research topic whenever I spontaneously happen to be thinking about it" is probably not their best way to contribute to the field.

>That most of us have times we dedicate to thinking about the things that make us money and times we dedicate to thinking about other things? I'm not sure what's wrong with that. Obviously we don't have the strict control to turn our thoughts completely on or off so this doesn't preclude what might be considered "background processing". Still, surely it is reasonable to dedicate some times to some things and other times to other things, even if the things in question are creative processes.

Of course. After all, humans are computers.

I used to feel the same way. I still feel that there's no off switch, but one can still count hours.

With students, peers, and superiors these days, I actively encourage everyone to go home. Our research group, by default, easily encourages everyone to work 50+ hour weeks. I think it's less productive than 40 rested and focused hours.

You can think and dream at home, or lie awake in bed, but it's important to carve out time for everything else in life, too.

The problem is that the levels of bureaucracy are so high, that we spent a lot of time just managing research, which is not creative at all. And this management of research requires a lot of time, unfortunately.

I would not mind to spend hours during my weekends thinking about scientific problems. The problem is that we must write proposals during the weekends, time that we should spend with our family and friends.

This bureaucratic work hinders creativity.

So, the question is: should scientists do science during our free time and do project management during working hours, as we do now? Or should we try to change how the system works in order to diminish the management workload in order to allow for more time for thinking about scientific problems?

I reply to myself in order to add an example.

I just was told that a proposal we sent a few months ago has been denied due to formal problems (not the content).

Apparently, there is an error of 1.8 € (the price of a coffee) on a total budget of 2M€. And the error was introduced by the software used by the administration handling the call. Our documents were correct.

The work of a scientist is fighting against stupid bureaucrats. Real science? Who wants that!?

It also depends where you work and what your ambition is. Not all academics work in US top-ranked institutions.

Personally, I'm tenured and I work very little. I don't do much research anymore. I teach about 10 hours a week, which amounts to 20-30 hours of effective work (including grading, various meetings, administrative work). Besides that, I try to keep up to date with the latest developments that pertain to the subjects I teach. I also try to switch topics regularly so I keep learning new things. I attend research talks and follow my colleagues research.

Because I don't do research, I can't expect any promotion and I feel a bit like an outsider. If I was to do meaningful research, then I would have to neglect some of the teaching, and work much more. I'm not entirely happy with this situation, but it's the best compromise I found.

EDIT: my office mate has a research-only position with almost no administrative overhead. He's not overworked, supervises a couple of phd students and postdoc, and is reasonably well-known in his field.

Just to say that depending on the institution, country and personal ambitions, working conditions can differ greatly.

Yeah, I have a friend who is a "research scientist" - he just does research, no teaching, and gets a decent salary. Good gig, except it's soft money so there's a little less security than your converse.

If the population has 100K people who think being a prof would be a cool job, graduate 1000 PHDs per year qualified to be a prof, and have 100 job openings per year across the world to actually be a prof, you can expect that the selection process will winnow down based on very easy to measure and "justify" metrics like demographic membership and hours of butts in seats, not to mention publish or perish.

No matter how small of a group you're in, there's always someone who loves their family, themselves, friends, hobbies, or life, less than you do, and in the modern hyperconnected world your boss wants to replace you with that person, because we're all interchangeable fungible cogs that turn salary into production metrics.

I wonder why you are downvoted. This sounds like a pretty accurate description.

We shouldn't forget that life is a marathon not a sprint. I personally make sure I am not tired while I work. If tired I found out that I make mistakes that I have to repair the next day. This cannibalizes my concentrated time on this next day, so I try to avoid this. Of course, if tired stupid work can still be done unless it eats into the recreation (which is: make sure you are not tired the next day).

I hardly know anyone who is effective beyond the usual 40 hours week. I attended meetings with totally overworked colleagues which did not come to a goal after hours of blabla. I also attended meeting with clear thinking colleagues which ended with a week of work for everybody after 30 minutes of discussion. Everybody awake, well prepared and belonging in that meeting. But here everybody has to find its own best performance limits.

I also agree with other comments that we should not work more, but better. We automatize work to win time and enhance quality of life, not to get into competition about less and less work. If the wall street banker don't get that - fine with me. <arrogance>This is certainly not the only thing they don't get. </arrogance> But I also wouldn't count bankers as academics.

> Academic work is obviously very different from using a lathe in a factory. It requires creativity, intense intellectual effort and the social skills to deal with colleagues

I submit that the author hasn't spent much time around highly skilled lathe operators.

(edit: formatting)

I think they're talking about a production-line type environment.

I have (and welders, and carpenters, etc), and I'm in academics now, and it's nonsense to compare the amount of intellectual effort the two require. Not to dismiss the skills of tradesmen, but let's stay realistic here.

This is a sample size of 1, but my wife is currently averaging about 70 hours per week at a Russell Group university. That's the average number of hours, it is frequently higher.

She works every evening and nearly every day of the week ( only seldom taking a full day off on a weekend).

As an early career lecturer in the UK she is currently (this term):

* teaching 60 students (this definition means marking the essays of 60 students, 11k words = 660k to be marked at end of this term)

* convening two modules (researching, writing the module materials, etc)

* lecturing 6 times per week to at least 50 students per time (including prepping all of the material for that)

* running large lectures for 300 students 2 times per week

She is also:

* writing and publishing 4 papers this term

* working on her book proposal (initial chapter from her PhD)

* working on a trip later this year for which she has received a research grant

* completing teacher training, this is supposed to be 160 hours of work this term that she has to find, no work has been removed from her to make time for this

* presenting 2 papers, 1 of those at Cambridge

* working in the local community, every Monday she works with a local group and this is required as the University measure "impact"

* mentoring students and having to make herself available for student consultations, this takes up at least 12 hours per week (not including the waiting time between students which is context switching and difficult to utilise)

Somewhere in here she still has to read and consume enough information in her field to be able to have ideas on where to take these things next term.

She is so very close to quitting academia after three years of sustaining these hours with only 2 weeks off per year (that's all she can afford to take).

We had the conversation again yesterday, about what she might like to do instead. She does love researching and her field, but she is being absolutely crushed by the workload.

On top of all of this, she needs to look to me to pay (fully) for her vacation as her salary is barely £30k (though if she sticks it out another two years she'll qualify for a £600 pay rise!).

All I want is for her to be happy, but it's been a long time since she's been happy in academia. The unbelievable workload is killing her love of the subject.

This comment on the original article sums it up: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/how-many-hours-wee...

Hours are not measured, only "student satisfaction", "papers published", "impact"... output is the only thing measured, and the required output does not fit into less than 60 hours per week, and if you actually want any career progression or to do a quality job then the hours it takes is much higher.

.. and this is all metrics-driven through mechanisms like the RAE.

I'd almost prefer a reversion to naive Taylorism, when you had men with stopwatches standing around working out how much coal could be moved in an 8-hour shift. At least there was a shift limit. The modern application of metrics to complex jobs just ends up ratcheting up the demands without looking at how much time the work actually takes.

See also the junior doctor's strike at the moment.

One of my abiding memories of academia is how truly appalling managers everyone seemed to be. Has your wife tried telling her line manager (if she has such a thing clearly defined) that she is finding the workload difficult? It could be that more senior staff have dumped stuff on her without actually considering what other stuff she has on.

Either that, or given the potential for viciousness in academic politics, maybe she is seen as a threat and is being overloaded to try and make her fail?

Her line manager is useless. And appealing to the head of department has achieved nothing. Essentially, you get what you're given and that's it.

She has lots of support amongst her peers (other lecturers), students and those in her field... but the University operates very much like a business and really does not care for the lecturers, just whether their REF ( http://www.ref.ac.uk/ ) targets are met.

Lecturer in the U.K. seems worse than most places, even the relatively high-pressure U.S. standards. As far as I can tell from the outside (though with some good colleagues who work there), U.K. universities seem to want the research output and grant funding of U.S.-style "tenure-track research faculty", but without being willing to give the relatively low teaching loads that U.S.-style research faculty have, instead having teaching expectations more akin to what in the U.S. are called lecturers or teaching faculty, or just regular faculty at universities not considered research universities (these faculty in the U.S. don't have particularly high research/grant expectations). And to sweeten the pot, they also offer fairly poor pay.

The one big advantage seems to be that job security comes much quicker. The U.S.-style "tenure clock", where you have six years to either be promoted or leave, is pretty stressful. While it seems that many Lecturer positions in the U.K. turn into permanent positions relatively quickly, and don't have the same up-or-out pressure.

> The one big advantage seems to be that job security comes much quicker. The U.S.-style "tenure clock", where you have six years to either be promoted or leave, is pretty stressful. While it seems that many Lecturer positions in the U.K. turn into permanent positions relatively quickly, and don't have the same up-or-out pressure.

My wife is at the University of Exeter and has a 5-year probation period with measured goals after each year.

Few to none of the goals have time allocated within her regular workload. The stress here is very real.

> U.K. universities seem to want the research output and grant funding of U.S.-style "tenure-track research faculty", but without being willing to give the relatively low teaching loads that U.S.-style research faculty have, instead having teaching expectations more akin to what in the U.S. are called lecturers or teaching faculty, or just regular faculty at universities not considered research universities (these faculty in the U.S. don't have particularly high research/grant expectations). And to sweeten the pot, they also offer fairly poor pay.

At least in my field (economics) UK teaching loads tend to be lower than in the US but the pay is much lower. [Note: I'm not referring to the top tier in either country.]

I would suggest she look into teaching (proper teaching, not lecturing :P ) at Secondary level.

The hours she will put in will be about the same, but (assuming you're in a half-decent school) when you do a good job you're properly appreciated.

Going into Secondary teaching with a research focus will also mean she could lead action research within the school. Continuing the PhD would even be seen as a major plus in the eyes of the school - there isn't a single (half-decent) school who wouldn't want a Dr. on staff.

Honestly, as long as she can put up with a class of 30 smelly teenagers, teaching could be a massively rewarding switch.

Based on buro9's comment, their wife already has a PhD.

Then she would be an even stronger candidate. :)

What subject?

This is in the English department, though she is actually a film lecturer (film belongs to English within University of Exeter). She does speak to lots of other lecturers though, this culture of being measured on output and the stress levels and workloads is common there. Again though... sample of 1.

Do you think this is a problem of too many willing candidates? For a subject like film, and indeed for English, you have a lot of people passionate about the field, but not many jobs available in industry. So many graduates will bounce back to academia and try to join the faculty, which is their only other option to pursue their subject in a professional capacity. The universities know this, but keep collecting fees from students while tendering the staffing requirements to the lowest bidding graduates. My undergraduate was English at a Russel group university... at one point I was encouraged to pursue a post-graduate degree in literature, after which I'd probably try to double down and get a faculty job. Thank god I didn't.

They need to separate out those who teach from those who don't. Then you can get a better idea of who is working too much.

I know a professor who has written articles for Parade magazine about how to improve your lawn.

This guy is going in every direction at once and he regularly runs out of gas when driving to rural locations. Definitely he has so much going on that he doesn't think straight all the time.

They need to work twice as much than us. Flipping burgers during the day to pay for their studies and doing their studies at night!

If you love what you do, you'll never work an hour in your life. So maybe academics shouldn't work at all, since the compensation isn't worth doing something you don't love ;-)

That's absurd. No matter how much I love what I do, spending more than a certain amount of time at it makes me tired. Tired me makes mistakes that fresh me has to fix. Tired me produces less overall output for the same amount of effort put in. If what I want is to maximise output, stopping to rest is the only rational choice.

Also, the implicit assumption is that, if you love what you do, you don't love doing anything else. I want time to devote to activities other than the work I so love. Much of that time can and does end up producing useful cross-pollination with my day job, but that's just gravy.

As the saying goes, "If you tell me to chop down a tree in six hours, I will spend the first three hours sharpening the axe."

Swinging a blunt axe at a tree does nothing but keep you from devoting time to sharpening the axe.

Not quite true. I love what I do, but what I do is really hard work. It is such excruciatingly hard work thay it slowly rips out my sanity.

I can imagine this is the same for academics.

Plus a lot of the job are things that they hate doing - politics, fundraising, dealing with hopeless students, writing modules that never get used. Many of them spend all their time doing these things, and the "overtime" is necessary to get the real work done after all that.

Says all first year phd students until their third year.

I am currently a postdoc. It's a scam that academia perpetuates this idea to justify paying less.

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