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Comment by weka | Hacker News Reader

> You need experience and you have no other option to get experience.

This was me and I paid for it. Right now I'm on week 8 of 30 hour weeks. It sucks.

30 hour weeks? Don't most people work 40 hour weeks? My first job I worked 60 hour weeks for basically 2 years straight (average, we'd work a ton of hours for a month, then work normal for a week or two, then back up to a ton of hours) and I should have started looking sooner. Instead I waited until I was burnt out and got fired. Only took me two weeks to find a newer, better job where I didn't work more than 40 per week and with a significant pay increase.

Everyone should look for a new job sooner (don’t wait for burnout, don’t wait if you’re not being promoted or seeing comp increases, don’t wait for the promise of reasonable hours). Congrats on the soft landing, sorry to hear you burned out first.

I learned some very valuable lessons at least!

I thought standard work weeks were 40 hours (at least in the US)? Are your work weeks normally shorter?

40 hours is the target. In practice, most salaried employees work around 50-60 hours a week -- more if you count checking and responding to email after work / pager duty / etc

I don't think that is true in general. Heavily depends on the employer, industry and country. Also unions play a big part in worktime.

While I'm aware some would call this a rather contrarian opinion, I truly believe that if you're in a salaried position and routinely required to work 45 or more hours a week, whether by actual mandate or "but that's just what we all do here" cultural pressure, there is something wrong with that company, more than likely starting at the top. Many companies have extraordinary crunch periods for one reason or another, and that's fine, but if you're in a crunch period more often than you aren't, that's no longer extraordinary.

Even outside of US, 40h is standard, some places have 35 hour work week. 30 is less than 4 days a week, or 5x6h. I actually think that _might_ be more efficient _and_ healthier, but it's unusually little, I think it's a typo.

in the UK 37.5 after accounting for lunch is common at BT it was 36 hours a week on average (not counting lunch).

> 30 hour weeks. It sucks.

Sounds terrible

30 hour weeks — Do you mean in addition to a regular full-time job?

Do you mean you're being worked too hard or not hard enough?

omg 30 hour weeks sounds perfect

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