People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours
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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.
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.
A bit of silver lining in all this I guess, the friendships that have formed.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/real-life/774372/sleep-insomnia-...
You have to add in a boss who spends 2/3rd of the time you're home screaming at you to the mix.
I get what you are saying, but this is not a universal truth. Life gets complicated.
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.
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.
Fun Fact I learned from that link: Supposedly, we'll be reaching our first trillion sometime between 2050 and 2060. That's actually pretty close.
> Especially with global warming and everything.
Yes, you're also right about that. I just didn't want to throw global warming into the mix.
[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/
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.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation#History_o...
Smarts for scienfic advancement is not evenly spread across global populations.
It's possible to have population growth while the high IQ fraction shrinks. All evidence says this is the current state of the earth.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See https://www.amazon.com/1-2-3-Magic-Effective-Discipline-Chil...
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.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jul/05/childca...
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"
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.
And crapping their pants while staring at you to show you who's really the boss.
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 found regular hiking made the biggest difference to me personally. Wish my list of remedies was longer than that but... Yeah. Mountains
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.
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.
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.
You could do taht with 2 instances and dropwizard (https://www.dropwizard.io/1.3.9/docs/)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I think part of the problem in the US is health care. Employees still want it, but employers view it as a high fixed cost for a partial employee.
That being said, I get healthcare through my wife, so wouldn't need it.
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.
Maybe I should build a startup based on this premise. :)
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 did it for a few months - really starts breaking you down as a human being.
(says the guy posting on HN instead of 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.
Sounds like a bad way of doing things.
No, you're not. Also, Europe is large and diverse. Source: European.
Probably not right about Ireland or the UK though.
Can't speak for any other European countries.
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.
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...
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.
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.
[upper management typing detected]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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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!
This includes an hour nap in his car, lunch for 2 hours, and running errands/personal things outside the office for a few more hours.
If he sat down and worked straight, we figured he would only need to be in the office no more than 8 hours
(Now if he claims he works 14-hour days, that's a bit dishonest.)
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX1P-gGqNjo
All of them seem tired, with strong dark circle under their eyes.
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'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.
So beware.
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
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.
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.
This has far-reaching consequences in itself.
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.
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.
Or they're picking up more hours at a different hospital, so there's no overtime but they still make more.
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 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.
There is also a bit of machismo/pride for the shifts worked thing, which isn’t helpful.
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
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.
Agreed, I'd be surprised if I spent more than 25 hours a week actually actively working
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.
[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/09/11/commentary/j...
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.
What salary or other payout is worth "markedly harming" your health, actually?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
1) you start early
2) keep focus 100%, no browsing/distractions etc.
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
6) you are single & healthy
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/most-of-us-do...
I suppose the takeaway may simply be that people are not good at remembering/estimating quantities of time?
- 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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 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.
https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-on-1...
i'm sorry but she was early stage at Google, what since then has all that hard work gotten her?