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Comment by _moof | Hacker News Reader

> The top 1 percent of the income distribution is composed largely of executives, financiers, consultants, lawyers, and specialist doctors who report extremely long work hours, sometimes more than seventy a week.

Be extremely skeptical of this claim by the super-rich of 70-hour work weeks. I can't find it now but a while back there was a graphic going around by an exec who charted out how he spends his work time. A huge proportion consisted of things like going to the gym and getting haircuts--activities that us common rabble have to call "time off."

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Also be extremely skeptical of people who lump together lawyers, financiers, doctors, and executives; they are all very different types of jobs with very different pay structures and hourly/daily/weekly schedules. It's just as inane as lumping in restaurant servers with longshoremen.

And be even more extremely of people who lump in upper-middle-class white-collar wage earners with the "super rich". It's just as inane as lumping in people living on welfare checks and people who work a blue collar job on a union salary.

Given the cost of living nowadays in major US metro areas where those professions are concentrated, only a rarefied tiny fraction of people in those professions can make enough money to be richer than "comfortably upper-middle-class" anyway. Things of course are different in areas where houses cost $300k and not $1.3m, but they make comparatively less in those areas anyway.

Finally, lawyers, doctors, and (some) financiers do absolutely work 50-80+ hour weeks. Maybe not every week, but certainly more than a few weeks out of the year. And rarely do they have a "down" week. And not all of those hours are "billable". These people are paid not just for their expertise but their ability to grind through hours and hours of tedious and tiring knowledge work.

Perhaps they are overpaid in relation to people who work with their hands, but that is a completely separate discussion.

The point is that it's insulting and fallacious to claim that people in these careers do not work long hours, and therefore it's insulting and fallacious to conclude that susceptibility to burnout in these careers is exaggerated.

> The point is that it's insulting and fallacious to claim that people in these careers do not work long hours

This feeling perfectly illustrates two of the core issues raised in the article: that overwork is valorized, and that our jobs should be our identity. If we lived in a world without those values, skepticism over claims of hours worked wouldn't be a cause for insult--and there would be no incentive to even make the claims in the first place.

I'm not sure. "You don't work hard" is generally kind of insulting to someone who works hard, valor or no valor.

If I'm stressed from overwork and you have skepticism about claims of hours worked that is insulting because you are either claiming I'm a liar or claiming I shouldn't be stressed. The reason why telling a stressed person that they shouldn't be stressed is insulting should be self-evident.

There is a certain breed of exec who is extremely generous with what they consider work. They will read a few articles after dinner and consider it "working all evening." Staying up late idly scrolling through LinkedIn is "working past midnight." Their accounts don't differentiate between operational work and social activities that relate to work. For example, wining and dining a stakeholder is always considered several hours of pure work. Once I worked with a CEO whose "80 hour" weeks included regular binge drinking and 2am kebabs with his buddies on the board.

Not to detract from the very good point you are making, but wining and dining stakeholders sounds exhausting. I would definitely consider myself "on the clock" for such an activity.

Yeah if you consider the person to be an introvert - it definitely would change the perspective on whether it is work or not.

People like to think that "work" is always doing things you dislike but it doesn't have to be.

It's work under extreme pressure even for extoverts, and even hardened BD/relationship people. often it's extremely high stakes, and very little room for errors.

Those that think it's not work, I challenge you to close a multiyear, multi-billion deal with Boeing over a few dinners, and then tell us how it was just a walk in the park.

You can do it.

This ignores a large volume of low stakes business lunches and dinners and the propensity of business people to turn debriefs and meetings into leisurely lunches. I've been to many lunches and dinners like this and they feel like more of a psychological break than eating lunch in the common room. Plus the company pays.

If you're closing a high stakes multi-billion dollar deal with Boeing then you should count that as work, definitely.

I think it depends. If all these meetings are about closing deals with clients then sure. But execs engage in a variety of work related social activity. So dinner with another exec, grabbing a beer or coffee, turning a debrief into a lunch all count towards the self-reported 80 hours. A lot of outings with external stakeholders are also low stakes. I'm an introvert and I have never found these work related lunches and dinners anything close to real work. In addition, eating out on the company card relieves you of the personal work of preparing and shopping for meals on those days.

The problem in my view is not how we categorize work vs non-work but how people homogenize different types of work to create unrealistic expectations of what work is and how much of it we should be doing.

Burnout is not overwork. Burnout is a cycle of missed expectations, perceived unfairness, etc, etc. When one is at risk of burning out, one is often at their least productive.

The 1% who claim such long hours... I know some people who live to work, and have done so for years, but they are amply rewarded and respected. Their entire social life is entwined with what they do and what they do is WHO they are.

When I have burned out it is because I have poured so much effort into specific activities while those people around me did nothing, where the credit for my effort was not offered or, even worse, offered but not followed through, and where I expected a result that never eventuated.

Reward for effort offsets the stress gained. When one feels disrespected, when one feels like they are being worked to death while others sit around, when one feels that they are the unacknowledged single-point-of-failure, this breeds burnout.

This has always been part of the propaganda against the poor. If only you worked as hard as this CEO, you'd be rich too!

In reality, it's exactly the opposite. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20151720 Page 16, Figure 4. Average hours worked by income group. The poorer you are the more hours you work.

The graph shows difference between countries with different income, not groups of individuals with different income within same country.

The difference of hours worked may be due to factors relevant to countries, not to job done or individual differences.

I cannot deduce your conclusion from that graph.

The conclusion of the actual paper doesn’t quite support your argument: “ We document that, on average, adults in the developing world work about 50 percent more hours per week than adults in rich countries. Average hours worked are higher in developing countries both for men and for women, for all age and education groups, and along both the extensive and intensive margins. Within countries, hours are decreasing with income on average and particularly so in the poorest countries. In the richest countries, hours worked are flat or increasing in income. One implication of our findings is that aggregate labor productivity and TFP differences across countries are larger than previously thought. Moreover, ignoring hours worked also leads to misleading conclusions about the extent of welfare differences across countries. Put simply, residents of the poorest countries are not only consumption poor, but leisure poor as well.”

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