My first reaction when reading the title of this article was to think of a variation of the punchline for an old _macho_ joke: "because other men pretend to care".
In my experience, and granted I haven't worked in the US, the number of hours you spend in the office is always expected to be in line with what your manager has committed to paying you for.
In countries like Germany or Holland, if you consistently stay over-time in the office you might be surprised to find that you will be called upon justifying your behavior since the local belief is that you are either incompetent and can't finish the work assigned to you in your normal work schedule, which will cost the company money to train you or hire a replacement, or your manager is incompetent because he over-assigned your time and it will cost the company money when you finally burnout or start taking shortcuts in your work.
Other European countries have established rules that forbid employers contacting their employees (mail or phone) outside of business hours to avoid the pressure of having to do work on your personal time.
I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
US engineer here. Agreed on not wanting to start a "war". Allow me to share the rationale that my manager in a previous job shared with me.
This is not an exaggerated quote, it's taken from the notes I wrote immediately after the incident.
"engi_nerd, we at $MEDIUM_SIZED_AEROSPACE_COMPANY expect our engineers to work at least 15 to 20 hours of unpaid overtime each week. This is the minimum of what you need to do to demonstrate that you are ready for a promotion. During that extra time, we'll assign you duties that are beyond your normal job responsibilities. Carry those out well and you'll prove that you're ready for a promotion."
I swear I am not making this up. When I stated that I refused to do what he asked, the manager said, "Then you'll never have a chance to be promoted from what you're doing now." That very day I went home and began updating my resume; my final day at that job was less than 4 months later.
Good on you. I would refuse to work at any company that places such ridiculous standards on its employees. I'm surprised you even stayed for 4 months I would have been out of there much sooner.
It took that long to get to where I wanted to be -- I had to arrange to sell a house and move, etc. But the actual "find a new job" process took a single email to a key member of my professional network.
That sounds like a horrible place to work and the arguments are complete nonsense.
To me, and maybe I'm just too cynical, but it sounds like the manager was telling you that the company needed 50% of your work to be off the books in order for them to meet expectations which is a sign of a poorly managed company. But then again it makes sense since, according to him, only people who show no capacity to self-manage, prioritise or delegate get promoted.
I think you did well in leaving that job, good on you!
What makes this story a little more ridiculous (and funnier to tell) is that we were all employed in the business of designing and launching scientific research rockets.
The phrase "it's not rocket science" has a whole new meaning for me now.
Fair play to you. That's some shockingly explicit wage theft. Thankfully, skilled workers (such as most Hacker News readers / contributors) usually have other options and don't have to accept such nasty work conditions.
BTW, I'm impressed that you're organised enough to keep notes on such exchanges after they happen; memory alone is too damn unreliable.
I was taking notes because I believed that my manager was unfairly trying to make a case to fire me. Background, if anyone might be interested...
I was proven right two days before I handed in my resignation letter, when said manager called me to the carpet and informed me in very direct terms that he thought I was an extremely poor engineer and was not going to last long without an attitude adjustment. I believe that my refusal to work overtime, as well as my refusal to comply with management directives I found to be unethical, was what triggered that conversation.
The unethical acts they wanted me (and all my fellow engineers to do): work on one mission while billing time to another, which is illegal while working on US government contracts, and tell ISO auditors that we were following our engineering redlining process while actually following a secret, different process that was not officially released in our document management system.
Not going to prison for you, nor am I compromising my professional ethics.
The problem is the definition of work. Last night I was at a Wine Bar in Houston with Clients and Colleagues from 5:30 to 9:30.
Was it billable? No. Was it paid for? Yes. Does it have work value? Yes. Is it "technically" work? Maybe. Did I have a good time? Yes. Would I have done it if I didn't think there was business value to it? Absolutely not.
That's not always the case, though. I have a friend who works in public accounting who actually does work 80-hour weeks during busy season (i.e. just before taxes are due) and spends pretty much that whole time in the office from what I understand.
Knowledge work is so diversified now, it would be impossible to capture everyone. I was just providing an anecdote as someone who sympathized with the article.
Well, I would classify it as work because it was a social interaction with a comercial intent.
If you were a contractor you could probably justify those expenses as part of your activity because it's culturally acceptable to engage in alcohol consumption with work relationships and you were representing your company while doing so.
>I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
In short bursts, I think the diminishing returns of long hours is sorta overblown. Over the long term, 16 hour days will wear you down and destroy you.
I work in a big law and 16 hour days are too common. But people are successfully managing billion dollar deals and litigation while doing 16 hours fairly often.
But over a long period of time it takes a toll emotionally and physically.
One problem with organizations that bill by the manhour--law and consulting--is that even if the employee output diminishes, the firm still bills the same rate. There isn't a lot of incentive to keep your employees heads fresh.
>One problem with organizations that bill by the manhour--law and consulting--is that even if the employee output diminishes, the firm still bills the same rate. There isn't a lot of incentive to keep your employees heads fresh.
I think you've hit a pretty good point straight in the head here. The article also seems to focus on a consulting company which very likely sells man-hour packages so it is on their best interest to have "heroes".
In CA some people won't meet the salary requirement, which is somewhere around $90K/yr. Also, all administrative and many sales staff, who use keyboards extensively, are exempt (except at VP and up level).
>>do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
It depends on what you are working on, how important that is, how interesting it is and what is at stake. There have been instances when I could do long hours which just come naturally out of the flow. Other times, its difficult to get by the day and I long to see 5:00 on the watch.
Having said that most of the burnouts and hatred towards long working are caused due to resentment. I have seen people used and thrown like tissues for the well being of political cartels within companies.
Overall I think this is the largest flaw in Humans. Else if we had any appreciation for meritocracy we would all be living in space colonies by now. A lot of talent and work is lost because a few hardworking are making up for every one else. And with rewards continuously being stolen by the thieves in the political cartels, there is a little incentive for anybody genuine to stay up and contribute.
Conclusion is people don't like to work hard when they get nothing in return. This situation is starving the whole world ecosystem of good work.
> do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
Knock it down to 14h, and I can think of 2 people. I worked for both, and both fell into the category of having moved to the US from another country. My career took me elsewhere, but they were both great to work for.
In my experience people who work long hours are often too tired to be objective about the quality of the work they are delivering or their own efficiency .
The short version is, despite the information-age, we still think about this stuff in an industrial-age terms; that productivity is directly proportional to time spent. In fact it's highly non-linear for most forms of information-age value creating activitie.
I agree with you completely. Even our work schedules are still based on the mandated daylight times which were created so that factories wouldn't have to keep their lights on for too long.
I'm an expat myself so I'm curious about this.. Were their visas tied to their work contract? Did they have their families living with them?
As an anecdote, when I first moved abroad I was single and didn't speak the local language (Dutch) so I didn't really have any incentive to interact socially outside of work and I ended up spending way too many hours in the office but just about managing to do my job competently because I was pretty sad and demotivated all the time and often doubted my decision to move abroad.
I also have some experience working in Germany and I feel you are right with the hours but that's not the point. Even if everybody wants you to work just 40 hours people still have unreasonably high demands because they don't understand the complexity of the situation they are in (coworkers, bosses, customers all the same). So you still need to find ways to satisfy people without always doing exactly what they have asked for.
That's just the nature of work though. You'll find that even general contractors do a great deal of pushing back on scope during a project in order to make sure things come in on both cash and time budgets. The only difference is we work in the virtual space which tends to disconnect people from the fact that things still take time.
Yeah, that's what I was pointing out in another comment directly responding to the topic. That's just how work is, or better how life is. You can complain about it or you find a way to handle it. It's not about the 80-hour week but about handling people.
> local belief is that you are either incompetent and can't finish the work assigned to you in your normal work schedule, which will cost the company money to train you or hire a replacement, or your manager is incompetent because he over-assigned your time and it will cost the company money when you finally burnout or start taking shortcuts in your work.
That belief makes too much sense. To be a belief shouldn't there be a contrary believable belief? I wouldn't want to be part of the other retrograde group who believes something else.
The contrary belief is what is described in the article, where people are expected to stay in the office, or on-call for long hours to be valued as employees.
The sad thing is how many people actually live like this, defining themselves through what they do instead of who they are.
I live in Berlin and a lot of tech companies here (especially startups) expect unpaid overtime. This is in stark contrast to Vienna where I've almost never encountered it.
I think it's normal for startups to try to get things for free, be it software or work hours, and that's OK up to a point, but once a company reaches a plateau of business activity and operational maturity then it becomes a sign of poor management that they can't balance workload and workforce.
Out of curiosity, are you German? My experience with German companies was centred in the financial services sector out of Frankfurt and some tech companies out of Munich and overtime was never even suggested so I'm thinking there might also be some differences between the regions.
I'm not German, but we've been living in Berlin for about 2 years now and lived in Vienna for almost 8 years before that.
I was even explicitly told by some companies when interviewing that they expect and encourage workers to stay until at least 7-8pm...at least between Berlin and Vienna there is definitely a difference in attitude.
I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
American here. No need for "a war". European countries are more productive. Long hours don't work. Most Americans know it, and would agree with everything you have to say.
I would generally agree with you, although I don't think that long hours necessarily signify incompetence. In the HBR article, the sense given is that they signify being bad at politics, and therefore find themselves in a position where they sacrifice too much and only get moderate reward. The people who are good at politics figure out how to "pass", how to get full credit for being dedicated without working unsustainable hours.
It's a vicious cycle: people who are bad at politics put their heads down and work 80-hour weeks, and because they're overworked they never learn how the politics of the organization really work (they don't have the time) and, when they inevitably tire of the nonsense and face time, they don't have the political skill to reduce their effort and get away with it, even though they could probably cut their hourage by 50% at least without hurting the company at all.
The counterintuitive reality is that overwork projects low status, in the US as it does in the EU, but so many people are oblivious to the fact and think that "busy" is a good look on them. (It's a good look to other over-busy, mid-level chumps. It doesn't fool the people with actual power.) There are a few jobs in which you simply have to work 90-hour weeks or you'll get fired (e.g. investment banking's analyst programs) and my observations wouldn't apply but, even in the US, they're rare. This isn't like Japan salaryman culture where average people have to work 14-hour days just to stay put. In general, working in a way that lowers your status, emphasizing availability and sacrifice rather than unique skill, tends only to get you more grunt work.
The irony is that, 10 years ago at age 21, these bankers and consultants were, for the most part, way ahead of people like me in terms of social skills. But after 10 years of doing the true-believer thing and working themselves to death, they've gotten to the (surprising) point where they suck at politics.
This is also why I think it's silly that Americans are so averse to learning "office politics". Academically, it's a disgraceful game, but if being halfway good at it saves you 20 hours per week and gets you the same damn reward, it's absolutely worth learning. The truth is that 5 percent of one's reputation as a strong or weak performer is performance, 10 percent is raw (and obvious) politics, and 85% is the politics of performance that looks like merit to true-believer types, but is usually quite game-able. And there's nothing morally wrong with gaming it; it makes a person more likely to reach a high-impact role with his or her capability intact, and that benefits the company as much as the individual.
There is a prisoner's dilemma aspect to office politics: the more time you spend learning the politics of an organization, the more effective you will be within that organization, but the more time that everyone in the organization spends politicking, the less effective the organization will be as a whole. At some critical point, the organization collapses inwards on itself and becomes unable to react to changing market conditions, and goes out of business. That's why there's resistance to teaching or even making people aware of politics: eventually it results in the destruction of everyone's jobs.
There's another game you can play, which is to find organizations (or parts of organizations) where there is a minimum amount of politics to begin with. These are usually younger, high-growth companies filling a real need in the marketplace; because everyone's so busy delivering value to the customer, they don't have time to compete with each other, nor do they need to because the pie's expanding faster than anyone can gobble up a piece of it. As Eric Schmidt liked to say, "More revenue solves all known problems."
The problem with personally optimizing for office-politics is that now you have a big comparative advantage over other employees, but only in high-politics workplaces. That will bias your selection criteria toward companies which are about to fail in the marketplace, which may not be a winning strategy in the long term.
There is a prisoner's dilemma aspect to office politics: the more time you spend learning the politics of an organization, the more effective you will be within that organization, but the more time that everyone in the organization spends politicking, the less effective the organization will be as a whole.
I agree that this conflict of interest exists.
At some critical point, the organization collapses inwards on itself and becomes unable to react to changing market conditions, and goes out of business. That's why there's resistance to teaching or even making people aware of politics: eventually it results in the destruction of everyone's jobs.
That, I'm not sure that I buy. Large tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have a lot of politics but are still very successful. I think that, at some point, companies get to a level where typical political behavior doesn't help them, but won't unhorse them either. Most Fortune 500 companies do just fine at delivering returns to investors and salaries to employees, despite being large and political.
The problem with personally optimizing for office-politics is that now you have a big comparative advantage over other employees, but only in high-politics workplaces.
Sure, and I don't advise learning only politics. I think that people need to learn enough to solve political problems and to avoid losing fights. (It's rare that any kind of fight is ever "won", so avoiding political fights in general might be best. I wish I had known this when I was at Google.) Ideally, it's best to specialize in something that adds value but learn enough politics to get by, protect the good, and keep one's work from falling into a black hole.
The sad truth, as we'd both agree, is that organizations tend to end up being run by people who specialized in politics itself. That's unfortunate and, given the game-theoretic issues that you already described quite well, I don't see an easy solution. When bodies end up being overwhelmed by individually fit cells that harm the organism we call it "cancer". When corporations' upper ranks are filled with individually fit (politically speaking) people who lack vision or care for the organization, we end up with exactly what you described.
"(It's rare that any kind of fight is ever "won", so avoiding political fights in general might be best. I wish I had known this when I was at Google.)"
As human beings that evolved for living in smaller tribes, our anger and retribution instinct makes a lot of sense. If you get a reputation for just accepting being walked all over, then your life will be much worse. You need to need have honor, and to defend your honor, and attack those who bully you. But in the modern world, reputation does not travel in the same way. Nor do you have the same tools for defending yourself. Duels became passe long ago. So fighting back often is just net negative to your own interests. When you run into a bad boss, the past option is usually to play along and then plot an escape.
> Large tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have a lot of politics but are still very successful.
Those large tech companies have put some solid barriers to enter in their markets before being run by politics. I suspect nostrademons is suggesting to work in a new sector, where there is no clear leader and no entry cost: any startup has a chance to win. However in this case one has to sell the products, make some partnerships, market one's company, etc. which might involve politics, but outside the company.
All three can be explained away :D Norway = oil, Luxemburg & Ireland = tax havens. The GDP-based worker productivity definition is pretty useless, IMO.
There are huge differences in work force that make such comparisons as good as useless.
For example, the jobs for people who put your stuff in paper bags at Walmart do not exist in large parts of Western Europe, and doormen are way rarer. In general, the USA has more low-paying, low productivity jobs than Western Europe. That lowers average productivity for the USA.
Also, measuring productivity is hard. You can't look at pay, as that can be quite different for exactly the same work (you can get a suit made in Asia for peanuts, but that doesn't mean people working there aren't productive)
So, you scale for _something_: average income (before or after taxes), hamburger index, or whatever. In the end, it will be very, very hard, if not impossible, to do that objectively. If the outcome of your procedure differs by a large factor from what you expect, you will search for errors in your logic. If it matches what you expect, it is hard to keep searching as hard.
Is there not some comparison of two similar roles and metrics for those roles? (e.g. an engineering firm in the US produces specs for a bridge in X person-hours vs the Y person-hours it takes a firm in the UK.)
Define 'similar'. Do both firms have to go through the same amount of red tape? If not, is time spent doing extra calculations showing the safety of the bridge productive time or bureacratic overhead?
You _can_ let both design a bridge according to the same rule set, but to measure how hard teams work and not how fast they can do that task, you have to make sure both have equal experience with that rule set (US engineers will likely be faster at designing a U.S. bridge than UK engineers, and vice versa)
To make a truly fair comparison of efficiency of working, you probably will end up with an exercise where both teams design a bridge that will never get built. Possible? Yes, but also expensive.
I can say I'm just oblivious enough that I probably wouldn't have learned that lesson had I stayed doing the normal work thing. I freelance so I have my own set of politics to deal with, but the change in perspective is enough to view the politics as something other than detrimental.
But I've never really thought about office politics in those terms, thank you for the enlightening post.
> do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
A lot of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft's employees all seem to put in long hours and are productive with the extra time. Amazon on the other hand is one of the companies with a lot of people "pretending" to work long hours. I was looking into these companies when applying to jobs and that was a sense I got at least.
None of this has anything to do with productivity or swindling clients, it's about control.
If you want to be at the table, you need to be in the cool kids club. If you want to be in the club, you need to sacrifice your identity to the club. Membership requires that you look, think and act like a member. In exchange for your sacrifice, you'll be financially rewarded, and usually become a member of a little fraternity that will be a tight social network as your career progresses.
It's all about what you want. In this case, you make a decision to become a management consultant to banks and Fortune 50 companies. In doing so, you're trading cub scouts for the prestige and rewards of working with those clients. You're not going to be super-dad, you're going to be the cartoon character dad who is never around and fucking around with your iPhone when you are. They tell you up front that they own you -- it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
If you're in this situation "Take a pay cut" is a ridiculous approach. If you're in a business like that, you're a type-A predator type, and doing that will just marginalize you. "Be strategic in picking a career" is the advice you should follow.
Nicely written. Most of us are not in this league, and personally, I am so happy for that. Companies, and world probably too, needs some people like that. But it's a big fallacy to think everybody should be, act and work like that. This world already has enough unhappy people chasing careers that won't make them happy. What we need more of are balanced, happy and strong personalities (that can create stable and loving environment for their kids for example) to counter-balance these perceptions. One can be a great performer, not despite but exactly because he has a life apart from work. Seems to me like a failed management practices that hurt companies in long run.
Raising a happy well-functioning family is freaking hard, I would say it's by far the hardest task one could endeavor on. I have big respect for every man who achieves that. What one has in CV is marginal and really unimportant compared to that. But I am far from stating everybody should have this drive.
>f you want to be at the table, you need to be in the cool kids club
While this is true, the fact of the matter, is people like to do business with people they trust and they tend to trust people like them.
I don't think it is as nefarious as you make it sound, but it is a problem because it implies it isn't based on merit, and while there are circumstances that it isn't, a lot of it is. They are where they are based on skills and experiences, but the barriers to entry are high because Fortune 50 companies aren't just handing these jobs out to people they can't trust.
I think deliberately inducing a degree of what the psychologists call learned helplessness is a part of it. If you continually stress out a rat randomly in ways out of his control, the rat will fail to take advantage of escape opportunities. It will helplessly sit there and put up with the random shocks (or whatever) even when the door is open.
These firms absolutely want the employees stressed out to a degree that contemplating escape from the cage seems like too much.
I recently worked for a company that expected employees to stay well pass 5pm. I was personally working 13 or 14 hours a day and having to occasionally volunteer my time on weekends. My salary in comparison to hours worked went down significantly.
Anyway, I did what most of the men described in the article did. I learned how to work without working. It was easy to copy the kind of workaholic appearance expressed by many of my peers.
The strange thing was that most everyone was pretending. Everyone was just lying. It was like there was some secret unwritten rule that we should pretend instead of talking about the obvious elephant in the room. Which was that we were asked too much of us and that needed to change.
When I was first starting out (way before I took that job) I was told that the idea is to "manage perception" and that appears to be true of a few places.
> When I was first starting out (way before I took that job) I was told that the idea is to "manage perception" and that appears to be true of a few places.
I have been giving this advice to quite a few people lately, both inside and outside my company.
As a manager I feel that my team's productivity benefits more from "work hygiene" than from long hours, but we have a few team members who have come under scrutiny because of perceived short hours.
My advice to them is always, "I trust that you are doing your best as a part of the team. But remember, the teams perception is what matters. And when you leave at 3 it looks like you are slacking. No one knows you got here at 6 because they weren't here. So rather than changing your behavior, work on changing their perception."
It's really sad to see that people have all but forgotten how hard our grandparents and great grandparents fought to have a 40 hour work week. It's also sad that while our GDP has gone up so little of that prosperity has translated into better living/working conditions.
I don't think that many people believe that unions were always unnecessary. They were vital in a time where employers could just do what they wanted. Nowadays, though, unions are built on greed and laziness.
That's certainly the perception, but I still have to wonder how true it is vs how much is propaganda. Still, even if it is true that unions weren't necessary for a period of time, they most certainly have become necessary once again:
And big companies aren't? They aren't built on greed and squeezing every last bit of productivity out of someone for the absolute minimum they can pay?
Seriously, the only reason people have that perception is because big companies have the money to run smear campaigns against labor.
I hear what you're saying, but staying at work longer, is still shitty. The point of leaving work is so you can tend to your matters at home - family, chores, pursuing your own interests. A long break in the middle of the day won't fix that - you'll simply waste more time on the internet.
Certainly not saying the setup is something to aspire to. But we have to deal with the cards we were dealt.
My goal as a manager is to promote better work hygiene in my employees. Which was supposed to be the point of my comment, probably should have left off how I personally have dealt with this.
I am so glad you're not my manager. My team just got a Team of the Year award -- and we are completely results-oriented. I usually get to the office by 10, leave whenever I feel like it. We only care about skill and productivity. We would fire someone who hung around the office in order to meet a perception...
The employee can still leave at 3pm, but maybe he shoots off a couple of his team-oriented emails at 6:30am. That shows he's indeed working early, so leaving early isn't weird.
One of my employees does this by spending the morning hours managing his inbox and otherwise catching up. Additionally, he always makes a fresh pot of coffee right when getting in. The coffee maker has a 2 hour heat timer, so when it dings at 8:30am it's a clear indication he was in the office early.
You don't have to be blatant. He isn't, but he's well known as the guy in the office that likes working super early, and no one gets bent when he steps out of the office by 4pm. They occasionally whine about how it's unfair he's a morning person and gets to enjoy the afternoon sun, but it's jovial joking about their night owl habits compared to his morning habits.
Basically, having a good team that understands and respects each other is the key. If you don't have that you miss out on many of the good parts.
Your goal as a manager should be to deliver the perception that everything is great to your superiors and not put it on the backs of your team members. If they have to stay after to impress your boss, then you have failed.
> But we have to deal with the cards we were dealt
Are you sure about that? You're a manager. Responding to your parent comment about managing worker's perceptions of their team members: In the case that someone wants to leave at 3 because they got there at 6, why not just explain to everyone that it is, in fact, okay (or even encouraged)?
There is a difference between a manager and owner. I am taking the hit because I can and because it keeps up the expectations of the owners. Sadly it is hard to escape the "butts in chairs" mentality when you pay people >5 figure salaries.
Then why stay? Why waste quality of life for a startup lottery ticket that data has repeatedly shown will most likely fail? Being a non-profitable early stage startup is no excuse to run the place like a slave ship.
I think this is an interesting comment. Enjoyment of work is a large contributor to my "quality of life". And working at a startup provides interesting and unique work.
I find it interesting that everyone always assumes that working more hours means less quality of life. I thoroughly enjoy my job, so spending more time doing it does not detract from anything.
Do you have a significant ownership stake in the company? If not, then why the fuck are you killing yourself working all this free overtime for nothing?
I had an interesting conversation with my boss a few weeks ago. I had been leaving earlier just to test the waters, working 10-5. I caught my boss outside the office on our way out at 5, he asked me about how my "schedule seemed to be changing. Nobody's said anything so far but..." I said that I was "working really hard and was getting fried at the end of the day. I could just sit at my desk..." and he was quick to say, "No, don't do that! I'll let you know if it becomes a problem, and in the meanwhile we'll just have an unofficial policy." I nodded in agreement, then went home and adjusted my attitude towards work to "go in whenever the hell I want to go in and leave around 5-ish or whenever I want to leave."
I actually feel like I'd be bothering my boss by asking him to leave early. Sometimes he asks me if I'll be in at 3pm or whatever for some meeting that may or may not move a needle, just to send the message that no, I'm not expected to be at my desk all day.
Because my work generally impacts no one else in the company, unless there's a fire I rarely interact with them on anything other than a social level, no one knows or cares when I get in or leave. It's just a perception-management game that I'm pretty good at. Projecting competence goes a very long way towards allowing you leeway to claw back on expectations.
Perception is also something that is taught. If everyone puts in 12 hours, 12 hours becomes the norm. I really dislike working for organizations that care more about the perception than the reality, and it's my advice that folks try to avoid those (or leave them).
It's better to not condition your manager to think this is acceptable early on, or it quickly becomes something you can be forced to do regularly.
I do agree that if that's the case, you definitely shouldn't be putting in a continuous 12, because it's almost guaranteed your management isn't.
The worse case is when they want presence, and as a result, people stay at work long hours reloading the internet. There's no point in that, which is why it's important to just measure results, not effort.
Yeah, IMHO it's good to learn quickly that other people's perceptions of you - if they don't achieve results that you need them to, don't matter. Making sure you are happy is the most important thing. Trying to make people you don't respect respect you and is also kind of a terrible thing to force yourself to do, it feels like selling your soul every single second. It's worse when the people you are trying to get to respect you already don't, so it's better to drop the illusion. Care about helping people who care that you are helping them.
There is potentially a big legal difference between tinkering on your side projects at work, compared to carving out time for them at home. Unless you have a specific exemption in your contract, then your employer owns all your work that you do in the office or on their equipment.
My reply to that would be "I'm working with adults, not babies". If your team can't deal with seeing someone leave early, then you should fire me. I honestly wouldn't mind, there's plenty of work around here.
This was my most recent specific recommendation, just send out an email right when you get in. Maybe do a peer review or push a commit. Anything small that shows the team you were there doing work.
Where I work now, I got talked to because I was working too much. Working over 40 hours / week was a problem. But my boss' attitude has changed somewhere.
He has always said, "I don't track butt in chair time. That doesn't matter. What matters is that you get work done."
People lived that. They got their work done and work was fairly flexible and happy.
The message has changed to "I don't track butt time. As long as you are here 40 hours / week, you can spend as much additional time working as you want."
Not surprisingly, unhappiness has increased significantly and productivity has taken a corresponding hit.
Did the switch (and switched companies) the other way around: I've never been happier. My CTO even gave me the day off yesterday to spend time with my girlfriend I hadn't seen in two weeks.
It's similar here - I leave pretty much when my timer clicks over 8 hours (don't take a lunch hour - 20 minutes tops if Tesco is busy) and people are definitely glaring at me.
At one job we had set hours 8:30 to 5:00, I was ALWAYS the first one out; packed and walking at 5:00:00. It became a joke, my line was, I'm the first to leave so no one else would suffer the stigma, taking the hit for the team. Our manager was not pleased, but my work quality was good, so he lightened up after a while. That company later tanked by the way, entire IT staff was laid off. I had left for greener pastures long before.
I was at a job about a year ago where a project missed deadline, like all the engineers said it would, and management said that the engineers needed to put in 11.5 hour days.
We did. But we didn't get much done on those days, like anyone could have told you happens with knowledge work.
All those engineers, including me, are now gone from there.
This is what happens when the reward culture does not match reality. In school, every time you value grades over learning, you foster a classroom of cheaters.
The company is looking for cheater types because:
1) they clearly can't cope with employees telling the truth, that is, there are priorities other than work.
2) they reward looking busy over being productive.
It's a consulting shop. They want to give their clients the impression that they're always working, always available, and to bill the maximal hours possible. So it may be rational for the firm (at least in the short term) to encourage this cheater culture -- it's the clients they are cheating, not the firm.
In this case, they should tell their consultants how to… "communicate" with the client. They want cheaters? Then cheating the client should be part of the contract.
> You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my son had a Cub Scout meeting.
I felt a sharp disdain for the managers. Seriously, children growing up is a onetime thing.It's fucked up beyond reason that people accept this, and I'd gladly take a lower paying job so I can be there.
I was at a training seminar where they were trying to go through the ethical dilemma of a manager who had two employees wanting to go home on time (one for spousal medical issue, one for child based commitment) and asking how to decide which one is allowed to leave. I went a little apeshit at the premise itself, and indeed at the training company for re-enforcing the idea you need permission to leave at 5pm.
Yesterday my manager asked me what I was doing this evening, and whether I could cover a release in terms of support. As it happens, I can. If I had plans of any kind my answer would have been "Sorry, nope. I've got plans so need to be out of the office by xx:xx".
> ... the idea you need permission to leave at 5pm.
I hate this idea too. I'm lucky to be able to organize my work as I want to (working in academia). Asking a permission for such a thing sounds so wrong.
However, this freedom comes with a price. I earn much less than most of my friends with the same education level and I have to admit that I suffer (a little) to have a lesser social status and little recognition.
I disagree that compromise is necessary. I've found that one merely needs to avoid any organization that routinely hires MBAs and HR directors as a good litmus test for whether or not the place will try to grind me down. That can be hard to do in software development, especially if you end up getting stuck in consulting[1]. Hence why I freelance now. I work 20 hours a week and I gross more than I ever did working for The Man.
People always tell me, "Oh, I could never do that, I like knowing I have a regular job," but they don't realize that A) they could get fired at any minute just because their boss doesn't like them, and B) I've had the same client for the last 3 years, which is longer than I've stayed at any job I've ever had before.
As long as you're working for someone else, as long as you aren't making the actual profit off of your work, your work will always be treated as a cost center, rather than an income center. You will never be paid the full value of your work, because there would be no point to paying someone to do the work if there were no profit in it for the employer. Ultimately, I'd like to get out of freelancing, but for now, at least freelancing lets me demand a higher portion of the margin. I've found it also seems to set me in a position of being a peer to my client (we are both business men) rather than a subordinate. It's a small difference that makes all the difference.
[1] It's incredibly hard to transition from a job in consulting to a job in a product-based software company. I think it's mostly that there are so few of the latter compared to the former, but I suspect the latter looks askew at people with a history at the former as well.
With regard to your footnote, I actually just made that switch. I haven't noticed any negative feedback - they welcomed me just like any other team member. I'm actually much, much happier working at a product company than as a consultant.
I'm not an employee, I don't have to pretend to care about career advancement and I get paid for the time I'm here. The money is actually better though I have to sort out my own pension provisions etc.
And I don't ask anyone's permission for anything, because they're my clients, not my manager.
I'll second this. I recently switched from permanent to contract work, and I love it. Walking out the door at 17:30 on the dot and completely forgetting about work until the next day is very liberating.
Also, you aren't involved in office politics and you can upwardly delegate any decisions that you don't want to make ("I'm afraid I'm just a contractor, you'll have to ask my manager about that).
As a developer, I really get to get my head down and work hard, which is what I most enjoy about this job.
I try to maintain an objective distance from my clients. I refuse to do on-site work. I announce hours or days of unavailability, not request time off. I have a few subcontractors that do a modicum of work for me--though their productivity is certainly appreciated and I pay them for it, I'm more interested in the image it creates that it's not just me. I specifically don't reply to emails right away. I maintain separate servers from them and refuse to accept passwords to their production servers (consequentially, because I can't just "go fix it" for them, I think it's made their other developers more cautious about testing).
The first one was easy actually, and the second. Then I took a month off between contracts and it took another two or three months to find the third, and I had a bit of a gap last year when looking for the fourth (where I am now) too.
YMMV. If you're in London it's probably pretty easy. Elsewhere you'll need to be financially prepared for the odd two-three month hiatus.
I work a pretty standard 40 hour work week in an office, and even that makes me feel like a distant father sometimes. Love my kids, hate seeing them only 2 hours a day before they go to bed (they're still very young).
You have to wonder at the mentality of someone who wouldn't be there for their kid. I know you can't be there 100% of the time, but you've got to make some effort and stand up for yourself. Take a pay cut, do less hours.
I loved the book Red Mars in which children were quite uncommon, so whenever a child was about all the adults would pay them lots of attention. This included bosses.
> You have to wonder at the mentality of someone who wouldn't be there for their kid.
I have three boys (5, 4, 1) and another baby on the way. I'll tell you: some of the crap these kids do is freaking boring. Seriously. The older two are in T-ball now, and the practices and games are just mind bogglingly uninteresting. I'm glad they're playing, and I'm glad they're learning important life skills like following directions, understanding rules, and especially some physical prowess, but four innings is just numbing, especially when I'm also chasing around/entertaining my toddler at the same time.
Help with homework? Sure. Answer questions, all day long? Hell yeah I'll do that. Teach the oldest to play "Tower of Guns" to introduce him to using the mouse and keyboard? Yup, happy to help. But T-ball practice? God, only if I must. Cub scout meetings don't sound any better.
But you know what? That's perfectly fine. That's why we have coaches. There are also a number of other dads who are interested in T-ball and help out at practices and games. Not every parent has to be interested in every thing their kid does all the time: it's actually healthy for kids to encounter adults in roles other than "parent" and "teacher".
>I have three boys (5, 4, 1) and another baby on the way. I'll tell you: some of the crap these kids do is freaking boring. Seriously. The older two are in T-ball now, and the practices and games are just mind bogglingly uninteresting.
We always cringe in Europe about this thing in American movies/series, where its "so" important for the kid to have the parents be there for their school performance or game, especially when said kid is 12 or 15 or so.
In real life (at least here) most kids at that age would be enbarassed to be seen with their parents.
Sure, they like for parents to be there for some of the important stuff, but not most BS school functions or game practice.
As an US-ian, I agree with this. I take it the gp above means the Big events. For example as a kid I was only ever in one big school event, and graduations from highschool/college.
Well it's mostly teenagers you know, they want to be and look "independent", not to have their (embarrasingly dressed and outdated) parents cheer them up in school functions...
Its fun if you get involved either as a den leader/assistant or in the background (I was a treasurer). Its basically your ask questions and give directions but with a 15 kid family, thankfully temporarily. And the other parents can be interesting. Being a treasurer kept me busy.
Its actually kinda a downer when they graduate into boy scouts which is a boy run organization as opposed to cub scouts which is a parent run org. Last night all the parents got to do, other than observe, was provide endless safety warnings about their "chemical fuel" chit training. "So you don't try to find a propane stove leak using a match, right?" and its that kind of stuff all night long.
I wasn't meant to be understood that you have to be there for everything. I send my children on their merry way on their own. I don't follow the oldest into the class, he's 6 and can do that himself. I take him to the scouts every week, but I'm not there.
I was more thinking along the line where you have arranged to go the park with your kid Sunday, and play some ball - work better not cancel that more often than not.
You have to wonder at the mentality of someone who wouldn't be there for their kid.
Some people rationalize it with that making sure their kid lives in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, goes to a great school, has access to all the latest gadgets and gets to to travel the world is the best thing they can do for their kids. And if the cost is that they have to work 14 hour days and hardly ever see their kids then that is a sacrifice they're willing to step up and make.
No saying I agree, but I can certainly see how you could convince yourself that working an 80 hour week is you doing the best thing for your kids and family.
Furthermore while I agree with (having done so myself) saying "Take a pay cut, do less hours.", it is only easy when you are already essentially rich. If "take a pay cut" meant I would have to move my family into a tiny apartment in the shitty part of town I probably wouldn't have such a cavalier attitude about it.
There is also the fact that for some careers there is no intermediate state between success and failure -- no "not being promoted", only continual success or a lack of a job (recruiting and finance spring to mind).
In those careers where there is in fact an intermediate state, it can feel as though it is very narrow and difficult to stay in.
While the parent getting more pay may not really be important to a child, their long-term job security could prove to be essential.
We're not poor or anything, but I've never met a family that could choose to work less. It doesn't take 80 hours every week, but when they call you on Saturday (or even Sunday), there is no choice.
The central Europe countries that I know (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, etc.) and western-Europe coutries (France, Great Britain, etc.), there is a choice and most don't work on Saturday or even Sunday (except for certain jobs like DevOps/Admins, restaurants/hotels, factory workers with shifts, etc.). But in some of these countries you also cannot go shopping during the night (shops are only opened from about 9 am to 7 pm) nor on Sunday. You are not allowed to work more than specific hours per week. And even doctors with shifts that last more than 8 hours have several scheduled sleep hours.
When I worked in an office in the UK flexitime was very common, and seems much more so. Many people would balance work and life by doing 4 long days and then taking a 3 day weekend. Some would build up flexi credit to take extra weeks of holiday. Provided you were working effectively then great flexibility was allowed, flexi priveleges could be removed for under performance (well below average).
My wife and I chose to work less by starting our own business so we could spend lots of time with our kids when they were pre-schoolers. It's kinda backfiring a bit now. We are most definitely poor financially.
I have twice taken pay cuts so that I could be there for my kids and have given up on businesses so I could be there for them. I have always been of the belief that nobody on their death bed ever says "I wish I had spent more time at work".
A certain level of resources are necessary to give the kids the best shot though - having a car to go to events and access resources, for example. Buying things for projects, clothing suitable for activities they might have chance to take part in; money for school trips. Money for clubs, classes, holidays, ... it's great having 6 weeks with your kids in the Summer but not so much if you can't afford to do anything with them, would it be even greater if you could have only 3 weeks but travel abroad and afford to pay for someone else to do the cooking and cleaning ... it's a balance isn't it.
Without wishing to detract from your point, people also frequently (on their death bed or otherwise) wish they had achieved more in their life - which might imply they wished they had worked more.
This is true, but I have yet to speak to anyone old who felt that it was lack of time at work that was the limiting factor in them achieving more in their lives.
I should add that I am not suggesting that everyone should follow my example since it is really for everyone to decide how their life is best lived. I know I have not been able to acheive even a fraction of what I have wanted to do in my life, but I don't regret the choices I have had to make. There is only 24 hours a day for every person.
Just make sure you don't go too far in the other direction and become a helicopter parent. Children also need some disinterest and neglect occasionally.
You have to be there for your kid, but your kids don't really need you at those arbitrary functions. That's make-work for parents. My dad used to travel overseas 3-5 months out of the year when I was a kid. I've never given a second thought to what school functions he missed--because they were stupid and inconsequential.
I wasn't thinking of weekly game practice or something like it. No, I was thinking of those Sundays where you do something with your child, the parent/child time where you talk to your children and do stuff. If you often work in the weekend, when exactly would you spend time with your child?
Plenty of normal people in not-especially-demanding jobs work on weekends. It's a normal thing. My butcher started his shop because he felt like the demands of the restaurant he ran were making it hard to have a family. He works every weekend; in fact, I think he may only take Tuesdays off.
Lots of private practice doctors and dentists have days off in the middle of the week so they can see patients on Saturday. We don't generally think of dentists as people who are worked so hard they can't spend time with their kids.
So, you should take a pay cut to work the agreed upon 40 hours salary? I don't see why not working unpaid overtime means you should get paid less to not work it.
Immediately after graduating from college, I always felt bad seeing parents who were sacrificing time with their kids to put in extra hours even if the hours weren't necessary. Late night calls to "catch up" when we easily could have waited until the morning.
I just turned 25 and I've worked a few jobs where pretending to work was the norm. It was a drag on me and I was single and in my early twenties. I couldn't imagine doing that while having kids at home as well.
At the same time, this ended up being one of my biggest motivators when it comes to my career. I don't want to end up in that position, ever. If I start a company, I don't want to be that manager. It sucked but it was also a great learning experience so that I know what to avoid in life.
The issue in a lot of cases seems to be that there is no "regular employee": workers are expected to put in the extra time ("effort"), or they're instantly sub-par.
And if it is expected of everyone, then they are not "superheroes" (exceptional individuals) anymore, only regular employees, and the regular ones (those who have a life outside work) are pushed down to the mediocre employee category.
I also hate when HR people or bosses equate the time spent being at work with effort (and let's not talk about efficiency or work output quality.) Being a great parent while working 40 or even 50 hours a week is still a remarquable achievement.
Children goes through multiple phases, where they're learning and their personality emerges. It's not as simple as saying it's 15+ years, you can catch up in the last 3.
It doesn't have to be about children, every person goes through different stages in a period of any 15 years. Single people deserve same (good) treatment as married.
The great thing is, you don't have to take a lower paying job. I started freelancing three years ago and have made more than I've ever made in my career, and I only work 20 hours a week.
Heh, no, I just go by my real name. Well, I'm sort of in the process of merging my consulting business with a partner, but that's mostly just an organizational thing. The "moron4hire" handle is older than my freelancing and was meant to be a daily reminder to myself to be humble.
"I studied a global strategy consulting firm with a strong U.S. presence"
That's the problem right there. These kind of consulting firms are the worst kind of soulless, dysfunctional, corporate sweatshops, preying on the ignorant management of other companies. They desperately try to compensate for the essential mediocrity of their expensive solutions with a veneer of marketing, overwork and crassly macho professionalism.
When a company is built on bullshit, and everyone knows it, even if they won't admit it, then the same falseness and bullshit eventually pervades every corner of the company, and produces the kind of poisonous atmosphere that makes them such a nightmare to work for.
Startups can (but not always are) be just as rough for expecting crazy outputs, because they belief they have nothing, can lose everything at every time, pivots and changes happening all the time, lack of process. The "using the mail/chat client to see if people are 'working'" thing, etc. I prefer more established startups and companies for this reason, but I think they can have most of the same traits, at times, as consultancies as mentioned in this article.
Back after I finished uni, a friend of mine with the same degree went to work in investment banking.
We lived together. Sort of. I basically had the whole house to myself outside of midnight - 0700. Some nights he'd check in with me as I was lying in bed about to sleep. Quite often we'd go a whole week without seeing each other, the only sign of life from him being that his door was closed when I went off to work. Weekends were precious, sometimes we could get a meal in together. His Blackberry would ring, but he could push some things aside to after the meal. The initial rush of getting a prestigious job was soon replaced by complaints about the insanity of the system: sit around from morning to evening doing nothing, wait for the MD to make some work that you can do before the next morning.
So one day his boss decides he's had enough of everything and ends it all. This was a guy of similar background to my friend, similar culture. Just 20 years down the line.
I think it caused my friend to have some thoughts about where he wanted to be, how he wanted to live. He's changed jobs now, much happier, married, got a kid.
This was the impression I got from friends who worked in that industry after college. They were definitely at work for 80 to 100 hours per week, but it seemed like a lot of that extra time was stuff like waiting around for someone else to finish something, eating dinner at the office, or just hanging out because a higher up hadn't left yet.
So much of this is framed around working less to spend time with your kids -- which is perfectly admirable. But, how about working less to spend more time for yourself (personal hobbies, interests, etc) or more time with your spouse? These also seem like equally admirable and important reasons to not work 60-80 hours a week.
The focus on kids drives me nuts. I worked in a web dev shop that billed itself as "family friendly." Flexible hours, work from home, etc.
The reality was that the childless developers never got to use the flexible benefits. Your child has a soccer game? Is sick? Sure take the afternoon off, the childless devs will cover for you. We wouldn't want you to not be there for your child. Oh you want to take a two hour lunch to go out with your girlfriend. Too bad, so-and-so needs to pick their kid up from school so we need you to sit here and babysit the server while he's out.
They are, honestly - and I would never hold it against anyone saying they prioritize that over work.
I think people mention children because a child depend on the parents far more than most people think. It's much easier to find time for yourself, or with your spouse, while working a lot, than it is with a child. I can spend time with my wife nearly every evening, or work on hobby projects - I barely have 1 hour with both my children in weekdays after school. So if my employer starts to take my weekend, I'm looking for a new job where I can also be a father.
"Can't dial in, my kids got a little league game on Sunday" which means 1 hr for kid and theoretically up to 23 hrs for hobby (well not really, but possibly). Scouts is only an hour and a half of actual scouting and the rest of the night is a night off from work. Swim meets were like that too, even counting drive time, a full weekend day off but the meet would only be like 3 hours.
I've never had an ethical problem with this. No one can be productive for more than 40 hours per week or so. Maybe less, honestly. The only hope of over 40 hours of actual net productivity is operating WAY below your ability. So they pretend to think we're productive, we'll pretend to be productive.
This is why people need unions. Because while an individual can say "no" only at the expense of their career, the entire united workforce can force the boss to the negotiating table.
Summary: bosses promote based on butts in seats. By working remotely, with a mobile device , you can fool your boss into thinking you work 13-hr days by working only mornings and evenings.
"We kind of have a shared agreement as to what work–life balance is on our team. We basically work really closely with each other to make sure that we can all do that. A lot of us have young kids, and we’ve designed it so we can do that."
Quote from OA itself quoting a statement made by a member of a team that self-organised their work-life balance. Later in the quote the team member points out that their team is regarded as highly effective. Just wondering if a positive work-life balance might be correlated with that high performance! Perhaps the company is missing a trick there.
> expectations that one be an “ideal worker”—fully devoted to and available for the job, with no personal responsibilities or interests that interfere with this commitment to work—are widespread
Wat? Is this a thing in the US? If so, I'm incredibly happy I live in Sweden.
> many men experienced these expectations as difficult to fulfill or even distasteful.
I'm an Australian who spent 6 months last year in Sweden. I definitely got the impression that companies needs came second to the needs of individuals. Here in Australia, it is much more balanced, depends on your circumstances. My American friends tell me the US is the other way, the company comes before the individual.
If you are in the driving seat for your career, I certainly feel that the USA provides more opportunity. However for the ~70% (random guess) of people who don't have the luxury of being selective with their jobs, the Swedish model looks extremely appealing.
> Wat? Is this a thing in the US? If so, I'm incredibly happy I live in Sweden.
Very much dependent on the company. For most, no, 40 hours is the standard and that's that. There's probably a skewed view here since early stage (i.e. desperate) startups often buck that trend. Harvard Business Review is also probably not the most unbiased voice on an issue like that.
An extreme example of this is South Korea. The basic idea in most medium/large companies being that underlings must be present whenever their bosses are, so people will turn up really early in the morning to greet the boss, and leave really late at night, often just waiting for the boss to go home.
Hierarchy is a very important cultural concept in SK, socially and professionally, and generally companies are far more layered than they would be in most western countries, resulting in lots of bosses. Because of this you have a trickle-down effect of "work more than the boss" hours, with people at the bottom working completely ridiculous hours.
This has two interesting consequences.
The first one I call "gold star sticker promotions", whereby people get promoted on a regular basis, often without a pay rise, sheerly for "working" more hours than the next guy. While the promotions often mean very little by themselves, they tend to result in slightly less work hours.
The second consequence is that people, as described in the article to some extent, actually end up doing very little work despite occupying a seat for so many hours. A friend of mine actually plays Diablo 3 while seating at his desk, and everybody's ok with that. In fact, he got promoted three times just last year. The point is not to get work done, it's simply to show that you're willing to give your soul to your employer.
What exactly happens if you just refuse to work more than forty hours a week? I mean, obviously you won't get promoted, but promotion at that price isn't worth having. Do you get fired? The reason I ask is that I've heard in countries like that it's very difficult to fire an employee, so I was wondering how those two aspects of work go together.
You would be made absolutely miserable, be assigned the most menial of tasks with ridiculous deadlines, tasks that are often largely made up and of no benefit to the company. Your boss might call your parents or your spouse and shame you, might even insult you to your face. If that doesn't make you fall in line and you finally decide to jump ship, you may be ridiculed publicly, potential employers will be contacted and told about your "work ethics", making it really hard to be employed again. You'll essentially be shunned for the foreseeable future, which in SK is generally not culturally acceptable. It's pretty harsh, but it's also important to note that this is not a culture based on individual interest.
What struck me the most about the article was the employee who was denied a promotion because of his 6-weeks of unpaid FMLA leave. That's not only unethical it's also against the law (as is denying FMLA). I can understand the lure of the huge salary but having to work in such a toxic culture would never make it worth it to me.
I can see what the author is saying, but... It's not necessarily about everyone working 80 hour weeks. It's about a corporate culture of 80 hour weeks. Cheating, if you get the job done, and maintain the image, doesn't discourage that culture. Acknowledging that some people are working 40 hours does.
80 hour weeks are important. It gives 40 hours for work, and 40 hours for personal growth. The former is a short cycle, and the latter is a long cycle.
1. If you trim down the growth part, your employees won't be competitive in the long term. Growth compounds, and sometimes superlinearly. If you know more, you learn faster.
2. This may be less relevant to management consulting, but if you trim down the work part, product part falls apart. I've seen organizations killed when work-life balance management stepped in. You go from 20 employees at 80 hours per week to 80 employees at 40 hours per week. Knowledge becomes much more distributed. Communication channels grow. Hiring standards slip.
In addition, if it's an 80 hour week, it becomes your life. It may sound like just 80 hours, but it dominates your life. You think about it in the shower. You dream about it. When you spend time with family, you're distracted with work and want to go work.
In practice, if I can get the same quantity of output from 20 employees as from 80 or a hundred at a higher level of quality, I can pay those employees at least five times as much. Many high-performance organizations try to make this trade-off.
But when society demands work life balance of employees with salaries starting at $300k and going into millions -- that falls flat.
Part of the obscene salaries go into making sure kids and families are healthy, even with a parent out of the house.
The premise that 80 hour work weeks are somehow more productive than 40 hour work weeks is known to be false in the typical case. It's not the hours which determine your productivity, it's the engagement and motivation. Most people who do 80 hour work weeks slack off during a majority of that time and probably realize lower productivity than if they had stuck to a 40 hour work week.
Making your workforce do 80 hours instead of 40 does not make them more productive. Motivating workers and putting them in control of their own work is what gets stuff done.
But it's not about productivity - it's about impression management.
IMO there are two kinds of working relationships - face-based, and fact-based.
Face-based relationships are about impression management, egotism, and exploitation. A face-based employer has no interest in your life, because they only care about their narcissistic self-image. At best they have a delusional belief in the value of hierarchy and process as business goals in themselves. At worst they're simply assholes. If the entire culture is face-based you're in an alligator swamp, and you need to leave and work somewhere else.
A fact-based relationship is based on getting useful stuff done in an efficient way. A fact-based employer assumes employees are functional adults, and is more interested in the end result of the work. Process is only valuable if it creates observable positive results, not for its own sake. They consider employee happiness and development a significant positive benefit to the company.
It's false in the typical case. It's true in the atypical case, where the worker genuinely cares about the job. Earlier in my career, I had sustained 70+ hour work weeks at very high levels of productivity. In the process, I've personally conservative generated tens of millions of dollars of value. That moved me into my current position.
I know a number of other folks like me. I'm not unique here. It's that sort of person that you want to hire.
An 80 hour work week implies 16 hours work during the workdays or 10 if you work weekends. If work takes 16/10 hours for your work, when do you sleep or eat or socialize?
~ As for those other things you mentioned, the remaining 88 hours in the week would allocated as follows: 56 hours for sleep, 10 hours for meals, 3 hours for personal hygiene, 2 hours for exercise, 16 hours for a personal side project, and 1 hour to socialize. ~
~ You'll have plenty of time for friends and relationships when you're dead. If you really cared about the company, you would abandon your personal side project and work 96 hour weeks. If you spent less time eating, you could also spend less time exercising. And some of your co-workers do get a bit ripe at times, so you're probably over-allocating time to hygiene. It takes me 3 minutes to shower, head to toe. That's how you get ahead in this business: effective time management. Also, I survive on a nutrient slurry that allows me to consume an entire day's worth of meals in only 30 seconds. And since I don't have time to actually buy anything, almost all my earnings go straight to savings! ~
The real answer is that you either sacrifice some sleep or you don't have any leisure time. That previous schedule breakdown intentionally ignores the time cost of transportation between activities, and little things like bathroom breaks.
Calculating from my own life, if I worked 80 hours per week, I would have approximately 4 hours of disposable leisure time left. That would only be possible if 95% of my weekly fun requirement was met by work. The likelihood of that happening in any workplace that expected 80 hour weeks is abysmally low.
> The real answer is that you either sacrifice some
sleep or you don't have any leisure time.
You lose sleep, you get sleep debt. Which is bad and shouldn't be tried. So the answer is no leisure time... Which is bad but not at that.
> Also, I survive on a nutrient slurry that allows me to
consume an entire day's worth of meals in only 30 seconds.
And since I don't have time to actually buy anything,
almost all my earnings go straight to savings!~
~ And with oral, anal and urinal catheter you don't even have to ever go to the bathroom. Heck cut of your legs as they are useless and constant source of problems and inefficiencies. Just keep your upper torso for maximum efficient work.
You don't even need to lose 30 seconds on making those meals, let your company provide the Oral Sludge receptacle™.
Upon your termination, the health inspected Murder Rod™ will pierce your head and you'll be recycled into nutrients. Yum. ~
If you are just 30min away from work, you can already remove 5 hours per week assuming you work from Monday to Friday. And that's an absolute minimum, you just cannot live normally and work 80 hours a week.
I'm not suggesting it's a good idea, I'm just mildly questioning this recurring "truth" that you can't be productive working <x> hours per week. It's very commonly repeated and seemingly accepted as an indisputable fact here on HN, but then we also read stories from people (often who have families and often kids) who built their startup working evenings & weekends while holding down a full time job. Both of these cannot be true.
"I can pay those employees at least five times as much"
I understand that as he's talking about five times minimum wage or about $70K/yr, not five times a real wage. Nobody offers five times a real wage. Nobody.
Everyone has their weird false beliefs. Most middle and lower class see themselves as temporarily disadvantaged millionaires and that weird false belief can be very profitably exploited.
The similar weird belief from the upper classes is that economic destruction has been so successful over past decades that there is an infinite pool of infinitely highly talented labor willing to work for minimum wage so anyone asking for more than minimum wage is the cheeky nail standing up that must be pounded down, and its socialism or letting the terrorists win to ever pay someone without direct reports more than the minimum wage. Sure, managers earn millions and CEOs earn billions but conventional upper class wisdom is there's an infinite pool of neurosurgeons willing to work minimum wage for 80 hrs a week while repeating "thank you sir may I have another" as their morally and ethically superior manager paddles them. To some extent you can profitably exploit them by letting them screw up, then offering Very expensive consulting fees to fix the mess they created for themselves. Never, ever work for people like that if you can possibly avoid it, always consult to clean up their messes at like $300/hr.
Let me put this in real numbers. Most folks I know who work those hours make around $300k. That's mean. I know folks who make half that, and I know folks who make several times that.
Personal growth also happens when you're not at work. That's when many people here learn new languages, read about new technologies, and get some of their best ideas. You won't lose anything by working 40 hours a week.
I don't know anyone who can sustain 80 hour work weeks if they're not passionate about what they're doing and enjoy it. People who try to do it just for the money do it for a while, and then either turn into cheaters (as the article documents), or burn out and move onto more fulfilling careers.
Doing something you're passionate about and having an impact on the world is living. It is much more living than going to a job you don't give an f- about for 40 hours per week so you can buy a house in the suburbs and an SUV, retire after 40 years, and then die having left no impact on the world.
1) Not so stealthy ageism. So someone your age should be out of the trenches and on his way up the management chain and we're not saying you're fired because you're 30 yrs old because that would be illegal but you are going to work 60 hr weeks or get fired for not working enough, and not being sustainable is not something we care about because our pyramid says up or out in a couple years, so if you insist on staying 20 unsustainable years its not our problem, you're only supposed to sustain it for 6 years not 20. And we don't care about the large fraction who are kicked out either. Aren't we just the most lovable human beings ever?
2) Management is expected to falsify / adjust metric reports and manage appearances in this number driven company from the lowest to the highest levels because we're crooks and we know it, and this is how we train the front line to groom them for mgmt, and the 1 in 20 who get promoted (the other 19 in 20 will be ageism fired) will rely on their experience pretending to work to pretend to produce great numbers.
3) We all know we're lying to the client and upper mgmt and maybe the .gov, and you'll keep quiet about that or we'll have to notice that you're only putting in 30 hours of "real" net positive productive work per week even if you're on paper butts in seat 75 hours per week. You're productively working 30 hours per week and you'll shut up about the other issues or you'll only earn credit for the 30 instead of being the 75 hour "hero" you currently are. Now shut up or we start auditing your internet access logs too.
4) I hate my wife and kids and being a provincial idiot of a manager with no empathy for other human beings (hey, someone has to be the failure, after all) I assume all others are the same as me because I'm great so why don't you hang out at work for 80 hrs per week just like me? If my whole family hates me the problem can't be me because I've got an ivy diploma so whats the problem with staying at work all night? I actually worked for a guy like that and this is a paraphrase of a couple conversations I had with him. A sad, sad dude.
Sites with static header bars like this one need to die. Vertical space is a horrible thing to steal, given that most of the world are using 16:9 monitors.
Even worse when they're applied in on mobiles / responsive-design.
This is just a technique for mostly pointless management structures to keep power over the technical workers who are actually providing value. Technical workers are paid well, but managers of technical workers are usually paid more, even though their role is frequently limited to telling the technical workers what to do (when in fact the technical workers are quite capable of figuring out what to do). A better manager acts as more of a facilitator of communication, but even then that puts them at best on even footing with the technical workers, which is not reflected in compensation. A manager of a technical team is a glorified secretary, and meritocratic compensation would reflect that by paying managers less than technical workers.
In order to keep this structure, companies create an environment of “this is just how we do it”. The whole pretense of long hours is part of this. A few more examples are covered in Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work.
In client-service industries, the hours are unavoidable. Your client doesn't want to talk to two people each doing half the work. At the same time, the artificial expectations are just self-abuse. When people hang out around the office when they don't have work to do, it really is money out of the company's pocket.
Is it really people passing of as 80-Hour Workers, or is it that they just solve the tasks given to them without creating additional work for their bosses?
Are the successful guys fakes or are they doing something that we could learn to be more successful hourselves?
In any case I would be interested in more in depth stories of these successful guys to learn from them. Choosing the right tasks to work on, for example, seems to be a very important strategy. I would love so much to read more details about how to do that. And especially in this case, if I would be the boss, I would appreciate people with that skill more than people without that skill. Someone with that skill will be able to pick most of the low hanging fruits and might also be more able to solve the really necessary ugly tasks, because he cares about getting it done.
Thankfully, I haven't see too much employer imposed long hours, but I have seen self imposed long hours. I read a different article about 6 months ago from a professor that I'd love to read over again. I can't seem to find it. The premise was that they worked extra hours because the regular hours were filled with "procedure" like meetings, time cards, and getting interrupted. It only left a little time each day for doing the interesting stuff; the reason they chose that profession.
I and others have talked about how much more productive we are when working early or late in the day and are compelled to stay late to finish something because it seems to take longer to pick it up and finish it the next day.
The guys who pretend are Losers, the true believers who don't are Clueless. As the subjects of the HBR article are consultant types, I'll bet many of the Clueless there think they are Sociopaths. Anyhow, my hat's off to the Losers who manage to score a solid paycheck without working/drinking themselves into an early grave.
>At this firm, people believed that success indeed required ideal-worker-like devotion.
The word "success" seems like a misnomer here. Success is not possible under these conditions. Killing yourself for transient business projects designed and managed by others, for the adulation of peers whose only accomplishments in life are, similarly, killing themselves for transient business projects designed by others, is no success at all.
Perhaps the monetary compensation is decent. But what are you going to do with that money?
In fact, when I have - out of pure boredom - attempted to work, get something, whatever, done, the initiative was quickly destroyed by managers.
The illusion of work, pretending, we are all adults here playing on a theatre, must be maintained, and nobody is allowed to step out of line. When I look at it that way, that we are just adults but playing like when small children play that they are adults, so are we playing that we are working, then it all makes sense.
Hey kids - important lesson here. You don't realize how hard it will be to receive permission to do work at work. Of course, you will still be expected to look like you are working and to even put in overtime pretending to work.
My recommendation is to find things to do that look like work. If you are a programmer, learn new languages or develop your own projects. If you are expected to write, work on your own blog articles. If you sometimes work offsite or in different parts of the building, go sleep or read in your car (away from where you could get caught.) If you are writing or programming, nobody can tell over your shoulder if it is work related or not. Hell, your manager probably has no clue what you are supposed to be doing anyhow and is just pretending to do his job too. Help the guy out and give him the warm fuzzy feeling that you are working. Telling everyone you meet how much work you have to do and how hard you are working on it won't hurt either.
I know it sucks but you can't fix it. The ability to look like you are working while not losing your mind is a critical survival skill. The sooner you cultivate that skill the happier you will be.
One guess is, its just not in human nature, its not possible, to be productive 8h between X and Y hours of the day. Not for you, programmer, not for the manager either.
So we start learning how to pretend and eventually all we do is pretend. Thats just one of the reasons.
To fix the problem - an organization and contract which is not time or space based, you dont have to sit there in that open space, or be there between X and Y.
But then we woudl've been back to quite radical economy, quite radical model of society than we have now - where you dont sell your labor, where you would sell your produce. And thats problematic because we cant really measure or quantify "what programmer/manager produces". So we end up in this circus of pretending to know what that value is of programmer when in a cubicle on a timeclock, and pretending to care, and then come the backstabbing and office politics.
People need to stop worrying so much about what their boss thinks of them. If you get fired, it's probably a sign you shouldn't be working there in the first place. If you don't get a promotion or raise, who cares? Your life won't get better if you make slightly more money.
In my experience, and granted I haven't worked in the US, the number of hours you spend in the office is always expected to be in line with what your manager has committed to paying you for.
In countries like Germany or Holland, if you consistently stay over-time in the office you might be surprised to find that you will be called upon justifying your behavior since the local belief is that you are either incompetent and can't finish the work assigned to you in your normal work schedule, which will cost the company money to train you or hire a replacement, or your manager is incompetent because he over-assigned your time and it will cost the company money when you finally burnout or start taking shortcuts in your work.
Other European countries have established rules that forbid employers contacting their employees (mail or phone) outside of business hours to avoid the pressure of having to do work on your personal time.
I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?