From experience, I'm not sure the 40 hour work week is an actual thing outside of highly bureaucratic organizations. In part time jobs like retail or restaurant work, it seems very difficult to get enough "hours" assigned. In professional fields such as software engineering, there seems to be an abundance of possible work. However, I find that even working 50 hours a week is far more enjoyable and easy when compared to a CS/engineering degree from a top school.
Bring back the 40-hour work week (2012)
31–40 of 70 posts
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week (2012)
#32I visited a manufacturing plant in Guadalajara Mexico. Holy moly did the people there work long hours, I have high respect for them. Also the air was bad due to lack of pollution controls on the cars. It's a sign of the difference in standards of living between US and them.
Anyway, there is no way that working long hours is good for your health and well being. It would be fine if you did it one time for an exit, but of course there is no guarantee, and the new normal in the tech world seems to be to keep people on that treadmill forever.
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week (2012)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the data is really hard to gather. I work remotely for a startup and my hours vary drastically week to week. Is checking email working? Answering a Slack message? Taking a phone call? Those things don’t feel like work to me, but I don’t think everyone feels that way. If “being available” is working then I’d say I work close to 17 hours per day. If we’re talking hands on keyboard development, management etc, i…
Totally agree. My complaint for this article would be that given how much time the author spent on the cultural story of pushing the working hours up it'd be good to first do the basics: 1) what is "work" precisely, 2) what are the current and historical measurements of "work" per week, 3) how's the situation when you sensibly break it down, for example by profession or salary or geography. Don't think it is so hard…
In fact, someone does gather this data, though in hours per year, not per week.
And, surprise(?): hours worked has been dropping since the 1970, not rising. https://data.oecd.org/chart/5skA
https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm to explore more.
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week (2012)
#34I don't understand why anyone would take a job or stay in a job that requires you to work more than you are comfortable with or to work more hours for free. If you are stuck, then that sucks and I feel bad for you, maybe it got sprung on you after you were in too deep, but you gotta make this stuff a priority to you if it matters, find out as you are interviewing, get ready to leave if it's not a fit, and that one thing, despite everything else being perfect, can make it a non-fit.
Maybe I've been through the looking glass because I've run my own startups and seen how others run theirs, I know the stupid culture, and I've had people try to bring me into their startups with the culture, and they reword or candy coat it to make it seem like it's ok and everyone is doing it and it's so worth it, but man, it's just a scam, plain and simple. Everyone running the show knows it.
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week (2012)
#35anecdotal evidence in the United States, in the last twenty years.. the concept of "overtime" has been crushed out of existance.. tech workers are essentially expected to respond to signals and/or work, just about all of the time; certain contract-bound jobs are "milking" overtime to get pay raises that are otherwise not available; employers offer extra shifts and hours to existing employees rather than hire, even if…
In my company we have groups that over the last years have made weekend work pretty much the normal case. Whenever a project finishes management sends out congratulatory E-mails about "sacrifice" and "late hours". It gets really annoying. I can see how sometimes you have to scramble but this should be viewed as management failure and not as an incentive to glorify overwork. As far as I know there is no compensation besides a few pizzas and maybe a $50 gift card.
The evil part about this is that there is a lot of peer pressure on others to also show up and support the weekend workers although they have done their job during the week. It requires a lot of willpower to resist that.
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week (2012)
#36From what I've seen the software industry is pretty good at this. At companies I've been at, people sometimes choose to work over 40 but it's rare. Friends in finance regularly work 60 though.
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Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week (2012)
#37From experience, I'm not sure the 40 hour work week is an actual thing outside of highly bureaucratic organizations. In part time jobs like retail or restaurant work, it seems very difficult to get enough "hours" assigned. In professional fields such as software engineering, there seems to be an abundance of possible work. However, I find that even working 50 hours a week is far more enjoyable and easy when compared…
It's very common in government work (and there are millions of government employees at local, state, and federal levels).
I'm at a Big 4 and it's pretty common amongst everyone I know to work 40 hour weeks.
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week (2012)
#38Working over 40 hours a week is bad for work-life balance, as the employee won't have enough time to spend his money, but it's a lie that it decreases productivity. The most productive people that I know work more than 40 hours, and I don't think they do it just because they are lazy / stupid.
It’s true, but some of the most un-productive people I know also work a lot more than 40 hours. If anything it feels like no correlation to hours working.
I know Goolgle had an internal experiment in one of the offices to try to stop people to work more than 40 hours, and productivity went down, so they reverted the experiment.
For me I just decided that I won't overwork even if it means that I don't get promoted.
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week (2012)
#39(2012)
I considered it, but didn't agree. Apparently, the admin agrees. Guess it should be mandated, or at least cleared up, when exactly should the year be included in the headline.
Re: Bring back the 40-hour work week (2012)
#40I don't understand why anyone would take a job or stay in a job that requires you to work more than you are comfortable with or to work more hours for free. If you are stuck, then that sucks and I feel bad for you, maybe it got sprung on you after you were in too deep, but you gotta make this stuff a priority to you if it matters, find out as you are interviewing, get ready to leave if it's not a fit, and that one th…
It's hard to find jobs in many industries (although maybe not ours). It's common for people to lose their jobs to be unemployed for months before finding another. And forgoing a single paycheck can be catastrophic if you don't have anything saved up, which is true of ~40-50% of Americans.
In these circumstances, you work harder when asked to upon pain of potentially losing your job, because the alternative is much worse.