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Working more than 55 hours a week kills 750k people a year worldwide

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Re: Working more than 55 hours a week kills 750k people a year worldwide

#81

Post by thealig »

marcusverus wrote: post #63
giantg2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It also benefits you because you'll learn new skills rapidly." Only if those skills are in wide demand. Moving companies can be risky and complicated depending on one's personal and family issues.

> Only if those skills are in wide demand. Of course it's not worth spending extra time to learn skills that aren't in demand. This would, by definition, be a dead-end job. If you have a growth mindset like GP, having a dead-end job doesn't mean that "hard work doesn't pay off". It just means that the 'hard work' should go into looking/training/applying for a job/career with more learning opportunities/upside. > Movi…

I don't think personal and family issues are necessarily edge cases. Plus it also depends from where the person is and what the technology industry scene is like there. Nowadays jumping companies is easier and more acceptable (atleast in tech) for sure, but then there's always some uncertainty with respect to interviewing and obtaining offers(and possible stress) in particular when you're past a certain age.

Re: Working more than 55 hours a week kills 750k people a year worldwide

#82

Post by c_o_n_v_e_x »

I was working as a contractor in a chemical plant owned by one of the largest companies in F500.

Work beyond 50 hours required approval from your direct manager. Work beyond 55 hours had to be approved by the next level of management. Beyond 60 hours required approval from the highest level of plant management and was usually only approved during commissioning when you have no choice but to start your testing at random hours of the day or emergency scenarios.

Re: Working more than 55 hours a week kills 750k people a year worldwide

#84

Post by anonzzzies »

supertimor wrote: post #68
anonzzzies wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if they were, would that not result in another outcome?

As someone who really enjoys their job and also typically works 10-12+ hrs a day full time, I can tell you that the lack of sleep and lack of work/life balance really adds up. It’s just not very sustainable long term and requires entire weekends to recover from and inevitably leads to burnout. Because even with loving your job, there are still only 24 hrs in a day, and spending most of those working leaves very littl…

As someone who has been doing 7 days a week 10-12 hours for the past 30 years and never had any issues and still get up happy, well rested and no stress, I think really your job should be your life in this case ; I mean my work is my hobby, my wife works in the company as well. I don't really can see another of being. I could've retired nicely over 20 years ago but I really don't like the stuff most people spend their days doing.

But the point is, I guess, it's not the hours; it's that somewhere you are still getting stress or discomfort from it and that's the problem. 10-12 hours a day leave 4+ hours for the gym, games, etc and 8 hours for sleep. I cannot see how that ever can amount to lack of sleep? Work/life balance is another thing; if you have kids this doesn't work, if you don't, it depends on how much you need I guess.

Re: Working more than 55 hours a week kills 750k people a year worldwide

#85

Post by sonicanatidae »

ecshafer wrote: post #75
sonicanatidae wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. We work normal shifts, but also, the very best time to work on servers is after hours/holidays, etc. so we tend to work a lot of both. We also tend towards ownership of the gear, so it becomes a little personal. It's also a bit of professional pride. I worked as the Director of IT for 3 hospitals over my career in acute care. I maintained 99%+ uptime on these systems, since this is acute care. I'm proud of that,…

Sysadmins and “1 man it shops” are tough because most people in business dont give a shit until its broken. Its a classic “it works fine why do we pay you?” Or “its broken what do we pay you for anyways” situation 95% of the time, its lose lose. If you are sales you work hard and bring more money, engineer work hard and deliver product faster. Ops just works hard to keep things alive, its very under appreciated by bu…

Late in my career I started focusing on balancing life and work. I still work additional hours, but I've worked out some comp time. If I work 8 hours on the weekend, I take Monday off. Ok.. Some of Monday..lol

I saw an MST3K a long time ago with a line that I've remembered ever since. Caveman Times, old man in a cave, laying on a rock, noise outside, and the old man rushes out of the cave. The MST3K guys overdubbed, "It's always something with this Tribe".

That quote is SysAdminLife, imo.

Re: Working more than 55 hours a week kills 750k people a year worldwide

#87

Post by supertimor »

anonzzzies wrote: post #84
supertimor wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who really enjoys their job and also typically works 10-12+ hrs a day full time, I can tell you that the lack of sleep and lack of work/life balance really adds up. It’s just not very sustainable long term and requires entire weekends to recover from and inevitably leads to burnout. Because even with loving your job, there are still only 24 hrs in a day, and spending most of those working leaves very littl…

As someone who has been doing 7 days a week 10-12 hours for the past 30 years and never had any issues and still get up happy, well rested and no stress, I think really your job should be your life in this case ; I mean my work is my hobby, my wife works in the company as well. I don't really can see another of being. I could've retired nicely over 20 years ago but I really don't like the stuff most people spend thei…

I mean, that’s great that you can make your schedule work for you but everyone’s situation isn’t the same. You clearly have a very unique situation that you can work with your wife and consider your job your hobby. Not everyone can maintain their relationship by hiring their spouse. Do you work a desk job? Do you WFH? Do you have downtime during the day? Are you your own boss? People’s situations vary greatly and not everyone has those same luxuries.

Add in 1-2 hours of commuting and those 4 hours become 2. That’s 2 hours to make and eat dinner, cleanup, take care of pets, shower and get ready for work the next day in order to get 8 hours of sleep; and that doesn’t even factor in time to get ready in the morning. If I want to do anything else beyond that, then it will have to cut into my time for sleep.

The point is absolutely the hours worked. I shouldn’t have to sacrifice my sleep and health in order to take care of things in my personal life because the entirety of my waking hours are taken up by work.

Edit:

I’d also like to point out that in one of your comments you claim that you got 3-5 hours of sleep a night throughout your 20’s working at your first company, so clearly you haven’t actually managed to be happy and well rested for all those 30 years. It seems you’re only sleeping 8 hours a night now that your older and financially comfortable.

“Never slept better getting older; I used to do 3-5 hour nights in my 20s because of stress for my company, sold the company and had no worries anymore so slept 8-9 hours/day. Opened another company but with far less worries (if it fails it's sad but far from the existential stress the first company was) so now into my 50s I lay down, pass out and wake exactly 8 hours later.”[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38514444

Re: Working more than 55 hours a week kills 750k people a year worldwide

#88

Post by vaxman »

chollida1 wrote: post #2

I think this is more about manual labour but I'll take the opposite side when it comes to white collar work that working more hours can be better early on in your career. When I was just out of school and in my early 20s I worked as much as I could, I probably did close to 12 hours days in my 20s. I think I probably averaged an all nighter a month for a few years and worked at least one day on weekends and I loved ev…

> I think this is more about manual labour

When I was young, I saw older engineers and ops people die after hours in their offices (of heart attacks, trying to keep up with recent grads who had just spent four years learning something that the older workers were expected to know instantly). There was one really productive older guy who had wired his whole house with RS-232 ports back to a coat closet where he stuffed a minicomputer and AC unit, then he wheeled a VT100 on a cart from room to room and plugged-in, as needed...so he could work around the clock in comfort, but for most everyone else, there were no laptops and they worked at cold/hot office before and after work, especially in F500 and military industrial complex jobs.

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