A 60 hour work week? Jesus. I pulled those before college at a factory. And during college at a gas station. But now? Hell no. I average 20-30 hours a week with a daily nap. But then I don't really care about money so long as my family is happy and comfortable.
A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
211–220 of 323 posts
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#212I work 40 hours a week at maximum - most weeks I work about 34 to 38 hours. You 80 hours a week guys, what the hell are you doing with your time? Are you divorced? No family? No friends? Is 'disrupting' an industry really that important to you?
I think most of them are inefficient workers. There's no reason, other than doing a critical surgery, to work on a single task for 15 hours in a single day. It's ridiculous.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#213The army has done a lot of research on this topic from WWII onwards. I've read some of the studies. I've also read some papers done in the private sector on this topic in the construction industry. What they found was about the same: people who work more that 40 hours a week can do so for a short period of time before it starts to impact a lot of aspects of their health, which translates directly to their performance…
Can you link to some of these studies you mention? Would love to read them. Thanks.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#214I still find it a bit odd that the 3-day week before I go on vacation is probably my most productive, focused week. It probably has to do with focus and weeding out the distractions with the "I need to get this done by Weds night, so can we talk when I get back?".
I've worked a sustained 60 for a lot of years and done back-to-back 80's. I just don't think I was super productive. My most personally productive run was on a job that I had 4 hours in the morning to program and was doing something completely different in the afternoon.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was actually a huge heap of money involved, because we made the CGI and stats software and animations for the worldwide TV broadcast of FIFA World Cup '98. It was a crazily ambitious project, not to be equalled by off-the-shelf software for 8 years, and we had to throw an insane amount of hardware at it: 2 SGI Origin 2000, 30 SGI Octanes and 60 high-end PCs, plus some custom hardware at places to interface with…
Upvoted both of his comments so people learn it is not worth working this much for someone else.
What happened to working and sacrificing towards a single goal? Would you say the same if the project was to bring water or electricity to a few remote villages or parts of a city somewhere?
I'm not saying it's a must - everyone decides for themselves - but some might think it was all worth it even if someone else got all the recognition.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#216We forget so soon. Labor movements within recent memory were fought at great cost to secure the possibility of shorter working hours. People were killed at factory gates trying to get labor laws enacted, in part to reduce employer demands for long working hours. One argument in favor of capping work hours: unrestricted overtime discriminates against workers unable or unwilling to compete. A race to the bottom is not…
As they used to say in the army, no matter how good you are, no matter what you accomplish, you'll burn out in 10-15 years and be replaced by a young 20-something willing to do what you can't.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#217This false dichotomy is seriously getting annoying. If 60 hours is sustainable for you, do it. If only 30 hours is sustainable for you, do that instead. But stop imposing onto others what is right or wrong when there are so many factors at play. Some of my most productive memories are summers studying and working for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (= 72 hours). I didn't get tired, burned out, or anything. Another summ…
Preach the word. I personally do fine with 16 hrs per day. Yes I'm healthy, fit and extremely successful.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its even easier to fool yourself into thinking you can't handle things that actually can handle. At least when you take on something that's too much, there are signs of failing or your wellbeing declining.
Its even easier to fool yourself into thinking you can't handle things that actually can handle. I don't know if that's true or not. It's probably too vague to be even true or false. But it also seems like a dangerous sort of symmetry to invoke because the consequences of going beyond your capacities tend to be a lot worse than the consequences of not quite reaching them. I recall you as fitness person from other dis…
I guess if there are negative consequences and you aren't able to detect them and respond appropriately, then you'd not attempt anything. Its too dangerous for you.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#219I started software development recently, and coming from the restaurant industry it's extremely hard to wrap my head around the way most people in the tech industry think when it comes to work ethic. Personally I think it has a lot to do with being spoiled with an over-abundance of jobs. Most of you are very comfortable and wouldnt be worried about finding work if you were fired tomorrow. In the restaurant industry i…
I worked in both industries and while hours in restraunt industry might be longer than '40', you comparing the two makes it obvious that you did not do much in tech sector to say that.
Staring at a computer all day and writing code is way harder on you than running around the restaurant. There are also stuff like deadlines, bugs, 12 am outages and tons of other issues that always are in the back of your mind.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Upvoted both of his comments so people learn it is not worth working this much for someone else.
What happened to working and sacrificing towards a single goal? Would you say the same if the project was to bring water or electricity to a few remote villages or parts of a city somewhere? I'm not saying it's a must - everyone decides for themselves - but some might think it was all worth it even if someone else got all the recognition.
Two things...
1. Workers that build water and electricity projects are typically unionized and get paid at least time and a half if not double for hours over 40 per week.
2. If those remote villages have gone w/o power and water for years and years there is no good reason to work excessive hours to bring those things to them a few weeks faster.