N.B. this article is from 2015
How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)
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Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)
#12It is possible to do 80 hour workweeks if:
- The rest of your life is exactly where you want it to be. So, this one isn't true for 99% of the population.
- You have the correct mental attitude for it. This isn't true for most of the population either.
- You are doing exactly what you want to do in life. The chance that you could be distracted by another possibility / avenue is next to nil.
None of the above are impossible asks, but they certainly unreasonable. But some managers like to ask anyway, mostly as a form of leverage. If you're foolish or desperate enough to fall for it, then well, only fools and desperate people will give you time week after week to listen to how much you hate your boss / job.
Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)
#13I'm not sure where the "faking it" comes from. The point seems to be people who get their job done and don't make a big deal out of structuring their work arrangements to create more flexibility/fewer hours don't get penalized. Which squares with my personal experience though obviously doesn't apply everywhere and isn't something you can always depend on being able to do on an informal basis.
I find modern communications are a big help in this regard. In past lives, there often was no real replacement for being literally "by the phone." Though I still took month-long vacations in those days which some co-workers found rather hard to comprehend.
Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)
#14(2015)
Added. Thanks!
Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)
#15men and women. parity folks. dont be so misogynist
Read the article. It was mostly men that faked it, while women would request lighter work more formally and be punished for it.
Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)
#16Well, duh. I can't even work a full 40 hour week as a programmer without being completely braindead.
I think the dirty secret is that as long as you hit the meetings you're supposed to be at, and show your face at strategically useful times, nobody cares the slightest whether you are actually there or not - as long as the work gets done.
> The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter workload, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly didn’t suffer. The maxim of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply.
This is generally good advice to live by. If something is worth doing, you are wildly better off just doing it, rather than asking for permission to do it. At best, the thing you wanted to do will get denied, and at worst so crusted up with input and bikeshedding from everyone that is sucked into it that it is actively detrimental.
Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)
#17I was surprised at the evocation of “men” in the title. It is obvious that if we found a flaw in some women, we wouldn’t say it outright in the title. Whereas finding a flaw in men calls directly for a click, since it appeals to the human’s innate hate for men.
Then I understood: “It’s a disadvantage for women, because they ask more formally.” There you go, misandry followed by feminism. Which is fine. If it goes both ways.
Would we ever find an article titled as such:
“Some people beat their children. 70.2% of them are women[1]. Here’s why it matters.”
[1] CDC 2001-2006
And it matters because 60% are boys. And most (don’t remember how many, about 90%) of the prison population received hits on the head as kids. And what they need is not judicial treatment, nut medical treatments. 97% prison population is men.
It also matters because, even when sane father ask for custody, we consciously decide to give it to the mother. Father is ambassador of Sweden and mum is in psychiatric yard beating up the baby? That’s right, give the baby to the mother[2].
[2] Breivik, 77 killed.
It’s more than time women stop getting the newspaper headline for unfair misandry, while men commit suicide 3 times the rate of women: The two of them are related.
But it doesn’t matter.
They’re men.
Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)
#18Of course. In the past. Now. And long into the future.
It's vastly easier to project a convincing illusion than it is to sustain a reality. Self interested, shrewd people will always put their energy into the illusion. Illusions give you massive leverage. Reality grinds you down.
And the conscientious and the passionate burn their energies to actually help the magicians cast their shabby spells.
Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)
#19This makes perfect sense to me. From what I've seen anecdotally, it seems most people can work 80-hour weeks at full productivity for maybe one or two weeks, tops. After that, the fatigue starts to set in and that person's performance starts to decline. In the long run, the person working 80 hour weeks isn't getting much more done than someone working far fewer hours, simply because during those 80 hours they are ope…
Depends if they are engaged or not and how taxing it is. People can play MMOs or MOBAs way past 40hr/week and they don't all have a huge performance dropoff. They are probably more prone to RSI and stuff at more hours though. I wouldn't be surprised to see a productive 100hr week in some kind of MMO player.
> People can play MMOs or MOBAs way past 40hr/week and they don't all have a huge performance dropoff.
Is that your personal observation or do you have access to some actual data? I imagine pro-gaming teams do use all kinds of analytics to maximize their performance, stuff like hours played, hours slept, nutrition, physical exercise ... so there must be some pretty good datasets out there. Unfortunately probably all closely-guarded secrets.
In my own experience as a heavy Anki user, I have found sleep to be the most important determiner of performance. When I sleep 1–2 hours less, my error rate the next day roughly doubles.
Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)
#20A friend of mine used to check all his code into a private CVS repository and then trickle his commits out into the official company repository over the course of a week.