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People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

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Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#101

Post by johnm1019 »

rexpop wrote: post #94
kelnos wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that having a child is an optional activity that you choose to do, whereas going to work is (usually) required. Ideally that work doesn't include periods of extreme overwork, and lucky people are sometimes able to walk away from jobs that do, but many people just have to do it in order to put food on the table.

Having a child is optional for individuals, but not for society, and so it's really only "pseudo-optional" for individuals: there is some distributed portion of requirement on everyone.

I wish there was more discussion about how society should recognize and handle this. Much of modern society is orthogonal to parenting and raising children, I would love to see it addressed more in the public discourse -- maybe even "disrupted" by tech so we can be thrice better parents, citizens, and workers.

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#102

Post by munk-a »

kelnos wrote: post #73
radicalbyte wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make that 6 months into two years and the sleep time to an average of 5 - 5.5 hours a night and you have parenthood of a crybaby. You have to add in a boss who spends 2/3rd of the time you're home screaming at you to the mix.

Except that having a child is an optional activity that you choose to do, whereas going to work is (usually) required. Ideally that work doesn't include periods of extreme overwork, and lucky people are sometimes able to walk away from jobs that do, but many people just have to do it in order to put food on the table.

Nobody should be forced to work 75 hrs to put food on the table, it's dehumanizing and we, as a society, have enough wealth to make sure everyone can live a minimally enjoyable life.

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#103

Post by TheOperator »

mwfunk wrote: post #13

In my experience, when a workplace has a perpetual crunch time culture, little if any additional work gets done that wouldn't have gotten done if everyone stuck to 40 hour weeks. I'm very curious how true this is in 996 places. When someone knows that they're going to spend 12 hours in the office regardless of how much work is actually required, that time gets padded out a LOT with non-work stuff, both to preserve th…

In my experience 996 is a scam to get compensated for doing tons of hours of work while often doing no more work than the employees on a regular schedule. I've seen plenty of people working two jobs who just do the needful and rest every minute they can who do far less work tha their "less hardworking" peers.

You CAN take a 40hr week worker, make them work extra, and their productivity will spike pretty hard. It's just that people eventually adapt by resting more at work. Employers end up seeing little additional work done even if they schedule somebody for an extra 20hrs a week.

The only jobs where more hours = more work sustainably are jobs like trucking where the work is actually very easy and its just a matter of staying awake at the wheel. Long work weeks are mostly a form of virtue signalling which you recieve money for doing. The only reason the 24/7 crunch time companies don't immediately go broke from sheer inefficiency is because they don't pay their staff overtime. Everybody would be better off in the long run with a culture that was focused on hiring a greater number of people to work more reasonable hours with strongly encouraged breaks. This 996 crap is a reflection of the egos of people like Jack Ma who would rather have employees with his work ethic rather than employees that get a lot of work done in little time.

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#104

Post by gilleain »

jolmg wrote: post #95
sidlls wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work is optional. There are plenty of people who get by without it. Doesn't mean they're doing well or healthy. And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional.

> Work is optional. There are plenty of people who get by without it. Doesn't mean they're doing well or healthy. Except if you don't have a kid, you have better chances of staying well and healthy. That's the whole point. That's what is meant with parenthood being optional and work not. > And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional. With the rate at which world population is incr…

7 billion, not trillion

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#105

Post by polote »

In the last year, I had two jobs,one at the office, and one at a startup I was working with.

I managed to make more than 75h a weeks only 3 weeks of the year.

During these weeks, my life was, sleep, go to the gym, go to work, go to second work sleep, every weekday, and on week-ends gym + work.

75h per week is 11h per day EVERY day. when you do that, your body is tired, and if you want to be productive your have to sleep a lot, and you have no social life.

(I track my time with an app, so it is not fake numbers, my max is 78 hours)

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#106

Post by jolmg »

gilleain wrote: post #104
jolmg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Work is optional. There are plenty of people who get by without it. Doesn't mean they're doing well or healthy. Except if you don't have a kid, you have better chances of staying well and healthy. That's the whole point. That's what is meant with parenthood being optional and work not. > And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional. With the rate at which world population is incr…

7 billion , not trillion

:P Thanks.

Fun Fact I learned from that link: Supposedly, we'll be reaching our first trillion sometime between 2050 and 2060. That's actually pretty close.

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#108

Post by opportune »

munk-a wrote: post #98
bitL wrote: post #96

I think 75+ productive hours are doable if: 1) you start early 2) keep focus 100%, no browsing/distractions etc. 3) after 7 hours you make a 2-3h long break and do something completely different, like taking a walk outside, sunbathing, biking, sauna or whatever makes you happy 4) when you return, you work on another task/for another company, never the same stuff you worked on in the morning 5) you take only one day o…

Why do you want to work 75+ hours? What are you working for - what value are you receiving from life? These are serious questions, I've worked crazy overtime (defined by me as anything over 50 hours a week) and never want to return to it, consistently doing 10 hour days is draining and significantly lowered my productivity, it was just bad times all around.

Personally if I was running my own business, single, and childless I think I would do that. But I would never do that just to make someone else rich, or to the detriment of important relationships

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#109

Post by Rescis »

jolmg wrote: post #95
sidlls wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work is optional. There are plenty of people who get by without it. Doesn't mean they're doing well or healthy. And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional.

> Work is optional. There are plenty of people who get by without it. Doesn't mean they're doing well or healthy. Except if you don't have a kid, you have better chances of staying well and healthy. That's the whole point. That's what is meant with parenthood being optional and work not. > And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional. With the rate at which world population is incr…

To start, we are at 7.53 /billion/, not trillion.

Second, ever single time someone has said that overpopulation was going to be the end of us, they've been wrong. To quote Wikipedia, which go so far back as Ancient Carthage and Greece:

Concern about overpopulation is an ancient topic. Tertullian was a resident of the city of Carthage in the second century CE, when the population of the world was about 190 million (only 3–4% of what it is today). He notably said: "What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint) is our teeming population. Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us.... In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race." Before that, Plato, Aristotle and others broached the topic as well. [1]

Finally, to answer your question of "How can the world support so many of us?", I would like to point at that with every new person born, that is a new person thinking of scientific advancements that can be made, producing stuff for others, for their kids, etc.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation#History_o...

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#110

Post by buybackoff »

osrec wrote: post #14

Investment bankers will often claim this, while also lying about their salary. I was often surprised by my colleagues claiming extra long work weeks, all while looking remarkable fresh. I couldn't work it out - I mean, if I worked a solid 14 hour day, you could see it clearly on my face, yet if they do it, they seem to develop a healthy glow. Turns out a lot of them were in the building, but not at their desk. Oftent…

From my experience gym/steam/sauna is probably the only structured activity you have other than work, and probably "too weak vacation" if you are lucky. And those are just required to be physically functional. 5x12 in the office at PC/phone is absolute minimum, then one of the two weekends, usually Sunday, you catch up and prepare for the next week because during other days there is too much client work (in a general sense - both internal & external clients). So it gives you 72 hours minimum office/PC time, not average.

And then you are expected to be always online, even on rare vacations, and respond to emails very quickly. Plus work from remote desktop before bedtime and right after wake up to handle overnight emails and read news. So even if you are not in office you are constantly "ON" and the brain is always working, even on a treadmill in the gym... And then during IPO/initiation/reporting season it's actual 100-120 hours of actual office hours, but that are spikes, after which there is usually some relax time of only light 5x12 schedule. This is for research. Investment bankers in a narrow sense (IPOs, etc) just work in those spike/calm mode.

When I first saw the 996 story, my first reaction - given my background - was "whiner"... But in banking your monthly salary is just to cover your "costs of doing business" (but still high), only total annual compensation is a meaningful number, of which the fixed monthly part used to be less than half in good years. So in banking you kind of know why you are doing this. In programming bonuses are usually a much smaller fraction. Plus important thing - you could actually do 100 hours work if you do different work and are switching between tasks that load different parts of the brain. Financial modelling is comparable to programming (actually it is if we agree that Excel is the most used functional programming language) by cognitive load, but it takes a small share of total time. In the 996 case of constant coding it's very doubtful. I mostly do programming now and when I have 8 hours of uninterrupted clear mind spent on complex algos - that's a very productive lucky day. In the 6-8 hours range the focus and brain capacity usually drop so much that having good sleep & rest is much more important to have another good and deep 6-8 hours tomorrow.

But then you could write docs, add tests, do simple refactoring, setup backend & cloud, fight with configs - it takes hours and does not load brain as much as some concurrent lock-free data structure. Someone still needs to do that job and it could easily turn 6-8 hours into 10-14.

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