Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nymag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 243 posts

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

#141

Post by rdm_blackhole »

Robotbeat wrote: post #121
rdm_blackhole wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only if our current economic model stays the same. At the moment most developed countries rely on immigration to create growth by adding more consumers. However, it is changing, as the world develops, fewer people are born and within a century our population growth will flatten and our global population will even decline to the 2000's level. Children should not be made just to keep society going. That's quite…

That’s the opposite of selfish.

Do you care to elaborate?

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

#142

Post by coryrc »

seppin wrote: post #118
luminati wrote: post #115

Well Marissa Mayers claims to have worked 130 hour work weeks[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-on-1...

> "the hardest working CEO in Silicon Valley, bar none." i'm sorry but she was early stage at Google, what since then has all that hard work gotten her?

hundreds of millions of dollars?

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

#143

Post by zcw100 »

WalterSear wrote: post #25
danielb12345 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard from people who work in that culture that it is more for show. Most people still browse YouTube/Reddit and stuff. When everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency.

I've worked in that environment, but without anyone goofing off. Fortunately, as a contractor, I did not have to come in on the weekends. My coworkers were no more productive than me: IMNSHO, they would end up dragging as much busywork out of every problem as they could, simply because they were too overworked to think more than one step ahead. To wit: we were running 10 AWS servers - to serve a mostly static website…

I’ve worked in that environment as well. One of the problems is it’s a rollercoaster. You crash as soon as the emergency is over and you get nothing done until the next emergency. You just mentally shutdown. So now the quality of work when there is an emergency is shit because you’re rushing and the quality of work when there isn’t an emergency is shit because you’re recharging for the next emergency. Average output goes down even though peak output has gone up but the boss loves to see people putting in the long hours on his way out the door for a round of golf.

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

#144

Post by S_A_P »

FiddlyPack wrote: post #33
S_A_P wrote: post #5

I’m currently working legit 65-70 hours per week. We have a hard stop that costs millions if we miss. It basically means 6am-6pm Monday through Saturday. I’m not as productive as when I work less but there is a net win in productivity. I don’t think I can do this for much more than a few months. I can already tell it has markedly harmed my health. Being stressed for months at a time is hard.

No shade here, but how can you possibly be on HN right now? Or do you consider this kind of commenting activity to be part of your job? I consider myself to work maybe 15 hr per week, but according to my contract I work 40, and sometimes my timesheet says 60. Nonetheless, I am “on-call” quite a bit, at my own discretion. I just can’t imagine how I could stay in deep concentration and be “legit 65-70 hours per week,”…

I actually posted this during a change management meeting. I was required to be there despite my portion of the meeting being 10 minutes of the hour. There are varying descriptions of "work", but my day usually lines up like so:

4:30am wake up 5:30 leave 6 arrive at the office 6-9 heads down coding 9-11 status, project, and various other meetings and help/administrative work 11-12 take lunch at the desk while I code 12-2 any follow up various other meetings 2-6 more code/tech work

Or course Im not 100% utilized. Nobody is. If I were to work 8, I would have no time to actually work on the project I have deliverables due on. Meetings are toxic, but also necessary, and Im manager and technical in this role so I have to split my time. Saturdays I usually get a solid 8-10 hours of work in with few interruptions.

I don't feel badly at all for posting here during billing hours, and if anything my invoices are conservative on real hours worked.

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

#145

Post by Robotbeat »

rdm_blackhole wrote: post #141
Robotbeat wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the opposite of selfish.

Do you care to elaborate?

Doing something that’s essential to society but which requires enormous amount of individual sacrifice and cost. Voluntarily.

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

#146

Post by alexpetralia »

jnbiche wrote: post #139

I worked 60-70 hours a week for 6 months and destroyed by health ( actually programming for 50+ of those hours, tracked time since it was billable hours for a consulting firm). Finished the project by the deadline I was hired for, but quit soon afterwards and within 2 months I was in the ICU, and then in and out of the hospital several times with some serious chronic health issues that I'm still recovering from 2 yea…

I have no idea why this isn't more common.

You basically get _huge experience_ for 10-20 hours a week and you don't have to shell out that cost at 40 hours a week. I believe there are many people who don't mind working an extra 10-20 hours a week.

Yes, they may not be your Googlers, but there is still a lot of talent/experience you are able to access without breaking the bank.

(Yes, there are also non-compete agreements and various types of reasons why this doesn't work, but I maintain that many experienced devs wouldn't mind working on projects in their spare time and leading/learning/getting paid for it.)

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

#147

Post by EuroShill »

sergers wrote: post #132
kelnos wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like he is working an 8-hour day, just during non-traditional times of the day. If that works for him and his family, and management isn't pissed off, sounds like a win-win. (Now if he claims he works 14-hour days, that's a bit dishonest.)

Yep claims he has to work till 8pm and work on weekends, but it's all due to his work habits of not doing work in a concistent manner

Yeah but butt in seat time is important! Once had a job where I was working 10am to 4pm with an hour lunch. Was fine for a long time until the company management became more OCD about their bean-counting and I got a new toxic "yes man/ass kisser to management" boss.

Suddenly my work hours were an issue. They started hard enforcing a department-wide policy where if you weren't seen at your desk, you're assumed to be not working. Under the threat of being fired, I was forced to sit at work from 9am to 7pm. I suspect managers also had "monitors" assigned to keep a watch over employees like me and hours we were at our desks.

It was a massive waste of my time as I was now spending a additional 20 hours a week at the office to do the same amount of work as before.

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

#148

Post by tokyoHacker »

cm2012 wrote: post #19
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…

Japanese and Korean salaryman culture is 996 and notoriously unproductive.

Working as an engineer in a traditional japanese tech company(大企業), I can say that 996 is not a norm here. In fact at my workplace, working on two consecutive weekends is prohibited. A significant fraction follow 995 though.

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

#149

Post by otakucode »

yibg wrote: post #45

Many years ago I was working for a small consulting firm and had a stretch of time with a lot of overtime; aka "crunch time". Since these were billable hours, time was tracked daily, even if they weren't all actually billed. The tracked hours varied over the ~6 month span, but ranged from 55 hours a week to 93 for one week. Of course not 100% of the time was spent on actual work but it was pretty close. The 93 hour w…

>Adrenaline?

Likely cortisol as well. Cortisol is the bane of modern society. We evolved to benefit from short intense bursts of cortisol and adrenaline, but our health suffers tremendously from extended elevated levels. And practically everything in the way we have structured society maximizes cortisol levels, especially in the workplace. It's particularly destructive to cognitive abilities, which is why I hope that maybe it might eventually get some attention and be consciously avoided. It would benefit productivity as well as benefit the health and happiness of nearly everyone.

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

#150

Post by new299 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #87
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.

As a parent who added a second child when my first was 2 and a half, I think you're doing it wrong. A year later, both children are still extremely demanding. It's all about setting limits and knowing when to bend them, like last night when my daughter finally figured out how to wake herself up in the middle of the night to go poop. That's one of the rare sleepless nights that's worth it. Otherwise, knowing how you s…

The advice is interesting, but I don’t think warrant telling someone “they’re doing it wrong”.

Your extrapolating from your experience with 2 children. Children are difficult and often respond differently to the same techniques. However if you wanted to show that a particular technique is superior in the majority of cases, some data would be useful.

In general, the workload of parenting is underestimated. This is somewhat problematic in the tech industry (male dominated) when the majority of childcare is still performed by women [1]. It leads to a lack of understanding and devalues childcare work.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jul/05/childca...

Post reply on HN