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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

#151

Post by Jill_the_Pill »

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…

Ha! Never had that book when mine were small, but I used to count to 3. Never ever figured out what would have happened -- we never got past 2!

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

#152

Post by sidlls »

rdm_blackhole wrote: post #117
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.

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…

Children are literally the entities that make our shared future viable. If we don't reproduce at a sufficient rate we literally, as a species, will not be able to sustain our own existence. And considering how much more personally expensive (both in yes of resources and one's self) we have made raising children over the years it's the absolute opposite of selfish to have them.

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

#153

Post by zild3d »

gerbilly wrote: post #49
WalterSear wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> we were running 10 AWS servers - to serve a mostly static website and handle a few hundred REST API calls each day. You could do taht with 2 instances and dropwizard ( https://www.dropwizard.io/1.3.9/docs/ )

don't need more than a single instance, or 1-2 lambdas

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

#154

Post by otakucode »

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…

>Why isn't there someone disrupting software development paying experienced people like me a low salary for 20-30 hours a week?

I've wondered this for quite awhile myself. Many companies would benefit from being able to keep software developers "on retainer" like a lawyer even. That sort of arrangement might mitigate the cycle of a product becoming excellent, and then immediately starting to go down hill because the company feels compelled to make the developers do something. I'm not confident it would help as you would still face managers who want to 'make a name for themselves' pioneering changes just to get some credit regardless of how beneficial the users would find it.

My personal theory on the matter is that it's a combination of "this is just how things are done", lingering influence of the Protestant Work Ethic, and managers who measure their personal and organizational value based upon how many people they control and how much they control them. It's always good to keep in mind that the 40 hour work week and the way work, offices, and much else in society is structured was optimized for very predictable constant physical labor in manufacturing. It was never meant to be used for mental labor or intellectual pursuits at all. We're still adapting to pure mental work being the most valuable sort of work to society. We haven't dealt with things like human beings having much different capacities for extended exertion between physical and mental types. We recognize an awful lot of problems (the destructive nature of interruptions, the diminished returns of long work days, etc) but there are very few organizations dedicating themselves to finding working solutions.

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

#155

Post by nn3 »

praneshp wrote: post #82
mrweasel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is work anyway? I had a co-worker who negotiated having his commute home be counted as work. His reasoning was that he did a lot of thinking and problem solving during the drive. Working as a developer it was kinda hard for the company to argue that thinking wasn't in fact a large part of his job.

Did he drive himself? Maybe the company should ask him to stop thinking and focus on driving.

One of my old professors had an interesting story about this.

He had an management job at an larger European company and actually had a driver for his company car.

He complained to his boss that he doesn't need a driver, he could drive himself. The boss told him: you're not supposed to drive, you're supposed to be in the back and work.

After this experience he realized the management job wasn't for him and switched to a university career.

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

#156

Post by balfirevic »

seppin wrote: post #120
bryanlarsen wrote: post #3

And even if they do spend 75 hours at their workplace, they're probably spending far less than 40 actually working. (says the guy posting on HN instead of actually working).

> And even if they do spend 75 hours at their workplace, they're probably spending far less than 40 actually working. Interesting, in Europe the hours are less but you are expected to work every minute you are there. In America you are expected to physically stay longer but being on FB/Reddit is no big deal. Sounds like a bad way of doing things.

> Interesting, in Europe the hours are less but you are expected to work every minute you are there.

No, you're not. Also, Europe is large and diverse. Source: European.

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

#157

Post by rdm_blackhole »

Robotbeat wrote: post #145
rdm_blackhole wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you care to elaborate?

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

And That's where we disagree.

Having kids is not essential to society. Actually, society would be better off if we just maintained our current population level and learned to live with the resources at hand instead or ever expanding and depleting the ocean, the underground and the forests until there is nothing left.

If you consider having kids as an individual sacrifice, then maybe you are having kids for the wrong reasons.

People should not be forced to have kids to perpetuate society or because its good for the economy or because the government( of any country) says we should.

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

#158

Post by otakucode »

TheOperator wrote: post #103
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 ju…

> 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.

I think you also have to figure in the absurdly high value of the sort of work we're talking about. A company can launch a website after investing $2 million in its creation and have it pay for itself in a few days. That sort of return on investment is big enough to cover a multitude of grave sins of inefficiency. That's why companies can persist with open floor plan offices which over 1000 studies have shown destroy productivity, having high attrition on purpose so they can staff primarily with entry level candidates, and renting expensive office space that actually drains value rather than contributing any.

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

#159

Post by NotHereNotThere »

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…

As a parent of multiple children (3+), your comment really rubs me the wrong way.

It comes off as judgemental ("you're doing it wrong", "you really need to learn to"), and you're generalizing your own children's behavior as if it applied to every child.

Every child is different, their sleep cycles, reactivity, personalities, etc.

I'm not even going to comment on the 1-2-3-timeout technique apart from saying I think it's disrespectful towards children; it is basically conditioning them to fear certain words you say and to force them to do something. Isolating them when they "misbehave".

You're free to raise your children how you want, but perhaps be mindful of how you.. "give advice"

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

#160

Post by cletus »

So this is something you learn sooner or later. People lie. And I don't mean maliciously. I mean they lie to themselves and to other people. Some prime examples:

- How much they get paid. Honestly you need to see a W2 before you believe what anyone tells you.

- Commute times. "It's 15 minutes door to door". No, it's not. It's like 35. This isn't even a "perfect circumstances" type deal. I honestly don't know what this is but it's so common for me to hear outright falsehoods for this I just take any estimate and double it and then go from there.

- How much they work. Most people who work 70, 80 or 100 hours a week just don't. I mean they may work a lot but not that much. Kudos to this study for using a diary allocating time rather than self-reporting.

- The article mentions this one but I'd forgotten about it: how much people go to the gym and how long they spend there.

There's a weirdly large amount of self-delusion and presenting a particular image that honestly I could never be bothered with (which isn't to say I don't have my own foibles of course). Sometimes I wonder what I missed out on here in terms of social norms. But it just seems so exhausting and pointless.

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