How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)

The study included women and results differed between the two. Misogyny is not in play here.

"A second finding is that women, particularly those with young children, were much more likely to request greater flexibility through more formal means, such as returning from maternity leave with an explicitly reduced schedule. Men who requested a paternity leave seemed to be punished come review time, and so may have felt more need to take time to spend with their families through those unofficial methods."

[Edit: Unfortunately, a moderator made a similar error and revised the title. Ah well.

The previous title was: How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters]

You Americans are messing eachother up with your workaholic culture. Relax folks, there’s much more to life.

Two anedoctal stories of mine:

a) I do some consulting for a healthcare company, and bill them by the hour. It is very difficult to reach 60h/month, I managed to get that once, and it translated to an incredible amount of work. Initially they were worried about the cost, and put a cap of 80h/mo, but I never got even near that.

b) Back in the 1990s I worked as technical support for a small ERP company. I had a colleague that kept a frantic pace the whole day, did a lot of overtime, always buried by work, complaining, etc. He had so many booked overtime hours, he took a 3-week vacation solely on them (in Brazil you have 30 day of vacation per year, as well).

Those 3 weeks were the most quiet I ever saw in my work. I even found the K&R book and learnt C (I was really amused to find that UNIXes came with a free compiler. Development tools used to cost several thousand USD back then.)

Makes fairly rational sense -- in addition to the hard deliverables provided by professional services firms (market studies, fairness opinions, consummated M&A transactions, etc), their "product" is to a great extent the warm-n-fuzzy feeling that clients get from the general perception that a bunch of intelligent, highly educated and broadly competent, insecure overachievers are burning the midnight oil to triple-check that everything is going to plan and there are no contingencies left unexamined.

As such, on a meta level, the "product" in this regard is not some kind of impartial measurable standard of client-related vigilance, but rather, constant reinforcement of a perception in the client's mind. And so, it's totally rational that, for example, investment banking associates will always respond to a late-night email from the client's internal M&A guy or corporate development lady on the same night the incoming email was sent -- even if it's an email of the "hey no need to respond to this, just wanted to make sure I sent you the attachment" variety. Maintaining the perception that someone is always watching the store is paramount not only in maintaining client relationships, but also in justifying high fees.

When I was hired as a consultant, the very first day I was asked to give an estimate on how long it will take me to complete the project. (Coincidentally, it was for a New York Times)

I spent my time studying the code base and the requirement. By the end of the day, I told them around ~20 hours. It was a fairly easy project.

I spent a month and a half to complete the project. What I didn't take into account was how long it will take to get resources from them. When I asked a question, it took anywhere from 48 hours to an entire week to get a response. When I completed a task, I got no response.

But I needed to be on call because they would sent hundreds of emails about everything except what was needed. I charged them for all the hours I spent waiting for them, and reading long emails that led nowhere.