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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

#31

Post by Scoundreller »

Theodores wrote: post #12

What is work anyway? If you are a programmer then work is different. Sure you are not on your feet all day at the beck and call of customers, however, if you are not working then your computer is. Waiting is not supposed to be part of the job. Learning on the job is also verboten. Very little time that is on the company clock is spent travelling. I have colleagues in sales that do lots of travel, then, when they are…

Meanwhile, every day someone goes to work in an office, sharpens their pencils, and finds ways to eliminate those waiting times (unless they have a powerful union of course).

The taxi driver is replaced with a rideshare with none of that aimless driving looking for an uncalled fare.

The security guard has more cameras to review, or has more walkabouts that are tracked with their fob. Or replaced with remote monitoring of the camera feeds. But has to deal with a million Amazon packages (I wish they consolidated better...). I don’t know why there isn’t a locker where I scan my fob and the right door opens...

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

#32

Post by clubm8 »

Theodores wrote: post #12

What is work anyway? If you are a programmer then work is different. Sure you are not on your feet all day at the beck and call of customers, however, if you are not working then your computer is. Waiting is not supposed to be part of the job. Learning on the job is also verboten. Very little time that is on the company clock is spent travelling. I have colleagues in sales that do lots of travel, then, when they are…

> I also know from experience that time spent travelling is tiring, but is it strictly work?

If I'm someplace other than where I want to be, it's work.

A lot of comments in this thread don't seem to understand - even if you're free to read HN during downtime, if I need to be in by 9am and am unable to leave until 7pm, the period in between was work. If I would have suffered professionally if I'd left at 5 regardless of how much "work" was done, the performative behavior is also "work".

Labor law in the states uses "engaged to work" and similar language often, mostly in the context of hourly employees. You can't tell someone "you must show up to the jobsite and wait to see if you're needed" under threat of no future work... that's being engaged to work.

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

#33

Post by FiddlyPack »

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,” unless I was also counting chatting on HN, Slack, meals with coworkers, research...ie the things that make my actual “work” time (of maybe 15 hours per week) truly productive.

I guess it would be totally reasonable to include some of those activities as “legit work time,” but then how do you decide what is and isn’t legit? I require a lot of adjacent “down” time to provide very high-value “on” time for my company, but how could you possibly know if 20 hours spent researching something you are excited about will have any value whatsoever for your company? Should it be “billable?” This is the unsung benefit of being a salaried worker: you don’t have to concern yourself about whether your research and exploratory development is “on task” or not, you just need to bring the benefits back to your company.

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

#34

Post by drjesusphd »

secfirstmd wrote: post #10

I recently starting using a training a productivity tracker that has a decent mix of tracking but keeping the data local. It's really amazing to see how time is spent in the office. If on a very unusual and rare day of say 10 hours, I might be lucky to get 6 hours of actual work (with maybe an hour of deep work in there).

What software is this productivity tracker?

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

#35

Post by drugme »

S_A_P wrote: post #11
drugme wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can already tell it has markedly harmed my health. What salary or other payout is worth "markedly harming" your health, actually?

A pretty good hourly rate actually. I am definitely treating this as a sprint. And for the following 2 years I have lined up 35-40hour per week work. This will allow for a significant runway when the project ends as well. I’m hoping to have 12months salary in the bank.

Fair enough -- I genuinely hope the odds work out for you, then.

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

#36

Post by notfromhere »

arosier wrote: post #21

This happened to me. I was working 40 hours per week but saying I was working 75 hours per week (without really measuring it). Then I got a second job which made it more important to manage my time effectively (including measuring my time). With the second job, I actually started working 72 hours per week and realized how hard it is to work that much time due to the necessities in life (sleeping, eating/shopping, bat…

Also puts into perspective how much of a mental wear working 70+ hours is.

I did it for a few months - really starts breaking you down as a human being.

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

#37

Post by osrec »

dclusin wrote: post #30
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…

Investment banking interns have turned up dead from exhaustion. So some of them probably do work a lot. I can see it more so than engineering because deals are so time sensitive, you really can't slack off if there's a deal on. But agreed, most are probably full of shit :)

I agree with you. Interns and analysts run the banks. They really are made to slog it out. It's the VPs, Ds and MDs that claim to work a lot, but many don't actually (thanks to the interns).

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

#39

Post by microwavecamera »

Theodores wrote: post #12

What is work anyway? If you are a programmer then work is different. Sure you are not on your feet all day at the beck and call of customers, however, if you are not working then your computer is. Waiting is not supposed to be part of the job. Learning on the job is also verboten. Very little time that is on the company clock is spent travelling. I have colleagues in sales that do lots of travel, then, when they are…

  [upper management typing detected]

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

#40

Post by FiddlyPack »

clubm8 wrote: post #32
Theodores wrote: post #12

What is work anyway? If you are a programmer then work is different. Sure you are not on your feet all day at the beck and call of customers, however, if you are not working then your computer is. Waiting is not supposed to be part of the job. Learning on the job is also verboten. Very little time that is on the company clock is spent travelling. I have colleagues in sales that do lots of travel, then, when they are…

> I also know from experience that time spent travelling is tiring, but is it strictly work? If I'm someplace other than where I want to be, it's work. A lot of comments in this thread don't seem to understand - even if you're free to read HN during downtime, if I need to be in by 9am and am unable to leave until 7pm, the period in between was work. If I would have suffered professionally if I'd left at 5 regardless…

The confusion is because many of us work many days remote, and/or have flexible hours. For many of us, our entire existence is oriented around improving a bottom line...so when we have down time, we are recreationally reading about how to do that better, whether we are on the clock or not. So, if you are a remote worker, and you produce 3 proof of concepts for your company for fun, and none of them pan out, how many hours did you work? Nobody knows, including you.
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