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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

#41

Post by osrec »

haolez wrote: post #22
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…

On the other side, I know some investment bankers and they work more than 60 hours per week. They look unhealthy to me :)

I too was one of those unhealthy looking, overworked bankers. I was promoted at a young age and had a lot to prove, so I overdid it for a year or two. Then I understood the secret the other MDs had known for years - you just have to look busy, not actually be busy!

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

#42

Post by secfirstmd »

drjesusphd wrote: post #34
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?

Qbserve

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

#43

Post by FiddlyPack »

badpun wrote: post #28
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…

Work is every activity you take to further the goals of your employer. So, traveling is work, waiting for a build is work, learning new tech required for the job is work etc. The caveat is that not all work is equally demanding and tiring - so, if for example your job consists of a lot of travel, you could negotiate a lower hourly rate for the time you spend traveling.

I think this is a pretty good definition, except that in creative work (like developing a novel application), sleeping often produces some of the best epiphanies/solutions. The truth is this: we have patrons, and our value is not calculable by the hour.

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

#44

Post by notfromhere »

ridgewell wrote: post #7
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.

People like to bring up the long hours that workers in Asian countries stay in the office or workplace for to justify long work weeks in North America and Europe when needed. In practice, they drag out their work day (eat breakfast, take showers, go to the gym, go on their phone) and don't really work significant hours in the end. Their productivity in terms of economic value produced per hour is markedly lower than…

You can't. After a few solid months of 70 hour weeks you start seeing some serious health effects (blood pressure spikes, nervous system issues triggered by high levels of persistent stress, insomnia, exhaustion, etc).

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

#45

Post by yibg »

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 week was pretty much: go to work, eat meals at desk, go home, work from home until bed time, go to sleep, then repeat. But in general weird things happened during that time, probably due to a combination of stress and unhealthy habits. For example:

- I've never been a morning person and struggled to wake up before 9 all my life. During this time I woke up early to meet with the client early in the morning. After some time I'd habitually wake up 15 minutes before 6, which was when my alarm was set at. Also due to lack of sleep I'd always be pissed that I was missing out on 15 minutes of sleep too.

- I was sleep deprived but didn't feel sleepy at all during the day. Granted I did consume a lot of coffee, but still. Adrenaline?

- Got drunk really easily. Part of client facing work is drinks with clients every so often. I used to be able to drink 4-5 beers and not show much effect externally. Towards the end of this period 1-2 drinks and I'd be slurring.

- Perversely, things were often times "fun". The team got really close to each other and we actually looked forward to going to the client office to do "battle".

Definitely not sustainable nor healthy. I got pats on the back and some token raises / bonuses but I've since learned that going above and beyond like this is not worth it. The hit to mental and physical health is just not worth the small amount of extra money and (possibly) career advancement.

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

#47

Post by mrweasel »

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,”…

Maybe HN is something he browse during the evening to relax?

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

#48

Post by marvin »

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…

If you can bill $200 per hour for 75 hours a week for a year, though, maybe you'd be willing to do that for a year or so just in order to never have to do it, or any other work, ever again.

Of course, if the client actually has to pay $200 per hour you're present, it's exceedingly likely that the overtime culture will stop overnight. It's obvious that it isn't working already, once the company actually pays for it as well, it is bound to stop.

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

#49

Post by gerbilly »

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…

> 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/)

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

#50

Post by mrweasel »

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…

>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.

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