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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

#91

Post by RHSeeger »

Scoundreller wrote: post #23
ridgewell wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medicine is an interesting case. The prioritization isn't so much on the health of medical practitioners and nurses, but on patient safety. It is argued that patients have higher survivability rates when patient handoffs/shift changes are kept to a minimum. The focus has never been on the health of doctors, nurses, X-Ray technicians, etc. but from a public health perspective. This has far-reaching consequences in its…

The nurses may be working 12 hour shifts, but they’re unlikely to work more than 4 in a week. Overtime is expensive for employers, so they prefer to hire more or hire contract nurses where necessary. Even the doctors usually cover 12 clinical 12hr shifts a month. They may do more work after another takes over, academic work, moonlight, or have admin work. And having a good income allows you to buy your way out of mos…

> The nurses may be working 12 hour shifts, but they’re unlikely to work more than 4 in a week. Overtime is expensive for employers, so they prefer to hire more or hire contract nurses where necessary.

Or they're picking up more hours at a different hospital, so there's no overtime but they still make more.

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

#92

Post by WalterSear »

marvin wrote: post #48
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…

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…

I was paid pretty well, but the period of burnout that followed cut my effective hourly rate in half.

The problem wasn't the long hours - it was that places that push long hours tend to get other, even more important things wrong as well, like product-market fit.

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

#93

Post by notfromhere »

smallgovt wrote: post #54
notfromhere wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This is quite a generalization. It depends on how much you value and enjoy your work. And, every person's limit is different. There exist people on both extremes.

70+ hours of sustained work per week is unsustainable, the human body largely can't handle it. SV has a lot of dumb mythology around working non-stop (i.e. Musk claiming he works 100+ hours a week), but what people usually call 70 hours is 50 hours of work and 20 hours of dicking around 'working'.

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

#94

Post by rexpop »

kelnos wrote: post #73
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.

Except that having a child is an optional activity that you choose to do, whereas going to work is (usually) required. Ideally that work doesn't include periods of extreme overwork, and lucky people are sometimes able to walk away from jobs that do, but many people just have to do it in order to put food on the table.

Having a child is optional for individuals, but not for society, and so it's really only "pseudo-optional" for individuals: there is some distributed portion of requirement on everyone.

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

#95

Post by jolmg »

sidlls wrote: post #80
kelnos wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that having a child is an optional activity that you choose to do, whereas going to work is (usually) required. Ideally that work doesn't include periods of extreme overwork, and lucky people are sometimes able to walk away from jobs that do, but many people just have to do it in order to put food on the table.

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.

> Work is optional. There are plenty of people who get by without it. Doesn't mean they're doing well or healthy.

Except if you don't have a kid, you have better chances of staying well and healthy. That's the whole point. That's what is meant with parenthood being optional and work not.

> And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional.

With the rate at which world population is increasing[1], I think the opposite is true. It wasn't that long ago that we reached a world population of 7 billion. Now, we're apparently more than halfway to 8 billion. How in the world can the earth support so many of us?

Yesterday, there was a post here that talked about the absolutely brutal conditions that we're raising livestock in[2]. We wouldn't need to be so god damn efficient in working livestock if we didn't have so many mouths to feed.

[1] http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19743006

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

#96

Post by bitL »

I think 75+ productive hours are doable if:

1) you start early

2) keep focus 100%, no browsing/distractions etc.

3) after 7 hours you make a 2-3h long break and do something completely different, like taking a walk outside, sunbathing, biking, sauna or whatever makes you happy

4) when you return, you work on another task/for another company, never the same stuff you worked on in the morning

5) you take only one day off, i.e. depending on your location/culture/religion one of Fri-Sun is strictly no-work

6) you are single & healthy

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

#97

Post by jolmg »

beart wrote: post #76
kelnos wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that having a child is an optional activity that you choose to do, whereas going to work is (usually) required. Ideally that work doesn't include periods of extreme overwork, and lucky people are sometimes able to walk away from jobs that do, but many people just have to do it in order to put food on the table.

> Except that having a child is an optional activity that you choose to do I get what you are saying, but this is not a universal truth. Life gets complicated.

For the vast majority, life doesn't get that complicated. I think even 5% of the population being forced into parenthood is too much of an exaggeration.

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

#98

Post by munk-a »

bitL wrote: post #96

I think 75+ productive hours are doable if: 1) you start early 2) keep focus 100%, no browsing/distractions etc. 3) after 7 hours you make a 2-3h long break and do something completely different, like taking a walk outside, sunbathing, biking, sauna or whatever makes you happy 4) when you return, you work on another task/for another company, never the same stuff you worked on in the morning 5) you take only one day o…

Why do you want to work 75+ hours? What are you working for - what value are you receiving from life?

These are serious questions, I've worked crazy overtime (defined by me as anything over 50 hours a week) and never want to return to it, consistently doing 10 hour days is draining and significantly lowered my productivity, it was just bad times all around.

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

#99

Post by bitL »

munk-a wrote: post #98
bitL wrote: post #96

I think 75+ productive hours are doable if: 1) you start early 2) keep focus 100%, no browsing/distractions etc. 3) after 7 hours you make a 2-3h long break and do something completely different, like taking a walk outside, sunbathing, biking, sauna or whatever makes you happy 4) when you return, you work on another task/for another company, never the same stuff you worked on in the morning 5) you take only one day o…

Why do you want to work 75+ hours? What are you working for - what value are you receiving from life? These are serious questions, I've worked crazy overtime (defined by me as anything over 50 hours a week) and never want to return to it, consistently doing 10 hour days is draining and significantly lowered my productivity, it was just bad times all around.

I managed to work like that for ~9 months; when you work on some bleeding edge stuff like inventing some new Deep Learning method you can actually have fun and be eager to keep doing it. If it's just usual treadmill caused by silly decisions from the top and inability to push back to customer, then it's hell.

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

#100

Post by rootusrootus »

jolmg wrote: post #95
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.

> Work is optional. There are plenty of people who get by without it. Doesn't mean they're doing well or healthy. Except if you don't have a kid, you have better chances of staying well and healthy. That's the whole point. That's what is meant with parenthood being optional and work not. > And for society to continue to function having children is actually not optional. With the rate at which world population is incr…

Well, if everyone stopped having kids effective immediately, we could have the population issue solved very quickly. Along with all our other problems, too, after a few decades of suffering.
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