6 ms·
What’s wrong with an hour long lunch? Isn’t that normal?
by isatty 5y ago
What’s wrong with an hour long lunch? Isn’t that normal?
- zitterbewegung 5y agoYea, I haven't heard of a job that wouldn't have an hour long lunch. It's a part of labor laws at least in Illinois.
- posguy 5y agoThis appears to be incorrect. Illinois only requires a 20+ minute lunch at or before 5 hours into a shift of 7 and 1/2 hours or more: https://www2.illinois.gov/idol/FAQs/Pages/meals-breaks-faq.aspx https://www2.illinois.gov/idol/FAQs/Pages/meals-breaks-faq.a...
- RikNieu 5y agoNo, you're expected to eat at your desk and type while chewing.
- Svperstar 5y agoNo lie my first job out of college expected you to eat at your desk and not leave for your lunch break.
- mstuyt 5y agoAn insurance company I did some work for had a bell go off for your two coffee breaks and lunchtime. You spent half of your lunchtime waiting for elevators.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoWhaaaat? What year, country, and/or location was this? Call center?
- stopnamingnuts 5y agoThat was the routine at Safeco in Seattle well into the 90s. My wife temped there over summers during grad school. Although she says they played Muzak instead of bells. So, in fact, it was much worse.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoD: What slave-drivers.
- aix1 5y agoI saw something similar in Tokyo. It was at a telco office. A bell would ring (at 1pm IIRC) and an entire skyscraper's worth of office workers would get up and try to get to street level. Every day. I was visiting a Western company that was renting a small space in the same building. Their routine was to never get caught up in the great migration (in either direction).
- failwhaleshark 5y agoOnce upon a time, I worked at a nuclear engineering consultancy. One engineer ate a hamburger and french fries over his keyboard, using it as a placemat, and never cleaned it up. In order to fix his computer, I first used a bottle of alcohol to clean the brown and black muck and hunks from the keycaps. It honestly smelled like a dumpster.
- vxNsr 5y agoI would just toss that
- failwhaleshark 5y agoIt was his favorite keyboard. He would've cried, TBH. Consider it was a place where one guy hoarded 15 years of WSJ in his office. When staff are excellent professionals in the field, they get to do all sort of weird things.
- square_usual 5y agoWeekly Shounen Jump or Wall Street Journal?
- syockit 5y agoThis question comes to my mind as well everytime I see that abbreviation.
- vxNsr 5y agoIn that case whenever I need to do anything on his machine I would just bring my own keyboard. Regardless that’s gross and unsanitary, probably attracted all sorts of pests.
- SilverRed 5y agoFrom what I have seen 30 mins is standard but some companies have an hour lunch and ask you to start 30 minutes sooner.
- lehi 5y agoIf I ate lunch I was expected to stay from 9 to 6.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- irrational 5y agoGet a new job? Do they actually pay attention to when you show up and leave, or do they treat you like an adult?
- kevstev 5y agoI have never ever worked a job where 9-6 was not the standard, and I don't really know anyone who took an entire hour for lunch either, at least not as a regular thing. This is in NYC. Do 9-5 jobs really exist these days?
- xf1cf 5y agoAt least in the states most places require you to "make up" your lunch. So normally you'd show up at 8 and work until 5 to make up for an hour lunch. This is true for both hourly and salary.
- viceroyalbean 5y agoI think the question is whether that "make up" time is always 1 hour or can be adjusted. At my previous job I would regularly take 15 minute lunch breaks and leave 45 minutes early (compared to a 1 hour lunch). Where I work now local laws require taking at least 1 hours of breaktime per day so I can technically not do that.
- xf1cf 5y agoI think this is based on local laws, yeah. Where I am at you're required to take a 30 minute break for 6 hours of work. The stipulation is that 30 minutes must be a continuous 30 minutes. I'm not aware of any law anywhere that says you can't just make your last 30 minutes of the day "lunch" but every company I've ever worked at has frowned upon or discouraged this. Usually by "forced clockouts" ostensibly for legal protection. My salary career has been more lenient but when I was an hourly employee if we ran over the 6 hours we'd get yelled at by HR and/or force clocked out (and told to go to lunch). Labor laws in the states are quite precarious for employers so it's semi-understandable why they do this.
- irrational 5y agoThat’s insane. I’m in the states, but my company treats us like adults. I roll in when I want, work out in the gym for 2 hours during the day, leave whenever I want. I can’t imagine working for a place that tracked my hours.
- ghshephard 5y agoYou've never worked at a job where you had to submit time sheets at the end of each week? Lots of "professional" gigs where people have to do that in order to accurately track time to customers - particularly when they are billing you out at $500/hour on the contract.
- whatshisface 5y agoIt is normal, but if you think about it, it doesn't really take an hour to eat lunch - and sometimes it would be preferable to eat in 5 minutes and leave at 4:05 instead of taking an hour to sit around the office. Every reasonable employer would permit this but I have learned from reading HN comments that not every employer is reasonable.
- millirem 5y agoBreak times also tend to be regulated in most countries I believe. I.e. here in Japan 60 minutes break time is required if you work for more than I think about 6ish hours.
- tmmx 5y agoWhen I used to work in Japan I hated that rule. One day I feeling not so great, so I took the morning off. But we had an important release, so I still went to the office in the afternoon. The release ran into few issues, so I had to stay past the regular finish time of 6pm. I started to feel no so great again, so I wanted to finish the release and head home as soon as possible. But at 7pm, my boss came running towards me and forced me to take one hour break. I tried to explained to them (unsuccessfully) I only have about 5-10mins to finish the release. So I spent another one hour with watering eyes, massive headache, and chills, just to finish 5mins of work.
- kyleee 5y agoI mean, it's a sensible regulation but there should be some leeway for edge case situations like yours (if there aren't already - since you were actually sick that should make it OK for you to leave ASAP one would hope)
- vadym909 5y agoit easily does- 20-30 min to walk/bike/drive back and forth to cafe / restaurant- 5-10 min to order/get food, 15-20 min to eat.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoIn my state 30 minutes has been the standard for a long time. Usually in the service industry they don't even give you a lunch break.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoIf and when companies stop treating employees like children and more like adults who can decide for themselves when to take breaks, work, and take vacations, they might just watch productivity and morale soar. Netflix generally has the right idea on this.
- aix1 5y agoCan also highly recommend Google (from first-hand experience). While there are pockets where this isn't 100% true, internal mobility is first-class so it's easy to improve things if you don't land well.
- toomanybeersies 5y agoThese kinds of rules are usually put in place because without them, companies treat their employees like slaves.
- arendtio 5y agoI like one hour lunches. My biggest issue is, that in an office environment I can't use it as effectively as I would like to. At home I tend to spend 20-30 minutes taking a short nap and it really pays off as it boosts my productivity for the afternoon. At the office, I don't have that opportunity :-/
- AYBABTME 5y agoIt's too short is what's wrong!