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The myth that many people work 60-80 hr weeks needs to die. Very few people do this and the ones that do choose to. C levels, company owners etc. Anyone else wo

by alar44 5y ago

The myth that many people work 60-80 hr weeks needs to die. Very few people do this and the ones that do choose to. C levels, company owners etc. Anyone else working that much straight up chooses to.

watwut 5y ago
Plus those numbers are not productive in long term. Productivity goes down with too many hours for more then few weeks.
kuboble 5y ago
I don't know about SV but in academia it is extremely common and often expected that people work 60+ hours. Sometimes it's just peer pressure. Sometimes it's an explicit requirement. Few years ago I spoke with an American professor who just started his tenure in Switzerland. He told me he was shocked and outraged when he was the only one to show to work on national holiday!
- alar44 5y ago
  Great anecdote. Academia is, what, like 0.1% of the workforce? Browsing some polls, it looks like less than 10% of salaries people work more than 60 hours. I don't know what the ratio is for salary vs hourly in the US, but that probably puts it less than 5% for all workers. I think these people are just the loudest and like writing articles about how much they work. No one writes about how they work 40 hours and life is fine. There is also the other case where someone may go to the office 10 hours a day, punch some time on the weekends, claim they "worked" 60 hours, but in reality only got 4-5 hours worth of work done per day. I just don't buy it.
  - mlac 5y ago
    > There is also the other case where someone may go to the office 10 hours a day, punch some time on the weekends, claim they "worked" 60 hours, but in reality only got 4-5 hours worth of work done per day. They spend the other 5-6 hours writing about their 10 hour days.
- Leherenn 5y ago
  If he's salaried in Switzerland, it's actually illegal to work on national holiday (similarly at night/on Sundays). (Unless he has an exemption, but that would be very unlikely, exemptions are for emergency workers and similar, not university professors.)
  - kuboble 5y ago
    It might me. But in academia there is a lot pressure and many people decide to work on weekends, some have to work on weekends (e.g. long running experiments that require human input every 6 hours), and some are forced to work and only if there is an abundance of other forms of abuse it might get exposed. Consider famous case of https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/technology-institute_prestigious-swiss-university-sacks--bullying--professor/45098114 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/technology-institute_prestigiou... If you read the detailed postmortem it is clear people were working way beyond normal working week. And it's not even mentioned as one of problems about the work with this professor.
yourapostasy 5y ago
> The myth that many people work 60-80 hr weeks needs to die. 996 and Japanese salarymen entered chat... You might not consider much of what they do "work". You might consider their choice freely-given. Others reasonably have a difference of opinion. I'd advise caution when baking in assumptions on what you see in an asymmetric power differential context.
- alar44 5y ago
  We are talking about the US specifically.
  - yourapostasy 5y ago
    For W-2 exempt (salaried), if your definition of "work" is the equivalent of being in the zone for that much, of course not. However, meeting Japanese-style salaryman-type management expectations of butts-in-seat-appearing-busy, or in a poorly-led consulting company that underbids and expects hapless employees to still deliver with uncompensated overtime while timesheets read exactly 40 hours per week, or overbook in a subscription-based business and throw the overage onto the heads of the employees, or any number of numerous scams I've seen? Yeah, that happens plenty. Any area of human activity that is so structurally secular that it not only has a formal label ("overtime abuse"), but has law firms specializing in litigating it [1], makes it a real stretch to assert it is a "myth". I'd like to see where your assertion is coming from, because this is a concern I have to address with job candidates, and I'd really love to have persuasive evidence that it really is a myth in general, and with my organization in particular. [1] https://winebrakelaw.com/abuses-of-the-executive-employee-exemption-to-overtime-coverage-continue-to-flourish-what-you-can-do-to-fight-back/ https://winebrakelaw.com/abuses-of-the-executive-employee-ex...

by alar44 5y ago

The myth that many people work 60-80 hr weeks needs to die. Very few people do this and the ones that do choose to. C levels, company owners etc. Anyone else working that much straight up chooses to.

watwut 5y ago

Plus those numbers are not productive in long term. Productivity goes down with too many hours for more then few weeks.

kuboble 5y ago

I don't know about SV but in academia it is extremely common and often expected that people work 60+ hours. Sometimes it's just peer pressure. Sometimes it's an explicit requirement. Few years ago I spoke with an American professor who just started his tenure in Switzerland. He told me he was shocked and outraged when he was the only one to show to work on national holiday!

alar44 5y ago
Great anecdote. Academia is, what, like 0.1% of the workforce? Browsing some polls, it looks like less than 10% of salaries people work more than 60 hours. I don't know what the ratio is for salary vs hourly in the US, but that probably puts it less than 5% for all workers. I think these people are just the loudest and like writing articles about how much they work. No one writes about how they work 40 hours and life is fine. There is also the other case where someone may go to the office 10 hours a day, punch some time on the weekends, claim they "worked" 60 hours, but in reality only got 4-5 hours worth of work done per day. I just don't buy it.
- mlac 5y ago
  > There is also the other case where someone may go to the office 10 hours a day, punch some time on the weekends, claim they "worked" 60 hours, but in reality only got 4-5 hours worth of work done per day. They spend the other 5-6 hours writing about their 10 hour days.
Leherenn 5y ago
If he's salaried in Switzerland, it's actually illegal to work on national holiday (similarly at night/on Sundays). (Unless he has an exemption, but that would be very unlikely, exemptions are for emergency workers and similar, not university professors.)
- kuboble 5y ago
  It might me. But in academia there is a lot pressure and many people decide to work on weekends, some have to work on weekends (e.g. long running experiments that require human input every 6 hours), and some are forced to work and only if there is an abundance of other forms of abuse it might get exposed. Consider famous case of https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/technology-institute_prestigious-swiss-university-sacks--bullying--professor/45098114 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/technology-institute_prestigiou... If you read the detailed postmortem it is clear people were working way beyond normal working week. And it's not even mentioned as one of problems about the work with this professor.

yourapostasy 5y ago

> The myth that many people work 60-80 hr weeks needs to die. 996 and Japanese salarymen entered chat... You might not consider much of what they do "work". You might consider their choice freely-given. Others reasonably have a difference of opinion. I'd advise caution when baking in assumptions on what you see in an asymmetric power differential context.

alar44 5y ago
We are talking about the US specifically.
- yourapostasy 5y ago
  For W-2 exempt (salaried), if your definition of "work" is the equivalent of being in the zone for that much, of course not. However, meeting Japanese-style salaryman-type management expectations of butts-in-seat-appearing-busy, or in a poorly-led consulting company that underbids and expects hapless employees to still deliver with uncompensated overtime while timesheets read exactly 40 hours per week, or overbook in a subscription-based business and throw the overage onto the heads of the employees, or any number of numerous scams I've seen? Yeah, that happens plenty. Any area of human activity that is so structurally secular that it not only has a formal label ("overtime abuse"), but has law firms specializing in litigating it [1], makes it a real stretch to assert it is a "myth". I'd like to see where your assertion is coming from, because this is a concern I have to address with job candidates, and I'd really love to have persuasive evidence that it really is a myth in general, and with my organization in particular. [1] https://winebrakelaw.com/abuses-of-the-executive-employee-exemption-to-overtime-coverage-continue-to-flourish-what-you-can-do-to-fight-back/ https://winebrakelaw.com/abuses-of-the-executive-employee-ex...