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Tenure track profs work 80 hours per week? Really? They work from 8AM to 8PM, 7 days per week (taking only a 15 minute break each day to eat)??? This doesn't

Tenure track profs work 80 hours per week? Really? They work from 8AM to 8PM, 7 days per week (taking only a 15 minute break each day to eat)??? This doesn't seem likely, since they would be completely burned out after only a few months, and you would have diminishing returns after the first week. If you are really working 80 hour weeks then you are being incredibly foolish and wasting a lot of time being completely unproductive due to exhaustion. But, of course, you don't really mean 80 hours, you were just exaggerating a bit to make your point. Fair enough, lets say profs are putting in (I'm assuming a proper research university where tenure track professors teach 3-4 classes at most) 12 hours lecturing each week, for 30 weeks per year. That's (at most) 360 hours of teaching, per year. Lets say you spend 2 hours per week preparing for lectures (you should know this stuff already, but lets say you just need time to get organized). That's 60 hours, yearly. Now, lets say you spend 4 hours every day working on research. Everybody probably would like to spend more, but some days you have to see friends or your wife/husband or kids or get your car fixed or whatever. That's 4 * 365, which is probably a huge overestimate for most people, but that's 1460 hours per year. Now, as for writing grant proposals, or mentoring students, or whatever else, nobody believes you are spending any serious time (more than 5 hours a week) on that. I don't know how long you really spend on it, but I'm going to assume that you aren't writing more than 1 grant proposal per month, so I'm going to just say that I gave very optimistic and too-high estimates for everything else, so this will get rolled in as overhead. So you're doing (drumroll) 360 + 60 + 1460 = 1880 hours of work per year, all but 420 of which is just thinking about the problems that interest you most. If you work in industry, you are spending 220 * 9 = 1980 hours per year working on stuff that are not the things that most interest you, and almost none of it is blue-sky thinking of any kind. Want fries with that? Edit: With my really crazy overestimates on how tenure track profs spend time, averaged over a regular work schedule it is 42.72 hours per week, of which 9.5 is anything at all besides pure 'research'. Odd that, it's within .5 hours per week of my original guess, and I swear I didn't cook the numbers to come to that.

daleroberts 14y ago
I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of work we need to do...
AlisdairO 14y ago
I'm friends with several lecturers, and while they don't work 80 hours a week, it's fair to say they work substantially longer hours than I do. That's fine, they generally enjoy their jobs and get to do interesting things (as well as deal with a lot more bullshit than I do). You're utterly crazy if you think they spend only 10 hours a week on non-research activities. As an outsider, your estimates are finger in the air at best. How can you possibly know you've covered all their activies?
liedra 14y ago
Wow, your hours on preparing lectures, grant proposal writing, dealing with students, etc. are all way underestimated. A solid grant proposal that is likely to get funded (often in a super competitive field with maybe 8% acceptance rate) can take well over 2 months of solid preparation. Of course we don't actually get 2 months of solid preparation time, what with all the other stuff we have to do. My workload as an early career academic is roughly 10% on a funded project, 20% "research", i.e. grant/paper writing, 5% on a couple of committees I am on, and the rest teaching, with roughly half of that supervisions of PhD/Masters students. For my masters students that equates to about 6 hours of meetings and reviewing their stuff over 3 months of their project. Most of my colleagues and I burn through that in the first month. So what do we do for the other 2 months? Well it's not like we can shut up shop and say "welp, sorry, but you've used all your allotted time" because that'd be terrible. So we continue to give whatever amount of time we feel is necessary (within reason). Anyway it's not as simple as you've broken it down to be. Things ebb and flow over the year too, students need more mentoring at certain times of the year than others. Grant proposals, conferences, special issues journals all have deadlines and calls. My week is extremely varied and I'm still working on juggling all the different hats and priorities I have. I have a full load right now over summer even without teaching; when teaching starts up again I'll have to do all the stuff I'm doing now (bar masters student supervision) while doing roughly 25% of my allotted time teaching undergraduates. Anyway, just another perspective.
- larsberg 14y ago
  Your numbers are in line with what I see from my advisor. The original also failed to break down paper writing. For a top-tier conference, you're going to spend several weeks worth of full days working on a paper, and you're probably going to do it twice per paper because, as they say, even Simon Peyton-Jones has papers rejected occasionally. This time is on top of work you already did to get your system working! (well, unless the paper is the result, as in some areas of theory) You really, really have to want to live it. I enjoy it, and as a PhD student I don't mind spending all my waking hours that aren't devoted to my wife or a little bit of exercise doing research. But just to be competitive, that's sort of the baseline. I'm not sure, though, whether it's truly a demand of the job or just the default because academic research attracts people who work like that (I also worked like that when I was a developer at MSFT).
dododo 14y ago
you can't really account for academic time on a hours-per-week basis. there's too much variety. as others have noted, it's a modal way of working. one week it's this, next month it's this, then maybe there's a paper deadline so you have to crunch down and get on a particular project. maybe it didn't fly so you have to try something else. it also depends where your university is. being a professor is like running a company but with fewer support staff. running your lab takes time most weeks, it's almost a constant: whole-lab meetings are easily 2-3hours per week, meeting each individual member of your lab is another hour or so each. then there's the admin for your lab (some of which you delegate). then there's organizing new grants: this involves collaborating with other people which means... yup, more meetings, often over skype or similar. then working out ideas, then writing, re-writing, and re-writing the draft and doing a lot of preliminary work. many grants need a lot of preliminary work to be shown before they get funding. teaching is a lot more than just lecturing, you forgot: time spent talking to students one-on-one, running labs, designing interesting homeworks and exercises, preparing exams, marking homework and exams (marking easily consumes a week or two per course here). also, "knowing stuff already" doesn't mean you can teach it. it's enough to teach yourself, not others. developing a new course or just keeping and old course up to date and interesting takes an awful lot of time. what content will you include? what exercises? what text books? what's examinable? what's useful? what's the structure? what can students handle? all of these apply to courses old and new, but are faster for older courses, especially ones that do not change much (i.e., not active research areas). then there's your research. what you do here depends upon the stage of you career. in the very least, you need to read. a lot. in CS-disciplines, this is easily a weekly activity. then you can spend some time thinking. then trying some things out. maybe. then going to conferences, talking to more people. presenting your own work: writing papers, arguing about their acceptance, visiting labs, workshops and conferences to give talks, preparing talks, etc.. believe it or not, you have to advertise and advocate your research, even once it's published and done. how else will people notice? so advertising is another thing you must spend your time on. now multiply all this work by the number of projects you have: potentially one per lab member. interestingly you miss out one of the most important parts of being an academic--reviewing other people's work for conferences and journals. this takes a lot of time. firstly because reviewing a paper thoroughly takes considerable time, secondly because the discussion afterwards takes considerable time, and thirdly because often you will do this many, many times a year. as you become more senior, you take on a more senior role here: managing reviewers, journal and proceedings, conferences and workshops, etc. i'm sure this isn't the same everywhere, but this is a small glimpse at academia in the places i'm aware of. it's busy busy busy.

daleroberts 14y ago

I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of work we need to do...

AlisdairO 14y ago

I'm friends with several lecturers, and while they don't work 80 hours a week, it's fair to say they work substantially longer hours than I do. That's fine, they generally enjoy their jobs and get to do interesting things (as well as deal with a lot more bullshit than I do). You're utterly crazy if you think they spend only 10 hours a week on non-research activities. As an outsider, your estimates are finger in the air at best. How can you possibly know you've covered all their activies?

liedra 14y ago

Wow, your hours on preparing lectures, grant proposal writing, dealing with students, etc. are all way underestimated. A solid grant proposal that is likely to get funded (often in a super competitive field with maybe 8% acceptance rate) can take well over 2 months of solid preparation. Of course we don't actually get 2 months of solid preparation time, what with all the other stuff we have to do. My workload as an early career academic is roughly 10% on a funded project, 20% "research", i.e. grant/paper writing, 5% on a couple of committees I am on, and the rest teaching, with roughly half of that supervisions of PhD/Masters students. For my masters students that equates to about 6 hours of meetings and reviewing their stuff over 3 months of their project. Most of my colleagues and I burn through that in the first month. So what do we do for the other 2 months? Well it's not like we can shut up shop and say "welp, sorry, but you've used all your allotted time" because that'd be terrible. So we continue to give whatever amount of time we feel is necessary (within reason). Anyway it's not as simple as you've broken it down to be. Things ebb and flow over the year too, students need more mentoring at certain times of the year than others. Grant proposals, conferences, special issues journals all have deadlines and calls. My week is extremely varied and I'm still working on juggling all the different hats and priorities I have. I have a full load right now over summer even without teaching; when teaching starts up again I'll have to do all the stuff I'm doing now (bar masters student supervision) while doing roughly 25% of my allotted time teaching undergraduates. Anyway, just another perspective.

larsberg 14y ago
Your numbers are in line with what I see from my advisor. The original also failed to break down paper writing. For a top-tier conference, you're going to spend several weeks worth of full days working on a paper, and you're probably going to do it twice per paper because, as they say, even Simon Peyton-Jones has papers rejected occasionally. This time is on top of work you already did to get your system working! (well, unless the paper is the result, as in some areas of theory) You really, really have to want to live it. I enjoy it, and as a PhD student I don't mind spending all my waking hours that aren't devoted to my wife or a little bit of exercise doing research. But just to be competitive, that's sort of the baseline. I'm not sure, though, whether it's truly a demand of the job or just the default because academic research attracts people who work like that (I also worked like that when I was a developer at MSFT).

dododo 14y ago

you can't really account for academic time on a hours-per-week basis. there's too much variety. as others have noted, it's a modal way of working. one week it's this, next month it's this, then maybe there's a paper deadline so you have to crunch down and get on a particular project. maybe it didn't fly so you have to try something else. it also depends where your university is. being a professor is like running a company but with fewer support staff. running your lab takes time most weeks, it's almost a constant: whole-lab meetings are easily 2-3hours per week, meeting each individual member of your lab is another hour or so each. then there's the admin for your lab (some of which you delegate). then there's organizing new grants: this involves collaborating with other people which means... yup, more meetings, often over skype or similar. then working out ideas, then writing, re-writing, and re-writing the draft and doing a lot of preliminary work. many grants need a lot of preliminary work to be shown before they get funding. teaching is a lot more than just lecturing, you forgot: time spent talking to students one-on-one, running labs, designing interesting homeworks and exercises, preparing exams, marking homework and exams (marking easily consumes a week or two per course here). also, "knowing stuff already" doesn't mean you can teach it. it's enough to teach yourself, not others. developing a new course or just keeping and old course up to date and interesting takes an awful lot of time. what content will you include? what exercises? what text books? what's examinable? what's useful? what's the structure? what can students handle? all of these apply to courses old and new, but are faster for older courses, especially ones that do not change much (i.e., not active research areas). then there's your research. what you do here depends upon the stage of you career. in the very least, you need to read. a lot. in CS-disciplines, this is easily a weekly activity. then you can spend some time thinking. then trying some things out. maybe. then going to conferences, talking to more people. presenting your own work: writing papers, arguing about their acceptance, visiting labs, workshops and conferences to give talks, preparing talks, etc.. believe it or not, you have to advertise and advocate your research, even once it's published and done. how else will people notice? so advertising is another thing you must spend your time on. now multiply all this work by the number of projects you have: potentially one per lab member. interestingly you miss out one of the most important parts of being an academic--reviewing other people's work for conferences and journals. this takes a lot of time. firstly because reviewing a paper thoroughly takes considerable time, secondly because the discussion afterwards takes considerable time, and thirdly because often you will do this many, many times a year. as you become more senior, you take on a more senior role here: managing reviewers, journal and proceedings, conferences and workshops, etc. i'm sure this isn't the same everywhere, but this is a small glimpse at academia in the places i'm aware of. it's busy busy busy.