16 ms·

Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks

259 points by bootload 12y ago

sukilot 12y ago
Summary: bosses promote based on butts in seats. By working remotely, with a mobile device , you can fool your boss into thinking you work 13-hr days by working only mornings and evenings.
- mauricemir 12y ago
  Butts in seats they can see I think
- yetanotheracc 12y ago
  I do exactly that. Perception management.
- ant6n 12y ago
  By working remotely, you are not a butt in a seat.
hvidgaard 12y ago
When I read this > You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my son had a Cub Scout meeting. I felt a sharp disdain for the managers. Seriously, children growing up is a onetime thing.It's fucked up beyond reason that people accept this, and I'd gladly take a lower paying job so I can be there.
- monk_e_boy 12y ago
  You have to wonder at the mentality of someone who wouldn't be there for their kid. I know you can't be there 100% of the time, but you've got to make some effort and stand up for yourself. Take a pay cut, do less hours. I loved the book Red Mars in which children were quite uncommon, so whenever a child was about all the adults would pay them lots of attention. This included bosses.
  - sjwright 12y ago
    Just make sure you don't go too far in the other direction and become a helicopter parent. Children also need some disinterest and neglect occasionally.
  - dagw 12y ago
    You have to wonder at the mentality of someone who wouldn't be there for their kid. Some people rationalize it with that making sure their kid lives in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, goes to a great school, has access to all the latest gadgets and gets to to travel the world is the best thing they can do for their kids. And if the cost is that they have to work 14 hour days and hardly ever see their kids then that is a sacrifice they're willing to step up and make. No saying I agree, but I can certainly see how you could convince yourself that working an 80 hour week is you doing the best thing for your kids and family. Furthermore while I agree with (having done so myself) saying "Take a pay cut, do less hours.", it is only easy when you are already essentially rich. If "take a pay cut" meant I would have to move my family into a tiny apartment in the shitty part of town I probably wouldn't have such a cavalier attitude about it.
    - JimmyM 12y ago
      There is also the fact that for some careers there is no intermediate state between success and failure -- no "not being promoted", only continual success or a lack of a job (recruiting and finance spring to mind). In those careers where there is in fact an intermediate state, it can feel as though it is very narrow and difficult to stay in. While the parent getting more pay may not really be important to a child, their long-term job security could prove to be essential.
    - pestaa 12y ago
      We're not poor or anything, but I've never met a family that could choose to work less. It doesn't take 80 hours every week, but when they call you on Saturday (or even Sunday), there is no choice. I live in Middle Europe.
      - castell 12y ago
- draven 12y ago
  Better to be a regular employee and a great dad/mom than a "superhero" and a shitty parent.
  - rev_bird 12y ago
    The issue in a lot of cases seems to be that there is no "regular employee": workers are expected to put in the extra time ("effort"), or they're instantly sub-par.
    - draven 12y ago
      And if it is expected of everyone, then they are not "superheroes" (exceptional individuals) anymore, only regular employees, and the regular ones (those who have a life outside work) are pushed down to the mediocre employee category. I also hate when HR people or bosses equate the time spent being at work with effort (and let's not talk about efficiency or work output quality.) Being a great parent while working 40 or even 50 hours a week is still a remarquable achievement.
- Ntrails 12y ago
  I was at a training seminar where they were trying to go through the ethical dilemma of a manager who had two employees wanting to go home on time (one for spousal medical issue, one for child based commitment) and asking how to decide which one is allowed to leave. I went a little apeshit at the premise itself, and indeed at the training company for re-enforcing the idea you need permission to leave at 5pm. Yesterday my manager asked me what I was doing this evening, and whether I could cover a release in terms of support. As it happens, I can. If I had plans of any kind my answer would have been "Sorry, nope. I've got plans so need to be out of the office by xx:xx".
  - yodsanklai 12y ago
    > ... the idea you need permission to leave at 5pm. I hate this idea too. I'm lucky to be able to organize my work as I want to (working in academia). Asking a permission for such a thing sounds so wrong. However, this freedom comes with a price. I earn much less than most of my friends with the same education level and I have to admit that I suffer (a little) to have a lesser social status and little recognition. In the end, it's a matter of compromise.
    - moron4hire 12y ago
      I disagree that compromise is necessary. I've found that one merely needs to avoid any organization that routinely hires MBAs and HR directors as a good litmus test for whether or not the place will try to grind me down. That can be hard to do in software development, especially if you end up getting stuck in consulting[1]. Hence why I freelance now. I work 20 hours a week and I gross more than I ever did working for The Man. People always tell me, "Oh, I could never do that, I like knowing I have a regular job," but they don't realize that A) they could get fired at any minute just because their boss doesn't like them, and B) I've had the same client for the last 3 years, which is longer than I've stayed at any job I've ever had before. As long as you're working for someone else, as long as you aren't making the actual profit off of your work, your work will always be treated as a cost center, rather than an income center. You will never be paid the full value of your work, because there would be no point to paying someone to do the work if there were no profit in it for the employer. Ultimately, I'd like to get out of freelancing, but for now, at least freelancing lets me demand a higher portion of the margin. I've found it also seems to set me in a position of being a peer to my client (we are both business men) rather than a subordinate. It's a small difference that makes all the difference. [1] It's incredibly hard to transition from a job in consulting to a job in a product-based software company. I think it's mostly that there are so few of the latter compared to the former, but I suspect the latter looks askew at people with a history at the former as well.
- moron4hire 12y ago
  The great thing is, you don't have to take a lower paying job. I started freelancing three years ago and have made more than I've ever made in my career, and I only work 20 hours a week.
  - rev_bird 12y ago
    I assume your username is also your business name? Wish I'd have thought of it first, it would have fit perfectly.
    - moron4hire 12y ago
      Heh, no, I just go by my real name. Well, I'm sort of in the process of merging my consulting business with a partner, but that's mostly just an organizational thing. The "moron4hire" handle is older than my freelancing and was meant to be a daily reminder to myself to be humble.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Seriously, children growing up is a onetime thing. Sure, but it's a onetime thing that takes 15+ years.
  - hvidgaard 12y ago
    Children goes through multiple phases, where they're learning and their personality emerges. It's not as simple as saying it's 15+ years, you can catch up in the last 3.
    - M8 12y ago
      It doesn't have to be about children, every person goes through different stages in a period of any 15 years. Single people deserve same (good) treatment as married.
- ohitsdom 12y ago
  I work a pretty standard 40 hour work week in an office, and even that makes me feel like a distant father sometimes. Love my kids, hate seeing them only 2 hours a day before they go to bed (they're still very young).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- atom-morgan 12y ago
  Immediately after graduating from college, I always felt bad seeing parents who were sacrificing time with their kids to put in extra hours even if the hours weren't necessary. Late night calls to "catch up" when we easily could have waited until the morning. I just turned 25 and I've worked a few jobs where pretending to work was the norm. It was a drag on me and I was single and in my early twenties. I couldn't imagine doing that while having kids at home as well. At the same time, this ended up being one of my biggest motivators when it comes to my career. I don't want to end up in that position, ever. If I start a company, I don't want to be that manager. It sucked but it was also a great learning experience so that I know what to avoid in life.
Red_Tarsius 12y ago
This is what happens when the reward culture does not match reality. In school, every time you value grades over learning, you foster a classroom of cheaters. The company is looking for cheater types because: 1) they clearly can't cope with employees telling the truth, that is, there are priorities other than work. 2) they reward looking busy over being productive.
- bryanlarsen 12y ago
  It's a consulting shop. They want to give their clients the impression that they're always working, always available, and to bill the maximal hours possible. So it may be rational for the firm (at least in the short term) to encourage this cheater culture -- it's the clients they are cheating, not the firm.
  - loup-vaillant 12y ago
    In this case, they should tell their consultants how to… "communicate" with the client. They want cheaters? Then cheating the client should be part of the contract. Except, well… that might be illegal.
    - learnstats2 12y ago
      Exactly. Show, don't tell. Telling people to cheat the client is illegal and unethical, but creating a culture where people behave in that way is only unethical.
wooger 12y ago
Sites with static header bars like this one need to die. Vertical space is a horrible thing to steal, given that most of the world are using 16:9 monitors. Even worse when they're applied in on mobiles / responsive-design.
pckspcks 12y ago
I can see what the author is saying, but... It's not necessarily about everyone working 80 hour weeks. It's about a corporate culture of 80 hour weeks. Cheating, if you get the job done, and maintain the image, doesn't discourage that culture. Acknowledging that some people are working 40 hours does. 80 hour weeks are important. It gives 40 hours for work, and 40 hours for personal growth. The former is a short cycle, and the latter is a long cycle. 1. If you trim down the growth part, your employees won't be competitive in the long term. Growth compounds, and sometimes superlinearly. If you know more, you learn faster. 2. This may be less relevant to management consulting, but if you trim down the work part, product part falls apart. I've seen organizations killed when work-life balance management stepped in. You go from 20 employees at 80 hours per week to 80 employees at 40 hours per week. Knowledge becomes much more distributed. Communication channels grow. Hiring standards slip. In addition, if it's an 80 hour week, it becomes your life. It may sound like just 80 hours, but it dominates your life. You think about it in the shower. You dream about it. When you spend time with family, you're distracted with work and want to go work. In practice, if I can get the same quantity of output from 20 employees as from 80 or a hundred at a higher level of quality, I can pay those employees at least five times as much. Many high-performance organizations try to make this trade-off. But when society demands work life balance of employees with salaries starting at $300k and going into millions -- that falls flat. Part of the obscene salaries go into making sure kids and families are healthy, even with a parent out of the house.
- Joeri 12y ago
  The premise that 80 hour work weeks are somehow more productive than 40 hour work weeks is known to be false in the typical case. It's not the hours which determine your productivity, it's the engagement and motivation. Most people who do 80 hour work weeks slack off during a majority of that time and probably realize lower productivity than if they had stuck to a 40 hour work week. Making your workforce do 80 hours instead of 40 does not make them more productive. Motivating workers and putting them in control of their own work is what gets stuff done.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    But it's not about productivity - it's about impression management. IMO there are two kinds of working relationships - face-based, and fact-based. Face-based relationships are about impression management, egotism, and exploitation. A face-based employer has no interest in your life, because they only care about their narcissistic self-image. At best they have a delusional belief in the value of hierarchy and process as business goals in themselves. At worst they're simply assholes. If the entire culture is face-based you're in an alligator swamp, and you need to leave and work somewhere else. A fact-based relationship is based on getting useful stuff done in an efficient way. A fact-based employer assumes employees are functional adults, and is more interested in the end result of the work. Process is only valuable if it creates observable positive results, not for its own sake. They consider employee happiness and development a significant positive benefit to the company.
stupidcar 12y ago
"I studied a global strategy consulting firm with a strong U.S. presence" That's the problem right there. These kind of consulting firms are the worst kind of soulless, dysfunctional, corporate sweatshops, preying on the ignorant management of other companies. They desperately try to compensate for the essential mediocrity of their expensive solutions with a veneer of marketing, overwork and crassly macho professionalism. When a company is built on bullshit, and everyone knows it, even if they won't admit it, then the same falseness and bullshit eventually pervades every corner of the company, and produces the kind of poisonous atmosphere that makes them such a nightmare to work for.
- praptak 12y ago
  A classic article about this: http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/dubai.html http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/dubai.html "The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell"
- mpdehaan2 12y ago
  Startups can (but not always are) be just as rough for expecting crazy outputs, because they belief they have nothing, can lose everything at every time, pivots and changes happening all the time, lack of process. The "using the mail/chat client to see if people are 'working'" thing, etc. I prefer more established startups and companies for this reason, but I think they can have most of the same traits, at times, as consultancies as mentioned in this article.
neap24 12y ago
So much of this is framed around working less to spend time with your kids -- which is perfectly admirable. But, how about working less to spend more time for yourself (personal hobbies, interests, etc) or more time with your spouse? These also seem like equally admirable and important reasons to not work 60-80 hours a week.
- hvidgaard 12y ago
  They are, honestly - and I would never hold it against anyone saying they prioritize that over work. I think people mention children because a child depend on the parents far more than most people think. It's much easier to find time for yourself, or with your spouse, while working a lot, than it is with a child. I can spend time with my wife nearly every evening, or work on hobby projects - I barely have 1 hour with both my children in weekdays after school. So if my employer starts to take my weekend, I'm looking for a new job where I can also be a father.
- VLM 12y ago
  A lot of rounding error stuff goes on. "Can't dial in, my kids got a little league game on Sunday" which means 1 hr for kid and theoretically up to 23 hrs for hobby (well not really, but possibly). Scouts is only an hour and a half of actual scouting and the rest of the night is a night off from work. Swim meets were like that too, even counting drive time, a full weekend day off but the meet would only be like 3 hours. I've never had an ethical problem with this. No one can be productive for more than 40 hours per week or so. Maybe less, honestly. The only hope of over 40 hours of actual net productivity is operating WAY below your ability. So they pretend to think we're productive, we'll pretend to be productive.
- bowlich 12y ago
  The focus on kids drives me nuts. I worked in a web dev shop that billed itself as "family friendly." Flexible hours, work from home, etc. The reality was that the childless developers never got to use the flexible benefits. Your child has a soccer game? Is sick? Sure take the afternoon off, the childless devs will cover for you. We wouldn't want you to not be there for your child. Oh you want to take a two hour lunch to go out with your girlfriend. Too bad, so-and-so needs to pick their kid up from school so we need you to sit here and babysit the server while he's out.
Spooky23 12y ago
None of this has anything to do with productivity or swindling clients, it's about control. If you want to be at the table, you need to be in the cool kids club. If you want to be in the club, you need to sacrifice your identity to the club. Membership requires that you look, think and act like a member. In exchange for your sacrifice, you'll be financially rewarded, and usually become a member of a little fraternity that will be a tight social network as your career progresses. It's all about what you want. In this case, you make a decision to become a management consultant to banks and Fortune 50 companies. In doing so, you're trading cub scouts for the prestige and rewards of working with those clients. You're not going to be super-dad, you're going to be the cartoon character dad who is never around and fucking around with your iPhone when you are. They tell you up front that they own you -- it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. If you're in this situation "Take a pay cut" is a ridiculous approach. If you're in a business like that, you're a type-A predator type, and doing that will just marginalize you. "Be strategic in picking a career" is the advice you should follow.
- saiya-jin 12y ago
  Nicely written. Most of us are not in this league, and personally, I am so happy for that. Companies, and world probably too, needs some people like that. But it's a big fallacy to think everybody should be, act and work like that. This world already has enough unhappy people chasing careers that won't make them happy. What we need more of are balanced, happy and strong personalities (that can create stable and loving environment for their kids for example) to counter-balance these perceptions. One can be a great performer, not despite but exactly because he has a life apart from work. Seems to me like a failed management practices that hurt companies in long run. Raising a happy well-functioning family is freaking hard, I would say it's by far the hardest task one could endeavor on. I have big respect for every man who achieves that. What one has in CV is marginal and really unimportant compared to that. But I am far from stating everybody should have this drive.
- a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
  I think deliberately inducing a degree of what the psychologists call learned helplessness is a part of it. If you continually stress out a rat randomly in ways out of his control, the rat will fail to take advantage of escape opportunities. It will helplessly sit there and put up with the random shocks (or whatever) even when the door is open. These firms absolutely want the employees stressed out to a degree that contemplating escape from the cage seems like too much.
rayiner 12y ago
In client-service industries, the hours are unavoidable. Your client doesn't want to talk to two people each doing half the work. At the same time, the artificial expectations are just self-abuse. When people hang out around the office when they don't have work to do, it really is money out of the company's pocket.
eep_opp 12y ago
I recently worked for a company that expected employees to stay well pass 5pm. I was personally working 13 or 14 hours a day and having to occasionally volunteer my time on weekends. My salary in comparison to hours worked went down significantly. Anyway, I did what most of the men described in the article did. I learned how to work without working. It was easy to copy the kind of workaholic appearance expressed by many of my peers. The strange thing was that most everyone was pretending. Everyone was just lying. It was like there was some secret unwritten rule that we should pretend instead of talking about the obvious elephant in the room. Which was that we were asked too much of us and that needed to change. When I was first starting out (way before I took that job) I was told that the idea is to "manage perception" and that appears to be true of a few places.
- wesleytodd 12y ago
  > When I was first starting out (way before I took that job) I was told that the idea is to "manage perception" and that appears to be true of a few places. I have been giving this advice to quite a few people lately, both inside and outside my company. As a manager I feel that my team's productivity benefits more from "work hygiene" than from long hours, but we have a few team members who have come under scrutiny because of perceived short hours. My advice to them is always, "I trust that you are doing your best as a part of the team. But remember, the teams perception is what matters. And when you leave at 3 it looks like you are slacking. No one knows you got here at 6 because they weren't here. So rather than changing your behavior, work on changing their perception."
  - brianwawok 12y ago
    So you spend 4h extra away from your family to look good to coworkers? That seems a symptom not a cure.
    - wesleytodd 12y ago
      Agreed. Luckily I am 28 and don't have kids yet. Hopefully I will get to a point before I do have kids where I can be a little more free.
antocv 12y ago
I pretend to work 40h week. In fact, when I have - out of pure boredom - attempted to work, get something, whatever, done, the initiative was quickly destroyed by managers. The illusion of work, pretending, we are all adults here playing on a theatre, must be maintained, and nobody is allowed to step out of line. When I look at it that way, that we are just adults but playing like when small children play that they are adults, so are we playing that we are working, then it all makes sense.
- protonfish 12y ago
  Hey kids - important lesson here. You don't realize how hard it will be to receive permission to do work at work. Of course, you will still be expected to look like you are working and to even put in overtime pretending to work. My recommendation is to find things to do that look like work. If you are a programmer, learn new languages or develop your own projects. If you are expected to write, work on your own blog articles. If you sometimes work offsite or in different parts of the building, go sleep or read in your car (away from where you could get caught.) If you are writing or programming, nobody can tell over your shoulder if it is work related or not. Hell, your manager probably has no clue what you are supposed to be doing anyhow and is just pretending to do his job too. Help the guy out and give him the warm fuzzy feeling that you are working. Telling everyone you meet how much work you have to do and how hard you are working on it won't hurt either. I know it sucks but you can't fix it. The ability to look like you are working while not losing your mind is a critical survival skill. The sooner you cultivate that skill the happier you will be.
  - antocv 12y ago
    I wish there was a way to fix this. Not easy. One guess is, its just not in human nature, its not possible, to be productive 8h between X and Y hours of the day. Not for you, programmer, not for the manager either. So we start learning how to pretend and eventually all we do is pretend. Thats just one of the reasons. To fix the problem - an organization and contract which is not time or space based, you dont have to sit there in that open space, or be there between X and Y. But then we woudl've been back to quite radical economy, quite radical model of society than we have now - where you dont sell your labor, where you would sell your produce. And thats problematic because we cant really measure or quantify "what programmer/manager produces". So we end up in this circus of pretending to know what that value is of programmer when in a cubicle on a timeclock, and pretending to care, and then come the backstabbing and office politics.
geon 12y ago
> expectations that one be an “ideal worker”—fully devoted to and available for the job, with no personal responsibilities or interests that interfere with this commitment to work—are widespread Wat? Is this a thing in the US? If so, I'm incredibly happy I live in Sweden. > many men experienced these expectations as difficult to fulfill or even distasteful. No shit?
- lobe 12y ago
  I'm an Australian who spent 6 months last year in Sweden. I definitely got the impression that companies needs came second to the needs of individuals. Here in Australia, it is much more balanced, depends on your circumstances. My American friends tell me the US is the other way, the company comes before the individual. If you are in the driving seat for your career, I certainly feel that the USA provides more opportunity. However for the ~70% (random guess) of people who don't have the luxury of being selective with their jobs, the Swedish model looks extremely appealing.
- gipp 12y ago
  > Wat? Is this a thing in the US? If so, I'm incredibly happy I live in Sweden. Very much dependent on the company. For most, no, 40 hours is the standard and that's that. There's probably a skewed view here since early stage (i.e. desperate) startups often buck that trend. Harvard Business Review is also probably not the most unbiased voice on an issue like that.
JulianMorrison 12y ago
This is why people need unions. Because while an individual can say "no" only at the expense of their career, the entire united workforce can force the boss to the negotiating table.
- rev_bird 12y ago
  Exactly. In the U.S., we've _done_ this already, and then essentially undid it in the name of free enterprise.
leklund 12y ago
What struck me the most about the article was the employee who was denied a promotion because of his 6-weeks of unpaid FMLA leave. That's not only unethical it's also against the law (as is denying FMLA). I can understand the lure of the huge salary but having to work in such a toxic culture would never make it worth it to me.
Jimmy 12y ago
>At this firm, people believed that success indeed required ideal-worker-like devotion. The word "success" seems like a misnomer here. Success is not possible under these conditions. Killing yourself for transient business projects designed and managed by others, for the adulation of peers whose only accomplishments in life are, similarly, killing themselves for transient business projects designed by others, is no success at all. Perhaps the monetary compensation is decent. But what are you going to do with that money?
ukigumo 12y ago
My first reaction when reading the title of this article was to think of a variation of the punchline for an old _macho_ joke: "because other men pretend to care". In my experience, and granted I haven't worked in the US, the number of hours you spend in the office is always expected to be in line with what your manager has committed to paying you for. In countries like Germany or Holland, if you consistently stay over-time in the office you might be surprised to find that you will be called upon justifying your behavior since the local belief is that you are either incompetent and can't finish the work assigned to you in your normal work schedule, which will cost the company money to train you or hire a replacement, or your manager is incompetent because he over-assigned your time and it will cost the company money when you finally burnout or start taking shortcuts in your work. Other European countries have established rules that forbid employers contacting their employees (mail or phone) outside of business hours to avoid the pressure of having to do work on your personal time. I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
- Someone1234 12y ago
  The US on the other hand has marked almost everyone who uses a keyboard "overtime exempt[0]." [0] https://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/93636/is-programming-generally-an-overtime-exempt-field https://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/93636/is-pro...
  - e40 12y ago
    In CA some people won't meet the salary requirement, which is somewhere around $90K/yr. Also, all administrative and many sales staff, who use keyboards extensively, are exempt (except at VP and up level).
    - s73v3r 12y ago
      Unfortunately the state of California doesn't check for this. So many companies still do it, and likely get away with it.
lordnacho 12y ago
Back after I finished uni, a friend of mine with the same degree went to work in investment banking. We lived together. Sort of. I basically had the whole house to myself outside of midnight - 0700. Some nights he'd check in with me as I was lying in bed about to sleep. Quite often we'd go a whole week without seeing each other, the only sign of life from him being that his door was closed when I went off to work. Weekends were precious, sometimes we could get a meal in together. His Blackberry would ring, but he could push some things aside to after the meal. The initial rush of getting a prestigious job was soon replaced by complaints about the insanity of the system: sit around from morning to evening doing nothing, wait for the MD to make some work that you can do before the next morning. So one day his boss decides he's had enough of everything and ends it all. This was a guy of similar background to my friend, similar culture. Just 20 years down the line. I think it caused my friend to have some thoughts about where he wanted to be, how he wanted to live. He's changed jobs now, much happier, married, got a kid.
- waylandsmithers 12y ago
  This was the impression I got from friends who worked in that industry after college. They were definitely at work for 80 to 100 hours per week, but it seemed like a lot of that extra time was stuff like waiting around for someone else to finish something, eating dinner at the office, or just hanging out because a higher up hadn't left yet.
copsarebastards 12y ago
This is just a technique for mostly pointless management structures to keep power over the technical workers who are actually providing value. Technical workers are paid well, but managers of technical workers are usually paid more, even though their role is frequently limited to telling the technical workers what to do (when in fact the technical workers are quite capable of figuring out what to do). A better manager acts as more of a facilitator of communication, but even then that puts them at best on even footing with the technical workers, which is not reflected in compensation. A manager of a technical team is a glorified secretary, and meritocratic compensation would reflect that by paying managers less than technical workers. In order to keep this structure, companies create an environment of “this is just how we do it”. The whole pretense of long hours is part of this. A few more examples are covered in Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work. http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/abolitionofwork.html http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/abolitionofwork.htm...
keithpeter 12y ago
"We kind of have a shared agreement as to what work–life balance is on our team. We basically work really closely with each other to make sure that we can all do that. A lot of us have young kids, and we’ve designed it so we can do that." Quote from OA itself quoting a statement made by a member of a team that self-organised their work-life balance. Later in the quote the team member points out that their team is regarded as highly effective. Just wondering if a positive work-life balance might be correlated with that high performance! Perhaps the company is missing a trick there.
chojeen 12y ago
I love that the desire for developer talent is so great that many employers will bend over backwards to accommodate your desire for work-life balance.
VLM 12y ago
1) Not so stealthy ageism. So someone your age should be out of the trenches and on his way up the management chain and we're not saying you're fired because you're 30 yrs old because that would be illegal but you are going to work 60 hr weeks or get fired for not working enough, and not being sustainable is not something we care about because our pyramid says up or out in a couple years, so if you insist on staying 20 unsustainable years its not our problem, you're only supposed to sustain it for 6 years not 20. And we don't care about the large fraction who are kicked out either. Aren't we just the most lovable human beings ever? 2) Management is expected to falsify / adjust metric reports and manage appearances in this number driven company from the lowest to the highest levels because we're crooks and we know it, and this is how we train the front line to groom them for mgmt, and the 1 in 20 who get promoted (the other 19 in 20 will be ageism fired) will rely on their experience pretending to work to pretend to produce great numbers. 3) We all know we're lying to the client and upper mgmt and maybe the .gov, and you'll keep quiet about that or we'll have to notice that you're only putting in 30 hours of "real" net positive productive work per week even if you're on paper butts in seat 75 hours per week. You're productively working 30 hours per week and you'll shut up about the other issues or you'll only earn credit for the 30 instead of being the 75 hour "hero" you currently are. Now shut up or we start auditing your internet access logs too. 4) I hate my wife and kids and being a provincial idiot of a manager with no empathy for other human beings (hey, someone has to be the failure, after all) I assume all others are the same as me because I'm great so why don't you hang out at work for 80 hrs per week just like me? If my whole family hates me the problem can't be me because I've got an ivy diploma so whats the problem with staying at work all night? I actually worked for a guy like that and this is a paraphrase of a couple conversations I had with him. A sad, sad dude.
a3voices 12y ago
People need to stop worrying so much about what their boss thinks of them. If you get fired, it's probably a sign you shouldn't be working there in the first place. If you don't get a promotion or raise, who cares? Your life won't get better if you make slightly more money.
loveableloser 12y ago
Kind of surprised that no one has brought up the Gervais Principle. It was even covered on this site a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296 The guys who pretend are Losers, the true believers who don't are Clueless. As the subjects of the HBR article are consultant types, I'll bet many of the Clueless there think they are Sociopaths. Anyhow, my hat's off to the Losers who manage to score a solid paycheck without working/drinking themselves into an early grave.
erikb 12y ago
Is it really people passing of as 80-Hour Workers, or is it that they just solve the tasks given to them without creating additional work for their bosses? Are the successful guys fakes or are they doing something that we could learn to be more successful hourselves? In any case I would be interested in more in depth stories of these successful guys to learn from them. Choosing the right tasks to work on, for example, seems to be a very important strategy. I would love so much to read more details about how to do that. And especially in this case, if I would be the boss, I would appreciate people with that skill more than people without that skill. Someone with that skill will be able to pick most of the low hanging fruits and might also be more able to solve the really necessary ugly tasks, because he cares about getting it done.
grownseed 12y ago
An extreme example of this is South Korea. The basic idea in most medium/large companies being that underlings must be present whenever their bosses are, so people will turn up really early in the morning to greet the boss, and leave really late at night, often just waiting for the boss to go home. Hierarchy is a very important cultural concept in SK, socially and professionally, and generally companies are far more layered than they would be in most western countries, resulting in lots of bosses. Because of this you have a trickle-down effect of "work more than the boss" hours, with people at the bottom working completely ridiculous hours. This has two interesting consequences. The first one I call "gold star sticker promotions", whereby people get promoted on a regular basis, often without a pay rise, sheerly for "working" more hours than the next guy. While the promotions often mean very little by themselves, they tend to result in slightly less work hours. The second consequence is that people, as described in the article to some extent, actually end up doing very little work despite occupying a seat for so many hours. A friend of mine actually plays Diablo 3 while seating at his desk, and everybody's ok with that. In fact, he got promoted three times just last year. The point is not to get work done, it's simply to show that you're willing to give your soul to your employer.
- rwallace 12y ago
  What exactly happens if you just refuse to work more than forty hours a week? I mean, obviously you won't get promoted, but promotion at that price isn't worth having. Do you get fired? The reason I ask is that I've heard in countries like that it's very difficult to fire an employee, so I was wondering how those two aspects of work go together.
  - grownseed 12y ago
    You would be made absolutely miserable, be assigned the most menial of tasks with ridiculous deadlines, tasks that are often largely made up and of no benefit to the company. Your boss might call your parents or your spouse and shame you, might even insult you to your face. If that doesn't make you fall in line and you finally decide to jump ship, you may be ridiculed publicly, potential employers will be contacted and told about your "work ethics", making it really hard to be employed again. You'll essentially be shunned for the foreseeable future, which in SK is generally not culturally acceptable. It's pretty harsh, but it's also important to note that this is not a culture based on individual interest.
pfranz 12y ago
Thankfully, I haven't see too much employer imposed long hours, but I have seen self imposed long hours. I read a different article about 6 months ago from a professor that I'd love to read over again. I can't seem to find it. The premise was that they worked extra hours because the regular hours were filled with "procedure" like meetings, time cards, and getting interrupted. It only left a little time each day for doing the interesting stuff; the reason they chose that profession. I and others have talked about how much more productive we are when working early or late in the day and are compelled to stay late to finish something because it seems to take longer to pick it up and finish it the next day.

259 points by bootload 12y ago

Summary: bosses promote based on butts in seats. By working remotely, with a mobile device , you can fool your boss into thinking you work 13-hr days by working only mornings and evenings.

mauricemir 12y ago
Butts in seats they can see I think
yetanotheracc 12y ago
I do exactly that. Perception management.
ant6n 12y ago
By working remotely, you are not a butt in a seat.

hvidgaard 12y ago

When I read this > You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my son had a Cub Scout meeting. I felt a sharp disdain for the managers. Seriously, children growing up is a onetime thing.It's fucked up beyond reason that people accept this, and I'd gladly take a lower paying job so I can be there.

monk_e_boy 12y ago
You have to wonder at the mentality of someone who wouldn't be there for their kid. I know you can't be there 100% of the time, but you've got to make some effort and stand up for yourself. Take a pay cut, do less hours. I loved the book Red Mars in which children were quite uncommon, so whenever a child was about all the adults would pay them lots of attention. This included bosses.
- sjwright 12y ago
  Just make sure you don't go too far in the other direction and become a helicopter parent. Children also need some disinterest and neglect occasionally.
- dagw 12y ago
  You have to wonder at the mentality of someone who wouldn't be there for their kid. Some people rationalize it with that making sure their kid lives in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, goes to a great school, has access to all the latest gadgets and gets to to travel the world is the best thing they can do for their kids. And if the cost is that they have to work 14 hour days and hardly ever see their kids then that is a sacrifice they're willing to step up and make. No saying I agree, but I can certainly see how you could convince yourself that working an 80 hour week is you doing the best thing for your kids and family. Furthermore while I agree with (having done so myself) saying "Take a pay cut, do less hours.", it is only easy when you are already essentially rich. If "take a pay cut" meant I would have to move my family into a tiny apartment in the shitty part of town I probably wouldn't have such a cavalier attitude about it.
  - JimmyM 12y ago
    There is also the fact that for some careers there is no intermediate state between success and failure -- no "not being promoted", only continual success or a lack of a job (recruiting and finance spring to mind). In those careers where there is in fact an intermediate state, it can feel as though it is very narrow and difficult to stay in. While the parent getting more pay may not really be important to a child, their long-term job security could prove to be essential.
  - pestaa 12y ago
    We're not poor or anything, but I've never met a family that could choose to work less. It doesn't take 80 hours every week, but when they call you on Saturday (or even Sunday), there is no choice. I live in Middle Europe.
    - castell 12y ago
draven 12y ago
Better to be a regular employee and a great dad/mom than a "superhero" and a shitty parent.
- rev_bird 12y ago
  The issue in a lot of cases seems to be that there is no "regular employee": workers are expected to put in the extra time ("effort"), or they're instantly sub-par.
  - draven 12y ago
    And if it is expected of everyone, then they are not "superheroes" (exceptional individuals) anymore, only regular employees, and the regular ones (those who have a life outside work) are pushed down to the mediocre employee category. I also hate when HR people or bosses equate the time spent being at work with effort (and let's not talk about efficiency or work output quality.) Being a great parent while working 40 or even 50 hours a week is still a remarquable achievement.
Ntrails 12y ago
I was at a training seminar where they were trying to go through the ethical dilemma of a manager who had two employees wanting to go home on time (one for spousal medical issue, one for child based commitment) and asking how to decide which one is allowed to leave. I went a little apeshit at the premise itself, and indeed at the training company for re-enforcing the idea you need permission to leave at 5pm. Yesterday my manager asked me what I was doing this evening, and whether I could cover a release in terms of support. As it happens, I can. If I had plans of any kind my answer would have been "Sorry, nope. I've got plans so need to be out of the office by xx:xx".
- yodsanklai 12y ago
  > ... the idea you need permission to leave at 5pm. I hate this idea too. I'm lucky to be able to organize my work as I want to (working in academia). Asking a permission for such a thing sounds so wrong. However, this freedom comes with a price. I earn much less than most of my friends with the same education level and I have to admit that I suffer (a little) to have a lesser social status and little recognition. In the end, it's a matter of compromise.
  - moron4hire 12y ago
    I disagree that compromise is necessary. I've found that one merely needs to avoid any organization that routinely hires MBAs and HR directors as a good litmus test for whether or not the place will try to grind me down. That can be hard to do in software development, especially if you end up getting stuck in consulting[1]. Hence why I freelance now. I work 20 hours a week and I gross more than I ever did working for The Man. People always tell me, "Oh, I could never do that, I like knowing I have a regular job," but they don't realize that A) they could get fired at any minute just because their boss doesn't like them, and B) I've had the same client for the last 3 years, which is longer than I've stayed at any job I've ever had before. As long as you're working for someone else, as long as you aren't making the actual profit off of your work, your work will always be treated as a cost center, rather than an income center. You will never be paid the full value of your work, because there would be no point to paying someone to do the work if there were no profit in it for the employer. Ultimately, I'd like to get out of freelancing, but for now, at least freelancing lets me demand a higher portion of the margin. I've found it also seems to set me in a position of being a peer to my client (we are both business men) rather than a subordinate. It's a small difference that makes all the difference. [1] It's incredibly hard to transition from a job in consulting to a job in a product-based software company. I think it's mostly that there are so few of the latter compared to the former, but I suspect the latter looks askew at people with a history at the former as well.
moron4hire 12y ago
The great thing is, you don't have to take a lower paying job. I started freelancing three years ago and have made more than I've ever made in my career, and I only work 20 hours a week.
- rev_bird 12y ago
  I assume your username is also your business name? Wish I'd have thought of it first, it would have fit perfectly.
  - moron4hire 12y ago
    Heh, no, I just go by my real name. Well, I'm sort of in the process of merging my consulting business with a partner, but that's mostly just an organizational thing. The "moron4hire" handle is older than my freelancing and was meant to be a daily reminder to myself to be humble.
coldtea 12y ago
>Seriously, children growing up is a onetime thing. Sure, but it's a onetime thing that takes 15+ years.
- hvidgaard 12y ago
  Children goes through multiple phases, where they're learning and their personality emerges. It's not as simple as saying it's 15+ years, you can catch up in the last 3.
  - M8 12y ago
    It doesn't have to be about children, every person goes through different stages in a period of any 15 years. Single people deserve same (good) treatment as married.
ohitsdom 12y ago
I work a pretty standard 40 hour work week in an office, and even that makes me feel like a distant father sometimes. Love my kids, hate seeing them only 2 hours a day before they go to bed (they're still very young).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
atom-morgan 12y ago
Immediately after graduating from college, I always felt bad seeing parents who were sacrificing time with their kids to put in extra hours even if the hours weren't necessary. Late night calls to "catch up" when we easily could have waited until the morning. I just turned 25 and I've worked a few jobs where pretending to work was the norm. It was a drag on me and I was single and in my early twenties. I couldn't imagine doing that while having kids at home as well. At the same time, this ended up being one of my biggest motivators when it comes to my career. I don't want to end up in that position, ever. If I start a company, I don't want to be that manager. It sucked but it was also a great learning experience so that I know what to avoid in life.

Red_Tarsius 12y ago

This is what happens when the reward culture does not match reality. In school, every time you value grades over learning, you foster a classroom of cheaters. The company is looking for cheater types because: 1) they clearly can't cope with employees telling the truth, that is, there are priorities other than work. 2) they reward looking busy over being productive.

bryanlarsen 12y ago
It's a consulting shop. They want to give their clients the impression that they're always working, always available, and to bill the maximal hours possible. So it may be rational for the firm (at least in the short term) to encourage this cheater culture -- it's the clients they are cheating, not the firm.
- loup-vaillant 12y ago
  In this case, they should tell their consultants how to… "communicate" with the client. They want cheaters? Then cheating the client should be part of the contract. Except, well… that might be illegal.
  - learnstats2 12y ago
    Exactly. Show, don't tell. Telling people to cheat the client is illegal and unethical, but creating a culture where people behave in that way is only unethical.

wooger 12y ago

Sites with static header bars like this one need to die. Vertical space is a horrible thing to steal, given that most of the world are using 16:9 monitors. Even worse when they're applied in on mobiles / responsive-design.

pckspcks 12y ago

I can see what the author is saying, but... It's not necessarily about everyone working 80 hour weeks. It's about a corporate culture of 80 hour weeks. Cheating, if you get the job done, and maintain the image, doesn't discourage that culture. Acknowledging that some people are working 40 hours does. 80 hour weeks are important. It gives 40 hours for work, and 40 hours for personal growth. The former is a short cycle, and the latter is a long cycle. 1. If you trim down the growth part, your employees won't be competitive in the long term. Growth compounds, and sometimes superlinearly. If you know more, you learn faster. 2. This may be less relevant to management consulting, but if you trim down the work part, product part falls apart. I've seen organizations killed when work-life balance management stepped in. You go from 20 employees at 80 hours per week to 80 employees at 40 hours per week. Knowledge becomes much more distributed. Communication channels grow. Hiring standards slip. In addition, if it's an 80 hour week, it becomes your life. It may sound like just 80 hours, but it dominates your life. You think about it in the shower. You dream about it. When you spend time with family, you're distracted with work and want to go work. In practice, if I can get the same quantity of output from 20 employees as from 80 or a hundred at a higher level of quality, I can pay those employees at least five times as much. Many high-performance organizations try to make this trade-off. But when society demands work life balance of employees with salaries starting at $300k and going into millions -- that falls flat. Part of the obscene salaries go into making sure kids and families are healthy, even with a parent out of the house.

Joeri 12y ago
The premise that 80 hour work weeks are somehow more productive than 40 hour work weeks is known to be false in the typical case. It's not the hours which determine your productivity, it's the engagement and motivation. Most people who do 80 hour work weeks slack off during a majority of that time and probably realize lower productivity than if they had stuck to a 40 hour work week. Making your workforce do 80 hours instead of 40 does not make them more productive. Motivating workers and putting them in control of their own work is what gets stuff done.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  But it's not about productivity - it's about impression management. IMO there are two kinds of working relationships - face-based, and fact-based. Face-based relationships are about impression management, egotism, and exploitation. A face-based employer has no interest in your life, because they only care about their narcissistic self-image. At best they have a delusional belief in the value of hierarchy and process as business goals in themselves. At worst they're simply assholes. If the entire culture is face-based you're in an alligator swamp, and you need to leave and work somewhere else. A fact-based relationship is based on getting useful stuff done in an efficient way. A fact-based employer assumes employees are functional adults, and is more interested in the end result of the work. Process is only valuable if it creates observable positive results, not for its own sake. They consider employee happiness and development a significant positive benefit to the company.

stupidcar 12y ago

"I studied a global strategy consulting firm with a strong U.S. presence" That's the problem right there. These kind of consulting firms are the worst kind of soulless, dysfunctional, corporate sweatshops, preying on the ignorant management of other companies. They desperately try to compensate for the essential mediocrity of their expensive solutions with a veneer of marketing, overwork and crassly macho professionalism. When a company is built on bullshit, and everyone knows it, even if they won't admit it, then the same falseness and bullshit eventually pervades every corner of the company, and produces the kind of poisonous atmosphere that makes them such a nightmare to work for.

praptak 12y ago
A classic article about this: http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/dubai.html http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/dubai.html "The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell"
mpdehaan2 12y ago
Startups can (but not always are) be just as rough for expecting crazy outputs, because they belief they have nothing, can lose everything at every time, pivots and changes happening all the time, lack of process. The "using the mail/chat client to see if people are 'working'" thing, etc. I prefer more established startups and companies for this reason, but I think they can have most of the same traits, at times, as consultancies as mentioned in this article.

neap24 12y ago

So much of this is framed around working less to spend time with your kids -- which is perfectly admirable. But, how about working less to spend more time for yourself (personal hobbies, interests, etc) or more time with your spouse? These also seem like equally admirable and important reasons to not work 60-80 hours a week.

hvidgaard 12y ago
They are, honestly - and I would never hold it against anyone saying they prioritize that over work. I think people mention children because a child depend on the parents far more than most people think. It's much easier to find time for yourself, or with your spouse, while working a lot, than it is with a child. I can spend time with my wife nearly every evening, or work on hobby projects - I barely have 1 hour with both my children in weekdays after school. So if my employer starts to take my weekend, I'm looking for a new job where I can also be a father.
VLM 12y ago
A lot of rounding error stuff goes on. "Can't dial in, my kids got a little league game on Sunday" which means 1 hr for kid and theoretically up to 23 hrs for hobby (well not really, but possibly). Scouts is only an hour and a half of actual scouting and the rest of the night is a night off from work. Swim meets were like that too, even counting drive time, a full weekend day off but the meet would only be like 3 hours. I've never had an ethical problem with this. No one can be productive for more than 40 hours per week or so. Maybe less, honestly. The only hope of over 40 hours of actual net productivity is operating WAY below your ability. So they pretend to think we're productive, we'll pretend to be productive.
bowlich 12y ago
The focus on kids drives me nuts. I worked in a web dev shop that billed itself as "family friendly." Flexible hours, work from home, etc. The reality was that the childless developers never got to use the flexible benefits. Your child has a soccer game? Is sick? Sure take the afternoon off, the childless devs will cover for you. We wouldn't want you to not be there for your child. Oh you want to take a two hour lunch to go out with your girlfriend. Too bad, so-and-so needs to pick their kid up from school so we need you to sit here and babysit the server while he's out.

Spooky23 12y ago

None of this has anything to do with productivity or swindling clients, it's about control. If you want to be at the table, you need to be in the cool kids club. If you want to be in the club, you need to sacrifice your identity to the club. Membership requires that you look, think and act like a member. In exchange for your sacrifice, you'll be financially rewarded, and usually become a member of a little fraternity that will be a tight social network as your career progresses. It's all about what you want. In this case, you make a decision to become a management consultant to banks and Fortune 50 companies. In doing so, you're trading cub scouts for the prestige and rewards of working with those clients. You're not going to be super-dad, you're going to be the cartoon character dad who is never around and fucking around with your iPhone when you are. They tell you up front that they own you -- it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. If you're in this situation "Take a pay cut" is a ridiculous approach. If you're in a business like that, you're a type-A predator type, and doing that will just marginalize you. "Be strategic in picking a career" is the advice you should follow.

saiya-jin 12y ago
Nicely written. Most of us are not in this league, and personally, I am so happy for that. Companies, and world probably too, needs some people like that. But it's a big fallacy to think everybody should be, act and work like that. This world already has enough unhappy people chasing careers that won't make them happy. What we need more of are balanced, happy and strong personalities (that can create stable and loving environment for their kids for example) to counter-balance these perceptions. One can be a great performer, not despite but exactly because he has a life apart from work. Seems to me like a failed management practices that hurt companies in long run. Raising a happy well-functioning family is freaking hard, I would say it's by far the hardest task one could endeavor on. I have big respect for every man who achieves that. What one has in CV is marginal and really unimportant compared to that. But I am far from stating everybody should have this drive.
a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
I think deliberately inducing a degree of what the psychologists call learned helplessness is a part of it. If you continually stress out a rat randomly in ways out of his control, the rat will fail to take advantage of escape opportunities. It will helplessly sit there and put up with the random shocks (or whatever) even when the door is open. These firms absolutely want the employees stressed out to a degree that contemplating escape from the cage seems like too much.

rayiner 12y ago

In client-service industries, the hours are unavoidable. Your client doesn't want to talk to two people each doing half the work. At the same time, the artificial expectations are just self-abuse. When people hang out around the office when they don't have work to do, it really is money out of the company's pocket.

eep_opp 12y ago

I recently worked for a company that expected employees to stay well pass 5pm. I was personally working 13 or 14 hours a day and having to occasionally volunteer my time on weekends. My salary in comparison to hours worked went down significantly. Anyway, I did what most of the men described in the article did. I learned how to work without working. It was easy to copy the kind of workaholic appearance expressed by many of my peers. The strange thing was that most everyone was pretending. Everyone was just lying. It was like there was some secret unwritten rule that we should pretend instead of talking about the obvious elephant in the room. Which was that we were asked too much of us and that needed to change. When I was first starting out (way before I took that job) I was told that the idea is to "manage perception" and that appears to be true of a few places.

wesleytodd 12y ago
> When I was first starting out (way before I took that job) I was told that the idea is to "manage perception" and that appears to be true of a few places. I have been giving this advice to quite a few people lately, both inside and outside my company. As a manager I feel that my team's productivity benefits more from "work hygiene" than from long hours, but we have a few team members who have come under scrutiny because of perceived short hours. My advice to them is always, "I trust that you are doing your best as a part of the team. But remember, the teams perception is what matters. And when you leave at 3 it looks like you are slacking. No one knows you got here at 6 because they weren't here. So rather than changing your behavior, work on changing their perception."
- brianwawok 12y ago
  So you spend 4h extra away from your family to look good to coworkers? That seems a symptom not a cure.
  - wesleytodd 12y ago
    Agreed. Luckily I am 28 and don't have kids yet. Hopefully I will get to a point before I do have kids where I can be a little more free.

antocv 12y ago

I pretend to work 40h week. In fact, when I have - out of pure boredom - attempted to work, get something, whatever, done, the initiative was quickly destroyed by managers. The illusion of work, pretending, we are all adults here playing on a theatre, must be maintained, and nobody is allowed to step out of line. When I look at it that way, that we are just adults but playing like when small children play that they are adults, so are we playing that we are working, then it all makes sense.

protonfish 12y ago
Hey kids - important lesson here. You don't realize how hard it will be to receive permission to do work at work. Of course, you will still be expected to look like you are working and to even put in overtime pretending to work. My recommendation is to find things to do that look like work. If you are a programmer, learn new languages or develop your own projects. If you are expected to write, work on your own blog articles. If you sometimes work offsite or in different parts of the building, go sleep or read in your car (away from where you could get caught.) If you are writing or programming, nobody can tell over your shoulder if it is work related or not. Hell, your manager probably has no clue what you are supposed to be doing anyhow and is just pretending to do his job too. Help the guy out and give him the warm fuzzy feeling that you are working. Telling everyone you meet how much work you have to do and how hard you are working on it won't hurt either. I know it sucks but you can't fix it. The ability to look like you are working while not losing your mind is a critical survival skill. The sooner you cultivate that skill the happier you will be.
- antocv 12y ago
  I wish there was a way to fix this. Not easy. One guess is, its just not in human nature, its not possible, to be productive 8h between X and Y hours of the day. Not for you, programmer, not for the manager either. So we start learning how to pretend and eventually all we do is pretend. Thats just one of the reasons. To fix the problem - an organization and contract which is not time or space based, you dont have to sit there in that open space, or be there between X and Y. But then we woudl've been back to quite radical economy, quite radical model of society than we have now - where you dont sell your labor, where you would sell your produce. And thats problematic because we cant really measure or quantify "what programmer/manager produces". So we end up in this circus of pretending to know what that value is of programmer when in a cubicle on a timeclock, and pretending to care, and then come the backstabbing and office politics.

geon 12y ago

> expectations that one be an “ideal worker”—fully devoted to and available for the job, with no personal responsibilities or interests that interfere with this commitment to work—are widespread Wat? Is this a thing in the US? If so, I'm incredibly happy I live in Sweden. > many men experienced these expectations as difficult to fulfill or even distasteful. No shit?

lobe 12y ago
I'm an Australian who spent 6 months last year in Sweden. I definitely got the impression that companies needs came second to the needs of individuals. Here in Australia, it is much more balanced, depends on your circumstances. My American friends tell me the US is the other way, the company comes before the individual. If you are in the driving seat for your career, I certainly feel that the USA provides more opportunity. However for the ~70% (random guess) of people who don't have the luxury of being selective with their jobs, the Swedish model looks extremely appealing.
gipp 12y ago
> Wat? Is this a thing in the US? If so, I'm incredibly happy I live in Sweden. Very much dependent on the company. For most, no, 40 hours is the standard and that's that. There's probably a skewed view here since early stage (i.e. desperate) startups often buck that trend. Harvard Business Review is also probably not the most unbiased voice on an issue like that.

JulianMorrison 12y ago

This is why people need unions. Because while an individual can say "no" only at the expense of their career, the entire united workforce can force the boss to the negotiating table.

rev_bird 12y ago
Exactly. In the U.S., we've _done_ this already, and then essentially undid it in the name of free enterprise.

leklund 12y ago

What struck me the most about the article was the employee who was denied a promotion because of his 6-weeks of unpaid FMLA leave. That's not only unethical it's also against the law (as is denying FMLA). I can understand the lure of the huge salary but having to work in such a toxic culture would never make it worth it to me.

Jimmy 12y ago

>At this firm, people believed that success indeed required ideal-worker-like devotion. The word "success" seems like a misnomer here. Success is not possible under these conditions. Killing yourself for transient business projects designed and managed by others, for the adulation of peers whose only accomplishments in life are, similarly, killing themselves for transient business projects designed by others, is no success at all. Perhaps the monetary compensation is decent. But what are you going to do with that money?

ukigumo 12y ago

My first reaction when reading the title of this article was to think of a variation of the punchline for an old _macho_ joke: "because other men pretend to care". In my experience, and granted I haven't worked in the US, the number of hours you spend in the office is always expected to be in line with what your manager has committed to paying you for. In countries like Germany or Holland, if you consistently stay over-time in the office you might be surprised to find that you will be called upon justifying your behavior since the local belief is that you are either incompetent and can't finish the work assigned to you in your normal work schedule, which will cost the company money to train you or hire a replacement, or your manager is incompetent because he over-assigned your time and it will cost the company money when you finally burnout or start taking shortcuts in your work. Other European countries have established rules that forbid employers contacting their employees (mail or phone) outside of business hours to avoid the pressure of having to do work on your personal time. I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?

Someone1234 12y ago
The US on the other hand has marked almost everyone who uses a keyboard "overtime exempt[0]." [0] https://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/93636/is-programming-generally-an-overtime-exempt-field https://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/93636/is-pro...
- e40 12y ago
  In CA some people won't meet the salary requirement, which is somewhere around $90K/yr. Also, all administrative and many sales staff, who use keyboards extensively, are exempt (except at VP and up level).
  - s73v3r 12y ago
    Unfortunately the state of California doesn't check for this. So many companies still do it, and likely get away with it.

lordnacho 12y ago

Back after I finished uni, a friend of mine with the same degree went to work in investment banking. We lived together. Sort of. I basically had the whole house to myself outside of midnight - 0700. Some nights he'd check in with me as I was lying in bed about to sleep. Quite often we'd go a whole week without seeing each other, the only sign of life from him being that his door was closed when I went off to work. Weekends were precious, sometimes we could get a meal in together. His Blackberry would ring, but he could push some things aside to after the meal. The initial rush of getting a prestigious job was soon replaced by complaints about the insanity of the system: sit around from morning to evening doing nothing, wait for the MD to make some work that you can do before the next morning. So one day his boss decides he's had enough of everything and ends it all. This was a guy of similar background to my friend, similar culture. Just 20 years down the line. I think it caused my friend to have some thoughts about where he wanted to be, how he wanted to live. He's changed jobs now, much happier, married, got a kid.

waylandsmithers 12y ago
This was the impression I got from friends who worked in that industry after college. They were definitely at work for 80 to 100 hours per week, but it seemed like a lot of that extra time was stuff like waiting around for someone else to finish something, eating dinner at the office, or just hanging out because a higher up hadn't left yet.

copsarebastards 12y ago

This is just a technique for mostly pointless management structures to keep power over the technical workers who are actually providing value. Technical workers are paid well, but managers of technical workers are usually paid more, even though their role is frequently limited to telling the technical workers what to do (when in fact the technical workers are quite capable of figuring out what to do). A better manager acts as more of a facilitator of communication, but even then that puts them at best on even footing with the technical workers, which is not reflected in compensation. A manager of a technical team is a glorified secretary, and meritocratic compensation would reflect that by paying managers less than technical workers. In order to keep this structure, companies create an environment of “this is just how we do it”. The whole pretense of long hours is part of this. A few more examples are covered in Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work. http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/abolitionofwork.html http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/abolitionofwork.htm...

keithpeter 12y ago

"We kind of have a shared agreement as to what work–life balance is on our team. We basically work really closely with each other to make sure that we can all do that. A lot of us have young kids, and we’ve designed it so we can do that." Quote from OA itself quoting a statement made by a member of a team that self-organised their work-life balance. Later in the quote the team member points out that their team is regarded as highly effective. Just wondering if a positive work-life balance might be correlated with that high performance! Perhaps the company is missing a trick there.

chojeen 12y ago

I love that the desire for developer talent is so great that many employers will bend over backwards to accommodate your desire for work-life balance.

VLM 12y ago

1) Not so stealthy ageism. So someone your age should be out of the trenches and on his way up the management chain and we're not saying you're fired because you're 30 yrs old because that would be illegal but you are going to work 60 hr weeks or get fired for not working enough, and not being sustainable is not something we care about because our pyramid says up or out in a couple years, so if you insist on staying 20 unsustainable years its not our problem, you're only supposed to sustain it for 6 years not 20. And we don't care about the large fraction who are kicked out either. Aren't we just the most lovable human beings ever? 2) Management is expected to falsify / adjust metric reports and manage appearances in this number driven company from the lowest to the highest levels because we're crooks and we know it, and this is how we train the front line to groom them for mgmt, and the 1 in 20 who get promoted (the other 19 in 20 will be ageism fired) will rely on their experience pretending to work to pretend to produce great numbers. 3) We all know we're lying to the client and upper mgmt and maybe the .gov, and you'll keep quiet about that or we'll have to notice that you're only putting in 30 hours of "real" net positive productive work per week even if you're on paper butts in seat 75 hours per week. You're productively working 30 hours per week and you'll shut up about the other issues or you'll only earn credit for the 30 instead of being the 75 hour "hero" you currently are. Now shut up or we start auditing your internet access logs too. 4) I hate my wife and kids and being a provincial idiot of a manager with no empathy for other human beings (hey, someone has to be the failure, after all) I assume all others are the same as me because I'm great so why don't you hang out at work for 80 hrs per week just like me? If my whole family hates me the problem can't be me because I've got an ivy diploma so whats the problem with staying at work all night? I actually worked for a guy like that and this is a paraphrase of a couple conversations I had with him. A sad, sad dude.

a3voices 12y ago

People need to stop worrying so much about what their boss thinks of them. If you get fired, it's probably a sign you shouldn't be working there in the first place. If you don't get a promotion or raise, who cares? Your life won't get better if you make slightly more money.

loveableloser 12y ago

Kind of surprised that no one has brought up the Gervais Principle. It was even covered on this site a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296 The guys who pretend are Losers, the true believers who don't are Clueless. As the subjects of the HBR article are consultant types, I'll bet many of the Clueless there think they are Sociopaths. Anyhow, my hat's off to the Losers who manage to score a solid paycheck without working/drinking themselves into an early grave.

erikb 12y ago

Is it really people passing of as 80-Hour Workers, or is it that they just solve the tasks given to them without creating additional work for their bosses? Are the successful guys fakes or are they doing something that we could learn to be more successful hourselves? In any case I would be interested in more in depth stories of these successful guys to learn from them. Choosing the right tasks to work on, for example, seems to be a very important strategy. I would love so much to read more details about how to do that. And especially in this case, if I would be the boss, I would appreciate people with that skill more than people without that skill. Someone with that skill will be able to pick most of the low hanging fruits and might also be more able to solve the really necessary ugly tasks, because he cares about getting it done.

grownseed 12y ago

An extreme example of this is South Korea. The basic idea in most medium/large companies being that underlings must be present whenever their bosses are, so people will turn up really early in the morning to greet the boss, and leave really late at night, often just waiting for the boss to go home. Hierarchy is a very important cultural concept in SK, socially and professionally, and generally companies are far more layered than they would be in most western countries, resulting in lots of bosses. Because of this you have a trickle-down effect of "work more than the boss" hours, with people at the bottom working completely ridiculous hours. This has two interesting consequences. The first one I call "gold star sticker promotions", whereby people get promoted on a regular basis, often without a pay rise, sheerly for "working" more hours than the next guy. While the promotions often mean very little by themselves, they tend to result in slightly less work hours. The second consequence is that people, as described in the article to some extent, actually end up doing very little work despite occupying a seat for so many hours. A friend of mine actually plays Diablo 3 while seating at his desk, and everybody's ok with that. In fact, he got promoted three times just last year. The point is not to get work done, it's simply to show that you're willing to give your soul to your employer.

rwallace 12y ago
What exactly happens if you just refuse to work more than forty hours a week? I mean, obviously you won't get promoted, but promotion at that price isn't worth having. Do you get fired? The reason I ask is that I've heard in countries like that it's very difficult to fire an employee, so I was wondering how those two aspects of work go together.
- grownseed 12y ago
  You would be made absolutely miserable, be assigned the most menial of tasks with ridiculous deadlines, tasks that are often largely made up and of no benefit to the company. Your boss might call your parents or your spouse and shame you, might even insult you to your face. If that doesn't make you fall in line and you finally decide to jump ship, you may be ridiculed publicly, potential employers will be contacted and told about your "work ethics", making it really hard to be employed again. You'll essentially be shunned for the foreseeable future, which in SK is generally not culturally acceptable. It's pretty harsh, but it's also important to note that this is not a culture based on individual interest.

pfranz 12y ago

Thankfully, I haven't see too much employer imposed long hours, but I have seen self imposed long hours. I read a different article about 6 months ago from a professor that I'd love to read over again. I can't seem to find it. The premise was that they worked extra hours because the regular hours were filled with "procedure" like meetings, time cards, and getting interrupted. It only left a little time each day for doing the interesting stuff; the reason they chose that profession. I and others have talked about how much more productive we are when working early or late in the day and are compelled to stay late to finish something because it seems to take longer to pick it up and finish it the next day.