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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

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 11y 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 11y 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.
- mistermann 11y 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. How do you know this for sure? Not saying you're wrong, but I can think of many exceptions to this rule.
  - Ygg2 11y ago
    An 80 hour work week implies 16 hours work during the workdays or 10 if you work weekends. If work takes 16/10 hours for your work, when do you sleep or eat or socialize?
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      Firstly, 80:00:00 / 7 = 11:25:43 ~ As for those other things you mentioned, the remaining 88 hours in the week would allocated as follows: 56 hours for sleep, 10 hours for meals, 3 hours for personal hygiene, 2 hours for exercise, 16 hours for a personal side project, and 1 hour to socialize. ~ ~ You'll have plenty of time for friends and relationships when you're dead. If you really cared about the company, you would abandon your personal side project and work 96 hour weeks. If you spent less time eating, you could also spend less time exercising. And some of your co-workers do get a bit ripe at times, so you're probably over-allocating time to hygiene. It takes me 3 minutes to shower, head to toe. That's how you get ahead in this business: effective time management. Also, I survive on a nutrient slurry that allows me to consume an entire day's worth of meals in only 30 seconds. And since I don't have time to actually buy anything, almost all my earnings go straight to savings! ~ The real answer is that you either sacrifice some sleep or you don't have any leisure time. That previous schedule breakdown intentionally ignores the time cost of transportation between activities, and little things like bathroom breaks. Calculating from my own life, if I worked 80 hours per week, I would have approximately 4 hours of disposable leisure time left. That would only be possible if 95% of my weekly fun requirement was met by work. The likelihood of that happening in any workplace that expected 80 hour weeks is abysmally low.
mpdehaan2 11y ago
Money never makes up for actually not living.
- pckspcks 11y ago
  I don't know anyone who can sustain 80 hour work weeks if they're not passionate about what they're doing and enjoy it. People who try to do it just for the money do it for a while, and then either turn into cheaters (as the article documents), or burn out and move onto more fulfilling careers. Doing something you're passionate about and having an impact on the world is living. It is much more living than going to a job you don't give an f- about for 40 hours per week so you can buy a house in the suburbs and an SUV, retire after 40 years, and then die having left no impact on the world.
normloman 11y ago
Personal growth also happens when you're not at work. That's when many people here learn new languages, read about new technologies, and get some of their best ideas. You won't lose anything by working 40 hours a week.
VLM 11y ago
"I can pay those employees at least five times as much" I understand that as he's talking about five times minimum wage or about $70K/yr, not five times a real wage. Nobody offers five times a real wage. Nobody. Everyone has their weird false beliefs. Most middle and lower class see themselves as temporarily disadvantaged millionaires and that weird false belief can be very profitably exploited. The similar weird belief from the upper classes is that economic destruction has been so successful over past decades that there is an infinite pool of infinitely highly talented labor willing to work for minimum wage so anyone asking for more than minimum wage is the cheeky nail standing up that must be pounded down, and its socialism or letting the terrorists win to ever pay someone without direct reports more than the minimum wage. Sure, managers earn millions and CEOs earn billions but conventional upper class wisdom is there's an infinite pool of neurosurgeons willing to work minimum wage for 80 hrs a week while repeating "thank you sir may I have another" as their morally and ethically superior manager paddles them. To some extent you can profitably exploit them by letting them screw up, then offering Very expensive consulting fees to fix the mess they created for themselves. Never, ever work for people like that if you can possibly avoid it, always consult to clean up their messes at like $300/hr.
- pckspcks 11y ago
  Let me put this in real numbers. Most folks I know who work those hours make around $300k. That's mean. I know folks who make half that, and I know folks who make several times that.

Joeri 11y 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 11y 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.
mistermann 11y 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. How do you know this for sure? Not saying you're wrong, but I can think of many exceptions to this rule.
- Ygg2 11y ago
  An 80 hour work week implies 16 hours work during the workdays or 10 if you work weekends. If work takes 16/10 hours for your work, when do you sleep or eat or socialize?
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    Firstly, 80:00:00 / 7 = 11:25:43 ~ As for those other things you mentioned, the remaining 88 hours in the week would allocated as follows: 56 hours for sleep, 10 hours for meals, 3 hours for personal hygiene, 2 hours for exercise, 16 hours for a personal side project, and 1 hour to socialize. ~ ~ You'll have plenty of time for friends and relationships when you're dead. If you really cared about the company, you would abandon your personal side project and work 96 hour weeks. If you spent less time eating, you could also spend less time exercising. And some of your co-workers do get a bit ripe at times, so you're probably over-allocating time to hygiene. It takes me 3 minutes to shower, head to toe. That's how you get ahead in this business: effective time management. Also, I survive on a nutrient slurry that allows me to consume an entire day's worth of meals in only 30 seconds. And since I don't have time to actually buy anything, almost all my earnings go straight to savings! ~ The real answer is that you either sacrifice some sleep or you don't have any leisure time. That previous schedule breakdown intentionally ignores the time cost of transportation between activities, and little things like bathroom breaks. Calculating from my own life, if I worked 80 hours per week, I would have approximately 4 hours of disposable leisure time left. That would only be possible if 95% of my weekly fun requirement was met by work. The likelihood of that happening in any workplace that expected 80 hour weeks is abysmally low.

mpdehaan2 11y ago

Money never makes up for actually not living.

pckspcks 11y ago
I don't know anyone who can sustain 80 hour work weeks if they're not passionate about what they're doing and enjoy it. People who try to do it just for the money do it for a while, and then either turn into cheaters (as the article documents), or burn out and move onto more fulfilling careers. Doing something you're passionate about and having an impact on the world is living. It is much more living than going to a job you don't give an f- about for 40 hours per week so you can buy a house in the suburbs and an SUV, retire after 40 years, and then die having left no impact on the world.

normloman 11y ago

Personal growth also happens when you're not at work. That's when many people here learn new languages, read about new technologies, and get some of their best ideas. You won't lose anything by working 40 hours a week.

VLM 11y ago

"I can pay those employees at least five times as much" I understand that as he's talking about five times minimum wage or about $70K/yr, not five times a real wage. Nobody offers five times a real wage. Nobody. Everyone has their weird false beliefs. Most middle and lower class see themselves as temporarily disadvantaged millionaires and that weird false belief can be very profitably exploited. The similar weird belief from the upper classes is that economic destruction has been so successful over past decades that there is an infinite pool of infinitely highly talented labor willing to work for minimum wage so anyone asking for more than minimum wage is the cheeky nail standing up that must be pounded down, and its socialism or letting the terrorists win to ever pay someone without direct reports more than the minimum wage. Sure, managers earn millions and CEOs earn billions but conventional upper class wisdom is there's an infinite pool of neurosurgeons willing to work minimum wage for 80 hrs a week while repeating "thank you sir may I have another" as their morally and ethically superior manager paddles them. To some extent you can profitably exploit them by letting them screw up, then offering Very expensive consulting fees to fix the mess they created for themselves. Never, ever work for people like that if you can possibly avoid it, always consult to clean up their messes at like $300/hr.

pckspcks 11y ago
Let me put this in real numbers. Most folks I know who work those hours make around $300k. That's mean. I know folks who make half that, and I know folks who make several times that.