7 ms·

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 car

• Someone1234 11y 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 11y 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 11y ago
      Unfortunately the state of California doesn't check for this. So many companies still do it, and likely get away with it.
      • e40 11y ago
        An EDD audit will be expensive, then. It happens. It often happens because people rat out their employer.
    • rhizome 11y ago
      It was over 100K about 7 yrs ago when I looked into it, so unless there's been an adjustment since then... On that note, if you want to challenge your exempt status, you must have a record of your hours that you are going to try to claim on.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• supercanuck 11y ago
  The problem is the definition of work. Last night I was at a Wine Bar in Houston with Clients and Colleagues from 5:30 to 9:30. Was it billable? No. Was it paid for? Yes. Does it have work value? Yes. Is it "technically" work? Maybe. Did I have a good time? Yes. Would I have done it if I didn't think there was business value to it? Absolutely not.
  • mcdougle 11y ago
    That's not always the case, though. I have a friend who works in public accounting who actually does work 80-hour weeks during busy season (i.e. just before taxes are due) and spends pretty much that whole time in the office from what I understand.
    • supercanuck 11y ago
      Knowledge work is so diversified now, it would be impossible to capture everyone. I was just providing an anecdote as someone who sympathized with the article.
    • afarrell 11y ago
      How much does he work outside of March and April?
      • mcdougle 11y ago
        The standard 40 hour week quick edit: he works with businesses, too, so he does 80 hour weeks in Oct/Nov. and again in Mar/Apr. and then 40 hour weeks the rest of the year.
      • smileysteve 11y ago
        A lot of the major accounting agencies have a 2 week break around christmas because they expect tax season to be busy.
  • ukigumo 11y ago
    Well, I would classify it as work because it was a social interaction with a comercial intent. If you were a contractor you could probably justify those expenses as part of your activity because it's culturally acceptable to engage in alcohol consumption with work relationships and you were representing your company while doing so.
• engi_nerd 11y ago
  US engineer here. Agreed on not wanting to start a "war". Allow me to share the rationale that my manager in a previous job shared with me. This is not an exaggerated quote, it's taken from the notes I wrote immediately after the incident. "engi_nerd, we at $MEDIUM_SIZED_AEROSPACE_COMPANY expect our engineers to work at least 15 to 20 hours of unpaid overtime each week. This is the minimum of what you need to do to demonstrate that you are ready for a promotion. During that extra time, we'll assign you duties that are beyond your normal job responsibilities. Carry those out well and you'll prove that you're ready for a promotion." I swear I am not making this up. When I stated that I refused to do what he asked, the manager said, "Then you'll never have a chance to be promoted from what you're doing now." That very day I went home and began updating my resume; my final day at that job was less than 4 months later.
  • ToastyMallows 11y ago
    Good on you. I would refuse to work at any company that places such ridiculous standards on its employees. I'm surprised you even stayed for 4 months I would have been out of there much sooner.
    • engi_nerd 11y ago
      It took that long to get to where I wanted to be -- I had to arrange to sell a house and move, etc. But the actual "find a new job" process took a single email to a key member of my professional network. It pays to know good people.
      • ToastyMallows 11y ago
        That it does! Glad you're out of there.
  • ryguytilidie 11y ago
    That sounds a lot like the "pieces of flair" from office space.
  • ukigumo 11y ago
• skizm 11y ago
  > do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way? A lot of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft's employees all seem to put in long hours and are productive with the extra time. Amazon on the other hand is one of the companies with a lot of people "pretending" to work long hours. I was looking into these companies when applying to jobs and that was a sense I got at least.
• michaelochurch 11y ago
  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? American here. No need for "a war". European countries are more productive. Long hours don't work. Most Americans know it, and would agree with everything you have to say. I would generally agree with you, although I don't think that long hours necessarily signify incompetence. In the HBR article, the sense given is that they signify being bad at politics, and therefore find themselves in a position where they sacrifice too much and only get moderate reward. The people who are good at politics figure out how to "pass", how to get full credit for being dedicated without working unsustainable hours. It's a vicious cycle: people who are bad at politics put their heads down and work 80-hour weeks, and because they're overworked they never learn how the politics of the organization really work (they don't have the time) and, when they inevitably tire of the nonsense and face time, they don't have the political skill to reduce their effort and get away with it, even though they could probably cut their hourage by 50% at least without hurting the company at all. The counterintuitive reality is that overwork projects low status, in the US as it does in the EU, but so many people are oblivious to the fact and think that "busy" is a good look on them. (It's a good look to other over-busy, mid-level chumps. It doesn't fool the people with actual power.) There are a few jobs in which you simply have to work 90-hour weeks or you'll get fired (e.g. investment banking's analyst programs) and my observations wouldn't apply but, even in the US, they're rare. This isn't like Japan salaryman culture where average people have to work 14-hour days just to stay put. In general, working in a way that lowers your status, emphasizing availability and sacrifice rather than unique skill, tends only to get you more grunt work. The irony is that, 10 years ago at age 21, these bankers and consultants were, for the most part, way ahead of people like me in terms of social skills. But after 10 years of doing the true-believer thing and working themselves to death, they've gotten to the (surprising) point where they suck at politics. This is also why I think it's silly that Americans are so averse to learning "office politics". Academically, it's a disgraceful game, but if being halfway good at it saves you 20 hours per week and gets you the same damn reward, it's absolutely worth learning. The truth is that 5 percent of one's reputation as a strong or weak performer is performance, 10 percent is raw (and obvious) politics, and 85% is the politics of performance that looks like merit to true-believer types, but is usually quite game-able. And there's nothing morally wrong with gaming it; it makes a person more likely to reach a high-impact role with his or her capability intact, and that benefits the company as much as the individual.
• jpmattia 11y ago
  > do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way? Knock it down to 14h, and I can think of 2 people. I worked for both, and both fell into the category of having moved to the US from another country. My career took me elsewhere, but they were both great to work for.
  • harryf 11y ago
    In my experience people who work long hours are often too tired to be objective about the quality of the work they are delivering or their own efficiency . It's worth watching this talk from the Leading @ Google series - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tke6X2eME3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tke6X2eME3c The short version is, despite the information-age, we still think about this stuff in an industrial-age terms; that productivity is directly proportional to time spent. In fact it's highly non-linear for most forms of information-age value creating activitie.
    • ukigumo 11y ago
      I agree with you completely. Even our work schedules are still based on the mandated daylight times which were created so that factories wouldn't have to keep their lights on for too long.
  • ukigumo 11y ago
    I'm an expat myself so I'm curious about this.. Were their visas tied to their work contract? Did they have their families living with them? As an anecdote, when I first moved abroad I was single and didn't speak the local language (Dutch) so I didn't really have any incentive to interact socially outside of work and I ended up spending way too many hours in the office but just about managing to do my job competently because I was pretty sad and demotivated all the time and often doubted my decision to move abroad.
    • jpmattia 11y ago
      > Were their visas tied to their work contract? No, they held US citizenship. They were just hardworking immigrants. I'm the grandson of immigrants, which makes me positively lazy by comparison. I pretty much have to knock off after 12 hours these days.
• kamaal 11y ago
  >>do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way? It depends on what you are working on, how important that is, how interesting it is and what is at stake. There have been instances when I could do long hours which just come naturally out of the flow. Other times, its difficult to get by the day and I long to see 5:00 on the watch. Having said that most of the burnouts and hatred towards long working are caused due to resentment. I have seen people used and thrown like tissues for the well being of political cartels within companies. Overall I think this is the largest flaw in Humans. Else if we had any appreciation for meritocracy we would all be living in space colonies by now. A lot of talent and work is lost because a few hardworking are making up for every one else. And with rewards continuously being stolen by the thieves in the political cartels, there is a little incentive for anybody genuine to stay up and contribute. Conclusion is people don't like to work hard when they get nothing in return. This situation is starving the whole world ecosystem of good work.
• 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
  > 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. That belief makes too much sense. To be a belief shouldn't there be a contrary believable belief? I wouldn't want to be part of the other retrograde group who believes something else.
  • ukigumo 11y ago
    The contrary belief is what is described in the article, where people are expected to stay in the office, or on-call for long hours to be valued as employees. The sad thing is how many people actually live like this, defining themselves through what they do instead of who they are.
• erikb 11y ago
  I also have some experience working in Germany and I feel you are right with the hours but that's not the point. Even if everybody wants you to work just 40 hours people still have unreasonably high demands because they don't understand the complexity of the situation they are in (coworkers, bosses, customers all the same). So you still need to find ways to satisfy people without always doing exactly what they have asked for.
  • altcognito 11y ago
    That's just the nature of work though. You'll find that even general contractors do a great deal of pushing back on scope during a project in order to make sure things come in on both cash and time budgets. The only difference is we work in the virtual space which tends to disconnect people from the fact that things still take time.
    • erikb 11y ago
      Yeah, that's what I was pointing out in another comment directly responding to the topic. That's just how work is, or better how life is. You can complain about it or you find a way to handle it. It's not about the 80-hour week but about handling people.
• ido 11y ago
  I live in Berlin and a lot of tech companies here (especially startups) expect unpaid overtime. This is in stark contrast to Vienna where I've almost never encountered it.
  • ukigumo 11y ago
    I think it's normal for startups to try to get things for free, be it software or work hours, and that's OK up to a point, but once a company reaches a plateau of business activity and operational maturity then it becomes a sign of poor management that they can't balance workload and workforce. Out of curiosity, are you German? My experience with German companies was centred in the financial services sector out of Frankfurt and some tech companies out of Munich and overtime was never even suggested so I'm thinking there might also be some differences between the regions.
    • ido 11y ago
      I'm not German, but we've been living in Berlin for about 2 years now and lived in Vienna for almost 8 years before that. I was even explicitly told by some companies when interviewing that they expect and encourage workers to stay until at least 7-8pm...at least between Berlin and Vienna there is definitely a difference in attitude.
• rhino369 11y ago
  >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? In short bursts, I think the diminishing returns of long hours is sorta overblown. Over the long term, 16 hour days will wear you down and destroy you. I work in a big law and 16 hour days are too common. But people are successfully managing billion dollar deals and litigation while doing 16 hours fairly often. But over a long period of time it takes a toll emotionally and physically. One problem with organizations that bill by the manhour--law and consulting--is that even if the employee output diminishes, the firm still bills the same rate. There isn't a lot of incentive to keep your employees heads fresh.
  • ukigumo 11y ago
    >One problem with organizations that bill by the manhour--law and consulting--is that even if the employee output diminishes, the firm still bills the same rate. There isn't a lot of incentive to keep your employees heads fresh. I think you've hit a pretty good point straight in the head here. The article also seems to focus on a consulting company which very likely sells man-hour packages so it is on their best interest to have "heroes".