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Yep! I work in the steel construction industry. Damn near every day, typically mid to late afternoon, an order comes from on high: "this has to be on the truck at 6am tomorrow", but you also have to continue to meet the existing deadlines. Then you lose an hour of production because a machine needs maintenance or breaks down.

This is why we work 54hr weeks. All the time.

Ah yes, the emergency shipment that must go out ASAP and throws a wrench in dozens of other orders who were previously scheduled to maximize throughput.

Unfortunately you can't really tell management "a lack of planning on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on my part". Contracts often have penalties for late delivery or worse, running a vendor managed inventory level to 0 (full on stopping production costing many thousands of dollars per hour).

We have the exact same problem. Why can't sales just put a 2 day notice for orders in the contract?

Well, it depends. Scrambling the production might be worth it if it doubles the margin. Without knowing the price they're quoting for the "emergency order" it's hard to judge what the business case is.

I am a bit concerned about scrambling workers and production lines in heavy industry, though. Makes me question the safety of pushing tired workers to work faster/longer hours...

Commissions (which makes up a large part of a salesperson’s compensation).

Others are commenting about the 54 hours. Probably because it almost comes off as you are proud of the number. I've been around people before who've boasted about how long their job hours are -- it comes off in bad taste. I'm aware that in many industries you simply won't keep your job if you don't do these ridiculus hours. Even as a newly hired dev at Amazon, my manager tried to coerce me into doing free overtime - as if because I was new I owed something to the company... I eventually quit because that's bullshit. Its in poor taste to be proud of being taken advantage of. Hope you make the best of it.

In poor taste? What's in poor taste here is an individual working in an extremely privileged field (in terms of job security, ease of finding work, and pay scales) attempting to issue a style guide for blue collar workers. For people that actually work for a living this kind of work ethic is a self-defense mechanism. The alternatives are frequently minimum wage service jobs or homelessness. If you feel this strongly about worker's rights (and you should) you might consider volunteering with AFL-CIO organizing efforts in your community. Simple sneering will not suffice.

Read my comment again. I said I was aware that some jobs provide no alternative. I did not sneer - in fact I wished him the best. My main point is that many of these workers have the wrong mindset - they get taken advantage of because they are proud about how they have such a ballbusting job-- when in reality many times they are simply being violated. Usually by the direct manager. It is often hard to see outside of ones' direct work environment to gain a perspective. It really depends on the average conditions in that industry and whether they have options. Hopefully the worker is diligent and doesn't get an uneven workload compared to the industry norm. But it takes mindset and effort not to get bamboozled. All I mean is for the best..not trying to talk down to anyone who is a hard worker..

It certainly is a bit ballbusting, but as someone who was an injecting meth user on-and-off for the better part of 10 years up until about 5 years ago, and now has a stable job in a beautiful part of the world, plenty of well paid overtime at a great company, a home loan, and a 1.5 minute commute to work.

Fuck it, I'll take it. Might as well throw in some pride as well.

YMMV!

There are very few individuals here in a privileged position. Many here are working long hours for a startup about to fail and most are trying to meet ends in the most expensive cities in the world.

You assert that folks working for startups do so out of necessity and not choice, and that for them their options are limited to either live this life or be homeless? Because that's the reality of blue collar work. Let's not pretend it's particularly difficult to find work outside of the startup community. So yeah, privileged.

Yes it's difficult to find work globally. It's hard outside of a big city. It's borderline impossible if you live in the country side.

"Difficult" is a subjective term. One cannot telecommute to a bricklaying or machinist job.

Great for them. They will always have jobs in the vicinity at a fair local salary because they can't be outsourced oversea to the lowest bidder.

I'm sorry you work in a third world country. Advanced societies have working limits of 35 to 40 hours per week.

Im not sure which advanced society you are refering to. But i think you mean 40hrs of mandatory work. I worked at a chainsaw factory ~15yrs ago and in Canada & the managers would put huge amounts of pressure on the workers to do constant overtime. When you are desperate for job security being seen as the worker who won't go the extra mile does not feel optional.

> Im not sure which advanced society you are refering to. But i think you mean 40hrs of mandatory work

Germany or any other civilized country with such things as laborer protection laws. But in a society with at-will employment like the US I wouldn't expect any kind of protection, so...

Yeah.. No.

Having worked for a German company where 7-midnight shifts were a regular thing for month (project team of five): Sure. That's illegal. I know that, knew that then. But maybe you just want to do your job and get over with it. Then there's the fucked up problem between coworkers. Five people. If one says "Enough! I go home now after 12 hours!" then four are "Erm... why do you leave us to finish the tasks?".

Germany (can't comment on other so-called civilized countries) is no help here if the employees feel that they're in a bind.

> Germany (can't comment on other so-called civilized countries) is no help here if the employees feel that they're in a bind.

Yes, but these examples are rare and when you document your working time carefully you can get quite a load of money by going via the court system. In the US, they're widespread and no way for recourse.

Putting too much faith in regulations here.

Private industry always finds a way. And high-supply labour with no job security can't easily say no.

I sometimes wonder if someone has sat down and worked out that stealing from the employees in this way is actually a net positive for the firm or if one asshole just does it naturally and then it sets the rest in motion.

While I agree that forced overtime is a problem. I'm not sure I would call it "stealing", as presumably these are hourly workers who are getting paid time-and-a-half wages for the overtime. At the local margins, it's definitely more efficient for the firm, since the other solution would be to hire more workers to meet peak demand who might then sit idle during lower demand periods. To some extent, common overtime availability can be beneficial to both the worker and the firm, but if the demand is highly consistent throughout the year, it's probably ultimately a net negative for the firm.

>At the local margins, it's definitely more efficient for the firm, since the other solution would be to hire more workers to meet peak demand who might then sit idle during lower demand periods.

There are also times where it's not really a choice. I interned in a town of 1200 which hosted the only traffic light in the county and was 30 minutes away from a city of 30,000. Production was 4 10's, but turned into 5 10's when things were booming, and then an extra 4 hours on Saturday. The only way to guarantee a weekend of was to take a vacation day on Friday.

They had a tough time hiring when it's booming. When the economy is good, good welders are in short supply everywhere (not just small towns). They pay sufficiently for living in the rural Midwest, the only way they can really get the work done is by working the hours.

This is a very interesting anecdote. The wage, QoL, amenities, and therefore labor pool asymmetry between larger cities and smaller towns puts many companies in this bind. Without the ability to attract labor, the situation in small towns becomes more and more dire, while competitors closer to the labor pool do better, can hire more part time workers etc. The cost of housing is pretty much the only mediating factor here, but people's expressed preferences seem to be shifting more and more toward cities. If you develop software it can be pretty trivial to relocate. If you run a steel mill, or a welding plant, the cost of moving (actual equipment, environmental controls, square footage) can make it nearly impossible.

Yep! I work in a heavy industry now and we have original installations of equipment that take 9-12 months typically (after the shell of the building is in place). Once it's installed, it's getting run as much as possible for profits, and contracts for delivering product could very well prevent being able to do a 12 month hold on production while moving.

Some factories are located on rivers because the equipment brought in is many times the max allowable on roadways...there's no other way to get the equipment installed.

That depends on your job

can't you plan for 32hr weeks with more employees/machines? and end up with about 40 hours? or do you like the overtime?

IMHO 54h/week is not sustainable if you are supposed to have a life outside work, if your employer have a pattern of this kind of behaviour you should really look at getting another job. You could easily employ one more on those extra hours (or two more).

This really depends on commute times.

5x 8 hour work day + 1 hour each way commute = 50h/week.

54h/week + 20 minute each way commute = 57.3h/week.

54h/week + 1 hour each way commute = 64h/week.

That said, 56h is half your time awake a week. It does not leave a lot of wiggle room for other commitments.

You seem to be getting downvoted but no one's explaining why: check your math.

At 8 hours a day, plus 1 hour there and 1 hour back, each of your 5 work days would total 10 hours. 5 of those is a 50h work week, not a 60h week:

5d * (8h + 1h + 1h) = 50h/week

I do agree that commute times are important, but they're not quite the heavy hitter that your original example implies.

Edited it a few times, the original version was:

8 hours work + 2x 1h commute + off clock (30 minutes lunch + 2 x 15 minute breaks) = 55 hour week.

5 minute commute + 54 hour/week including lunch = 55 hour week.

But, that seemed a little contrived. I think you saw a poor edit.

Don't forget that 8h workday actually lasts 9h if you count in a lunch break. Sure, you don't work technically, but depending on a situation (which is the case more often than not from my personal experience), this hour still might be crossed out of your life.

That's a great way of looking at it.

My commute, door to door, is 1500 meters, no quite 1 mile. There is very little traffic to speak of, even at the the busiest part of the day.

5*(8+2)=50, still. To get to 60h, one needs to commute 4h every day with 40h weeks.

"And for a fun fact: lubricant used in food production equipment must be safe for humans. For this reason, vegetable oil and similar products are often used."

Good to know, had always wondered about this.

FWIW, peanut/soy oil is a pretty good cutting lubricant on the lathe/mill too. (manual machines, that is). It is slippery and can take relatively high heats. And, when it gets hot it smells nice.

Chris King (the bicycle parts manufacturer) uses only soy oil for their machining operations because it has a lower environmental footprint and can be safely recycled.

You had always wondered about lubricant used in food production equipment? People will always surprise me

It seems that most if not all of these issues have software development process equivalents…

I do some programming (unfortunately mostly VBA, the language of the non-technical business world) and spent 4 years of college working on robots for a competition with a bunch of mechanical engineers and computer engineers. I agree.

I specifically compared software projects here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15197767

And I outlined more manufacturing challenges here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15195869

Yes, proper lubricants are a great issue in software outsourcing companies.

This is a good joke, but if we extract the underlying intent - "things that may leak into being consumed by the user must be nontoxic" - it has a clear parallel in adtech.

Adtech and outsourcing firms have the parallel that they are about capturing money meaninglessly thrown away by other firms.

Kanban boards didn't originate in software development, but super markets and car manufacturing[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban#Toyota%27s_Six_Rules

> Imbalanced production rates. The bottleneck of the factory should be the primary focus for improvements.

This game shows this quite well: www.positech.co.uk/productionline/

An industrial sized tube of KY?