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Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

I work at a large company in NYC. Based wholly on personal observation, long hours are not uncommon. I often see folks eating dinner at the office. I suspect most people put in ~50 hours a week if not a little more than that.

The number tends to increase with the extent of one’s responsibilities (n.b. extent, not gravity).

As far as expectations go, I don’t think these are normally elaborated in terms of hours for salaried employees. You’re just expected to get your work done, regardless of whether or not it takes you more than 40. The expectation is probably that you put in ~40-50? This is purely speculation on my part, mind you.

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I'm trying to get at the underlying expectations - "get your work done" can mean a lot of things. At a prior job, it meant that you wrote a TODO list at the start of the week, which was approved by the boss. If you finished in 10 hours, you were done!

But if it's left vaguely defined, "'til the work gets done" can mean weekend hackathons in a we-work-hard culture, no?

It's definitely a vague phrase, sorry. Here's some more detail: my situation's a bit different from other employees (I'm hourly, not salaried), so I can only take guesses, but I think the performance measurement scale is longer-term around here. Basically there's yearly goals/key performance indicators you need to hit. One on one's are the preferred method of checking in to see that work is being done, but the ones I attend are pretty informal—I just provide a general summary of what I worked on that week and where the long term projects are at. The level of formality can depend on your manager, I believe. I think some managers are a bit more clerical and ask for written weekly lists of what you accomplished and things like that. From what I can tell though, there's mostly just an understanding around here that you should be invested in the work and as such be sure to accomplish your goals, whatever that might entail. So, yes, in that sense it is a structure/culture susceptible to things like weekend hours and extra grind. It's not uncommon to see people committing work on weekends or at 10pm on weekdays either--it's not super frequent but it's also not shocking when it does happen. Keep in mind though that NYC in general is quite a bit different than other places when it comes to working. There's a lot of "hustle" around here. I'd go so far as to say it's probably not uncommon for workers in any industry to work more hours if they work in NYC (there's probably some study on this out there somewhere).

> You’re just expected to get your work done

What does it mean exactly? there is always something new to do when you are done with what you had to do.

I think it means your superior is subjectively happy with the amount of work you are doing.

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