That said, I something of an edge case. I have an IQ in the mid 80's, so the fact that I got an office job at all is something of an accomplishment. I should've ended up a minimum wage laborer or turning to petty crime. My employer took a pretty significant risk hiring me, so I'm grateful for it.
To answer your question though; About 45 to 60 hours a week can be spent testing various things depending on what needs to be done. It's not a constant flow of testing testing though, I'd probably say at least a few hours of each day is spent semi idle. It can be waiting for feedback or clarification from the devs, or a compilation (which can take up to 55 minutes for a release build of the largest package, but require 3 hours to take it from the final tested version to managers sending out the release email to the public). In other cases it's doing the secondary tasks for testing; setup and teardown, writing reports, hardware changes, etc.
10 to 20 hours a week is spent working on user facing documentation. Some of the time it's just editing what someone else wrote but most of the time it's compiling notes from bug reports, test case results, feature documents, and trying to compress all that information into a more easy to digest format.
About 8 to 16 hours a week is spent reviewing test cases. In most cases it's just making sure that the cases are still relevant and accurate. It is rather tedious and because of that I think no one else wants to do it, but it is a necessary task as letting it slide causes a great deal of confusion for all. There's some 300 to 400 manual test cases at any given time that cannot be readily automated.
Some 2 to 5 hours a week is spent on administrative overhead. Meetings, email, etc.
Beyond that it varies on what odd jobs need to be done around the office, which. Most of the time it's minor things but it can sometimes turn a larger effort, such as a hardware audit.
Keep in mind that 60 to 90 hours a week is a range, but most of the time it hovers closer to 60. Higher times only occur every two or three months or so.
Doctors and medical staff treat human lives and I don't think they are comparable to an office job. They also get paid a lot for that (at least in the US)
I don't know how someone can focus with that time schedule and I cannot see how I could handle that. I have so many other stuff in my life that I could not see myself committing to that, unless maybe in the case of having my own business or actually thinking that doing that (still, only for a limited amount of time) will open up great possibilities (maybe I strongly believe in the start up I work for). Especially not for 40k/year.
Like I said, there's pretty significant downtime, it's not all go all the time. Weekend and evening work is at a fairly relaxed pace as well and is free of distractions.
It helps if you do not have hobbies, friends, dependents, a partner, and a family that is quite fine with not seeing you often, with no realistic possibility of any of that changing in the future. It would be much more difficult if any of those factors were different.
Though pray tell I ask, what on earth makes you think I would deserve 'better?' Should someone more that brings more value then then I not be proportionally rewarded better?
You deserve exactly as much as what you can bargain for. Which could be $40,000 for 40 hours a week. You can be grateful for your current job and also look for better hours.
You should be proud of your current accomplishment. If your current situation is not working for you, you are allowed to work towards finding a better job.
QA work, only 40k, and super low IQ? Is this a jab at QA workers...?
The reason I score low is due to problems in short term memory retention and pattern recognition. Take the next sentence for example. You might be able to skim over it in a few seconds, and skip a few words as you'd be able to key in on some words and work out the meaning of the sentence based on experience. I have a lot more difficulty; most typically I have to read everything word for word in order to grasp the meaning, in some cases up to three times before I am able to work it out. It doesn't mean that I cannot solve the same problem that someone with a 120 IQ can, it means that it takes me quite a bit more time before I'm able to keep it in my head.
And oddly it's for that reason that I'm actually decent at QA. To compensate for the memory problems, I tend to take notes. Very meticulous notes of what I'm doing, when I'm doing it, and why I'm doing it. It makes my test work slow but it makes creating bug reports easy, and the developers seem to like the the level of detail that is written in those reports.