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Comment by kdmccormick | Hacker News Reader

I should be clear that I am talking about expectations of time, not expectations of effort or competance.

I work 40 hours a week, no more. (If paid overtime were a thing at my company, I might do more. But it's not.) I bust my ass during those 40. Sometimes I work on personal side projects in my free time for fun or to sharpen my skills.

If you want to be promoted, I'd rather you work harder and smarter, not more. If a coworker of mine got promoted because they worked weekends, I would actually be pretty frustrated at them.

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Try to recognize that there are people who would rather work more than harder and that's ok. You provide your value and I'll provide mine. To be frank, I'm not sure I'm capable of working harder, but the occasional weekend project because you're fired up about the goals or the challenge is exhilarating. For you to think you can dictate that I shouldn't ever do that seems kind of selfish to me.

PS: how dare you work harder than me! You're raising the bar and that's not fair! ;)

> Try to recognize that there are people who would rather work more than harder and that's ok.

I don't understand that at all. You'd rather work 60 and 20 of that slack instead of 40 ? Why would you want to have less time for hobbies/family ?

Well, first off, I haven't put any numbers on it, so 60 hours is made up. Second, I'm not saying I'm going to "slack" during the 40 and waste 20 hours, I'm just talking about doing a normal job (with a normal amount of slacking interspersed. Let's not ignore that I'm posting on HN during my standard business hours at this very moment). And third, I am capable of adjusting how much time I need for hobbies and family on any given day, and sometimes I'll happily trade a saturday with hobbies or family to do some good work. I honestly don't know what it would be like to have a job that I never ever felt passionate enough about to willingly put in a little extracurricular time. It sounds horrible.

You don't work 40 full hours a week. No one actually _works_ every single minute of a 40 hour work week. There's lunch for one, bathroom breaks, interruptions by coworkers, meetings that they may not even need you in, etc, etc.

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