Working more than 55 hours a week kills 750k people a year worldwide | Hacker News Reader

Working more than 55 hours a week kills 750k people a year worldwide

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154 pointsPaulHoule81 comments

I think this is more about manual labour but I'll take the opposite side when it comes to white collar work that working more hours can be better early on in your career.

When I was just out of school and in my early 20s I worked as much as I could, I probably did close to 12 hours days in my 20s.

I think I probably averaged an all nighter a month for a few years and worked at least one day on weekends and I loved every minute of it.

I said yes to almost all the work I could get. My bosses loved me and I got raises/promotions faster than anyone else. I was able to compress 10 years of experience into about half that time. It really set me up for my career later on in life and I learned so much in that time.

I did the learn a language a year thing and that helped me get a job as a compiler writer.

And I was able to leverage that into becoming a quant as I put in the hours to relearn all the math I'd forgotten from school.

And I was able to leverage that to get into a pretty darn successful hedge fund where I said no to them a few times before they convinced me to join.

I'm now in my 40s with a family and I work far less but I still think it was the right move at the time. It really set me up for a life of success and I was able to see the effects of outworking everyone else pay off.

I didn't seem to miss out on a social life and I had no burn out or resentment to speak of from those days.

You had no burnout or resentment because you had an enjoyable working environment with what sound like just rewards and you were able to learn valuable things. That's pretty rare in my experience.

My anecdotal evidence is the opposite. I worked extra hours and volunteered for a long time. I took responsibility for things nobody else wanted. My raises and bonuses were trivial. I had one promotion early on from entry level to midlevel. Then I was filling the role of a senior dev and a tech lead for a year each with good reviews and respect of other devs in the department (and some outside it). No promotion, still minor raises and bonuses.

Here's the thing: working hard doesn't just benefit your employer. It also benefits you because you'll learn new skills rapidly.

If your employer doesn't recognize the value you're adding, don't just sit around hoping for a raise someday. Use your new skills to find one who will. At least in my experience (as an engineer in the US), this is relatively easy and is considered a normal thing to do in one's career.

Not every job has 'more work = new skills.'

Usually it's just more of the same.

Yeah, in my experience it's been more time on the system is more learning, but not in hours. It's usually the unusual errors that are the most interesting and informative, but those tend to happen over a fixed time and not hour dependent.

> If your employer doesn't recognize the value you're adding, don't just sit around hoping for a raise someday.

This is key. Staying at a company long-term is not a recipe for success. They're greedy and would lay you off swiftly if it was in their financial interest. You should be greedy too, and don't hesitate to improve your situation if such an option is open to you.

"It also benefits you because you'll learn new skills rapidly."

Only if those skills are in wide demand. Moving companies can be risky and complicated depending on one's personal and family issues.

> Only if those skills are in wide demand.

Of course it's not worth spending extra time to learn skills that aren't in demand. This would, by definition, be a dead-end job. If you have a growth mindset like GP, having a dead-end job doesn't mean that "hard work doesn't pay off". It just means that the 'hard work' should go into looking/training/applying for a job/career with more learning opportunities/upside.

> Moving companies can be risky and complicated depending on one's personal and family issues.

"Edge cases exist" is a given. It's still good advice in general.

I don't think personal and family issues are necessarily edge cases. Plus it also depends from where the person is and what the technology industry scene is like there. Nowadays jumping companies is easier and more acceptable (atleast in tech) for sure, but then there's always some uncertainty with respect to interviewing and obtaining offers(and possible stress) in particular when you're past a certain age.

Did you advocate for yourself? Doing good work is half the battle. The other half is "sales and marketing" i.e making sure that people are aware that you're a good worker.

Not too much. They were already singing my praises so there wasn't really anything to add. One of the main problems was it was a dying area of the company that ended up getting outsourced about a year after I switched teams.

Sounds like you stayed to long with one company. Learn new role, work for few months and jump to another company to the new role, new level and new salary.

Yeah, I should have. I'm too old and have too many family issues to do that now.

I worked pretty hard in my 20s as well, but always in a comfy way. I never pulled all nighters, I luckily worked in markets where there wasn't much need for that. I could make myself work late evenings, but never past when I wanted to sleep. If I was tired the next evening, I'd turn in early. I would say the thing that made it work was not having kids, and having autonomy over when to work and when to take it easy. I can honestly say I learned more in those years than ever before or since.

My housemate worked in investment banking, much longer hours than me, with a fair bit of pressure to be awake when you want to be sleeping. The kind of job where you don't do much during the day, the MD comes in at 6pm, and tells you to make 100 slides by the next day, which he then doesn't use for a couple of days despite the juniors having stayed up all night. Grinding, and all the people who did it got visibly heavier.

From the article:

> Of the 2.96 million deaths, 2.6 million are due to diseases derived from employment such as circulatory problems, cancer, and respiratory diseases. The remaining 330,000 are related to work accidents.

It's hardly surprising a cushy office spares of you of most of these issues. I'm happy to hear your career has been a successful one, but what you describe is completely unrelated to the submitted article.

Curious take. I would think that "a cushy office", which normally means sitting for very long periods, would directly lead to many of these issues over the long term. Indeed, I've seen many research reports and articles over the past decade declaring "sitting is the new smoking".

Sitting is pretty bad, yes. And it's also incredibly common - which is why it gets the press it does. Combined with a sedentary lifestyle, it's a recipe for serious and predictably poor health outcomes.

But it isn't half as hard as extended periods of hard physical labour, day after day, especially as you grow older. Doubly so if you don't have proper medical care, and your employer doesn't tolerate sick days.

These folks have it _much_ harder than we do.

I dunno, is getting exercise all day at work better or worse for your health than sitting down all day at work? Naturally hazardous jobs like coal mines excluded.

It's not just "getting exercise all day"

Manual labor jobs overtax people's bodies. They get older and break down hard. They commonly turn to substance abuse to try and help themselves get through it all.

Some jobs do, but the substance abuse part can be said for chair jobs as well.

Nonetheless, the article's examples sound like clearly attributable job specific cancer risks. Cancer decades later from lots of longterm sitting are harder to account and probably not included.

never waste a good opportunity for unsolicited bragging, even in your 40s, jeez

I actually don't think sitting even more for working 12+ hour days and pulling all nights is good for any of this.

I'd love to know more about the OP's health history and physical fitness.

I agree that it is easier to work more and harder when you are younger. These are also the best years of your life to build a foundation of fitness for the rest of your life.

Pulling all nighters is not health for anyone. It's just when we are younger we are able to bounce back quicker from poor decisions like this.

> I think this is more about manual labour but I'll take the opposite side when it comes to white collar work that working more hours can be better early on in your career.

I have the exact opposite real work experience: I can sustain more manual labor than performing thinking demanding activities.

While I have no reason to doubt your experience, please note that you're probably an outlier. One of the things I strongly believe that Extreme Programming got right is the max 40 hour work week. Some can easily do more than 40 hours and still function, some can do less but 40 hours seems like a happy average. Expecting more is unreasonable and won't lead to more productivity for most.

That's not to say that those who can should work the hours they'd like and see the benefits, but never expect others to be able to do the same, regardless of age and life situation.

I'm not calling into doubt the above poster's work estimates, there are people that work those hours, but I have found that it is extremely, extremely rare.

Across all of the teams I have worked with I have found that if you ask someone how many hours a week they work they will typically say 40+, usually closer to 50. If you ask someone how much they worked the previous week, every week, they will usually say 30-35, or even lower.

I also don't think the majority of them were lying or trying to cover up their work habits, I think they work 50 hours a week the same way someone might see themselves as smart, funny, a good person, or any other nebulous concept. They are a 50, 60, 70 hour per week person.

Also, all but one person who worked extended hours as the above poster claims has been of the "super chicken" type. Typically working for visibility and not to advance their team. I see they posted about their individual accolades and accomplishments but I have no way of knowing if their teams goals were met, if they lifted the performance of the rest of their team or anything else. Many an extreme outlier in performance can be found who has never shipped. Again, not specifically talking about the above poster.

I track my time, and you're just not right in my experience. And not of the majority of people I've worked with. Maybe this is an American thing, but this is certainly not universal.

If you have enough experience and (something approximating) mastery of your craft, you can squeeze out a lot of good work in your 5-6 productive hours of work a day. I've never been impressed at the output from the folks working into the evening - lots of output, yes, but lower quality and a bad tradeoff.

I'm confused, which part am I not right about? It seems like we agree based on your second paragraph.

Agreed with your confusion. I do think you guys are making similar points.

> I said yes to almost all the work I could get. My bosses loved me and I got raises/promotions faster than anyone else.

That culture of “hardwork = reward” is long behind us. Instead of being the “guy who reliably gets things done whatever you throw at them”, I advise on saving one’s sanity and avoid potential burnout by finding a friendly place where they enjoy and have power to make decisions(yes, place exists where even interns can offer decisions and make impacts) and focus on work-life balance more. We are no longer in the golden era.

Also, if one is smart enough to find the vein of the gold mine and settle there, one can learn more with balanced effort compared to working too hard or too much.

>That culture of “hardwork = reward” is long behind us.

No it's certainly not. I think it's a convenient excuse to not work hard though. People talk. I always get asked, "we're hiring, you know anybody?" I would recommend someone who works hard and never mention someone who doesn't. I had a brilliant but lazy colleague who I've never recommended to anybody.

Every job I've had in the last 25 or so years is because I worked hard and someone noticed and recommended me when they switched jobs or knew someone who was hiring. My first job out of college I had to do the recruiter/interview thing. I worked hard. Every job since has been an offer over lunch.

Working hard matters a great deal.

Working smart matters even more. Some jobs require more working hard (re: long hours and 6 days per week) than working smart though, and obviously employers love employees who want less money per time.

As an employee though, you want to work smart. And that might be working longer SOMETIMES to learn skills, but the chollida1’s post does not give me that vibe. You only get your 20s once, and while they might have thought it worthwhile to trade them for financial security in their 40s and 50s, I wouldn’t say that is an optimal move, or even a necessary sacrifice.

It is the main reason I would advise my kids from becoming doctors. The sacrifices the system asks are far too much. I had much more fun than my doctor friends and they did not end up better off. Spend time with family and friends, do leisure activities that you won’t be able to do when older, etc.

>Working smart matters even more.

I mean yea. Hammering a board to your head all day for 12 hours won't accomplish anything. I figured that goes without saying.

The second paragraph here is what I meant.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lordnacho

That's kind of true. You need to find a smaller company that is growing fast for hard work to translate into reward.I've seen hard workers kill it many times in the right,s maller up and coming company and I've seen hard workers die in bigger, less caring places. It's more about whether management values you the incremental value you bring because it's growing fast or if management is worried about your incremental cost because they already have a large enough position to have market power and are now optimizing for somethign other than growth (i.e. profit maximization by exploiting labor monopsony, minimum spend to defend the market power, etc).

Can I ask how much of that time you were in a relationship for? I have a theory that men who achieve a steady, loving relationship early that allows them to do what you did have a huge advantage.

I did the 12 hour days and all nighters too but I eventually got lonely and needed to spend a few years learning how to be social and find a relationship. Now I've found that I'm able to resume the many hours of work and it definitely seems to pay dividends. But I wouldn't be able to do it if I was preoccupied with sex and relationships.

> Can I ask how much of that time you were in a relationship for? I have a theory that men who achieve a steady, loving relationship early that allows them to do what you did have a huge advantage.

Met my wife when I was 25.

I bet you are correct. Having a supportive partner is one of the worlds greatest super powers!!

> I think this is more about manual labour

When I was young, I saw older engineers and ops people die after hours in their offices (of heart attacks, trying to keep up with recent grads who had just spent four years learning something that the older workers were expected to know instantly). There was one really productive older guy who had wired his whole house with RS-232 ports back to a coat closet where he stuffed a minicomputer and AC unit, then he wheeled a VT100 on a cart from room to room and plugged-in, as needed...so he could work around the clock in comfort, but for most everyone else, there were no laptops and they worked at cold/hot office before and after work, especially in F500 and military industrial complex jobs.

This appears to be a Mexican publication talking primarily about jobs involving physical labour. That's a far cry from the desk jobs we have.

It sounds like you enjoyed your path, that's a good thing and it seems like you've been really successful. Most people aren't Jamie Zawinski however (thank god), and don't embrace such overwork. If someone demanded that of me, I'd quit on the spot.

Survivorship bias though, not everyone has great coaches in their life or people who see their potential. You got dealt a good hand and played it well, and that's great, but not everyone is so lucky.

Working 12 hour days I would not recommend to anyone. Go out and play.

I did good too doing the opposite of this advice.

I think it sounds nutty.

> I was able to compress 10 years of experience into about half that time.

Not a dig, as you're incredibly driven and intelligent to achieve all of the above; I will say this can backfire early, for as painful as those 20 YOE first year x20 types are it's much, much worse to endure the HR hurdles from being the opposite.

>I did the learn a language a year thing and that helped me get a job as a compiler writer.

>And I was able to leverage that into becoming a quant as I put in the hours to relearn all the math I'd forgotten from school.

What was your first job role?

> I didn't seem to miss out on a social life and I had no burn out or resentment to speak of from those days

Correction: you don't really know what you missed out on or don't value those things.

that's not a correction, you're just offering potential explanations

Let me challenge the findings of that scientific study with my highly specific anecdote which portrays me in good light.

> Let me challenge the findings of that scientific study with my highly specific anecdote which portrays me in good light.

I don't think I challenged any findings, I mearly showed how working hard in my 20s has helped setup the rest of my life.

I figured that could help people starting gout in their career.

Some of us like to help others around here:)

I would argue against this in the IT industry, but I'm a SysAdmin and we're not known for common sense when it comes to working hours. Lots of other sense, sure, but this? Not so much.

In seriousness, I would like to see less of this. After working through most of my career this way, I would change it, if I did it over.

To new SysAdmins or just hard-headed senior admins like me:

It will still be there tomorrow.

> we're not known for common sense when it comes to working hours

Sorry, what does this mean? As in sysadmins are notorious for non-stop working? (I've never been a sysadmin and I don't know any sysadmin tropes.)

Yes. We work normal shifts, but also, the very best time to work on servers is after hours/holidays, etc. so we tend to work a lot of both.

We also tend towards ownership of the gear, so it becomes a little personal. It's also a bit of professional pride.

I worked as the Director of IT for 3 hospitals over my career in acute care. I maintained 99%+ uptime on these systems, since this is acute care. I'm proud of that, but man that was a lot of work.

Sysadmins and “1 man it shops” are tough because most people in business dont give a shit until its broken. Its a classic “it works fine why do we pay you?” Or “its broken what do we pay you for anyways” situation 95% of the time, its lose lose. If you are sales you work hard and bring more money, engineer work hard and deliver product faster. Ops just works hard to keep things alive, its very under appreciated by business.

I say this in no way to be dismissive of ops, if anything i am negstive of many management types, especially in non tech companies, that under value their ops teams.

More sysadmins should do a strict 40 hour work week, ask for overtime and paid on call.

Late in my career I started focusing on balancing life and work. I still work additional hours, but I've worked out some comp time. If I work 8 hours on the weekend, I take Monday off. Ok.. Some of Monday..lol

I saw an MST3K a long time ago with a line that I've remembered ever since. Caveman Times, old man in a cave, laying on a rock, noise outside, and the old man rushes out of the cave. The MST3K guys overdubbed, "It's always something with this Tribe".

That quote is SysAdminLife, imo.

Haha if there's one role I steer clear then it's anything OPs/admin related - no shortage of ass clenching situations where your job/product/the entire company might not be there tomorrow.

We mitigate this by being prepared. We keep things running well, with lots of likely needless PM. The problem is, you never know what PM is needless until the need arises.

We also usually have plans for getting things up and running again quickly, because revenue stops when the info doesn't flow.

But, even with all of that, we still pucker sometimes and develop weird habits.

One of mine is not looking at a server booting, after a serious repair with a 50/50 shot of working. Somehow, in my mind, the chances of it working are improved based on whether I'm looking at it or not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I ain't changing anything either. I've had some systems that I managed to literally raise from the dead and they booted, in part, because I wasn't looking at the screen during boot. I will accept no other explanation for the results.

> In relation to specific diseases, the ILO indicates that 32.4% of deaths at work are due to circulatory problems...

In the US military I was fortunate to be part of a team training for some specific events similar to long distance orienteering set apart from my normal run a 4m - 10k a morning routine in a paratrooper battalion. During this training my resting heart rate dropped from 38 BPM to 25 BPM as our workouts kept our heart rates elevated in that sweet spot for 10+ hours a day. I felt as though I had limitless energy and slept so deeply.

I think for some occupations and risk factors, more work of specific types is actually a giant plus.

We have too many people dying of issues relating to our sedentary lifestyles and cushy office jobs.

I was working as a contractor in a chemical plant owned by one of the largest companies in F500.

Work beyond 50 hours required approval from your direct manager. Work beyond 55 hours had to be approved by the next level of management. Beyond 60 hours required approval from the highest level of plant management and was usually only approved during commissioning when you have no choice but to start your testing at random hours of the day or emergency scenarios.

How does the long work day cause the death? Is it fatigue related accidents or something else?

>We concluded that working long hours is associated with depressive state, anxiety, sleep condition, and coronary heart disease.

https://www.sjweh.fi/download.php?abstract_id=3388&file_nro=...

>The evidence that long working hours are a risk factor for cardiovascular disease is accumulating and suggests a small risk.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11886-018-1049-9

>[...] working long hours is associated with an elevated risk of early cardiovascular death and hospital-treated infections before age 65.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

> >[...] working long hours is associated with an elevated risk of early cardiovascular death and hospital-treated infections before age 65.

But that sounds more like stress, depression and burnout which releases cortisol which causes inflammation right? If you work 12+ hours/day with 0 stress and only enjoyment, will the outcome be the same?

I'd wager that most workers doing 12 hour days aren't enjoying themselves.

Sure, but if they were, would that not result in another outcome?

As someone who really enjoys their job and also typically works 10-12+ hrs a day full time, I can tell you that the lack of sleep and lack of work/life balance really adds up. It’s just not very sustainable long term and requires entire weekends to recover from and inevitably leads to burnout.

Because even with loving your job, there are still only 24 hrs in a day, and spending most of those working leaves very little time to take care of anything outside of your work life. So even if I may not be stressed out over my job, trying to get everything else in my life done in between work can cause huge amounts of stress.

As someone who has been doing 7 days a week 10-12 hours for the past 30 years and never had any issues and still get up happy, well rested and no stress, I think really your job should be your life in this case ; I mean my work is my hobby, my wife works in the company as well. I don't really can see another of being. I could've retired nicely over 20 years ago but I really don't like the stuff most people spend their days doing.

But the point is, I guess, it's not the hours; it's that somewhere you are still getting stress or discomfort from it and that's the problem. 10-12 hours a day leave 4+ hours for the gym, games, etc and 8 hours for sleep. I cannot see how that ever can amount to lack of sleep? Work/life balance is another thing; if you have kids this doesn't work, if you don't, it depends on how much you need I guess.

I mean, that’s great that you can make your schedule work for you but everyone’s situation isn’t the same. You clearly have a very unique situation that you can work with your wife and consider your job your hobby. Not everyone can maintain their relationship by hiring their spouse. Do you work a desk job? Do you WFH? Do you have downtime during the day? Are you your own boss? People’s situations vary greatly and not everyone has those same luxuries.

Add in 1-2 hours of commuting and those 4 hours become 2. That’s 2 hours to make and eat dinner, cleanup, take care of pets, shower and get ready for work the next day in order to get 8 hours of sleep; and that doesn’t even factor in time to get ready in the morning. If I want to do anything else beyond that, then it will have to cut into my time for sleep.

The point is absolutely the hours worked. I shouldn’t have to sacrifice my sleep and health in order to take care of things in my personal life because the entirety of my waking hours are taken up by work.

Edit:

I’d also like to point out that in one of your comments you claim that you got 3-5 hours of sleep a night throughout your 20’s working at your first company, so clearly you haven’t actually managed to be happy and well rested for all those 30 years. It seems you’re only sleeping 8 hours a night now that your older and financially comfortable.

“Never slept better getting older; I used to do 3-5 hour nights in my 20s because of stress for my company, sold the company and had no worries anymore so slept 8-9 hours/day. Opened another company but with far less worries (if it fails it's sad but far from the existential stress the first company was) so now into my 50s I lay down, pass out and wake exactly 8 hours later.”[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38514444

Sounds like an interesting experiment, though probably impossible to set up.

Thanks! I'll have to read these. Seems like a lot of those conditions have been correlated with other attributes, such as lower income, etc. I wonder if working longer hours is really just a result of things like money problems causing the stress causing other issues.

Just grabbed a selection of both new and a bit older articles from okay sources. There is a lot of studies and reviews on the subject. Try checking for articles citing those three if you want to dive deeper. I believe it should be a good jumping off point.

Yeah, I mean I've seen a bunch of different ones exploring different factors. I was just wondering what was new about the one in the article (that the article didn't really cover and the link in the article took me to another article but not the actual study).

Exhausting manual labor in hot environments can just cause you to have a heart attack, especially at an older age. I know a good handful of men who were general laborers who died from heart attacks who didn't have the luxury of slowing down in their 40s, simply because they just pushed themselves too hard for too long.

I knew a single mother in her early 30s who died from a heart attack who simply worked every hour she could, and she wasn't even doing what most would consider "manual labor".

I was once asked to do 60 hour weeks indefinitely at a Perl shop. I quit of course, but it bothers me that it even entered their mind to ask such a thing. Wtf?

Wow that's not many at all. In fact, simply on a net basis, I'm willing to wager that the benefits very likely outweigh the costs.

> Working more than 55 hours a week kills 750k people a year worldwide

This cannot be true. I read about a CEO who worked 16 hours a day for 35 years. /s

If we worked zero hours, then zero people would die from working.

See also: "we lowered the speed limit and get X fewer deaths on the road".

Flawed logic. Lowering the speed limit does not reduce the time spent on the road, yet fewer people die.

Huh, that's actually a good point. Thanks for that.

Those two.scenarois dont compare well,because people can still drive just fine at a lower speed...

Yeah, this logic is seriously flawed.

For this analogy to work you would need to say “if people drove zero hours, then zero people would die from driving.”

No one is suggesting that people stop working and it’s pretty disingenuous to imply that.

This may explain why people working in tech are young - those that work long enough in the industry probably die before reaching old age. Without a family life, and on their way to an open plan office.

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