Who's in the Office? The American Workday in One Graph | Hacker News Reader

Who's in the Office? The American Workday in One Graph

npr.org

152 pointsnikhilpandit36 comments

Do 9-5 jobs with paid lunch exist?

Everything I've seen is either 8-5 or 9-6 or some variation of that. Heck, where I am now is 9 hour days plus they encourage you to take lunch, 7-5. Half-day Friday though.

I have a friend who works for a large software company (SAS), and he works 9-5 with an hour lunch in the middle.

Some still do, I guess it largely depends on the company. Each company I've worked at the last several years were 9-5 or 10-6 with lunch break in the middle somewhere.

I work any hours I want basically, I just have to show up to weekly meetings. But I work for a startup where the success of the business is linked to my efforts. So it behooves me to eat a quick lunch and return to work.

It's the same with my vacation. In my agreement it said "vacation: as you see fit". I hope to use that the same way, responsibly.

It's not for everyone obviously. Some people don't work the same way and will take advantage.

> So it behooves me to eat a quick lunch and return to work.

As you stated, it's not for everyone. I went from a position with a mandatory half hour lunch to one where I had an optional lunch up to an hour long. I find that I'm much more productive when I take a full hour for lunch, and then stay an extra half hour after when I would normally leave. It really breaks up my day, and time doesn't seem to drag on towards the end of the day.

It also helps that I live close to work, so I can go home and play with my dog for a while. She has really good ideas, and has helped me get through some conundrums.

My co-workers have those hours. In at 9, 1 hour lunches, out at 5 on the dot most days. As a consultant, however, I'm paid hourly, so I get to stay late every night.

They (kinda) exist in Finland, as lunch is unpaid, but the workday is 7.5 hours and the workweek is 37.50 hours. Lunch is often optional, but a typical workday can be from 9 to 5 with a 30 minute lunch break. There can also be two ~10min "coffee" breaks in addition to the lunch break but they typically matter only in non-software development work environments..

Is 7.5 the standard workday in Finland or are you talking only about your case? If it's typical, it's very encouraging to read about it and it explains a lot about why it's mostly Scandinavian places that are willing to experiment with 6 hours also.

By law the maximum is 40 hours per week (8 hours a day). The length of the workday is determined by a "generally binding" collective labor agreement[1]. It depends on the sector you're working in, but is often 37.50 hours per week. In the IT industry it's almost everywhere 37.50 hour per week. Some sectors have a 40 hour work weeks, but have extra days off here and there to bring the average down to 37.50 hours.

1. http://www.tietoala.fi/english/

Depends on the country. They are very common outside of the U.S., but seemingly a lot less common in the U.S..

One of the things that marks a "salaried" job out from hourly paid is that there are normally no fixed hours - unfortunately a lot of employers do not seem to understand this.

I expected to see more night owls in the "Computer and mathematical" category, but it looks like we're more conventional than the average.

The vast majority of computer programming is done in "stodgy", "boring" settings, like offices and for government projects, so this really shouldn't be a surprise for that field. The "work anywhere when you like, just get your 8 in" concept is relatively niche, even in the Valley "glamor" bubble.

Do you do your best work at night? I have the most fun coding at midnight with a cup of coffee. But, my work schedule doesn't permit that much...

Exactly. According to Oracle there are approximately 9 million Java developers in the world, and since Java is the enterprise programming language, an awful lot of them are working 8-5 in a cubicle.

I don't have numbers to back it up, but I suspect there are a huge number of programmers who work in mega-corps where the office is empty by 5pm.

The American Time Use Survey only measures "paid work" which I assume excludes personal projects and most "night owl" activity other than being in operations/on call or having a particularly bad job.

IT professionals (as a group) aren't really any different than any other group of workers.

Professional "exempt" workers I think you meant to say it will be quite different to a shift worker on the line at Ford or GM

No, I didn't. There are IT shift workers too.

The post I was replying to said they thought Computer and Math workers would be more night owls. Something that is really just based on the mothers basement late at night stereotype of those called geeks.

I was saying that IT workers just aren't that different than everyone else.

Well the number of hourly paid tape ops or punch card operators is probably not that many any more.

And don't forget those special laws that where passed to categorise hourly paid IT workers as exempt.

I'd be interested in seeing a weekday version of this data.

Realtors, car sales, etc, all work weekends. In tech, what about weekend maintenance windows?

Admittedly, that's probably less of a thing now we have redundancy and continuous deployment practises; the concept of a late night / weekend change window is diminishing in my personal experience. I'm intrigued if that's true across the tech industry.

> Admittedly, that's probably less of a thing now we have redundancy and continuous deployment practises; the concept of a late night / weekend change window is diminishing in my personal experience. I'm intrigued if that's true across the tech industry.

Odd, my experience is exactly the opposite. Increase complexity breads increasing numbers of potential problems, which causes partial outages at unpredictable times and for unpredictable reasons (or reasons so complex they are perceived as unpredictable).

Now are these "user impacting?" Often times, no. But they will become user impacting if left for too long (e.g. new instances aren't able to connect to a database, but existing ones are connected: classic DNS problems). So people are still waking up in the middle of the night to fix stuff when the alerts start streaming in.

The only thing that has REALLY changed is that now you can often fix these issues from your bedroom in your PJs. Since the AWS, Azure, Rackspace, etc console doesn't care where you are or what you're wearing.

But companies are getting no better at actually having around the clock staff. When they used to out-source a dedicated server the data centre would employ 24/7 staff on real shifts, Amazon/Rackspace/Google/etc do the same, but for the software side of things you rarely see it (never?). Most companies just expect employees to be on-call 24/7 as part of their salary (unpaid overtime essentially).

Weird, I came to work once at Twitter at 9am and I was the only one in sight on the whole floor.

I need to work at Twitter. I am a complete night owl and always push the limits of acceptable lateness at my corporate programming job.

I used to come in at 7am to beat traffic at my startup. There would only be a handful of people until everyone else started rolling in around 10. After acquisition by IBM basically everyone is there at 9 for a stand up and now I come in later when I do go in.

A couple of things that one would guess, but are neat none the less: Food prep is the only one without a dip during the lunch hour (they are preparing what everyone else is eating). Also, protective services has the fattest tails (most late shift workers).

Doctors match average the best? Am I reading that right?

Legal skips lunches the most. Engineers are most likely to be in office at peak hours along with legal and finance.

Great graph, though I was a bit confused by the categories - I ended up picking "Computer and mathematical", which seemed to be a strange way to describe what I do (but hey, I'm not American either).

Interesting data, reminds me of that thread a few months ago about work start times by city; I expected a bit more variation on some of the industries here, but I guess most of them are large categories.

Why is there a peak at 3 am for legal? It looks like an statistical error to me, unless it has something to do with conference calls and people starting their workday in Europe.

Legal doesn't even start climbing from 0 until after 6 am. Are you looking at "protective services" perhaps, which has a slightly-pre-3 am trough?

This bump http://i.imgur.com/dt0iVfG.png

Oops I'm sorry. I missed it.

if you take one of this graph for the east coast and overlay it with another one 3 hours shifted for the west coast, you get the traffic graph for pretty much every US news site. thats why the founder of buzzfeed calls it the "bored at work network".

hmm. "computer" is grouped with "mathematical" jobs. And these people are less likely to come in early and less likely to stay late. Seems reasonable...

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