Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks
hbr.org
hbr.org
In my experience, and granted I haven't worked in the US, the number of hours you spend in the office is always expected to be in line with what your manager has committed to paying you for.
In countries like Germany or Holland, if you consistently stay over-time in the office you might be surprised to find that you will be called upon justifying your behavior since the local belief is that you are either incompetent and can't finish the work assigned to you in your normal work schedule, which will cost the company money to train you or hire a replacement, or your manager is incompetent because he over-assigned your time and it will cost the company money when you finally burnout or start taking shortcuts in your work.
Other European countries have established rules that forbid employers contacting their employees (mail or phone) outside of business hours to avoid the pressure of having to do work on your personal time.
I don't want to start a "war" about US vs insert-European-country-here productivity but, honestly, do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
[0] https://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/93636/is-pro...
On that note, if you want to challenge your exempt status, you must have a record of your hours that you are going to try to claim on.
Was it billable? No. Was it paid for? Yes. Does it have work value? Yes. Is it "technically" work? Maybe. Did I have a good time? Yes. Would I have done it if I didn't think there was business value to it? Absolutely not.
quick edit: he works with businesses, too, so he does 80 hour weeks in Oct/Nov. and again in Mar/Apr. and then 40 hour weeks the rest of the year.
If you were a contractor you could probably justify those expenses as part of your activity because it's culturally acceptable to engage in alcohol consumption with work relationships and you were representing your company while doing so.
This is not an exaggerated quote, it's taken from the notes I wrote immediately after the incident.
"engi_nerd, we at $MEDIUM_SIZED_AEROSPACE_COMPANY expect our engineers to work at least 15 to 20 hours of unpaid overtime each week. This is the minimum of what you need to do to demonstrate that you are ready for a promotion. During that extra time, we'll assign you duties that are beyond your normal job responsibilities. Carry those out well and you'll prove that you're ready for a promotion."
I swear I am not making this up. When I stated that I refused to do what he asked, the manager said, "Then you'll never have a chance to be promoted from what you're doing now." That very day I went home and began updating my resume; my final day at that job was less than 4 months later.
It pays to know good people.
To me, and maybe I'm just too cynical, but it sounds like the manager was telling you that the company needed 50% of your work to be off the books in order for them to meet expectations which is a sign of a poorly managed company. But then again it makes sense since, according to him, only people who show no capacity to self-manage, prioritise or delegate get promoted.
I think you did well in leaving that job, good on you!
The phrase "it's not rocket science" has a whole new meaning for me now.
BTW, I'm impressed that you're organised enough to keep notes on such exchanges after they happen; memory alone is too damn unreliable.
I was proven right two days before I handed in my resignation letter, when said manager called me to the carpet and informed me in very direct terms that he thought I was an extremely poor engineer and was not going to last long without an attitude adjustment. I believe that my refusal to work overtime, as well as my refusal to comply with management directives I found to be unethical, was what triggered that conversation.
The unethical acts they wanted me (and all my fellow engineers to do): work on one mission while billing time to another, which is illegal while working on US government contracts, and tell ISO auditors that we were following our engineering redlining process while actually following a secret, different process that was not officially released in our document management system.
Not going to prison for you, nor am I compromising my professional ethics.
A lot of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft's employees all seem to put in long hours and are productive with the extra time. Amazon on the other hand is one of the companies with a lot of people "pretending" to work long hours. I was looking into these companies when applying to jobs and that was a sense I got at least.
American here. No need for "a war". European countries are more productive. Long hours don't work. Most Americans know it, and would agree with everything you have to say.
I would generally agree with you, although I don't think that long hours necessarily signify incompetence. In the HBR article, the sense given is that they signify being bad at politics, and therefore find themselves in a position where they sacrifice too much and only get moderate reward. The people who are good at politics figure out how to "pass", how to get full credit for being dedicated without working unsustainable hours.
It's a vicious cycle: people who are bad at politics put their heads down and work 80-hour weeks, and because they're overworked they never learn how the politics of the organization really work (they don't have the time) and, when they inevitably tire of the nonsense and face time, they don't have the political skill to reduce their effort and get away with it, even though they could probably cut their hourage by 50% at least without hurting the company at all.
The counterintuitive reality is that overwork projects low status, in the US as it does in the EU, but so many people are oblivious to the fact and think that "busy" is a good look on them. (It's a good look to other over-busy, mid-level chumps. It doesn't fool the people with actual power.) There are a few jobs in which you simply have to work 90-hour weeks or you'll get fired (e.g. investment banking's analyst programs) and my observations wouldn't apply but, even in the US, they're rare. This isn't like Japan salaryman culture where average people have to work 14-hour days just to stay put. In general, working in a way that lowers your status, emphasizing availability and sacrifice rather than unique skill, tends only to get you more grunt work.
The irony is that, 10 years ago at age 21, these bankers and consultants were, for the most part, way ahead of people like me in terms of social skills. But after 10 years of doing the true-believer thing and working themselves to death, they've gotten to the (surprising) point where they suck at politics.
This is also why I think it's silly that Americans are so averse to learning "office politics". Academically, it's a disgraceful game, but if being halfway good at it saves you 20 hours per week and gets you the same damn reward, it's absolutely worth learning. The truth is that 5 percent of one's reputation as a strong or weak performer is performance, 10 percent is raw (and obvious) politics, and 85% is the politics of performance that looks like merit to true-believer types, but is usually quite game-able. And there's nothing morally wrong with gaming it; it makes a person more likely to reach a high-impact role with his or her capability intact, and that benefits the company as much as the individual.
Do you have a citation for this? I've heard it before but I'm curious where it comes from.
For example, the jobs for people who put your stuff in paper bags at Walmart do not exist in large parts of Western Europe, and doormen are way rarer. In general, the USA has more low-paying, low productivity jobs than Western Europe. That lowers average productivity for the USA.
Also, measuring productivity is hard. You can't look at pay, as that can be quite different for exactly the same work (you can get a suit made in Asia for peanuts, but that doesn't mean people working there aren't productive)
So, you scale for _something_: average income (before or after taxes), hamburger index, or whatever. In the end, it will be very, very hard, if not impossible, to do that objectively. If the outcome of your procedure differs by a large factor from what you expect, you will search for errors in your logic. If it matches what you expect, it is hard to keep searching as hard.
You _can_ let both design a bridge according to the same rule set, but to measure how hard teams work and not how fast they can do that task, you have to make sure both have equal experience with that rule set (US engineers will likely be faster at designing a U.S. bridge than UK engineers, and vice versa)
To make a truly fair comparison of efficiency of working, you probably will end up with an exercise where both teams design a bridge that will never get built. Possible? Yes, but also expensive.
Not really true. Only 2-3 European countries are more productive in terms of GDP per hour worked. Varies based on dataset: [0] [1]
[0] http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL [1] http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV
And we're talking European countries with the populations of smaller US states. Luxembourg, Norway, and Ireland.
But I've never really thought about office politics in those terms, thank you for the enlightening post.
There's another game you can play, which is to find organizations (or parts of organizations) where there is a minimum amount of politics to begin with. These are usually younger, high-growth companies filling a real need in the marketplace; because everyone's so busy delivering value to the customer, they don't have time to compete with each other, nor do they need to because the pie's expanding faster than anyone can gobble up a piece of it. As Eric Schmidt liked to say, "More revenue solves all known problems."
The problem with personally optimizing for office-politics is that now you have a big comparative advantage over other employees, but only in high-politics workplaces. That will bias your selection criteria toward companies which are about to fail in the marketplace, which may not be a winning strategy in the long term.
I agree that this conflict of interest exists.
At some critical point, the organization collapses inwards on itself and becomes unable to react to changing market conditions, and goes out of business. That's why there's resistance to teaching or even making people aware of politics: eventually it results in the destruction of everyone's jobs.
That, I'm not sure that I buy. Large tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have a lot of politics but are still very successful. I think that, at some point, companies get to a level where typical political behavior doesn't help them, but won't unhorse them either. Most Fortune 500 companies do just fine at delivering returns to investors and salaries to employees, despite being large and political.
The problem with personally optimizing for office-politics is that now you have a big comparative advantage over other employees, but only in high-politics workplaces.
Sure, and I don't advise learning only politics. I think that people need to learn enough to solve political problems and to avoid losing fights. (It's rare that any kind of fight is ever "won", so avoiding political fights in general might be best. I wish I had known this when I was at Google.) Ideally, it's best to specialize in something that adds value but learn enough politics to get by, protect the good, and keep one's work from falling into a black hole.
The sad truth, as we'd both agree, is that organizations tend to end up being run by people who specialized in politics itself. That's unfortunate and, given the game-theoretic issues that you already described quite well, I don't see an easy solution. When bodies end up being overwhelmed by individually fit cells that harm the organism we call it "cancer". When corporations' upper ranks are filled with individually fit (politically speaking) people who lack vision or care for the organization, we end up with exactly what you described.
Sage advice from Christ Matthews: "Don't get Mad; Don't get even; Get ahead" https://books.google.com/books?id=Klm4oM20MpMC&pg=PA105&lpg=...
As human beings that evolved for living in smaller tribes, our anger and retribution instinct makes a lot of sense. If you get a reputation for just accepting being walked all over, then your life will be much worse. You need to need have honor, and to defend your honor, and attack those who bully you. But in the modern world, reputation does not travel in the same way. Nor do you have the same tools for defending yourself. Duels became passe long ago. So fighting back often is just net negative to your own interests. When you run into a bad boss, the past option is usually to play along and then plot an escape.
Those large tech companies have put some solid barriers to enter in their markets before being run by politics. I suspect nostrademons is suggesting to work in a new sector, where there is no clear leader and no entry cost: any startup has a chance to win. However in this case one has to sell the products, make some partnerships, market one's company, etc. which might involve politics, but outside the company.
Knock it down to 14h, and I can think of 2 people. I worked for both, and both fell into the category of having moved to the US from another country. My career took me elsewhere, but they were both great to work for.
It's worth watching this talk from the Leading @ Google series - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tke6X2eME3c
The short version is, despite the information-age, we still think about this stuff in an industrial-age terms; that productivity is directly proportional to time spent. In fact it's highly non-linear for most forms of information-age value creating activitie.
As an anecdote, when I first moved abroad I was single and didn't speak the local language (Dutch) so I didn't really have any incentive to interact socially outside of work and I ended up spending way too many hours in the office but just about managing to do my job competently because I was pretty sad and demotivated all the time and often doubted my decision to move abroad.
No, they held US citizenship. They were just hardworking immigrants.
I'm the grandson of immigrants, which makes me positively lazy by comparison. I pretty much have to knock off after 12 hours these days.
It depends on what you are working on, how important that is, how interesting it is and what is at stake. There have been instances when I could do long hours which just come naturally out of the flow. Other times, its difficult to get by the day and I long to see 5:00 on the watch.
Having said that most of the burnouts and hatred towards long working are caused due to resentment. I have seen people used and thrown like tissues for the well being of political cartels within companies.
Overall I think this is the largest flaw in Humans. Else if we had any appreciation for meritocracy we would all be living in space colonies by now. A lot of talent and work is lost because a few hardworking are making up for every one else. And with rewards continuously being stolen by the thieves in the political cartels, there is a little incentive for anybody genuine to stay up and contribute.
Conclusion is people don't like to work hard when they get nothing in return. This situation is starving the whole world ecosystem of good work.
That belief makes too much sense. To be a belief shouldn't there be a contrary believable belief? I wouldn't want to be part of the other retrograde group who believes something else.
The sad thing is how many people actually live like this, defining themselves through what they do instead of who they are.
Out of curiosity, are you German? My experience with German companies was centred in the financial services sector out of Frankfurt and some tech companies out of Munich and overtime was never even suggested so I'm thinking there might also be some differences between the regions.
I was even explicitly told by some companies when interviewing that they expect and encourage workers to stay until at least 7-8pm...at least between Berlin and Vienna there is definitely a difference in attitude.
In short bursts, I think the diminishing returns of long hours is sorta overblown. Over the long term, 16 hour days will wear you down and destroy you.
I work in a big law and 16 hour days are too common. But people are successfully managing billion dollar deals and litigation while doing 16 hours fairly often.
But over a long period of time it takes a toll emotionally and physically.
One problem with organizations that bill by the manhour--law and consulting--is that even if the employee output diminishes, the firm still bills the same rate. There isn't a lot of incentive to keep your employees heads fresh.
I think you've hit a pretty good point straight in the head here. The article also seems to focus on a consulting company which very likely sells man-hour packages so it is on their best interest to have "heroes".
If you want to be at the table, you need to be in the cool kids club. If you want to be in the club, you need to sacrifice your identity to the club. Membership requires that you look, think and act like a member. In exchange for your sacrifice, you'll be financially rewarded, and usually become a member of a little fraternity that will be a tight social network as your career progresses.
It's all about what you want. In this case, you make a decision to become a management consultant to banks and Fortune 50 companies. In doing so, you're trading cub scouts for the prestige and rewards of working with those clients. You're not going to be super-dad, you're going to be the cartoon character dad who is never around and fucking around with your iPhone when you are. They tell you up front that they own you -- it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
If you're in this situation "Take a pay cut" is a ridiculous approach. If you're in a business like that, you're a type-A predator type, and doing that will just marginalize you. "Be strategic in picking a career" is the advice you should follow.
Raising a happy well-functioning family is freaking hard, I would say it's by far the hardest task one could endeavor on. I have big respect for every man who achieves that. What one has in CV is marginal and really unimportant compared to that. But I am far from stating everybody should have this drive.
These firms absolutely want the employees stressed out to a degree that contemplating escape from the cage seems like too much.
While this is true, the fact of the matter, is people like to do business with people they trust and they tend to trust people like them.
I don't think it is as nefarious as you make it sound, but it is a problem because it implies it isn't based on merit, and while there are circumstances that it isn't, a lot of it is. They are where they are based on skills and experiences, but the barriers to entry are high because Fortune 50 companies aren't just handing these jobs out to people they can't trust.
Anyway, I did what most of the men described in the article did. I learned how to work without working. It was easy to copy the kind of workaholic appearance expressed by many of my peers.
The strange thing was that most everyone was pretending. Everyone was just lying. It was like there was some secret unwritten rule that we should pretend instead of talking about the obvious elephant in the room. Which was that we were asked too much of us and that needed to change.
When I was first starting out (way before I took that job) I was told that the idea is to "manage perception" and that appears to be true of a few places.
I have been giving this advice to quite a few people lately, both inside and outside my company.
As a manager I feel that my team's productivity benefits more from "work hygiene" than from long hours, but we have a few team members who have come under scrutiny because of perceived short hours.
My advice to them is always, "I trust that you are doing your best as a part of the team. But remember, the teams perception is what matters. And when you leave at 3 it looks like you are slacking. No one knows you got here at 6 because they weren't here. So rather than changing your behavior, work on changing their perception."
(I'm doing that right now.)
My goal as a manager is to promote better work hygiene in my employees. Which was supposed to be the point of my comment, probably should have left off how I personally have dealt with this.
Are you sure about that? You're a manager. Responding to your parent comment about managing worker's perceptions of their team members: In the case that someone wants to leave at 3 because they got there at 6, why not just explain to everyone that it is, in fact, okay (or even encouraged)?
One of my employees does this by spending the morning hours managing his inbox and otherwise catching up. Additionally, he always makes a fresh pot of coffee right when getting in. The coffee maker has a 2 hour heat timer, so when it dings at 8:30am it's a clear indication he was in the office early.
You don't have to be blatant. He isn't, but he's well known as the guy in the office that likes working super early, and no one gets bent when he steps out of the office by 4pm. They occasionally whine about how it's unfair he's a morning person and gets to enjoy the afternoon sun, but it's jovial joking about their night owl habits compared to his morning habits.
Basically, having a good team that understands and respects each other is the key. If you don't have that you miss out on many of the good parts.
"Hey guys, I know we are an non-profitable early-stage startup, but do you think we could all try to stick to 8 hour work days?"
I find it interesting that everyone always assumes that working more hours means less quality of life. I thoroughly enjoy my job, so spending more time doing it does not detract from anything.
"Only 13 percent of people worldwide actually like going to work"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2013/10...
Yep. And people here harp on unions a lot, but we owe two-day weekends to unions.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottwinship/2014/10/20/has-ineq...
How else do you interpret "the wedge" except as the failure of labor to advocate strongly enough for its interests?
Seriously, the only reason people have that perception is because big companies have the money to run smear campaigns against labor.
It's better to not condition your manager to think this is acceptable early on, or it quickly becomes something you can be forced to do regularly.
I do agree that if that's the case, you definitely shouldn't be putting in a continuous 12, because it's almost guaranteed your management isn't.
The worse case is when they want presence, and as a result, people stay at work long hours reloading the internet. There's no point in that, which is why it's important to just measure results, not effort.
I actually feel like I'd be bothering my boss by asking him to leave early. Sometimes he asks me if I'll be in at 3pm or whatever for some meeting that may or may not move a needle, just to send the message that no, I'm not expected to be at my desk all day.
Because my work generally impacts no one else in the company, unless there's a fire I rarely interact with them on anything other than a social level, no one knows or cares when I get in or leave. It's just a perception-management game that I'm pretty good at. Projecting competence goes a very long way towards allowing you leeway to claw back on expectations.
He has always said, "I don't track butt in chair time. That doesn't matter. What matters is that you get work done."
People lived that. They got their work done and work was fairly flexible and happy.
The message has changed to "I don't track butt time. As long as you are here 40 hours / week, you can spend as much additional time working as you want."
Not surprisingly, unhappiness has increased significantly and productivity has taken a corresponding hit.
We did. But we didn't get much done on those days, like anyone could have told you happens with knowledge work.
All those engineers, including me, are now gone from there.
The company is looking for cheater types because:
1) they clearly can't cope with employees telling the truth, that is, there are priorities other than work.
2) they reward looking busy over being productive.
Except, well… that might be illegal.
Telling people to cheat the client is illegal and unethical, but creating a culture where people behave in that way is only unethical.
> You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my son had a Cub Scout meeting.
I felt a sharp disdain for the managers. Seriously, children growing up is a onetime thing.It's fucked up beyond reason that people accept this, and I'd gladly take a lower paying job so I can be there.
I loved the book Red Mars in which children were quite uncommon, so whenever a child was about all the adults would pay them lots of attention. This included bosses.
Some people rationalize it with that making sure their kid lives in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, goes to a great school, has access to all the latest gadgets and gets to to travel the world is the best thing they can do for their kids. And if the cost is that they have to work 14 hour days and hardly ever see their kids then that is a sacrifice they're willing to step up and make.
No saying I agree, but I can certainly see how you could convince yourself that working an 80 hour week is you doing the best thing for your kids and family.
Furthermore while I agree with (having done so myself) saying "Take a pay cut, do less hours.", it is only easy when you are already essentially rich. If "take a pay cut" meant I would have to move my family into a tiny apartment in the shitty part of town I probably wouldn't have such a cavalier attitude about it.
In those careers where there is in fact an intermediate state, it can feel as though it is very narrow and difficult to stay in.
While the parent getting more pay may not really be important to a child, their long-term job security could prove to be essential.
I live in Middle Europe.
The central Europe countries that I know (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, etc.) and western-Europe coutries (France, Great Britain, etc.), there is a choice and most don't work on Saturday or even Sunday (except for certain jobs like DevOps/Admins, restaurants/hotels, factory workers with shifts, etc.). But in some of these countries you also cannot go shopping during the night (shops are only opened from about 9 am to 7 pm) nor on Sunday. You are not allowed to work more than specific hours per week. And even doctors with shifts that last more than 8 hours have several scheduled sleep hours.
I live there-ish too, and it depends on the country.
My wife and I chose to work less by starting our own business so we could spend lots of time with our kids when they were pre-schoolers. It's kinda backfiring a bit now. We are most definitely poor financially.
I have three boys (5, 4, 1) and another baby on the way. I'll tell you: some of the crap these kids do is freaking boring. Seriously. The older two are in T-ball now, and the practices and games are just mind bogglingly uninteresting. I'm glad they're playing, and I'm glad they're learning important life skills like following directions, understanding rules, and especially some physical prowess, but four innings is just numbing, especially when I'm also chasing around/entertaining my toddler at the same time.
Help with homework? Sure. Answer questions, all day long? Hell yeah I'll do that. Teach the oldest to play "Tower of Guns" to introduce him to using the mouse and keyboard? Yup, happy to help. But T-ball practice? God, only if I must. Cub scout meetings don't sound any better.
But you know what? That's perfectly fine. That's why we have coaches. There are also a number of other dads who are interested in T-ball and help out at practices and games. Not every parent has to be interested in every thing their kid does all the time: it's actually healthy for kids to encounter adults in roles other than "parent" and "teacher".
We always cringe in Europe about this thing in American movies/series, where its "so" important for the kid to have the parents be there for their school performance or game, especially when said kid is 12 or 15 or so.
In real life (at least here) most kids at that age would be enbarassed to be seen with their parents.
Sure, they like for parents to be there for some of the important stuff, but not most BS school functions or game practice.
I was more thinking along the line where you have arranged to go the park with your kid Sunday, and play some ball - work better not cancel that more often than not.
Its fun if you get involved either as a den leader/assistant or in the background (I was a treasurer). Its basically your ask questions and give directions but with a 15 kid family, thankfully temporarily. And the other parents can be interesting. Being a treasurer kept me busy.
Its actually kinda a downer when they graduate into boy scouts which is a boy run organization as opposed to cub scouts which is a parent run org. Last night all the parents got to do, other than observe, was provide endless safety warnings about their "chemical fuel" chit training. "So you don't try to find a propane stove leak using a match, right?" and its that kind of stuff all night long.
I should add that I am not suggesting that everyone should follow my example since it is really for everyone to decide how their life is best lived. I know I have not been able to acheive even a fraction of what I have wanted to do in my life, but I don't regret the choices I have had to make. There is only 24 hours a day for every person.
Now all I need to do is figure out how to live for a 1000 years so I can just do some of the things I still want to do.
Lots of private practice doctors and dentists have days off in the middle of the week so they can see patients on Saturday. We don't generally think of dentists as people who are worked so hard they can't spend time with their kids.
So, you should take a pay cut to work the agreed upon 40 hours salary? I don't see why not working unpaid overtime means you should get paid less to not work it.
I also hate when HR people or bosses equate the time spent being at work with effort (and let's not talk about efficiency or work output quality.) Being a great parent while working 40 or even 50 hours a week is still a remarquable achievement.
Yesterday my manager asked me what I was doing this evening, and whether I could cover a release in terms of support. As it happens, I can. If I had plans of any kind my answer would have been "Sorry, nope. I've got plans so need to be out of the office by xx:xx".
I hate this idea too. I'm lucky to be able to organize my work as I want to (working in academia). Asking a permission for such a thing sounds so wrong.
However, this freedom comes with a price. I earn much less than most of my friends with the same education level and I have to admit that I suffer (a little) to have a lesser social status and little recognition.
In the end, it's a matter of compromise.
People always tell me, "Oh, I could never do that, I like knowing I have a regular job," but they don't realize that A) they could get fired at any minute just because their boss doesn't like them, and B) I've had the same client for the last 3 years, which is longer than I've stayed at any job I've ever had before.
As long as you're working for someone else, as long as you aren't making the actual profit off of your work, your work will always be treated as a cost center, rather than an income center. You will never be paid the full value of your work, because there would be no point to paying someone to do the work if there were no profit in it for the employer. Ultimately, I'd like to get out of freelancing, but for now, at least freelancing lets me demand a higher portion of the margin. I've found it also seems to set me in a position of being a peer to my client (we are both business men) rather than a subordinate. It's a small difference that makes all the difference.
[1] It's incredibly hard to transition from a job in consulting to a job in a product-based software company. I think it's mostly that there are so few of the latter compared to the former, but I suspect the latter looks askew at people with a history at the former as well.
I'm not an employee, I don't have to pretend to care about career advancement and I get paid for the time I'm here. The money is actually better though I have to sort out my own pension provisions etc.
And I don't ask anyone's permission for anything, because they're my clients, not my manager.
Out of interest was it difficult to start (get your first gig)?
YMMV. If you're in London it's probably pretty easy. Elsewhere you'll need to be financially prepared for the odd two-three month hiatus.
Also, you aren't involved in office politics and you can upwardly delegate any decisions that you don't want to make ("I'm afraid I'm just a contractor, you'll have to ask my manager about that).
As a developer, I really get to get my head down and work hard, which is what I most enjoy about this job.
Need me to work overtime? Pay me.
No delusions about if the company is going to be acquired/give bonuses/advance your career.
Demand what you're worth, leave on time, and never receive an after hour request (because no one wants to pay your over time rate).
Sure, but it's a onetime thing that takes 15+ years.
I just turned 25 and I've worked a few jobs where pretending to work was the norm. It was a drag on me and I was single and in my early twenties. I couldn't imagine doing that while having kids at home as well.
At the same time, this ended up being one of my biggest motivators when it comes to my career. I don't want to end up in that position, ever. If I start a company, I don't want to be that manager. It sucked but it was also a great learning experience so that I know what to avoid in life.
That's the problem right there. These kind of consulting firms are the worst kind of soulless, dysfunctional, corporate sweatshops, preying on the ignorant management of other companies. They desperately try to compensate for the essential mediocrity of their expensive solutions with a veneer of marketing, overwork and crassly macho professionalism.
When a company is built on bullshit, and everyone knows it, even if they won't admit it, then the same falseness and bullshit eventually pervades every corner of the company, and produces the kind of poisonous atmosphere that makes them such a nightmare to work for.
We lived together. Sort of. I basically had the whole house to myself outside of midnight - 0700. Some nights he'd check in with me as I was lying in bed about to sleep. Quite often we'd go a whole week without seeing each other, the only sign of life from him being that his door was closed when I went off to work. Weekends were precious, sometimes we could get a meal in together. His Blackberry would ring, but he could push some things aside to after the meal. The initial rush of getting a prestigious job was soon replaced by complaints about the insanity of the system: sit around from morning to evening doing nothing, wait for the MD to make some work that you can do before the next morning.
So one day his boss decides he's had enough of everything and ends it all. This was a guy of similar background to my friend, similar culture. Just 20 years down the line.
I think it caused my friend to have some thoughts about where he wanted to be, how he wanted to live. He's changed jobs now, much happier, married, got a kid.
I think people mention children because a child depend on the parents far more than most people think. It's much easier to find time for yourself, or with your spouse, while working a lot, than it is with a child. I can spend time with my wife nearly every evening, or work on hobby projects - I barely have 1 hour with both my children in weekdays after school. So if my employer starts to take my weekend, I'm looking for a new job where I can also be a father.
"Can't dial in, my kids got a little league game on Sunday" which means 1 hr for kid and theoretically up to 23 hrs for hobby (well not really, but possibly). Scouts is only an hour and a half of actual scouting and the rest of the night is a night off from work. Swim meets were like that too, even counting drive time, a full weekend day off but the meet would only be like 3 hours.
I've never had an ethical problem with this. No one can be productive for more than 40 hours per week or so. Maybe less, honestly. The only hope of over 40 hours of actual net productivity is operating WAY below your ability. So they pretend to think we're productive, we'll pretend to be productive.
The reality was that the childless developers never got to use the flexible benefits. Your child has a soccer game? Is sick? Sure take the afternoon off, the childless devs will cover for you. We wouldn't want you to not be there for your child. Oh you want to take a two hour lunch to go out with your girlfriend. Too bad, so-and-so needs to pick their kid up from school so we need you to sit here and babysit the server while he's out.
Quote from OA itself quoting a statement made by a member of a team that self-organised their work-life balance. Later in the quote the team member points out that their team is regarded as highly effective. Just wondering if a positive work-life balance might be correlated with that high performance! Perhaps the company is missing a trick there.
Wat? Is this a thing in the US? If so, I'm incredibly happy I live in Sweden.
> many men experienced these expectations as difficult to fulfill or even distasteful.
No shit?
If you are in the driving seat for your career, I certainly feel that the USA provides more opportunity. However for the ~70% (random guess) of people who don't have the luxury of being selective with their jobs, the Swedish model looks extremely appealing.
Very much dependent on the company. For most, no, 40 hours is the standard and that's that. There's probably a skewed view here since early stage (i.e. desperate) startups often buck that trend. Harvard Business Review is also probably not the most unbiased voice on an issue like that.
Hierarchy is a very important cultural concept in SK, socially and professionally, and generally companies are far more layered than they would be in most western countries, resulting in lots of bosses. Because of this you have a trickle-down effect of "work more than the boss" hours, with people at the bottom working completely ridiculous hours.
This has two interesting consequences.
The first one I call "gold star sticker promotions", whereby people get promoted on a regular basis, often without a pay rise, sheerly for "working" more hours than the next guy. While the promotions often mean very little by themselves, they tend to result in slightly less work hours.
The second consequence is that people, as described in the article to some extent, actually end up doing very little work despite occupying a seat for so many hours. A friend of mine actually plays Diablo 3 while seating at his desk, and everybody's ok with that. In fact, he got promoted three times just last year. The point is not to get work done, it's simply to show that you're willing to give your soul to your employer.
80 hour weeks are important. It gives 40 hours for work, and 40 hours for personal growth. The former is a short cycle, and the latter is a long cycle.
1. If you trim down the growth part, your employees won't be competitive in the long term. Growth compounds, and sometimes superlinearly. If you know more, you learn faster.
2. This may be less relevant to management consulting, but if you trim down the work part, product part falls apart. I've seen organizations killed when work-life balance management stepped in. You go from 20 employees at 80 hours per week to 80 employees at 40 hours per week. Knowledge becomes much more distributed. Communication channels grow. Hiring standards slip.
In addition, if it's an 80 hour week, it becomes your life. It may sound like just 80 hours, but it dominates your life. You think about it in the shower. You dream about it. When you spend time with family, you're distracted with work and want to go work.
In practice, if I can get the same quantity of output from 20 employees as from 80 or a hundred at a higher level of quality, I can pay those employees at least five times as much. Many high-performance organizations try to make this trade-off.
But when society demands work life balance of employees with salaries starting at $300k and going into millions -- that falls flat.
Part of the obscene salaries go into making sure kids and families are healthy, even with a parent out of the house.
Making your workforce do 80 hours instead of 40 does not make them more productive. Motivating workers and putting them in control of their own work is what gets stuff done.
IMO there are two kinds of working relationships - face-based, and fact-based.
Face-based relationships are about impression management, egotism, and exploitation. A face-based employer has no interest in your life, because they only care about their narcissistic self-image. At best they have a delusional belief in the value of hierarchy and process as business goals in themselves. At worst they're simply assholes. If the entire culture is face-based you're in an alligator swamp, and you need to leave and work somewhere else.
A fact-based relationship is based on getting useful stuff done in an efficient way. A fact-based employer assumes employees are functional adults, and is more interested in the end result of the work. Process is only valuable if it creates observable positive results, not for its own sake. They consider employee happiness and development a significant positive benefit to the company.
How do you know this for sure? Not saying you're wrong, but I can think of many exceptions to this rule.
~ As for those other things you mentioned, the remaining 88 hours in the week would allocated as follows: 56 hours for sleep, 10 hours for meals, 3 hours for personal hygiene, 2 hours for exercise, 16 hours for a personal side project, and 1 hour to socialize. ~
~ You'll have plenty of time for friends and relationships when you're dead. If you really cared about the company, you would abandon your personal side project and work 96 hour weeks. If you spent less time eating, you could also spend less time exercising. And some of your co-workers do get a bit ripe at times, so you're probably over-allocating time to hygiene. It takes me 3 minutes to shower, head to toe. That's how you get ahead in this business: effective time management. Also, I survive on a nutrient slurry that allows me to consume an entire day's worth of meals in only 30 seconds. And since I don't have time to actually buy anything, almost all my earnings go straight to savings! ~
The real answer is that you either sacrifice some sleep or you don't have any leisure time. That previous schedule breakdown intentionally ignores the time cost of transportation between activities, and little things like bathroom breaks.
Calculating from my own life, if I worked 80 hours per week, I would have approximately 4 hours of disposable leisure time left. That would only be possible if 95% of my weekly fun requirement was met by work. The likelihood of that happening in any workplace that expected 80 hour weeks is abysmally low.
> The real answer is that you either sacrifice some
sleep or you don't have any leisure time.
> Also, I survive on a nutrient slurry that allows me to
consume an entire day's worth of meals in only 30 seconds.
And since I don't have time to actually buy anything,
almost all my earnings go straight to savings!~
You don't even need to lose 30 seconds on making those meals, let your company provide the Oral Sludge receptacle™.
Upon your termination, the health inspected Murder Rod™ will pierce your head and you'll be recycled into nutrients. Yum. ~
I know a number of other folks like me. I'm not unique here. It's that sort of person that you want to hire.
Doing something you're passionate about and having an impact on the world is living. It is much more living than going to a job you don't give an f- about for 40 hours per week so you can buy a house in the suburbs and an SUV, retire after 40 years, and then die having left no impact on the world.
I understand that as he's talking about five times minimum wage or about $70K/yr, not five times a real wage. Nobody offers five times a real wage. Nobody.
Everyone has their weird false beliefs. Most middle and lower class see themselves as temporarily disadvantaged millionaires and that weird false belief can be very profitably exploited.
The similar weird belief from the upper classes is that economic destruction has been so successful over past decades that there is an infinite pool of infinitely highly talented labor willing to work for minimum wage so anyone asking for more than minimum wage is the cheeky nail standing up that must be pounded down, and its socialism or letting the terrorists win to ever pay someone without direct reports more than the minimum wage. Sure, managers earn millions and CEOs earn billions but conventional upper class wisdom is there's an infinite pool of neurosurgeons willing to work minimum wage for 80 hrs a week while repeating "thank you sir may I have another" as their morally and ethically superior manager paddles them. To some extent you can profitably exploit them by letting them screw up, then offering Very expensive consulting fees to fix the mess they created for themselves. Never, ever work for people like that if you can possibly avoid it, always consult to clean up their messes at like $300/hr.
2) Management is expected to falsify / adjust metric reports and manage appearances in this number driven company from the lowest to the highest levels because we're crooks and we know it, and this is how we train the front line to groom them for mgmt, and the 1 in 20 who get promoted (the other 19 in 20 will be ageism fired) will rely on their experience pretending to work to pretend to produce great numbers.
3) We all know we're lying to the client and upper mgmt and maybe the .gov, and you'll keep quiet about that or we'll have to notice that you're only putting in 30 hours of "real" net positive productive work per week even if you're on paper butts in seat 75 hours per week. You're productively working 30 hours per week and you'll shut up about the other issues or you'll only earn credit for the 30 instead of being the 75 hour "hero" you currently are. Now shut up or we start auditing your internet access logs too.
4) I hate my wife and kids and being a provincial idiot of a manager with no empathy for other human beings (hey, someone has to be the failure, after all) I assume all others are the same as me because I'm great so why don't you hang out at work for 80 hrs per week just like me? If my whole family hates me the problem can't be me because I've got an ivy diploma so whats the problem with staying at work all night? I actually worked for a guy like that and this is a paraphrase of a couple conversations I had with him. A sad, sad dude.
Even worse when they're applied in on mobiles / responsive-design.
In order to keep this structure, companies create an environment of “this is just how we do it”. The whole pretense of long hours is part of this. A few more examples are covered in Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work.
http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/abolitionofwork.htm...
Are the successful guys fakes or are they doing something that we could learn to be more successful hourselves?
In any case I would be interested in more in depth stories of these successful guys to learn from them. Choosing the right tasks to work on, for example, seems to be a very important strategy. I would love so much to read more details about how to do that. And especially in this case, if I would be the boss, I would appreciate people with that skill more than people without that skill. Someone with that skill will be able to pick most of the low hanging fruits and might also be more able to solve the really necessary ugly tasks, because he cares about getting it done.
I and others have talked about how much more productive we are when working early or late in the day and are compelled to stay late to finish something because it seems to take longer to pick it up and finish it the next day.
It was even covered on this site a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296
The guys who pretend are Losers, the true believers who don't are Clueless. As the subjects of the HBR article are consultant types, I'll bet many of the Clueless there think they are Sociopaths. Anyhow, my hat's off to the Losers who manage to score a solid paycheck without working/drinking themselves into an early grave.
The word "success" seems like a misnomer here. Success is not possible under these conditions. Killing yourself for transient business projects designed and managed by others, for the adulation of peers whose only accomplishments in life are, similarly, killing themselves for transient business projects designed by others, is no success at all.
Perhaps the monetary compensation is decent. But what are you going to do with that money?
In fact, when I have - out of pure boredom - attempted to work, get something, whatever, done, the initiative was quickly destroyed by managers.
The illusion of work, pretending, we are all adults here playing on a theatre, must be maintained, and nobody is allowed to step out of line. When I look at it that way, that we are just adults but playing like when small children play that they are adults, so are we playing that we are working, then it all makes sense.
My recommendation is to find things to do that look like work. If you are a programmer, learn new languages or develop your own projects. If you are expected to write, work on your own blog articles. If you sometimes work offsite or in different parts of the building, go sleep or read in your car (away from where you could get caught.) If you are writing or programming, nobody can tell over your shoulder if it is work related or not. Hell, your manager probably has no clue what you are supposed to be doing anyhow and is just pretending to do his job too. Help the guy out and give him the warm fuzzy feeling that you are working. Telling everyone you meet how much work you have to do and how hard you are working on it won't hurt either.
I know it sucks but you can't fix it. The ability to look like you are working while not losing your mind is a critical survival skill. The sooner you cultivate that skill the happier you will be.
One guess is, its just not in human nature, its not possible, to be productive 8h between X and Y hours of the day. Not for you, programmer, not for the manager either.
So we start learning how to pretend and eventually all we do is pretend. Thats just one of the reasons.
To fix the problem - an organization and contract which is not time or space based, you dont have to sit there in that open space, or be there between X and Y.
But then we woudl've been back to quite radical economy, quite radical model of society than we have now - where you dont sell your labor, where you would sell your produce. And thats problematic because we cant really measure or quantify "what programmer/manager produces". So we end up in this circus of pretending to know what that value is of programmer when in a cubicle on a timeclock, and pretending to care, and then come the backstabbing and office politics.