Maids and cloth-folding services are great, but a lot of people who have a whole lot of money but no time are working 60-80 hours a week (many work even more of course.) But you’re giving up more than money if you quit and take a 40 hour a week job. Jobs with fewer weekly hours often aren’t as glamorous and probably don’t have that feeling of “velocity”. Trying to take less than 40 hours a week and you’re probably not going to be a first class member of the company. If Bob takes off every Friday, how can he manage his full time team? And if a company tries to employ people at 30 hours a week as policy, how can they possibly compete?
When you're in a culture it's hard to spot the things that are not "normal".
From an external point of view working 60-80 hours a week is not "normal"[1] It's a very US centric thing. In, dare I say, most countries a 40 hour week (or less in places) is normal and working past that is not expected, and often frowned upon.[2]
If you are in the SV rat race, where you do 80 hours a week, then you can't imagine a world where people do less than that. But (spoiler alert) it works out just fine.
On the other hand if you have successfully indoctrinated employees to work for you for 100 hours a week growing your business for you, selling you their lives for nothing more than money, then by all means get rich off their sweat.
[1] I'm referring to regular salary work here, not minimum wage service jobs.
[2] there are also countries, often the same ones, that _require_ you to take 4 weeks of paid vacation every year.
>On the other hand if you have successfully indoctrinated employees to work for you for 100 hours a week growing your business for you, selling you their lives for nothing more than money, then by all means get rich off their sweat.
One of the great errors your comment exposes is that making your employees suffer enormously is going to make your company run well.
One of the first laws the Romans and Egiptians discovered is how unproductive slaves were compared to free men. It is a universal rule that applies to modern days as well.
The South pole was conquered (Amundsen expedition)making the men go SLOWER than what they wanted to go because that way the effort could be sustained over time.
I do that all the time in my company because I don't want heroes that do not sleep one day just to be zombies the next day making expensive mistakes.
The myth that many people work 60-80 hr weeks needs to die. Very few people do this and the ones that do choose to. C levels, company owners etc. Anyone else working that much straight up chooses to.
I don't know about SV but in academia it is extremely common and often expected that people work 60+ hours.
Sometimes it's just peer pressure. Sometimes it's an explicit requirement.
Few years ago I spoke with an American professor who just started his tenure in Switzerland. He told me he was shocked and outraged when he was the only one to show to work on national holiday!
Great anecdote. Academia is, what, like 0.1% of the workforce? Browsing some polls, it looks like less than 10% of salaries people work more than 60 hours. I don't know what the ratio is for salary vs hourly in the US, but that probably puts it less than 5% for all workers.
I think these people are just the loudest and like writing articles about how much they work. No one writes about how they work 40 hours and life is fine.
There is also the other case where someone may go to the office 10 hours a day, punch some time on the weekends, claim they "worked" 60 hours, but in reality only got 4-5 hours worth of work done per day.
> There is also the other case where someone may go to the office 10 hours a day, punch some time on the weekends, claim they "worked" 60 hours, but in reality only got 4-5 hours worth of work done per day.
They spend the other 5-6 hours writing about their 10 hour days.
If he's salaried in Switzerland, it's actually illegal to work on national holiday (similarly at night/on Sundays). (Unless he has an exemption, but that would be very unlikely, exemptions are for emergency workers and similar, not university professors.)
It might me. But in academia there is a lot pressure and many people decide to work on weekends, some have to work on weekends (e.g. long running experiments that require human input every 6 hours), and some are forced to work and only if there is an abundance of other forms of abuse it might get exposed.
Consider famous case of https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/technology-institute_prestigiou...
If you read the detailed postmortem it is clear people were working way beyond normal working week. And it's not even mentioned as one of problems about the work with this professor.
> The myth that many people work 60-80 hr weeks needs to die.
996 and Japanese salarymen entered chat...
You might not consider much of what they do "work". You might consider their choice freely-given. Others reasonably have a difference of opinion. I'd advise caution when baking in assumptions on what you see in an asymmetric power differential context.
For W-2 exempt (salaried), if your definition of "work" is the equivalent of being in the zone for that much, of course not.
However, meeting Japanese-style salaryman-type management expectations of butts-in-seat-appearing-busy, or in a poorly-led consulting company that underbids and expects hapless employees to still deliver with uncompensated overtime while timesheets read exactly 40 hours per week, or overbook in a subscription-based business and throw the overage onto the heads of the employees, or any number of numerous scams I've seen?
Yeah, that happens plenty. Any area of human activity that is so structurally secular that it not only has a formal label ("overtime abuse"), but has law firms specializing in litigating it [1], makes it a real stretch to assert it is a "myth". I'd like to see where your assertion is coming from, because this is a concern I have to address with job candidates, and I'd really love to have persuasive evidence that it really is a myth in general, and with my organization in particular.
48 hours a week is the maximum in the UK and the EU.
You (the worker) may opt out (this is a domestic add-on, not all countries have this I think) and work more hours, but you can't be required to, and may not be fired or discriminated against if you do not.
60 hours in any _individual_ week, but cannot exceed 48 hr/week on average (normally over 17 weeks to be exact, but this isn't fixed).
So your 60 hour week needs to be offset by, for example, a 36 hour week at some point. Unless you opted yourself out, or you work in one of industries where it doesn't apply.
However, it doesn't appear Austria has the opt-out at all.
I work over 40 hours a week or less and it is already tough, because the intensity of my work is very high, like an air controller work I just can't work more hours at that intensity or I will burn out.
No human being can run a marathon for 8 hours a day, every day. They will tell you they do but it is not true, the people that know the best are those that are used to run marathons.
The people that work 80 hours have an intensity of work that is extremely weak, or else they will not be able to work in a sustained way. Most people I know delude themselves and can do as much in way less time increasing their intensity of work and using delegation and automation.
By the way I am competitive doing that and lots of my friends also are doing the same.
> The people that work 80 hours have an intensity of work that is extremely weak, or else they will not be able to work in a sustained way
I don't think this is necessarily a fair way to frame this side. I was very close to burnout in a previous job, and it's taken me probably two years to realise that one of the root causes of my problems was that I just never, ever ever got a chance to switch off. I would be doing "light" work on the weekends (responding to people, messages, build issues), and in the evenings people would be messaging me with questions because I was in a different time zone where my evening overlapped with their afternoon. I turned off notifications outside of work hours and started getting feedback that my work was suffering so I turned them back on. What started as one message a week from a stressed coworker was now 4-5 messages every evening. I was starting work at 9am, finishing at 6pm, and then connected and pretty much unofficially on call until midnight, and then basically on call from 3pm until midnight on weekends. It was probably 90 hours a week all in, and I was definitely doing probably 50% more work than another engineer doing a 40h week, but I was doing it because I was working 2x the hours.
