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It seems these days that we are all getting busier and busier in our jobs. Particularly post-GFC there is more work to do, often with less compensation to pay for it, and an increased blurring of the lines between 'work' and 'life'. I'm keen to open some dialogue about work/life balance and get a feel for work/life balance in 2014 across different jobs and industries. What have been your experiences with work/life balance? How much do you work? How do you cope? I'm a Management Consultant and like any other deadline/project based work it has its ebbs and flows. When things are quiet, there is a lot of downtime and you can go home when the sun is still shining - or even work from home. But when it's bad, it's bad. 15 hour + days all week are not uncommon, together with weekend work. Phone calls at 11pm at night, text messages at 7am on a Sunday morning, e-mails at 3am. It's all a bit too much and it really takes its toll on relationships, health and well-being.
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Aug 1, 2014 09:55
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I work at a local private engineering consulting firm. I'm on the lower rung of things (only started this gig 8 months ago), so my work-life is pretty good; I pretty much put in my 40 and get out, though a minimal amount of unpaid overtime usually bleeds in there somehow. When crunch time comes, though, we pretty much keep working until it's done, and get paid straight time for our efforts. The most I've put in is 11 hours in a day. However, the managers and partners definitely put in more time; my boss gets in before 6 and leaves after 5 nearly every day. Between the job and his family, I have no idea how he does it. Overall, I'm pretty happy; my only gripe is that to make this jump from my old job, I had to take a bit of a pay cut, so my compensation is basically shifted back a year (better raises and tuition reimbursement means I'll come out ahead in the long run, though). Government contracting was a whole 'nother ballpark, though. In normal circumstances, if I worked more than my 80 per pay period, that was grounds for discipline; they wanted very much to appear to care about the budget. This led to the situation where I was free to take pretty much every Friday off if I wanted to, which was obviously excellent for work-life balance. During crunches, though, it often became a choice between unlimited overtime and a decent social life, the former usually winning out because I had loans to pay down at the time. I will say this: If you want to extract the most money from the government with the least effort, get a military contracting job.
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Aug 1, 2014 10:09
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quote:What have been your experiences with work/life balance? How much do you work? How do you cope? It's terrible in my field as a whole now and getting worse each year. Prior to making some changes to how I do things, I was being asked to work 80+ hour weeks regularly, and as a year-long average, I put in about 65 per week for the entirety 2012 to give some examples. My current job is exactly 40 and not a second longer, but this is due to me changing things. My boss works 90+ regularly. In my view, if you're displeased with the work/life balance of your job, the first thing you need to do is to identify whether or not it's a company issue or a field issue. If it's a bad company thing, get shopping for a place that doesn't suck. If it's a bad field, you need to make bigger changes. For bad fields, my view is that your choices are: 1) Find the best of a bad field. (Reduce the problem.) 2) Change fields entirely. (Eliminate the problem.) 3) Create the ability to say no. (Create a barrier against the problem.) Each of these has its obvious drawbacks. One may only last a little until it gets worse (or may be highly competitive, pay less, etc). Two can be extremely difficult and can negate any field-relevant experience you may have. Number three's drawback is that it initially requires extra work on top of an already exhausting amount of work, but it's what I went with. My approach was to take up professional writing on the side and built up a decent monthly income from writing royalties in an unrelated field. Any alternative means of income works, though--passive is better of course, but as long as it's sustainable, livable, and unrelated to your exact day job, it'll work. The point is to build a retaliation buffer to terrible work demands. At this point, I make enough off my writing to live comfortably with mild lifestyle changes. It isn't a full replacement to my day job yet, but it doesn't have to be. (That's the goal, but I'm not there yet.) For now, what it buys me is the power to say no. Threatening my job is meaningless now because firing me doesn't cut off my income anymore. I will live perfectly well on my self-employment income. Some overtime is reasonable. There are legit emergencies, unexpected terrible crunch times, etc. I help out with those still, but if it's bullshit, accelerated timelines to look good, 'urgent' but not emergency, 5PM surprise same-day deadlines, the answer is no and I'll see you tomorrow. If you're having issues with work life balance and can't resolve them within your field, my recommendation is to put in the extra work at night for as long as it takes to find out what you're good at / able to efficiently do as a side job to bring in buffer money. Once your employer doesn't own you, you can make the problem go away yourself. (Heck, you might even hit a jackpot with your side job and find a new career in self-employment. You never know!) quote:But when it's bad, it's bad. 15 hour + days all week are not uncommon, together with weekend work. Phone calls at 11pm at night, text messages at 7am on a Sunday morning, e-mails at 3am. It's all a bit too much and it really takes its toll on relationships, health and well-being. That's what it was like at my last job. It was awful, and I decided gently caress it, I'm not doing that anymore.
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Aug 1, 2014 17:20
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DNQ posted:It seems these days that we are all getting busier and busier in our jobs. Particularly post-GFC there is more work to do, often with less compensation to pay for it, and an increased blurring of the lines between 'work' and 'life'. Used to do IT consulting, similar situation to yours. I recently switched to inhouse ops at a cloud software company. It's much less stressful and way better balance. 9-5:30 most every day. It's still IT so there will always be oncall, occasional weekend maintenance etc., but outside of that my work phone stays in my bag from when I get home until I leave for work the next day. I've not even set up work email access on any of my personal devices.
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Aug 2, 2014 06:25
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Systems administrator jobs are almost always going to be 24/7 positions at any reasonably sized company, but there's a lot of variability in how different companies handle that requirement. The web hosting company I used to work for actually had separate night shift sysadmin positions; the admins who worked those shifts would keep an eye on the monitoring system, clean up leftover tickets from the day shift, and perform maintenance and changes during the overnight window. The systems engineers, however, were pretty much on-call 24/7/365 for issues with the systems they owned that the overnight admins couldn't fix (and that actually happened fairly often, as there was only one admin on staff each night, and most of us specialized in either Unix or Windows systems, so if something not-so-simple went wrong with one of the Windows platforms while the Unix guy was there or vice versa, then we had a problem...). At another large company I worked for as a sysadmin, everyone worked the usual 8/9-5/6 M-F work hours, but all after-hours and weekend maintenance, changes, etc. were in addition to your normal schedule, and there was no official comp time or overtime pay. The expectation from the corporate level seemed to be that you were on call 24/7/365 for the systems you supported and were always expected to be available (sometimes with little or no advance notice) for after hours and weekend work, and if you worked for 16 hours over Saturday night and Sunday morning, you were still expected to show up at the usual time on Monday. Some managers were cool about letting their folks take personal time here and there or move their hours around a bit to make up for the long hours and late nights, but not everyone was so lucky. My team also had a rotating NOC shift, where one team member would have to work their usual M-F shift and then also actively watch our monitoring system until midnight each night and all day until midnight on the weekend, so basically you'd be working for about a hundred hours that week. (And if you also had maintenance to do during the Sunday 2AM maintenance window, you got to tack that on as well!  )
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Aug 3, 2014 06:14
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dennyk posted:At another large company I worked for as a sysadmin, everyone worked the usual 8/9-5/6 M-F work hours, but all after-hours and weekend maintenance, changes, etc. were in addition to your normal schedule, and there was no official comp time or overtime pay. The expectation from the corporate level seemed to be that you were on call 24/7/365 for the systems you supported and were always expected to be available (sometimes with little or no advance notice) for after hours and weekend work, and if you worked for 16 hours over Saturday night and Sunday morning, you were still expected to show up at the usual time on Monday. Some managers were cool about letting their folks take personal time here and there or move their hours around a bit to make up for the long hours and late nights, but not everyone was so lucky. My team also had a rotating NOC shift, where one team member would have to work their usual M-F shift and then also actively watch our monitoring system until midnight each night and all day until midnight on the weekend, so basically you'd be working for about a hundred hours that week. (And if you also had maintenance to do during the Sunday 2AM maintenance window, you got to tack that on as well! I want to say that you worked for my old employer. It would depress me if it was just as bad at other companies...
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Aug 3, 2014 06:20
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DNQ posted:It seems these days that we are all getting busier and busier in our jobs. Particularly post-GFC there is more work to do, often with less compensation to pay for it, and an increased blurring of the lines between 'work' and 'life'. At my current job (that I'm leaving in a week) I work 38 hours in a call centre doing B2B technical support. Which hours I work changes, so for the past 4 weeks I've been working 6am-2:30pm. It's nice that the bank and post office are still open when you finish for the day, but it means my usual evening activities (judo, visiting family) tend to be put on hold since I find the early starts really draining. In that respect my work-life balance isn't that great because when I'm working the early shift, I'm too tired and stressed to have much of a life at all. To cope with the early starts I find I have to take the time to look after myself. Even if it's just ensuring I have healthy food and tossing it in a bag to bring to work with me and prepare my clothes for the morning I find I'm a lot more relaxed and have a bit more energy than I would otherwise. I've only ever worked overtime a handful of times, usually when something has gone horribly wrong and we need all hands on deck. When that happens we're paid for overtime and work tends to throw in a meal for us to keep us going. This job also has an on-call roster, which I've never done because there's two people on my team who like having the extra money. Even if I had been offered it I doubt I would have taken it - I don't want to end up in a situation where I'm obliged to be on-call for weeks or months at a time and I think I would find the on-call phone overly intrusive to my life. I value an uninterrupted nights sleep more than I value the extra cash. froglet fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Aug 3, 2014 |
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Aug 3, 2014 15:38
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froglet posted:At my current job (that I'm leaving in a week) I work 38 hours in a call centre doing B2B technical support. Which hours I work changes, so for the past 4 weeks I've been working 6am-2:30pm. It's nice that the bank and post office are still open when you finish for the day, but it means my usual evening activities (judo, visiting family) tend to be put on hold since I find the early starts really draining. In that respect my work-life balance isn't that great because when I'm working the early shift, I'm too tired and stressed to have much of a life at all. I work 6-3 at my current job. It took a bit, but you adapt to the schedule and life goes on. The only problem I have is that my (already an insomniac) friend doesn't get why I don't want to come over for game night that gets started around 7-7:30 and runs until 10-11 on a weeknight.
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Aug 3, 2014 16:05
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I work 40 hours/week as an 1-man IT everything (desktop support to software development) for a non-profit in Canada. Occasionally I might work an hour or two more (with overtime pay) if there's an emergency, but because we have limited resources I'm encouraged not to work more than the 40. I was able to change my days off to Sunday/Monday to better match my girlfriends schedule, and I have lots of flexibility with my own schedule - as long as I make my hours and am around if something breaks then it doesn't matter what time I start or leave, or how long I take for lunch. We live in a ski town, and in the winter I can take mornings off to go skiing every time it snows, and just work later that day. I'm taking 1 month unpaid leave next month, after my first year of work, to go travelling in Nicaragua. I am compensated less than I would be in a big city, partly due to the location and partly due to working for a non-profit. I wouldn't change it though - I make enough money to do the things I want to do, and have the time to do them.
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Aug 3, 2014 16:23
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I write code and do a bit of sys admin stuff at a huge technology company. The culture and work/life balance is great, honestly. I normally work 40/wk with plenty of flexibility. I worked a couple late nights a few months back, and was given some kind of award and bonus for it. I was completely shocked. Previously I've always worked in smaller companies and had to work OT, graveyard shift, rotating shifts, weekends, you name it. So to get a bonus for working a couple evenings was so refreshing. This is the only job I've ever hard where I haven't wanted to quit within 3 months, and I attribute that to the work/life balance and just generally chill attitude that management seems to have here.
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Aug 3, 2014 16:58
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Work life balance in the oilfield kicks serious rear end. Either I have a bunch of jobs and make a bunch of money, or I don't have jobs and I go home. Ideal. Schedule is 10 on / 4 off. During the 10 days on, I'm on call 24/7. Average eight or ten 24 hour jobs a month. If no job calls in, I hang out at the shop from 9-11, take lunch to 13:00, and then go home at 15:00. Oilfield work is the best work. Celot fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Aug 3, 2014 |
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Aug 3, 2014 17:32
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I'm a car salesman and currently experiencing a huge streak of success, but at the cost of my private life balance entirely. I work at least 55 hours a week, this past month I worked 6 days a week, 70+ hours a week, but also made more than I've ever made in a single month in my life... So I would have to say it's appropriately based on a ratio that I can't 'argue' with. I work like mad, but then I make mad money. I could work less hours if I chose, but would make alot less. I'm having trouble finding that balance but I suppose my financial goals are the main reason for that.
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Aug 3, 2014 19:50
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I think Sundae really nailed it. I'm a field service engineer who recently was given additional territory that used to be covered by another fse. The result is that I could easily be working 70+ hour weeks with so little time at home my fiancee could move out and I probably wouldn't notice. The good news is that we have a very clear target for utilization/billable time. We are expected to report 70% of a 40 hour work week which ends up being 4 8-hour days, with 1 day a week in the office for administrative work. What I've learned to do is use the 70% metric to my advantage. I aim for the 70% mark as best I can and once I've hit it, regardless of how many work days are left in the week, I'm done. It means my response time (another metric that is supposed to be under 3 days) is always in the red but I point out to my manager that this is a marathon not a sprint then remind him of how we lost one of our hardest working fse's because he was allowed to work 130%+ weeks for years. It could very well cost me my job at some point but again, as Sundae pointed out, it's important to have an alternative income stream. My fiancee and I are currently working that part of it but we're hoping to get ourselves to the point where either of us could pull a, "fire me. I dare you." with either of our employers. The work/life balance is incredibly difficult in this day and age. Especially in the US, so many people are slaves to their income that they will do anything and everything to hang onto it for dear life. I think that's why we're seeing such a surge in the Simple Living philosophy. Smaller houses (or even Tiny Houses), minimal ownership, etc. Gen X and Millennials have watched their parents work themselves in some cases literally to death and want nothing to do with that mess.
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Aug 3, 2014 21:53
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I work as a food process engineer in a 24/7 plant that has no other technical people in it. Needless to say I can empathize with everyone. I've told my employer straight up -- when I need time off I am going to take time off. I don't care if I don't have enough vacation time or whatever. I want to manage my own hours. This allows me to work hard when needed, and take time off after the fact. It makes things a little more bearable. So far they have been fine with it. I told them in the interview how it was going to be, so if they didn't like it they didn't have to hire me. Although for this approach to be effective, you better be a solid and productive employee. I have also learned that you need to draw the line in the sand, because the company sure as hell won't do it for you. Learn to say NO. Good managers will understand. Lastly, I want to help everyone, it's in my nature. I legitimately want to help the plant and help the processes. Unfortunately this leads to people trying to take advantage of your good nature. You have to look out for yourself and your best interest. Being a "team player" is over rated. Nobody else is a god drat team player, trust me. People only care about their objectives. You need to learn to be a little selfish. I am still working on this. It's hard because I really believe in working as a team, but that just doesn't exist here. I left my last company because my time was so heavily micro managed it was just silly. I am prepared to do that again if need be. I would work 20 hours and be expected in the next day. I am also prepared to change careers if need be. I get paid well, especially for being in the mid-west. However my experiences have taught me that money is pointless if you work 10-14 hrs a day, every day. Who cares how much you have if you spend all day in a plant, so disconnected from the outside world that you have no idea what time of day it is, or if a storm is raging outside. A tornado could hit and I would have no idea. p.s. - I can't wait until all of these old people who believe your life is your work and you should kill yourself working retire.
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Aug 6, 2014 00:32
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I used to work 50-55 hours per week doing consulting/accounting. The effect it had on my health, relationships, and mental well-being crept up on me but it got to the point that I literally cried every night, had aches in my joints, constant stomach pains, and probably almost made my SO dump me. The craziest yet most predictable part of it was that I had other coworkers doing even more and the expectation was that you should love the company so much that you're a bad person for even feeling burnt out. I quit that job and now I'm a QA engineer. Now "IT" has a whole raft of its own problems but now I work 40 hrs/week 3 weeks in a row and then just do the hours I have to to get the next release out on time. And my coworkers are too spergy to engage in the usual corporate jargon dumbshit. Austistic honesty is refreshing after a corporate nightmare.
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Aug 6, 2014 01:59
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I am a manager at a small consulting firm. Weeks range from 40-80 hours and are travel heavy. My typical is probably 50-55. It is what you make of it. I get bored if I work less than that. 60 is unsustainable to me for an extended period of time, though.
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Aug 6, 2014 02:26
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Personally I hate working - it sucks, and is boring.
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Aug 6, 2014 06:54
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I work in healthcare at a hospital. If you're a provider of some kind, you are sort of expected to be in sleep depravation purgatory for the rest of your life. It just comes with the job. But sometimes it can get a little ridiculous. For example, I work 8-10 hours a day 6 days a week. Those 8-10 hours I am either spending in my office, on the floors, or in the ICU doing poo poo. Once I'm at home, I'm usually doing 1-2 hours of patient research, shooting off emails, or taking care of any other administrative bullshit I couldn't get done because my department doesn't have a single office clerk (thanks budget). I've slowly been deteriorating to the point where I sleep in shifts. I get home, nap for 3-4 hours, do more work, then goto bed for 4-5 hours, and do everything again the next day. And the next day. It sometimes is really rewarding when you get good outcomes. For example, I had a teary eyed son give me a hug today and thank me for doing such a drat good job keeping tabs on his terminally ill father. That was awesome. Sometimes you get that kind of positive feedback back to back to back with patients/families. Sometimes you don't get a single positive one for a month+ and it's all just negative bullshit from both patients/families and the system itself. For example: patients being verbally abusive, threats, doctors with a God complex, nurses with a God complex, other providers making mountains out of anthills when something insanely minor (usually paperwork related), scheduling gently caress ups, patient no-shows to appointments, billing, other provider bitch-fits, and whatever other random problem someone can come up with to dump in my email or call me constantly about. Then you get to go home and worry about if you made the right call with a very difficult/marginal patient. Most evaluations are spectacular shades of gray, but you still gotta make a call. Then you do, get to worry about it all night, and sometimes all week if it is someone who keeps progressing/regressing like crazy and no one can figure out why. If I make a good call. Good. If I make a bad call (hasn't happened yet thank god, but it WILL), you get to worry about losing your license, going to jail, and living with the fact that something you did killed someone. And just forget about relationships. No time for that. Pretty much everyone I work with in my department or alongside either never married or is divorced. Many don't have kids. The pay isn't bad though, but I still make below the loving median for my profession.
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Aug 6, 2014 07:18
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It seems like doctors' high pay implies that they have leverage/are in-demand, so why can't doctors just say, "Nope, I'll work 40 and that's it"? Would it be impossible to find a hospital willing to take you with that demand?
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Aug 6, 2014 07:51
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scuzzy pumper posted:Personally I hate working - it sucks, and is boring. Yes. You should work as little as possible in life. The idea that we still do 40 hour weeks (and for most people more than that) is so beyond stupid.
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Aug 6, 2014 08:59
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How long did people work before that became the norm? Has technology/automation come far enough that working <40 hours a week can be a reality for all of the world's working population? Keep in mind while your level of education may enable you to cut back your hours without a huge decrease in quality of life, there are a shitload of people for whom this definitely isn't the case. I suppose it could one day be possible for everyone in the USA to work say only 30 hours a week but I imagine those gains would come from someone in a third world country picking up the slack, not an actual efficiency gain.
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Aug 6, 2014 11:08
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Cicero posted:It seems like doctors' high pay implies that they have leverage/are in-demand, so why can't doctors just say, "Nope, I'll work 40 and that's it"? Would it be impossible to find a hospital willing to take you with that demand? Pretty much impossible to find a hospital that would take you, plus the hours are implicitly supported by the AMA and the general field culture. Look at the fellowship period and how loving awful the hours are. On top of that, it's not like you can unionize (meaningfully) if you wanted to try to force the point. Many (most?) states make it illegal for healthcare workers (below doctor level as well) to go on strike or even, in some cases, to not show up for work because of the impact it has on patients. Hospitals can effectively use your own patients as leverage against you getting reasonable hours.
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Aug 6, 2014 14:24
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zmcnulty posted:How long did people work before that became the norm? Has technology/automation come far enough that working <40 hours a week can be a reality for all of the world's working population? Quite the opposite. Productivity gains over the last half century have gone through the roof and yet we still work the same number of hours. Globally there's a surplus of labor, even in poorer nations (This was one of the causes of the Arab Spring). Frankly there isn't enough work to go around, but it's more profitable to grind a few people into dust rather than have a bunch of people working 30 hour weeks.
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Aug 6, 2014 14:45
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I'm starting a government job that's 9-5 (or flex hours) including the 30 min lunch, so 37.5 hours/week 
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Aug 6, 2014 15:54
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Honestly if I could earn like $35k/yr and work 30 hrs/week I'd go for it. What sucks is it seems like my choice is between working 30 hrs/wk and earning $20k or working 55 hrs/wk and making enough to live on. I used to have a job I loved - I woke up every morning looking forward to doing it. I was an ESL reading tutor and I earned $15/hour (gross, not net) working 35 hrs/week and I couldn't afford to live by myself. That's cool, but what if I was a single parent?
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Aug 6, 2014 16:05
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You could be a teacher in a state like Texas. They pay well and you get the summer off, which isn't the same as 30/wk but it's something at least. Edit: Xibanya posted:Productivity gains over the last half century have gone through the roof and yet we still work the same number of hours. My Rhythmic Crotch fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 19:34
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Sundae posted:Pretty much impossible to find a hospital that would take you, plus the hours are implicitly supported by the AMA and the general field culture. Look at the fellowship period and how loving awful the hours are. Yeah but I imagine for a guy who does his residency at a hospital in the middle of nowhere rural Oklahoma or something and then opens up a private practice, it would be a pretty slow pace. Are those residencies just really rare, or are people just like "I wanna live in NYC where the action is" and just cave in to the 80 hrs/wk expectation chasing a chance at money and prestige at some important hospital someday?
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Aug 6, 2014 19:41
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No idea. All the doctors/fellows I know work for hospitals.
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Aug 6, 2014 19:45
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My Rhythmic Crotch posted:You could be a teacher in a state like Texas. They pay well and you get the summer off, which isn't the same as 30/wk but it's something at least. Lolno I was working in a school in Austin. The teachers were easily pulling 55-60 hour weeks.
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Aug 6, 2014 20:59
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Being self employed is cool because even though you are putting in 60-80hrs per week you can blur the lines between work and normal life, and your family can kind of grow around your business. Of course, when it's pants making GBS threads time that can be a drag. I had the following call at 1:30am a few weeks ago. Hey Diplowski this is bartender dude at the bar next to your shop Hrggghu hello what? sorry to bother you, but there is a torrent of water pouring out of the front door of your place. I just thought you'd like to know. oh poo poo! thankyouthankyouthankyou bye!Three hours of mopping and squeegeeing later and I stumble into bed only to wake up in 3 hours to spend 12 hours on my feet. Of course, this is pretty much par for the course for food service management anywhere. I've been doing it for so long that I get really anxious, restless, and have a hard time sleeping if I take more than two days off at a time.
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Aug 7, 2014 00:03
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When work is good, I can support myself on ~10 hours a week. (This doesn't count lead prospecting). I'd really like work 30 hours a week at my current rate. I honestly don't think, unless your work is extremely fulfilling, that 5 on/2 off is a reasonable work ratio.
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Aug 7, 2014 02:54
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I'm a mining engineer by trade, got my degree in '11. I've worked for two employers full time at this point, and I've found that the old timers at both expect longer days and work weeks compared to my desires. My old boss (left company) would take a half day on Fridays, but then come back in on Saturday to catch up without reimbursing vacation time. I found that pedantic, and can't believe he let himself get taken advantage of like that. We had a bit of confrontation when I was told to be on site for extra hours to literally watch contractors do a job we were paying them to do, with an on site supervisor of their own (I am all for check ins, but I didn't need to be there babysitting their guys 2 extra hours a day every day, six days a week, for 3 months...). It is similar with my new company, and got me into an interesting discussion with my newest supervisor. We pretty much had a sit down discussing some information he wanted, and why I hadn't compiled it yet. I discussed work life balance, how the deadline he set wasn't critical, and I value my personal use of time more than the company's. That didn't go over well, especially when I mentioned the vp of operations name and said I'd tell him the same thing, not burning the midnight oil for every request that could be put off until the next day, and that they would have to deal with it. If they couldn't, they'd have to find someone else. That REALLY didn't go well, and I was pretty well put in my place behind closed doors, but the issue has not been brought up since (it's been about a year now). As such, I'm in the office 45 hours a typical week, barring travel days where I'm out of town and don't have anything better to do anyways. Also got my full bonus, so that must not have hurt all too bad. The two of us soon went to a management training class, along the lines of DISC, and there was a discussion amongst approximately 20 variously aged employees with sentiment pretty well aligned with how you'd imagine from this thread. The Bob Pike group, the facilitator, also had quite a bit of statistical data to breakdown the differences between the boomers, gen x, gen y, etc. In short, older types were more focused on 'being there's whereas millennials are more focused on 'deliverables', which makes sense, as younger generations have generally been seen as.more efficient, meaning we don't need to be in the office to get the same work done. All in all, at 26, I have a hard time imagining moving up the company ladder. I'm capable enough, and all, but I enjoy being an individual.contributor, and being able to leave when I want without being compelled to stay just because it looks good.
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Aug 7, 2014 05:00
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In a normal week, I typically stay below 45 hours. Sometimes I am busy, and go up to 50 or so, and then there are big projects and acquisitions that occasionally push it higher. As a general rule, I spend 38 to 40 of those hours in the office and anything above that I work from home. Depending on how you view things I am either the most senior technical employee or the lowest level member of management.
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Aug 7, 2014 05:35
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Dead Pressed posted:That REALLY didn't go well, and I was pretty well put in my place behind closed doors, but the issue has not been brought up since (it's been about a year now). If they tried to "put me in my place" like that, I would tell them to gently caress off and immediately resign. Man... having a comfortable amount of savings feels good. 
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Aug 7, 2014 06:11
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I generally work 8 hours a day including lunchtime working at a big tech company as a junior software engineer, and I feel like I'm paid quite well, although for the area the pay isn't amazing. Most of my coworkers appear to do the same, although a handful regularly stay late (and of course during crunch time we work more hours).
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Aug 7, 2014 07:16
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While I don't live in states, I work in international construction projects (both in my country, Turkey and overseas) and it sounds the same with everyone else in the (white collar) world. Back in 2007-8, my first job was being a manager of a huge construction materials/geotech lab (being an adult student with some relevant work experience sometimes helps) and my day being like: Wake up at 7 am, get a shower & have some breakfast Nerd stuff until 6:30 pm (mostly office work, checking up on technicians, talking with companies, admin stuff, procurement etc.) Send the technicians to home, start doing the tests only I can do such as wet chemical analysis or using the concrete rebar testing machine. At least until I've trained the junior techs, it took 2 hours. Go to the main office and work with the general manager on proposals, cost analysis etc. Collapse to bed around 1-2 am. That was before the global economic crisis and I was working for a top end design firm. It kinda burned me out but due to the people being amazing I never felt it as a drag. Cue today, working as upper management whipping boy (QA Engineer) I usually put hours between 8:30 to 18:30 (only gubmint jobs have the luxury of leaving at 5, in here working till 7-8 is a common thing if not until 9-10 without any pay) but it feels like an awful drag. My "life" was more active during my first job because we had a great team and became friends which kinda fused the work life to "real life". Currently, due to the stress created by office politics and people in general I can barely find enough energy to do anything other than go home, pour a drink and collapse to bed. That being said, when people are on power trips or really, really bad at planing things I end up working all weekend only to be do more work during next weekend.
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Aug 7, 2014 07:40
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I run shipping activities at a steelworks and I think that I've got it pretty good. I normally start about 7:30am and knock off around 4:00pm. I'm on-call most weekends, but I don't normally have to come into work, just phone/computer based work. I feel it's pretty good, but then I think that heavy industry is a bit more flexible with working hours than other industries I've worked in.
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Aug 7, 2014 08:04
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I was a newspaper reporter until about 2 months ago, when I left to work in marketing at a medium-sized tech startup. The paper I worked at was a business paper, which was fortunate for me because it let me keep more regular hours than is normal for the journalism industry — business news just doesn't happen after hours and on the weekends all that much. So I worked 5 days a week, which was nice, but my hours were basically 9 to whenever I got my work done, which was realistically around 7 or 8 most nights with no breaks and the work was never really DONE because news keeps happening. The hours I was working were very high-effort, as I was basically writing as fast as I could to keep up a steady cadence of web stories as well as longer more in-depth features. So I was working 50 hour weeks every week, and when I wasn't working I was too mentally exhausted to do much of anything. I also often ended up taking work home for me or working "after hours" when I had to schedule an interview at a weird time or attend an event. The difference between that and what I'm doing now is really night and day. I'm working maybe 35-40 hours a week for about a 60 percent pay increase, the work itself is easier and my schedule is a lot more flexible. The flip side is that it's more boring, but I can use the mental energy I'm not devoting to cranking out endless reams of blog posts to actually learn other job skills and work on projects I care about. My hope is to use that time and money to hopefully build some passive revenue streams so I have something to sustain me if/when this company goes tits up or gets bought or something.
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Aug 7, 2014 23:35
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This thread is incredibly depressing. I probably average 45-50 hours a week and try to take days off in lieu of overtime since  as if my employer would pay me time and half for OT. Even then, I'm taking next Thursday off since I put it a couple of 11 hour days over the last couple of weeks, and I'll probably spend part of my day reading/sending work e-mails. There's also a pretty decent chance I'll get a phone call or two from work where they'll need a hand with something or have some sort of question.I took a 4 day weekend last month for a trip out of town, and I spent part of it stressing out about work and hoping that things were going smoothly. Since, if it isn't, It'll be a massive headache for me when I get back. I think when you reach that point, it starts being a problem. Edit: I didn't realize this is a 3 month old thread - woops
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Oct 22, 2014 06:17
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Thesaurus posted:I'm starting a government job that's 9-5 (or flex hours) including the 30 min lunch, so 37.5 hours/week I can beat this (in a good way  ). My boss is big on work life balance. I work the administrative side of imports. Mon-Thurs, I work 8-4 with a 1hr lunch. Friday I work 8-2, provided all time sensitive work is complete, because "it's Friday!" I still take my lunch so I technically work 34 hours per week, but I'm paid for ~43 according to my pay stub (weird salary thing, I guess). My boss actually moved my start time up a half hour (from 8:30 and with my OK) because it was summer and he thought wasting a sunny afternoon was silly when my bus gets me to work at 8 on the dot anyways.  However my coworker went on maternity leave so I'm doing 50 hour weeks for a month and a half, then my cush schedule comes back. I'm glad to work the overtime since my hours are lax the other 99% of the year and I'm being paid overtime despite being salaried.  In almost 2 years this is the first and only time I've needed to work OT, its extremely rare. Having an awesome work/life balance owns and in return I bust my butt at work.I think my boss would call me a crazy person if I checked my email before 8AM or after 4PM. If I take a sick day or something, I'll check my email to make sure everything urgent has the appropriate people CC'd on it, but no more (and more isn't expected). ladyweapon fucked around with this message at 09:51 on Oct 22, 2014 |
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Oct 22, 2014 09:49
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