As an intern 2-3 years ago, I looked at my older friends and realized that regardless of job/salary/prestige, they all seemed to be working 9, 10, or even 12 hour days. Now my older friends in IB/MC were obviously getting crushed and working far more than that, but even the guys who were marketing majors and partied their faces off and now working $40k a year mediocre to subpar jobs were all working until 6-8 PM. I know theres always exceptions, but even my roommate that's a Portfolio Manager at a Commercial Bank is regularly in the office until 10 PM. I always assumed Commercial banking was one of the few safe spots in terms of hours. It seems that long hours is becoming a systemic issue, and no longer a biproduct of IB/MC/PE. It seems that now everyone is relatively busy/stressed all the time (again, I know both of these adjectives are subjective). Has the working world shifted that much? What happens when things actually get bad again, and we experience some sort of economic decline? Is this increase in hours justified, or even adding additional value? Or is it just a result of facetime expectations/too many turns of work product/irrational managers?
I started doing minor research, and it turns out over 85% of males work over 40 hours a week, and the same goes for over 66% of women (Source). From a comparative standpoint, "Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers," (Source). Curious as to how US and non-US folks alike feel about this. I ddn't have time to thoroughly research this, but wanted to provide a few data points I came across.
What are your thoughts?
I see it as the very opposite. I see larger society moving to the 35-hour work week and possibly to a 30-hour work week over the coming decades.
"Work" is a loaded word. The typical office worker is productive for 14.25 hours/week (https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-…
My prediction: a few major companies will move to a 35-hour work week and then the arms race will be on as they compete for talent.
I absolutely agree. It won't be the case for many on this website, but it will definitely become the norm.
I'd personally love if it shifted a bit more toward the 4 10's model. Studies show that no productivity is lost, and 3 day weekends feel exponentially better than 2 day weekends even though it's just another day.
I completely agree. I am often allowed to WFH on Fridays, and even that makes a tremendous difference. Even when I end up working late, I don't hate it half as much. Plus now I have an excuse to build out an excessive home office
I just want a weekend
I think you bring up an excellent point. The gap between hours spent in office and accomplishing tasks/providing objectively useful output is widening. Smart companies are cognizant of this, and reduce mandatory hours spent in office. Many companies are not (look at the logistics industry - all leading 3 PL companies fucking tie their employees down to their chairs, even on holidays or pre-holidays like Christmas eve when there is no new business to be had ). Talent and pay will follow the modern enterprises, while the rest struggle to deal with the tremendous amount of turnover (spoiler alert this isn't a prediction, it is happening now).
However, I think as of right now, a substantially smaller percentage of Americans are in the office for less than say 40-50 hours per week when contrasted with 1-2 decades ago. It would be interesting to see what sort of data is available on the subject. It would be even better still if we had data that would factor in survey feedback on quality of life. Just a thought.
It's definitely becoming more common to work crazy hours IMO. For one thing, it's way harder to disconnect - no matter what hours you are in the office, there will be bosses who dont GAF and email you at dinnertime about stupid shit. It's just really, really hard to fully "get away" nowadays even compared to not too long ago (like back when I was an IB analyst at the beginning of the decade, I still had a BB that I could physically leave behind. Now everything is just on your personal phone.)
This is also a dynamic that is very company (and even group) specific. The exact same role at 2 competitors can have dramatically different hours. For example, read up on the Verge's report on Away - basically customer support was working IB analyst hours due to them being either understaffed or having significant product issues or customer communication problems... I would wager the vast majority of CS staff are not working 80-100 hours a week for $40k a year, even during the holiday season.
Yeah and look at how great the French are doing...
Personally, part of the reason I'm active in the US is because of the superior work culture.
The American dream is built on the foundation of hard work = success and I rather be treated like shit in the hope of one day being able to achieve my wildest dreams then to be living in my motherland . Yes people are most likely working more due to the technological advancement but i honestly don't mind that.
Back home we have a laid back approach to life and work that rewards extreme corruption and has an increasing amount of inequality with no social and economic mobility for the poor. I don't mean your dad is a md so you are offered the ability to work for GS, I am referring to blatant elitism and discrimination that if you are born in a poor family your life will never amount to much more than slightly better than your family name despite how smart you are, the reputation of your school or how good your gpa is. It results in generational mediocrity and a vicious cycle that so far has no light at the end of the tunnel.
Call me a workaholic but I know that I have the best chance in the world to go from nothing to something just based on hard work and the luck of going to a good university instead of the inability to even become middle class in my motherland. Sometimes people forget that despite America's social and political issues, this country is truly a special place that provides potential and opportunities to start a business or become a partner at a law firm or partner at a pe firm etc with the right degree and the right network. Easier said than done but the odds are in your favour in America vs Russia for instance.
I am not saying it is easy to do that or a guarantee that you can do it but as an outsider I really love this country and I reflect a lot about how my life will never be the same in a positive way . The world is yours...
Oh which countries ? I am curious as to which countries because I only believe Canada has that opportunity but even then I think the sheer size and economic power of America is far more lucrative.
This days we would have to define "Work Week" hours. because i technically work less hours/day but i work on weekends almost every week. My firm has been very generous about face time and allows employees to work from anywhere but is still expected to deliver quality work and attend important business meetings.
Plus i couldn't lie about working on weekends when i actually didn't (damn you SharePoint). So flexibility is definitely a double-edged sword.
I too work in an environment where facetime is deemed unimportant. I honestly don't think I could go work somewhere else where facetime was a core element of company culture. I think back to being an IBD intern and sitting around pretending to work on those rare nights when I actually had nothing to do, simply because I didn't want to leave hours before the analysts.
Curious what you meant about SP being able to track weekend work hours, how does it work exactly?
people enjoy the concept of opportunity. even though someone understands that it is unlikely that he/she is going to be wildely successful, the person believes that there is still a chance that he/she is going to be wildely successful. and this belief is alluring to people, it inspires people and gets them to work hard. and if hard work is a part of American culture, that is not necessarily a bad thing, it probably makes Americans more patriotic
but realistically success in the sense of achieving your wildest dreams is not just about working hard, there are other things that matter. it has something to do with working hard but what also matters is the complex set of personality traits that you possess.
I definitely agree that all jobs seem to overstate only working 40 hrs a week. I was surprised by two careers where I though the hrs would drop but they did not.
My gf works at a nonprofit as a a director and she’s in 9am but despite her being able to leave at 5 she offend stay closer to 7 or 8 because of work load
Second would is a food delivery start up I interned at where you had all the “google-like” benefits (food, massage, unlimited vacation,etc) still worked long hours got in late 930/10am but would see them stay pass 8 as well as deadlines are constantly being changed
It seems like a lot of start-ups have horrendous hours vs the pay non-developers get.
Yeah. Within the community of software engineers, startups typically have worse WLB. Pay is highly dependent on the individual company, just with larger variances compared to most of the larger companies.
People go to startups because they either believe in the mission, want the potential upside, or need more experience.
I can only speak for the firm I am at but with the reduced staff their work slides over to us and it creates those long hours. For the most part we have the freedom to WFH so those hours aren't as taxing as it would be if we were confinded to the office for 16 hours a day.
I think this is directionally true and likely leads to burn out and more and more young people changing jobs more frequently and even taking more career interruptions. I find it odd that friends in engineering (not tech), accounting (both in-house and big4) and corpdev/fpa all work close to lower band IB hours for substantially less pay. I think the difference is that they do greater volatility and will have a period of 35-40 hours weeks and then a period of 60-80 hour weeks. Also seems like they get more vacation time and use it more regularly. Regardless, of the difference in cadence and potentially more vacations, its seems nuts the culturally all white collar jobs are moving to working more under more stress than the alternative.
More people are getting competitive and working to develop their careers. Work may only require 8hrs, but if you work an extra 2 every day you'll be rewarded. Typically you weren't going to do anything important with that time anyway.
That only makes sense if you work in a company that values face time over results and/or if those two people are equally as productive.
What you are describing is an individual going above and beyond vs. a systemic cultural shift. There is no reward when its the new normal.
NYC seems to be the only place where most people work 9/10 hours a day. Most places get a lunch break and shutdown at the end of the day. There are some industries where it seems more intense, but usually people are able to log off and go home at 5/6.
Of course you have the very rare 10x a year that something big and important comes around and hours persist into the night, but it normally doesn't impact people's days.
As people continue to get used to and adjust to the fact that we're all able to work on projects around the clock, I continue to find more people with extremely flexible schedules like working remote 100% of the time or partially remote. Also, schedules where people have different hours working by phone or on mobile, completing projects around the clock as they focus on other areas of life.
Yeah, I think WSO is overestimating what the "common man" is doing. Even here in D.C., atrocious rush hour traffic comes to a head right around 4:30 to 6 pm, which suggests to me that the average person is not putting in a crazy number of face time hours.
Definitely, 95 and 66 are the banes of my existence here.
I don't think I know anyone who (1) has ultimate control over their schedule and (2) works 40 hours per week.
By "ultimate control over their schedule," I mean they don't have bosses, or if they do, there's zero facetime expectation. They're measured by well-defined metrics or output (like a sales goal) and the company doesn't care if it takes them 25 hours or 250 hours per month to achieve it. But most of these people are self-employed or sit at the top of an organization.
These people seem to fall into a few buckets:
The "I only do the things that only I can do" folks. These people outsource or otherwise offload as much as they possibly can, and are left with a few high-value tasks or decisions to make in any given week. These people have some extremely valuable skillset or ability that lets them get away with this - maybe they sit on a few boards and monitor their investments, or maybe they're brilliant creatives. They've probably also read a Tim Ferriss book or two. They seem to work 15-25 hours per week, and fill the rest of their time with other things they enjoy.
The "I enjoy my work but not at the level it would harm my health" folks. These people have found a job they genuinely enjoy, so they think about it through the day and direct most of their energy into it - but they leave some time to spend with their families, they work out, they get enough sleep. Full days and a few hours of catch-up on the weekends. These people seem to settle in the 50-60 hours per week range. Most people I know fall in this bucket.
Super-ambitious entrepreneurs. These people see anything other than work as a distraction. They're trying to "hack" their days by employing biphasic sleep patterns and drinking that weird Soylent food replacement stuff that helps them squeeze a few more work hours out of the day. I've seen people peak at 120 hours per week, but a longer-term sustainability looks like more in the 80-100 hours per week range.
I'm only setting out these cases to point out that if left to their own devices to match work time and productivity to their own life schedules, people don't seem to choose 40 hours per week - which tells me that 40 hours per week is an awkward fit for the hours we have in a week and the daily cadence of our lives. I suspect that as our economy (and especially knowledge workers) moves toward more autonomy and different proxies for measuring productivity that aren't hours-based, we will see fewer and fewer people who actually work a 40-hour week.
Completely agree and excellent writeup. The 40 hour workweek is a relic of a bygone era, a strange compromise to ratchet down manufacturing shifts to roughly 8 hour days. I think the subject would actually make for an interesting historical read, on the nature of work through the ages.
The ~50 hour weeks for regular employees (not banking) seemed to catch on after the 08-09 financial crisis. I remember companies had to seriously cut headcount, and there were concerns on whether they’d be able to stay in business at their new headcount levels. The assumption was it was only temporary and staff would be built back up when things got better.
Two things happened: the reduction ended up not being that harmful to companies and they realized they could make up lost staff by juicing existing employees by 10-30% with no downside.
Test2
It's pretty simple - immigration plus technology and anti-worker policies from PAC's run by groups like the Koch's and other Bilderbergers have created this environment. All of this has resulted in a lower birth replacement rate which just results in more of the same pressure. Not a mystery..
Have you read this MIT study?
Interesting to read about. Also ordered the book you previously recommended. From preliminary research the author and I have staunchly different opinions. I think technology is fantastic, he seemed to hate it (despite his background of mathematics, which is closely related).
I'm pretty sure those immigrants who have the Bachelors degrees and attained them in the US are not getting employed and working the long hours in the US. If anything I'm pretty sure they're struggling insanely to find work in the US because employers don't want to deal with H1-B Visa's and on top of that don't want to hire someone who they probably won't be able to understand. For every job posting out there, I've seen numerous Chinese applicant's resumes get screened out simply because it was assumed they were from China and would be a pain to deal with when trying to communicate with them. Only the few lucky ones land roles here and they're usually if not always STEM related students. Prejudice is real but it's human nature, so that's why I'm disagreeing with the data you pulled up.
Also Universities are actively trying to get more foreign students to attend their schools because foreign students keep the lights on, since they can charge them 4x what they could charge and out of state student and 10x would they could charge an in state student.
This does not agree with the experience of multiple friends of mine working for F500 companies in Dallas in IT.
Perhaps this would make moving to another country to work something worth considering. Working hours in he US are stupid long. There must be better options. Singapore? HK? London? Or maybe some US cities have better work culture. How's Miami? HIG Capital is in Miami. I can't imagine you'd want to work long hours when there's a beach with hotties nearby.
I think it’s a rather complex thing that can perhaps be artificially reduced to:
1) Actual work a) Deep Work b) shallow work
2) Availability a) legitimate availability b) facetime
Then it just largely boils down to the actual function of the job - is it a profession (say judge or surgeon where you sort of can’t just put in 4 hours and call it quits) or knowledge workers who fit into the “corporate drone bee”.
To the latter, automation / technology etc arguably should reduce a lot of shallow work. However because the culture isn’t shifting it means this is filled with either a different type of shallow work tech hasn’t sped up yet or “availability”, which is quite arbitrary as to whether it’s required or not.
you guys should see the inefficiency of China. Holy hell, it makes US look awesome. In China because of the high degree of hierarchy, essentially only the chairman of each company has any decision making power. So there's endless meetings where workers tell their boss - literally for hours - what their team did that week. I had at least one 3-hour-long meeting on my calendar each of my work days. I had to listed for hours, as co-workers in totally unrelated departments droned on and on about what they did, in front of the panel of bosses. Makes me want to gnaw the skin off my own wrists and pray to bleed out.
those labor camps in Xinjiang look pretty efficient :P
don't you mean ASS POUNDING CAMPS
Would like to hear more about this honestly.
Hear more about what? How shitty it is to be employed in a Chinese company? I could do an AMA, but I doubt anyone wants an Earthwalker bitch session. TLDR is that it's a hierarchy where only the top man gets any decision-making authority. And this is the problem with all Chinese hierarchical organizations, including governments. It means 1) susceptibility to corruption, because absolute power corrupts, 2) poor decision making, because the one boss-man running around deciding on countless small matters that he has no time to study, and he's gonna f- it up due to lack of attention and information, 3) if you're an employee, you're a neutered pup with no authority to act, and no point doing deep analysis because the decision maker won't have time to read it, 4) only relationship (and not competence or skills) matters, to the top guy or his next level down eunuchs.
I think work is becoming more and more efficient and we're trending closer and closer to the 4 hour work week with work from home over the internet. In my current role I'm in the office 50 hours per week, but I'm only actually working about 10 hours per week.
I would love to learn how you do that. Sounds great!
Quod ipsum maiores et voluptate debitis enim. Dignissimos molestiae aut et odit. Quas sit facere ab. Est dolore necessitatibus alias rem mollitia facilis blanditiis.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...
Deserunt et omnis consequatur ullam ut et nemo. Sequi quo ut esse aut. Omnis reiciendis molestiae occaecati ut itaque et. Accusamus totam maxime perspiciatis delectus culpa.
Non magni sint provident quis. Numquam velit qui doloremque quis quia voluptatem. Dolor suscipit veritatis et velit.
Beatae eum quas aut fugit amet asperiores commodi. Blanditiis aut ad quis non reprehenderit voluptatem incidunt. Itaque ut minus perspiciatis quia.
Ut et quae sit dolor. Magni ad earum laboriosam iusto perferendis molestias. Quasi porro eum doloremque occaecati a unde perferendis. Optio doloribus velit deleniti omnis aspernatur quos. Omnis repudiandae quia pariatur tempora et omnis laborum qui.