If you are routinely staying 50+ hours a week in the office, it’s your own fault. Most of the people I have met who work long hours are either great time-wasters or incompetent. I knew some senior VP’s who worked those hours but they are were unable to delegate so they attended a lot of worthless meetings.
Of course, I have known people who just hung around the office because they thought it looked good. I worked with one guy who worked 60-70 and he was grossly incompetent. He spent a whole week working on a PowerPoint on diversity. Seventy hours on a freaking PowerPoint!!
Spoken like a middle manager...
Sorry, but I suspect most of these employees are out at customer locations on service calls and tied to a Call Management System that assigns their workload. When your customer's equipment is down, you don't drop tools at 17:00 and expect to keep your job. You sound like a typical marketing puke -- all flash, but nowhere to be found when problems come up.
B.S. I have been in the corporate/financial world for over 30 years, and I have seen a tendency for employers to continually add to the workload of exempt employees...and why not, if they don’t have to pay them? I have known many people who worked extra hours because that’s what it took to do the extra work, NOT because they were incompetent, loiterers, blah, blah, blah.
It’s this kind of behavior that gives rise to law suits and unions (which I loathe). If employers want to avoid those odious outcomes, they need to be conscious of maintaining equity with their employees.
The regularly expressed attitude of “just find another job if you don’t like what’s going on” is simply not in the best interests of the employer (not to mention the employee). Historically, employees and employers take as much advantage as each other as they can get away with, and to posit that employers are always the ones with pure motives is silly. If employers aren’t proactive in maintaing a fair posture with their employees they will expose themselves to legal action, unionization, and at the very least the continued cost of turnover. I say that as a member of management, but you just gotta live in the real world.
Do you want to see my ball of string?
I wonder if you’ve worked in the computer business. I work in Silicon Valley as a design engineer. With the schedules that get imposed by the realities of this business - working longer hours comes with the territory.
You have to do more with less - this is a cut-throat business. No other industry in the world has reduced prices on a consistent basis over decades like the electronics industry. The way that has been achieved is by constant innovation and bloody hard work by ALL involved at all levels of the food chain.
I’ve had points in my career where I’ve had to work 50-60 hours a week for months at a time, and even a month or two at 90 hours a week because the “team” had to overcome technical problems. Nothing to do with ANYONE being incompetent or lazy. Hard problems that took time to solve.
So I take offense when you apply this wide-swath claim that anyone who works overtime must be incompetent or goofing off.
I think that it depends a lot on your position, the sort of business and company you're dealing with, and the sort of job you have. Your generalization may be true for many executive positions. I don't know for sure, since I'm not an executive.
I do know that long hours are quite common in the IT world. It's just a part of "the nature of the beast." In my case, I'm part of a 3 man department of network administration, and we're responsible for over 200 servers and 600+ remote locations. Since we've got these stores located all over the country, in every time zone, our "production hours" are from 7:00am until 10:00pm, Monday through Saturday. The only time we can do maintenance is between 10:00pm and 7:00am (and from 10:00pm Saturday night through 7:00am Monday). Plus we need to be able to support users during the production hours. So 50 to 60 hour weeks are quite common for us (sometimes quite a bit longer), and this has been the case since I started in the IT world back in the mid-1980s. I'm not complaining, this is the career I chose.
Mark