<p>Technology doesn’t save you the time of keeping up to date. The lower efficiencies aren’t in the face to face nature of meetings, but rather having to go to more of them.</p>
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<p>It’s 11 hours a day, not 13. I don’t consider myself a workaholic, I have plenty of other things I like to do, and my life doesn’t revolve around my job. I just put in the time and effort necessary to get things done.</p>
<p>@cobrat - Poetgrl is right, you’re going to have to start citing some sources rather than the invisible boogeyman. Because your stories are getting inconsistent. One guy hasn’t taken vacation time in 3 years because his office is so understaffed and busy, yet his supervisor forces him to use his PTO for a couple of weeks? Teachers and public employees in NY, at least, have the option of converting their PTO to cash… unless your state doesn’t, this story sounds a lot more like him being a workaholic than being critically understaffed.</p>
<p>I’m not necessarily against working long hours so long as they are actually productive in getting product/services to fulfill the business’/agency’s mission and provide win-win benefits for employer/employee. </p>
<p>However, I’ve experienced and read about too many instances where the encouragement to work long hours provides a crutch to and encourages procrastination, vacillating, and otherwise poor planning on the part of senior executives/management. </p>
<p>Having had managers who waited till 4 pm on fridays to assign us work that had to be done by monday despite the fact they could have assigned us the work earlier in the workweek/day due to poor planning/indecision/procrastination too many times for it to be an unexpected emergency or “something out of the blue” tends to make one wonder. </p>
<p>Especially when our department head admits this is a chronic problem apologetically before having us work late into the night and coming in on weekends. </p>
<p>I’ve also noticed this seems to be a chronic problem with biglaw partners and senior associates while working in their IT department. Only difference is that to them…this is standard operating procedure. </p>
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<p>It wasn’t necessarily because the supervisor wanted to force him to use his PTO…it was because he had concerns it could cause another big fight over the collective bargaining agreement with the union and possibly conflict with some regulations regarding state workers and vacation time. </p>
<p>Converting PTO to cash or allowing this time to “rollover” as “comp time” would have provoked similar complications.</p>
<p>on working long hours from the article cobrat posted</p>
<p>[Were</a> You Born on the Wrong Continent? - The Barnes & Noble Review](<a href=“http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Interview/Were-You-Born-on-the-Wrong-Continent/ba-p/3291]Were”>http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Interview/Were-You-Born-on-the-Wrong-Continent/ba-p/3291)
“…Since the start of the recession, the number of unemployed in the U.S. has doubled. Those who are fortunate enough to still have jobs are often working longer hours for less pay, with the ever-present threat of losing being laid off. But even before the recession, American workers were already clocking in the most hours in the West. Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours – the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year…”</p>
<p>“…How does he explain the existence of Germany? What country has the highest exports in the world today? It’s the country with the highest wage rates and union restrictions. Germany has become more of a power, not less of a power as the world has become more global…”</p>
<p>So US companies have found it is much more profitable to have fewer employees that are expected to do the work of the employees they let go. More hours for the salaried employee at no cost to the company and no more money for the salaried guy.(oh yeah…throw him a bone now and then) Just greater profits for the company (stock and execs).</p>
<p>If we can get them to work 60 hrs how about 70 or 80? Now we can lay off another person! If they won’t work that much we will find someone who will. </p>
<p>Of course this leaves the economy with one more person who has been laid off and will no longer be a consumer who can buy your product…</p>
<p>When does it end? At what point does an employee say “enough”?</p>
<p>keep it up and we will be looking at 2 in 3 college graduates unemployed/underemployed</p>
<p>dstark: Right before my dad died he brought me in close and said to me" You need to know this. Nothing else matters but who you have loved and who has loved you in your time here on earth. That’s all that really matters.</p>
<p>Mr. K, You should get a look at Shakespeare’s folios at some point. The number of us bad spellers with great editors is pretty high.</p>
<p>Sax: The german system is much different, though. We talked about it a while back, or I did. I prefer some things about it, personally. I like the fact that executive pay is tied to a multiple of employee pay, and so, there is absolutely no motivation for the execs to keep the workers on depressed pay, or to off-shore for profit potential. Here, in public companies, the only mission of the CEO, for some idiotic reason, is shareholder profit. I think the German system is a better system for prosperity, personally. But, I said that.</p>
<p>Just becuase there are people on this thread saying, “This is the way that it works” does not mean these people are saying, “This is the way that it “should” work.” But, you know, you have to eat. And, unless you want to support your kids indefinitely, they need to have realistic expectations.</p>
<p>the downside of the German system, and also one of the “reasons it works” is becuase by the age of 12 years old students are tracked for higher education or vocational and then they “know” their path.</p>
<p>Would you like your kids to be tracked at 12? It’s a part of how a system like that has to operate in order to work. </p>
<p>Everything has its up side and its down side.</p>
<p>With the EU-wide citizen privileges, loosening of the tracking system, and the prevailing option of sending kids abroad for high school and college in more open systems like the US for well-off families…the path isn’t as set in stone as it used to be. </p>
<p>Also, the US used to practice tracking in their educational system before they did away with it sometime in the late '60s or '70s because it was found to be discriminatory against minority and working-class children in practice.</p>
<p>Germany is not immune to the same controversies regarding that point as shown by greater access to college-prep Gymnasiums for working-class and minority children in the last few decades and concerned discussions about whether their college-prep Gymnasium system is “too elitist” and weighed against the working-class and minority students.</p>
<p>Also, a person has to be a risk taker…H has not been afraid of hard work and traveling over the many years of his career, but he wouldn’t have the stomach for taking the risky step of setting up his own company, for example. Rich people often own their own businesses–we’ll always be on salary…</p>
<p>I am becoming convinced it is the parents who are putting ideas into their kids’ heads about what sort of job, and in what location is acceptable for their little darlings. Perhaps we are unfairly blaming on the students the inflexibility posters have complained about. My D is still trying to find a summer internship. I mentioned to a friend that she has a lead about a job in Jersey City. Immediately, the friend said “Oh, you don’t want her to work there! I’d be really concerned about her safety.” Wow, that’s a huge blanket statement. I imagine there are parts of Jersey City you’d want to avoid, just like with any city, but the job is actually in a really nice area of the financial district. Many businesses moved there after 9/11, and from what I understand it’s like part of Manhattan. She is not the only parent I know who wants to keep their college student really close to home where it’s “safe.”</p>
<p>Good news for ellemenope’s S. At the company where my son works they would add 3-5 new software engineers right now if they could find them. This is a company that does not even require a college degree, just an ability to think creatively, work incessantly and write clean, elegant code.</p>
<p>Daughters friend just signed on with a start up for $150,000 a year with ALL the perks. Master at coding and self taught . Had one year college.</p>
<p>Computer coding can be an invaluable skill. S just couldn’t bear doing it on a regular basis–drove him to distraction but was a whiz at it. He’s still trying to decide what he thinks of his job as a project manager, but so far he hasn’t grumbled & that’s something. Hope the startup does great & your D’s friend will be the next Bill Gates!</p>
<p>Not only that, but it takes a certain type of personality with a specific way of thinking to not only be good, but also to enjoy doing so for 8-12 hours/day. </p>
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<p>Among Engineering/CS techies I worked with…that’d be considered an outright insult considering his main innovations were in the areas of marketing and business(i.e. Concept of software licensing)…not coding. In fact, Microsoft paid another programmer $50,000 for the rights to code that would eventually become MS-Dos and later, Windows in the beginning of the '80s. </p>
<p>I’d think comparing them to Steve Wozniak(Co-founder/tech guru of Apple) or Linus Torvolds (Instigating innovator of the Linux/Open Source movement) would be much more apt.</p>
home of the ultra achievers!</p>