Feel free to name any category of professional where working over 40 hours a week isn’t quite normal. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors. It sure looks like people who work more than 40 hours a week on average do better than those who don’t. This is not a claim about what I wish was true, but about what actually seems to be true.
The actual research on this is scarce to the point of non-existence. It may actually be non-existent for knowledge workers, at least published work.
> Feel free to name any category of professional where working over 40 hours a week isn’t quite normal.
YMMV but the only time I ever experienced the myth that "working over 40 hours a week is the norm" was when I started working at a US-based company.
And the only reason unpaid overtime was the norm was that managers, specially skip-level management, did a piss-poor job establishing sane goals based on realistic time-frames, and typically threatened to fire people pretty much each and every single week if they did not met those unrealistic goals.
Strangely enough, everywhere else people managed to do their job within the 40hours work week.
> YMMV but the only time I ever experienced the myth that "working over 40 hours a week is the norm" was when I started working at a US-based company.
Even in France, where the base legal hours are only 35 hours a week, intellectual/upper professions in a full-time position work an average of 43 hours a week.
That's the average which includes women, who work 10% less (in terms of number of hours worked) than men. If you only consider men, you reach an average week of 45 hours for those professions.
Yes, many places are willing to have lower productivity in exchange for higher quality of life. The US has a different culture and has most economically dominant companies.
> The US has a different culture and has most economically dominant companies.
The US's post-WW2 dominance doesn't explain why layers of lower management from the US stationed abroad insist in scheduling 3 weeks worth of work into 1 week in spite of being fully aware of how long the task takes, and afterwards boast to their leadership that their non-US teams outperformed US-based teams by a long shot while leaving out that team some non-US developers had to pull consecutive all-nighters to pull it off.
> YMMV but the only time I ever experienced the myth that "working over 40 hours a week is the norm" was when I started working at a US-based company.
Irish lawyers and doctors work well over 40 hours a week on average too. I feel pretty confident the same is true in finance. Tax professionals in Spain do too. That about exhausts my personal knowledge of working hours in Europe but I kind of doubt management work less than 40 hours a week anywhere, even the civil service.
> and typically threatened to fire people pretty much each and every single week if they did not met those unrealistic goals.
The secret to greater American productivity and hence wealth. People just work more hours.
> Feel free to name any category of professional where working over 40 hours a week isn’t quite normal.
Just because something is considered "normal" does not mean that it's actually efficient, or "good".
Certain job sectors, like social jobs, have been chronically overworked and underpaid for pretty much as long as they existed. Even during non-pandemic times burn-out, depression, and suicide rates of people working in healthcare have been way above those of the average population, particularly the people who actually do all the "grunt work" like nurses.
A situation has become much worse during this pandemic, yet remains largely ignored.
> It sure looks like people who work more than 40 hours a week on average do better than those who don’t.
Tell that to people working in logistics, those people delivering you packages the next day. Ask them how many hours they work and how "well off" they are financially in exchange for giving up large parts of their private life.
As a matter of fact, only two out of the 4 professions you listed are actually considered overworked to a degree of burnout: Physicians and attorneys [0].
The vast majority of the rest of the list is populated by professions that are generally not considered well-earning even when working massive hours: Nurses, social workers, teachers, school principals, police officers, public accounting, fast food or retail.
Most of these professions would have a very lasting and visible impact if they were gone, it would make society overall objectively worse to be missing them, yet somehow society at large still refuses to properly recognize that trough proper financial compensation even with many hours worked at very important tasks.
Working any number of hours isn't "normal", it's a trade off between free time and money (for example, colleagues who work part time in order to sleep late) and a consequence of social pressure (e.g. competitive attitude) and practical constraints (e.g. keeping a shop open at constant and useful hours).
In some cases people want to work, to some extent, because their job is more pleasant than their free time activities, but it cannot be considered "normal".
Medical error is apparently the third-leading cause of death in the United States (see https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading...). It certainly seems plausible that our culture of overworking doctors contributes to that significantly.
Specialist doctors are not staying late on a Friday or working the weekend. While a walkin clinic doctor might be pushing 60 hours.
An average business owner might spend more than 40 hours a week. The most successful business owners hire people to work for them while they enjoy their lives.
8 hours of tired programming gets less done compared to a well rested 3 hour work session.
> Specialist doctors are not staying late on a Friday or working the weekend
This isn’t true. Obstetricians work 24 hour shifts as standard. Babies don’t get born 9-5.
If you come into the ER on a Friday night with severe brain damage you’re seeing the neurologist immediately. If you have a punctured lung you’re not waiting for the pulmonologist to clock in at 9AM.
Nearly all medical specialties work shift patterns or are required to be on call.
As best I can tell the specialty with the lowest annual hours worked is pediatric emergency medicine at around 52 hours a week. Vascular surgery average 66 hours a week. If you want to check my calculations the below paper has annual work hours for different specialties.
> 2018 Average Physician Hours Worked Per Week
Physician Type Average Physician Workweek
Age 45 years or less 54.73 hours
Age 46 years or more 49.87 hours
Male physicians 51.89 hours
Female physicians 50.46 hours
Practice owners 51.96 hours
Employed physicians 53.73 hours
Primary care physicians 50.64 hours
Physician specialists 51.76 hours
Maybe plastic surgery, dermatology, rheumatology, and psychiatry don't, but other doctors are going to be splitting weekends and call among the members of their group. For specialties that have fewer doctors nationwide like vascular surgery, cardiothoracic surgery, and neurosurgery you can expect to be on home-call every third night and covering the weekend every third weekend. You might have to come in to operate every other call, and on the weekend you'll have to round on all of your group's patients on Saturday and Sunday and operate if anything operative comes in.
My sister-in-law is an Ob/Gyn. Yes, there's call, but that gets compensated for by fewer hours during the M-F week. There's a reason why doctors on the golf course on Wednesdays is a cliche.
Seriously? Of all things, something so obvious like this needs needs citation?