Quote:
Originally Posted by Cali Panthers Fan
I don't know about any of you, but it's laughable to think that most Americans have only a 40 hour work week in any meaningful job that is salary-based. Responsibilities seem to be nearly constant in most jobs and people are often working into the evenings and on weekends with increasing regularity. Throw in the fact that vacation time is rarely used and people don't want to call in sick for fear of losing their jobs. If we started by simply scaling all jobs back to a 40 hour work week that was rigidly held to, we would actually employ more people overall to do the same work. That might hurt profitability, but it would go a ways to dealing with un/underemployment.
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My personal experience aligns to what you're saying, as well as what I've observed from others at our firm. I'm in a fairly senior role in consulting and while I'm not constantly going over 40 hours a week, week over week, it's a pretty regular occurrence. I had assumed when I was younger that as I moved up, working extra hours would vanish, but this definitely hasn't been the reality. A lot of this is due to meetings taking up a ton of the day where you can't do any of your actual work and for my industry specifically, meetings with teams that land outside my working hours that require my attendance (some offshore, but also some as simple as being out of the eastern time zone when I work out of the Pacific time zone). I do wonder if it's always been this way or if things have gotten worse over time.