[alkonaut]

I consider myself “paid by the hour” even if I’m not formally paid by the hour. I log my time and have a bank of hours that can’t go outside +/-20 hours. If I did 41 hours last week I’ll do 39 next week. I’ll never take a position where I do more than 40h on average. There is no amount of money that will be compensation enough for regular 45h weeks.

[wutbrodo]

Yup, exactly.

Excluding those that are very low on the income scale, for whom everyone agrees life is difficult, I simply don't understand the claims of inescapable demands on skilled white-collar workers' time. If you're making any sort of non-negligible surplus above the basics, then you're at some level making a conscious choice of that surplus (usually for consumption) over a lower-stress job.

I have a friend who's a quant at Goldman Sachs, whose work life is miserable but who makes a good 150k more than me. His labor isn't (currently) valued at more than mine: I could get a similar TC with little effort and a much _better_ working environment, but I have absolutely no interest: I'm consciously trading off compensation consumption for a better work-life balance. The flipside is that he's consciously trading off quality of life for more compensation, for whatever his personal reasons are. It's bizarre to me to claim that it's a bad thing that that choice is presented to him (or to me for that matter).

I get that this sounds like a general-purpose argument against worker protections, but there's a key difference: in the absence of a robust, UBI-like safety net, we as a society have accepted that coercion can include nominally consensual actions taken to avoid bumping up against a lack of whatever we've defined as the basic necessities that everyone is entitled to (food, shelter, etc).

But the work burnout problem is, statistically, almost entirely a middle- and upper-class problem[1], and these are precisely the people who have the comp surplus to consciously choose to trade off compensation for a better quality of life.

I know as always the dimmer readers of comments like this will pattern-match this to the victim-blaming buzzword, but you can simultaneously bemoan the state of a culture and work to improve your lot within it. In this case, there's a fairly simple, concrete solution: perform worse at your current job by putting in less hours or get a job that isn't so rigid as to require a number of hours above what you find to be your healthy level.

[1] the job-related woes of lower income people tend to involve not being able to get enough employment and thus enough income to live off of

[mratzloff]

> perform worse at your current job by putting in less hours

Citation needed.

Edit: So self-evident is this equation to some people that they down vote the mere suggestion that working longer hours does not make you better at your job.

[wutbrodo]

What on Earth are you talking about? For the cases where your job requires longer hours even when they don't track productivity, the part of the sentence that you conveniently left out was "..by putting in less hours or get a job that isn't so rigid as to require a number of hours above what you find to be your healthy level."

For the cases where your work doesn't blindly want longer hours but measures your productivity in a saner way, if you can perform better at your job in less hours (which is totally plausible in many situations), then OBVIOUSLY you should be doing it already.

The fragment of a sentence that you quoted is narrowly referring to a situation where 1) you're still getting productivity out of your marginal hour and 2) your work doesn't arbitrarily require absurd hours as detached from productivity.

> So self-evident is this equation to some people that they down vote the mere suggestion that working longer hours does not make you better at your job

I can't even imagine what would drive someone to spend their weekend time feverishly imagining statements that no one is making so they can feel smug about disagreeing with them.

[mratzloff]

> I can't even imagine what would drive someone to spend their weekend time feverishly imagining statements that no one is making so they can feel smug about disagreeing with them.

I'm sorry my comment upset you. It wasn't my intention.

My point was that in many cases people are inclined to work longer as a result of social pressure when it has no positive impact on productivity. In that case, are longer hours "required"? Or is it strictly a choice? My interpretation of what you said was perhaps more binary than you intended.

In those cases, one can simply work less, shrug off the social pressure, and perform at the same level. You allude to this (sort of) in your second paragraph, but this is not as obvious to many people as you state and, I think, benefits from saying explicitly.

[ravenstine]

Hopefully you didn't learn this from doing overtime, paid or voluntary? I had to learn the hard way, in part because my dad is naturally a hard worker, so I think I took after him. Eventually I figured out that working more hours virtually never pays off, and it's stupid anyway because even if you're getting paid you're still trading even more of your life away.

[mgkimsal]

> and it's stupid anyway because even if you're getting paid you're still trading even more of your life away.

when you 'trade' you get something of value in return. if you're getting paid and you think it's a fair pay, it's not automatically 'stupid'. saving more now to pay for future expenses, nest egg, rainy day fund, whatever? how can that be 'stupid'? You have an opportunity to provide the means for a more secure future for your family, today, when that ability may be in doubt - take the pay now for more work.

your dad being a 'hard worker' may have been able to provide things to you that you never knew about at the time (or may never know about).

[esoterica]

That's a pretty silly line to draw in the sand. No amount of compensation to work 45 hours, really? Even if someone offered you enough money to retire 20 years early, you'd rather spend an extra 20 years doing the 9-5 just to avoid spending 1 extra hour a day at work?

If you made enough money you could easily save 10+ hours a week by moving closer to work, paying people to run errands for you etc. You could easily have more free time working 50 hours a week than someone with less money would working 40.

[alkonaut]

Anything has a price of course, but realistically there is no position that would let me retire earlier (nor do I want to).

My 40h is also already 100% remote, so very hard to improve on in terms of commutes etc. In fact, if I were to switch to non-remote I’d never accept a 40h ass-in-seat position either.

[esoterica]

Even a 20% pay raise would let you retire several years earlier, assuming you don't spend any of the extra pay.

[alkonaut]

A 20% pay rise is 10% after taxes here and wouldn’t make a huge difference. Also, I hope and intend to work well into my 70s. For that I need to not burn out in my 40s. I’m happy with what I do. I don’t need more money or more years retired. I need a job I’m happy with, money for bills and time with my family now. I pick up kids from school every day at 4 and make them dinner at 5. All this must sound pretty foreign to Americans...

[paganel]

> Also, I hope and intend to work well into my 70s. For that I need to not burn out in my 40s.

Glad I’m not the only one having this exact line of thought about my future career. If it matters I live in Eastern Europe and I’m approaching 40.

[airbreather]

Aussie?

[alkonaut]

Close. Swede

[herbst]

I would never work more in the hopes to retire earlier. I've worked different time models between essentially do whatever I want and 42 hour weeks. All of them paid for my living standard (which I would say is rather simple).

Everything above 35 hours feels like I have no time for myself anymore.

I think the main reason why I don't get the 'FIRE' mentality is because in my country we have a healthy pension system I can look forward to.