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by adrianN 1080 days ago
Nobody works 100 hours a week.
4 comments

Video Games industry survivor here, chuckling at the low number ;)

Yes, people do. It carries potentially huge personal costs, but if people are passionate enough, they absolutely will risk that. (Mind, I'm not saying this is a good idea, at all, but merely that it happens)

At least in the cases I did, it was usually a 9 month gruelling sprint at the end of a ~2.5-3.5 year project. Followed by people lollygagging about for ~3 months before they could do any reasonable work again. We sure got a lot of Age of Empires in during that time, though ;)

Which is maybe acceptable if it is your main job, but a bigger problem if you burn out from a side project and then can’t do much on your day job for some mysterious (to management) reason…
I agree it's not very sustainable, at least for your typical person in Western Society, but it's not unheard of either.

I've worked hundred hour weeks and also supervised crews of Hispanic Americans that will work 100 hour weeks.

On the other end of the spectrum, I've known m&a lawyers that do the same to close deals at the end of the fiscal year.

100 hour week is roughly 14 hour days with no weekend break. 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. is pretty common for agricultural work during harvest season for big cash crops. You start while it's dark and you end while it's dark.

It is not sustained/sustainable. I worked 100 hour weeks too, but then it took like a month to recover and during that time I could not properly work even 50 hours on my main job.

Agriculture is historically seasonal: you work a lot during some times, but the rest of the time you do completely nothing on the agriculture front. Not a luxury at most modern workplaces.

Just to help clarify, not a luxury at the agricultural places, either, just the pace it runs at.
I do not know what you mean. What I described with regards to agriculture is how it worked historically with communities growing stuff for themselves or to sell at a local market. I encountered leftovers of that personally growing up. People could work hard in planting/harvest times during summer and in winter do mostly nothing except maintenance and such. I am not talking about commercial industries which may well be working people to the bone unsustainably (and illegally, if it was a developed country) with 12+ hour shifts. Barely a worthy example.
It's not all rare for certain workers to to spend 14+ hour days, 7 days a week, for multiple weeks straight, without any breaks. And they do this every year, year after year. And they can still live to their 80s.

The claim that a long period of rest is always necessary in-between 100 hour work weeks is simply not true.

Physical work? Maybe, if the person is fit and the work is sufficiently easy.

Creative innovative mental work? In these amounts it will fuck you up.

Probably not for long anyway, or they are in a tiny minority…
Yes they absolutely do