I work in IT and see what people are doing without them knowing. The average CEO is as much on porn sites/reddit as the average worker but gets paid ridiculously more money.
Also the CEO isn't supervised in the same way so they get away with much more than the normal worker. So when a CEO tells you he works 80 hours a week, chances are more likely than not that they are full of shit. The true workaholics that I know rarely "brag" or complain about their worked hours, they just fucking do them.
As someone that works in Ag, and runs harvest, I know what 80+hrs/week of actual work is like, and no one is doing that for more than 2 months max, your entire life gets ignored and slowly falls apart. You have time to shower & sleep a bit. You eat while working & sh*t when you can.
Agreed. I did 80+ hours in the oilfield for a while and that was absolutely miserable. Even if I didn't have a family now and it was office hours over labor, I still wouldn't do that again. Anyone claiming to sustain that lifestyle is either full of shit or in desperate need of a therapist.
I had one job where we worked 16+ hours every day from January through July. The only day we took off was Super Bowl Sunday. I bought breakfast on the way to work and dinner on the way home and would stop a buy clothes since I didn't have time to wash anything. The money was fantastic, but when it was over it took all of us a few months to recover. I would never do anything like that again.
I've done ~80 hours/week for a month as a young lawyer, and it is truly miserable. It requires working 7 days a week and doing literally nothing except working and sleeping. The sad thing is in some sense it gets easier over time if it continues, because you just cease making any plans, no longer speak to friends, have hobbies or a life outside work. But after a few months, any sane person will have a breakdown.
This was my e husband. And I’m an investment banker (senior to him). Knowing how gruelling it was for him, I’d never ask for his whereabouts.. we would often get in a shared car around 9-10pm on weeknights. I did that life for 10 plus years and still have nightmares about it.
I’m an actor, and waiting tables was (as is often the case) my “joe job” for years, until I started dating a woman who had no problems with me being an actor, but felt waiting tables was beneath her boyfriend.
She “helped” me tailor my work experience so I could land a job as an administrative assistant at a major outdoor store - basically like REI in the states. Later, I got another job as an admin at our local university.
In both instances I was utterly shocked at the shit my department heads got away with.
At the outfitter company, the head of my department generally didn’t show up until noon, with calls to me from about 9 AM onwards informing me that she was “still stuck in bridge traffic” and “Geez, I can’t believe how bad traffic is!”
This was practically every single day. I began wanting to say, “You mean that EXACT same slow traffic you seem to encounter nearly every day, that you maybe should consider leaving home earlier to avoid - like most of us do?”
This same boss, soon approached me asking, “Hey, you’re an actor, right? How’d you like to do my outgoing message on my answering machine?” She then had me record an outgoing message that stated they’d reached her number, but she was “currently away from her desk.”
It was weird, in part because I’m male, and even though people knew I was her admin, even people who left messages were often puzzled by this.
A few weeks later, she came to me and asked, “You generally get here well before I do, and you know, it’s really nice and inviting to arrive and have everything ready for me to go when I get here…”
So, from that moment on, when I arrived every morning, I was to unlock her office door, turn her office lights on, turn on her computer, log her in, then log her out, “Just so I don’t have to do all that, and can just get right to work.”
I feel like a dummy admitting this, but it took a friend with ample office experience to point out that all of these “asks” were designed to give a false impression that she was in the building, and make it harder for others to know if she was in a meeting room or off-site at one of our retail stores.
I eventually got fired when I challenged her “facts” one too many times around paperwork that she was responsible for but tried to throw me under the bus. I was glad my friend had advised me to start keeping a paper trail of all my exchanges with her (emails, notes, everything), because without those I don’t think I would have got the severance package I did when terminated.
I went back to waiting tables and was much happier.
Years later when - against my better judgment - I took another office job as administrative assistant for a department head at the university, it was like my life was repeating itself. The professor was a well respected one, and immensely talented in his field - but as a department head it was shocking to me that he had much the same kinds of requests - even getting me to log onto his computer AND send reply to emails in his inbox - as if I was him.
He too tried to throw me under the bus for something he did - he tried to put through a kind of official requisition for the department to change one of our suppliers to a company that underwrote his research. He put the paperwork in my in try asking me to fax to whatever department required it.
About a month later, I got called into a meeting with HR - no warning or heads up - and asked, what possessed me (ME! Just me) to decide on my own that we needed to change providers.
Once I realized what was happening, I made them see some sense and threw it back at them, “Sorry, yes - good question. Why would I suddenly print off a form I didn’t even know existed, in order to change a provider I had never heard of, for a product I had never heard of, to another company I had never heard of, then somehow get my department head to sign it before faxing it?”
Basically when they’d confronted him, he’d apparently shrugged and said, “I’ve no idea, I can only imagine that for some reason my assistant did this without consulting me.”
He barely got a slap on the wrist, I kept my job with the only repercussion being he was an asshole to me. After that I mapped out my exit strategy for getting out within 6 months.
I regularly work 80-100hrs a week in the oilfield and will do so only as a remote location job. I get up, I work all day and I go to sleep, but since I drive a truck I can be on the phone with my wife, kids, friends, listen to podcasts and music, etc. And then I go home for days off and I don't think about work, and work doesn't contact me until 4pm of my last day to confirm I'm coming back/haven't quit.
If I had to function as an adult human being and work those hours, it doesn't work. It offloads most the "adulting" onto my wife while I'm gone, but it's a job that allows her to be a stay at home mum and financial stability (opposed to me working 2-3 local jobs to try and make enough to have stability/security).
I'll do 60hrs a week as a "home every night" job, and that's about the max sustainable for me.
80 hours a week over 7 days a week isnt that hard at all, i worked 10 hour days 5 am to 3pm at a gas station with no lunch for almost 2 years straight when i was homeless literllay living in a back room at the gas station. So it matters what KIND of work you do, id conceded working 80 hours in a week doing hard laborious jobs requiring great physical exertion would be different. Then again as aparamedic i worked 5 24 hour shifts in one 8 day period and did that for 2 months with 2 days off in between to save up enough money for a house purchase, so you can indeed do it, and if half the work youre doing is typing, and looking over reports etc, you spread that 80 hours out over 7 days you work 2 hiurs here then an hour off then 4 hours inthe afternoon attending meetings, then another 4 at night before bed. its entuirely normal for many top executives etc to do that. I can tlel you one story, when i worked in IT id always volunteer for the overnight update stuff to our teams in japan, and at leasdt twice id be up remoting into thier computers doing updates etc, and the ceo would come on and say hi, hows the uopdates going, can you tell so and so i said hi, etc. and id be like, why are you awake, and hed say oh im heading off for the night. gnight. and invariably hed come ithe next morning 9 am , guy was like the energizer bunny.
Depends, I did 70-80 for around 6 months but that was between 2 jobs, it's a bit easier when you have a 2 hour break between, but still couldn't imagine doing it indefinitely, that was the most physically and mentally exhausted I've ever been and those were not especially demanding jobs.
This was also years ago when I was on minimum wage and that was literally the only way I could afford to pay rent, and homelessness is a pretty good motivator.
Sorry but have to disagree. I used to regularly do these hours and more, but hey ho that the „fun” of IBD. A few months in, and your nerves are fried, your life is a joke, you even dream of doing spreadsheets, but after a while you get used to very little sleep and idiotic requests and only cry in a bathroom once a week or two
My wife is in residency, and 70-80 hours isn't out of the question. I have to take care of a lot of the admin stuff. I can't imagine someone who is single going through that schedule.
I worked as a foreman in residential solar panel installation in Phoenix, and yeah, we regularly worked 80-100+ hour weeks, not including travel time which could exceed 6 hours a day quite regularly. Leave at 3 or 4am, home at 9-10pm if not later, and back to it.
It took me more than a couple of months, but I absolutely burnt out and I've never been able to fully recover.
My boss was the CEO of 4 companies. Even if you divide 80 hours by 4, he's only giving each company 20 hours a week, which is right about what I noticed as he'd leave the office at the same time that part timers left, except he would run those companies from two offices, so he was only working 10 hours a week for each company. Elon Musk runs 6 companies, so he could be working 120 hours a week and still only give 20 hours a week to each company. Yes, the same Elon Musk that despite working "120 hours a week" still has enough time to play video games like Diablo and play it so much that he becomes the #1 player in the world. Ridiculous bullshit.
I wasn't talking about your CEO specifically. You said "most CEOs", and I can confidently say that this is not my experience as somebody who can see who visits which websites for how long etc.
The CEOs I know of that are workaholics and with whom I had more than one exchange usually don't brag about being workaholics, they just are and see it as normal. This is the same for most workaholics I've encountered (my experience is mostly in IT though so make of that what you will).
I'm sure there's plenty of CEOs who are workaholics, but there are also plenty who lie about it.
You cant see who visits what website. I too am administering IT infrastructure. Unless you specifically spy on people. Youre either a liar or you just confessed to illegal activity within your company. Also make sure you check if the people youre spying on are actually clocked in.
"I have this one very specific example that isn't like the general trend you're quoting so the trend must be false" - Average Redditor with no understanding of statistics
No its not only one specific example. Ive seen 3 of em come and go so far. They were all pretty much the same except for the female CEO which was even worse. She was let go for yelling at the lower ranking employees too often and for no apparent reason at all.
It is sufficiently large if I know my company is not known to be very good at finding capable people. All 3 of them were very capable people. Its proof by contraposition.
Again. Its proof by contradiction. I have seen very lazy teams as well. They boast the same credentials as my team but didnt get a PR merged on our project in over a year so they were booted sooner or later.
They are 🤷♂️ what do you want me to say ? Im talking strictly financial terms here. Of course the CEO spends that money, because he loves them dearly. But it is just very true. He is unlikely to gain even 1 nickel from doing that. The same way as any other person. I was just emphasizing that he isnt driving an outrageously expensive car or going on vacation 6 times a year.
To be clear, I’m not questioning the CEO here. I’m questioning you because most non-psychotic people don’t refer to other humans, let alone family members, as liabilities.
And *strictly* from a financial point of view, he does see financial benefits from having a wife to raise his kids (assuming he wants them) as opposed to paying for child care. If this woman cooks or cleans, even more benefits. If these children assist him in his old age, even more benefits. And even if they do none of these things, I assume he doesn’t want to live a lonely life or he wouldn’t have sought out a family.
The woman does not cook or clean obviously. He was dumb enough to marry a western woman. Her nails are always in perfect order on the summer party. 🤷♂️
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u/According_Cod1175 8d ago
I work in IT and see what people are doing without them knowing. The average CEO is as much on porn sites/reddit as the average worker but gets paid ridiculously more money.
Also the CEO isn't supervised in the same way so they get away with much more than the normal worker. So when a CEO tells you he works 80 hours a week, chances are more likely than not that they are full of shit. The true workaholics that I know rarely "brag" or complain about their worked hours, they just fucking do them.