I can’t find any statistics about this (because how would you?), but most of the people I know who work salary jobs work significantly fewer than 40 hours a week. They’re effective enough at their jobs or have sufficiently automated them to the extent that they only require mild management. Even if they work at the office, they don’t use that time only for office work.
This has been true for both my husband and I throughout our careers, as well as many of the people in our friend group, and I was recently speaking with someone who headed up talent for large companies around the world and said the same: He was so effective at his job that he barely needed to work to do a really good job at it.
But I’m curious how widespread this is (or isn’t)? Thus the informal poll! If you work a salary job, on average how many hours a week do you actually spend working on it? (Please don’t respond if you work an hourly job or are the founder of your own company!)
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Please share in the comments the finer details of how you manage your workload! I’d love to understand how people are working right now!
This data absolutely exists—you must need to find it. The Economist does a piece about this about once of year with tons of solid data. Salaried Americans work a LOT of hours—more than 40 on average.
I work part-time now, since I hold other non-salary jobs like writing here and taking care of children. But for your question, it is in essence, how many % of your contracted working hours per week are you actually working? In this case, I would say mine hovers at 70%, so if I do work a 40 hours work week, then it also lands at the 20-30 hours range.
I've been self employed for my entire career. I find that it has really changed my orientation toward time. I aggressively guard my time, and aggressively avoid meetings, especially phone and in person ones. I can always tell when I'm talking to a salaried colleague because they just seem much less panicked about wasted time. I think salaried work undermines people's sense of ownership over their time.
As a self-employed writer, I've spent most of my career right around forty hours, and really needing all of those hours. As I've made the switch to writing full-time on Substack, I've been able to scale back. I probably spend 20-25 hours actually working, though I'm still in my office about 40 hours.
Thanks for sharing that! Now that I write my Substack full-time I’ve noticed my work hovers around 40 hour weeks too. It was less at previous employers, but we also had more people to share the work with!
Not many people will be honest about this. But mainly because they don’t track their time accurately, going on TikTok for 5 minutes can turn into 30 minutes without even realising it.
I work in sales management for a large, international renewable energy company and typically work between 45-55 hours per week. I rarely work on weekends. I go to the office 2x per week and WFH the other days. Regardless of the location, about 60% of my time is spent in meetings/calls, 20% on email and chat communications, and 20% on what I would characterize as solo work activities. There’s never enough time to accomplish as much as I would like to. The last time I recall having a salaried position that demanded fewer than 40 hours was more than 20 years ago.
This is why I excluded founders 😆 When you're passionate about it you probably spend more time on it. And when it's a startup with expectations placed on it, you definitely spend more time on it! Yours is paying off so far!
This is such a fascinating discussion! I’ve worked in politics (a presidential campaign with 80-100+ hour weeks), a comms agency (50-60 hour weeks), and in-house in tech (50-60 hours with maybe one 35-40 hour week a quarter). It’s only now that I’m consulting that I’ve been working fewer than 40 hours a week, so interested to learn what industries are more consistently averaging lower hours.
It’s not just highly dependent on the industry and the specific role, but also your personal ambition. When I cared a lot about doing everything well and growing my career, I was working about 40-50 hours a week and constantly stressed. I’m at the same company but have totally given up progressing (I plan to retire in less than 2 years and I am burned out), so I work about 20 hours a week now of actual work. No one seems to notice or care.
This is a very good point. I do think personal ambition plays a big role here! My dad once said that every job he ever came into replaced someone who was working 80 hour weeks, and he just worked 40 instead.
My experience in senior management of smaller manufacturing businesses has never been 'less than 40'. I've clearly been doing it wrong LOL. Maybe it's different in larger companies....
I have been out of the workforce for 15 years, but I have never had a position where I had leisure time at work. What an interesting concept! My son works on salary and remotely, and he has great flexibility with his schedule, including four weeks of paid vacation. He may work 30 hours one week but then the following week works 60 to finish a project. He likes the flexibility but he believes he works well over the 40 hours a week. It definitely must industry-dependedent.
My husband works from home and is pretty much always working. He has meetings as early as 6am due to the company being international, works practically nonstop all day, and is often up past midnight doing required coursework to stay up to date on procedures. He even works weekends a lot. I often only see him at dinner during the work week.
My ‘job’ as a stay at home mom means I pretty much work nonstop everyday. I do the housework, childcare, meal making, etc. It’s tricky squeezing in time to work on my writing and art which almost always gets interrupted. I have a bit more time during school hours, but not much.
I read about people that have lots of leisure time and go on holiday and I’m baffled by the how of it. It’s just not something we get to do no matter how hard we try to carve that time out.
I retired quite a while ago, but even then noticed a transition from putting in the hours to putting in the work. Meaning many supervisors went from making sure everyone just looked busy to having them actually perform meaningful tasks. At their own speed.
Any salary job I had in mental health required a lot of paperwork so I was easily working 50-60 hours a week. A lot of my job was based on “billable hours” to insurance so all the paperwork time didn’t count towards that. Only actual client visits were “billable”.
I was going to mention social services here but you beat me to it! By the looks of the answers here the corporate employees have it made while human service workers are still overworked and underpaid. Some things in this society never change.
For the most part anything that is there to help serve humanity gets overworked, including educators. The only exception I do know are corporate lawyers who get worked to the bone as well. That seems to be one exception in the “corporate” world.
I'm an attorney; so not only do I have billable hour requirements I need to meet...but I also spend many, many hours per week do work on my "job" that I can't "bill" for.
Not to mention the near-constant stress/anxiety I feel regarding my job and my performance.
I’m a physician, and it totally varies: often 8-5 means 8-7 without good break to eat or use the restroom, and after hours texts/calls. Other days are “research/admin”, and that honestly is recuperating/taking care of life stuff: maybe only working 50%. So it varies. I know it’s hard on my spouse to guess which mode we’re in.
I am in a situation in my current job that has me terrified to step away from my computer even for 5 minutes, and I dread Monday as soon as I sign off on Friday. I try not work more than 40 hours because I hate what I'm doing, so the minute my 8 hours comes up at the end a day, I log off and try to do something I love.
This is an interesting discussion and not something i had thought a lot about. I work in construction management and typically work 50 hours per week on salary, though it can increase to 60+ hours a week when a project is ending. In this field, there is a set amount of time to complete all the pieces of a project and we typically seek ways to move ahead of schedule by completing as much work as possible as quickly as possible which means working more anytime circumstances allow. In my experience this strategy typically works and it is not uncommon to complete projects ahead of schedule, but it “eats up” much of your time as a human.
I’d be interested in what this looks like by industry. I have always considered more than 40 hours to be normal (in tech and in consulting). At Amazon I generally worked 10 hour days and would try to avoid weekends, but often opened up my laptop on Sunday evenings. I thought this was very good work life balance because I had friends doing 12 hour days and full Sundays. My time was flexible but I generally wasn’t sitting there and doing nothing.
The nature of most jobs is that the more efficient you are, the more work you tend to get. The number of hours, therefore, remains constant. It's Parkinson's Law in the workplace.
When I worked, got terminated for health reasons after working for 28 years, it was always a 50 plus hours a week. We flew out to places on weekends, to be ready to walk into offices on Monday morning, and flew back on weekends to walk into home office on Monday. I know and knew many people who worked more than 40 hours a week.
I had a supervisor who once said that she likes to staff an office where everyone is working .75 FTE, that way you can ask people to put in 1.25FTE during work surges. She was one of the good ones.
It's a good practice, not least because people can quit suddenly or a load of work can be dumped on your team. At least when I managed a team I would start petitioning for extra staff once I hit a point where everyone was 80% assigned.
I've become efficient because I created steps to help me along the way. My supervisor is great in that she allows me to do what I want as long as I get my work done, which I always do and will stop what I'm doing immediately if they ask me to do something else.
I'm paid for 38 hours a week, but I can achieve what's needed, to a high standard, in 25 to 30. It's a good pace which means I'm not rushing anything and I have a degree of flex when there is more to do. My previous job was 40 hours of running about and never having enough time to get everything done, which is not a good way to spend the majority of your time.
We’re remote and so there are no shifts proper. I do have a lot of time where I’m just wandering around on my phone talking, so I’m not really breaking a sweat, but I also have to be so disciplined with my free time that my free time hobbies might as well also be jobs.
As of Monday I started a two week vacation, and I’ve never had a vacation-stretch until now longer than a week.
Way too many hours as a teacher, most especially when new to a district and any position/grade levels. Digital curriculum-making, esp. when required to be extensive (excessive numbers of assignments and assessments) and thoroughly hyperlinked, with weekly slides and goals to boot, plus all the new administrative set up, adds 30% more time to your week that first year in a new position. So add 30 hours to an established teacher's 60 hours/week = 90 hours. After that first year, you can settle in at about 60+ hours/week.
I was going to say, yep, sounds accurate. Not only are we working during the day, but grading and lesson planning at night. My husband clocked me in at 70 hours a week, because I'm an English teacher, and the essays don't grade themselves. Life has been easier thanks to AI, and programs that check for plagiarism, but when you have 240 of them to grade, that still takes time.
I work in academia in 80% role that is actually 100% role, with multiple focuses, teachings, researching and writing , training and management- so most weeks it’s about 45-50 hours for a job that is supposed to take in 30hours
I recently quit my staff job because I was working more hours than I did as a contractor in the same role and getting paid a lot less. Too slammed to take all those nice PDOs, etc. I signed up for. Taking a break and will return to contractor pool. If I'm going to be burned out, I want to be paid by the hour at a higher wage.
I work more than 40 hours per week, many of these hours are just standing there doing nothing and this often bothers me but money is money and I need them to pay the bills.
I would gladly give away many of these hours if my writing work becomes profitable.
This is so interesting. Actually i am on a crossroad roght now, because I am a successful psychotherapist, with a loaded clinical agenda. But I'm transitioning to dedicate more time to writing. I'm wondering if someone here has some advice for me
This is so interesting! When I worked full-time as a primary school teacher, I averaged 11 hours per day, plus at least 1 hour each evening at home and 5 hours on the weekend. It was easily 60+ hours per week! I’m fascinated by people who manage to work less than 40 hours per week 🥰
Oof! As a high school special education teacher, I was probably putting in 50 hours per week (9-10 hours on weekdays plus a few hours over the weekend). To do all the things I was supposed to be doing, I probably would have had to do 60 hours or so but that wasn't feasible for me. It amazes me that when I moved out of teaching, every single other role has provided me with literally weeks of prep time (or at least several hours) to facilitate one important meeting or training session. Meanwhile when I was teaching, I was given two prep periods to create all of my lessons for 3 different grade levels, grade assignments and give feedback, contact and collaborate with families, do paperwork, while also tending to all of the students who came to me for support during my prep period.
Yes, I imagine teachers wouldn't be able to reduce those hours (and for good reason!) But then, I'm surprised the role isn't hourly like healthcare workers? Especially with the amount of physical hours you need to put in to be with children!
Teachers' contracted pay is based ONLY on the hours spent with the students. Imagine: how do you prepare for each day by making digital and paper-based curriculum and related content/copies, etc., and grade, and answer emails, and handle inquires, attend meetings to solve issues, etc., without putting in time outside of the hours you spend with students? Answer: you can't do the job. So, why do teachers not get paid for all hours spent? Could be that districts don't want it known just how many hours it takes to do the job, otherwise it would be clear that expectations need to be reduced, along with content, because it is untenable to work long hours like this week after week, year after year, and unpaid to boot.
If class sizes were cut in half, teachers would at least save half their grading time and, by law of averages, would have less issues/inquiries to solve. Additionally, students would get more individualized attention and feedback during the classes and smaller class sizes would likely make the experience more personal for everyone. Win-win.
FOR SURE! I had a class of 18 once (a weird quirk that is too detailed to explain here!) and the kids made so much progress. Like, so so much. When I had 33, it was so hard to get round everyone! And then my workload was through the roof. I love teaching, but I don’t think I’d ever go back now.
Yep, here in the UK (I’m not sure where you are!) we get paid 32.5 hours per week: that’s the exact equivalent of the time children are in our classroom. It’s nuts! That pay is aggregated over the holidays though, so I consider the holidays to be less of a break and more paid overtime.
We used to joke that teaching is a job where you work before you get to work, so that you can work when you get to work, and then after work you work so that you can work the next day 😂
This is interesting, I'm looking forward to results & comments!
For me, it varies -- workload is dictated by the seasonality of the videogame industry. Summer (so right now) is very quiet because all the devs are on holiday, winter after Christmas is quiet too, whereas spring & autumn are very busy. I actually enjoy this rhythm of sprint-rest cycles quite a bit. There's definitely more room for automation though...
For the poll, I averaged my weekly hours between those two "seasons" & arrived at 20-25. Still pretty good!
I have never worked a job where I worked less than 50 hours! What am I doing wrong here 😑
This data absolutely exists—you must need to find it. The Economist does a piece about this about once of year with tons of solid data. Salaried Americans work a LOT of hours—more than 40 on average.
I work part-time now, since I hold other non-salary jobs like writing here and taking care of children. But for your question, it is in essence, how many % of your contracted working hours per week are you actually working? In this case, I would say mine hovers at 70%, so if I do work a 40 hours work week, then it also lands at the 20-30 hours range.
I've been self employed for my entire career. I find that it has really changed my orientation toward time. I aggressively guard my time, and aggressively avoid meetings, especially phone and in person ones. I can always tell when I'm talking to a salaried colleague because they just seem much less panicked about wasted time. I think salaried work undermines people's sense of ownership over their time.
As a self-employed writer, I've spent most of my career right around forty hours, and really needing all of those hours. As I've made the switch to writing full-time on Substack, I've been able to scale back. I probably spend 20-25 hours actually working, though I'm still in my office about 40 hours.
Thanks for sharing that! Now that I write my Substack full-time I’ve noticed my work hovers around 40 hour weeks too. It was less at previous employers, but we also had more people to share the work with!
My publishing company reduced required hours to 35 this year, since that is common in the industry.
Not many people will be honest about this. But mainly because they don’t track their time accurately, going on TikTok for 5 minutes can turn into 30 minutes without even realising it.
I work in sales management for a large, international renewable energy company and typically work between 45-55 hours per week. I rarely work on weekends. I go to the office 2x per week and WFH the other days. Regardless of the location, about 60% of my time is spent in meetings/calls, 20% on email and chat communications, and 20% on what I would characterize as solo work activities. There’s never enough time to accomplish as much as I would like to. The last time I recall having a salaried position that demanded fewer than 40 hours was more than 20 years ago.
Previous gig was ~40. Now that I've started a company, definitely >40
This is why I excluded founders 😆 When you're passionate about it you probably spend more time on it. And when it's a startup with expectations placed on it, you definitely spend more time on it! Yours is paying off so far!
This is such a fascinating discussion! I’ve worked in politics (a presidential campaign with 80-100+ hour weeks), a comms agency (50-60 hour weeks), and in-house in tech (50-60 hours with maybe one 35-40 hour week a quarter). It’s only now that I’m consulting that I’ve been working fewer than 40 hours a week, so interested to learn what industries are more consistently averaging lower hours.
It’s not just highly dependent on the industry and the specific role, but also your personal ambition. When I cared a lot about doing everything well and growing my career, I was working about 40-50 hours a week and constantly stressed. I’m at the same company but have totally given up progressing (I plan to retire in less than 2 years and I am burned out), so I work about 20 hours a week now of actual work. No one seems to notice or care.
This is a very good point. I do think personal ambition plays a big role here! My dad once said that every job he ever came into replaced someone who was working 80 hour weeks, and he just worked 40 instead.
My experience in senior management of smaller manufacturing businesses has never been 'less than 40'. I've clearly been doing it wrong LOL. Maybe it's different in larger companies....
I have been out of the workforce for 15 years, but I have never had a position where I had leisure time at work. What an interesting concept! My son works on salary and remotely, and he has great flexibility with his schedule, including four weeks of paid vacation. He may work 30 hours one week but then the following week works 60 to finish a project. He likes the flexibility but he believes he works well over the 40 hours a week. It definitely must industry-dependedent.
My husband works from home and is pretty much always working. He has meetings as early as 6am due to the company being international, works practically nonstop all day, and is often up past midnight doing required coursework to stay up to date on procedures. He even works weekends a lot. I often only see him at dinner during the work week.
My ‘job’ as a stay at home mom means I pretty much work nonstop everyday. I do the housework, childcare, meal making, etc. It’s tricky squeezing in time to work on my writing and art which almost always gets interrupted. I have a bit more time during school hours, but not much.
I read about people that have lots of leisure time and go on holiday and I’m baffled by the how of it. It’s just not something we get to do no matter how hard we try to carve that time out.
I retired quite a while ago, but even then noticed a transition from putting in the hours to putting in the work. Meaning many supervisors went from making sure everyone just looked busy to having them actually perform meaningful tasks. At their own speed.
Any salary job I had in mental health required a lot of paperwork so I was easily working 50-60 hours a week. A lot of my job was based on “billable hours” to insurance so all the paperwork time didn’t count towards that. Only actual client visits were “billable”.
I was going to mention social services here but you beat me to it! By the looks of the answers here the corporate employees have it made while human service workers are still overworked and underpaid. Some things in this society never change.
For the most part anything that is there to help serve humanity gets overworked, including educators. The only exception I do know are corporate lawyers who get worked to the bone as well. That seems to be one exception in the “corporate” world.
I'm an attorney; so not only do I have billable hour requirements I need to meet...but I also spend many, many hours per week do work on my "job" that I can't "bill" for.
Not to mention the near-constant stress/anxiety I feel regarding my job and my performance.
This is what stopped me wanting to become a lawyer. The fear and all the extra time I know I’d need to put in that I wouldn’t be paid for.
I’m a physician, and it totally varies: often 8-5 means 8-7 without good break to eat or use the restroom, and after hours texts/calls. Other days are “research/admin”, and that honestly is recuperating/taking care of life stuff: maybe only working 50%. So it varies. I know it’s hard on my spouse to guess which mode we’re in.
I am in a situation in my current job that has me terrified to step away from my computer even for 5 minutes, and I dread Monday as soon as I sign off on Friday. I try not work more than 40 hours because I hate what I'm doing, so the minute my 8 hours comes up at the end a day, I log off and try to do something I love.
This is an interesting discussion and not something i had thought a lot about. I work in construction management and typically work 50 hours per week on salary, though it can increase to 60+ hours a week when a project is ending. In this field, there is a set amount of time to complete all the pieces of a project and we typically seek ways to move ahead of schedule by completing as much work as possible as quickly as possible which means working more anytime circumstances allow. In my experience this strategy typically works and it is not uncommon to complete projects ahead of schedule, but it “eats up” much of your time as a human.
I’d be interested in what this looks like by industry. I have always considered more than 40 hours to be normal (in tech and in consulting). At Amazon I generally worked 10 hour days and would try to avoid weekends, but often opened up my laptop on Sunday evenings. I thought this was very good work life balance because I had friends doing 12 hour days and full Sundays. My time was flexible but I generally wasn’t sitting there and doing nothing.
My guess is it differs significantly by company, job title, and location!
The nature of most jobs is that the more efficient you are, the more work you tend to get. The number of hours, therefore, remains constant. It's Parkinson's Law in the workplace.
Or you keep getting promoted and manage more and more people who can help with the work.
When I worked, got terminated for health reasons after working for 28 years, it was always a 50 plus hours a week. We flew out to places on weekends, to be ready to walk into offices on Monday morning, and flew back on weekends to walk into home office on Monday. I know and knew many people who worked more than 40 hours a week.
Same "job/company" evolved over time based on its stage...
- Early Startup (years 1-3) = 60-80 hrs/week
- Mid-Stage Startup (years 4-7) = 50-60 hrs/week
- Late-Stage Startup / Public Co (years 7-12) = 40-50 hrs/week
I had a supervisor who once said that she likes to staff an office where everyone is working .75 FTE, that way you can ask people to put in 1.25FTE during work surges. She was one of the good ones.
It's a good practice, not least because people can quit suddenly or a load of work can be dumped on your team. At least when I managed a team I would start petitioning for extra staff once I hit a point where everyone was 80% assigned.
I think a lot of middle managers are afraid to ask for more staff, so this rarely happens.
That’s smart!
I've become efficient because I created steps to help me along the way. My supervisor is great in that she allows me to do what I want as long as I get my work done, which I always do and will stop what I'm doing immediately if they ask me to do something else.
I'm paid for 38 hours a week, but I can achieve what's needed, to a high standard, in 25 to 30. It's a good pace which means I'm not rushing anything and I have a degree of flex when there is more to do. My previous job was 40 hours of running about and never having enough time to get everything done, which is not a good way to spend the majority of your time.
I work about 10 hours per day and I’m on call, but my case may be non-standard because I’m in engineering leadership at a startup.
Before that I was easily 9 hours per day. Only when I worked in higher ed did I work 40 hours. I’ve never worked less.
Anecdotally, most my friends and colleagues in tech work 40+ hours per week.
We’re remote and so there are no shifts proper. I do have a lot of time where I’m just wandering around on my phone talking, so I’m not really breaking a sweat, but I also have to be so disciplined with my free time that my free time hobbies might as well also be jobs.
As of Monday I started a two week vacation, and I’ve never had a vacation-stretch until now longer than a week.
Burnout’s pretty severe.
Way too many hours as a teacher, most especially when new to a district and any position/grade levels. Digital curriculum-making, esp. when required to be extensive (excessive numbers of assignments and assessments) and thoroughly hyperlinked, with weekly slides and goals to boot, plus all the new administrative set up, adds 30% more time to your week that first year in a new position. So add 30 hours to an established teacher's 60 hours/week = 90 hours. After that first year, you can settle in at about 60+ hours/week.
This is in reference to high school curriculum.
I was going to say, yep, sounds accurate. Not only are we working during the day, but grading and lesson planning at night. My husband clocked me in at 70 hours a week, because I'm an English teacher, and the essays don't grade themselves. Life has been easier thanks to AI, and programs that check for plagiarism, but when you have 240 of them to grade, that still takes time.
I work in academia in 80% role that is actually 100% role, with multiple focuses, teachings, researching and writing , training and management- so most weeks it’s about 45-50 hours for a job that is supposed to take in 30hours
Oof!!!!!! Thank you so much for sharing.
I recently quit my staff job because I was working more hours than I did as a contractor in the same role and getting paid a lot less. Too slammed to take all those nice PDOs, etc. I signed up for. Taking a break and will return to contractor pool. If I'm going to be burned out, I want to be paid by the hour at a higher wage.
Those contractors really do circumvent the system. I hope you enjoy your break, and can find a better gig when you go back!
I work more than 40 hours per week, many of these hours are just standing there doing nothing and this often bothers me but money is money and I need them to pay the bills.
I would gladly give away many of these hours if my writing work becomes profitable.
This is so interesting. Actually i am on a crossroad roght now, because I am a successful psychotherapist, with a loaded clinical agenda. But I'm transitioning to dedicate more time to writing. I'm wondering if someone here has some advice for me
I have no advice because I have similar goals:)
This is so interesting! When I worked full-time as a primary school teacher, I averaged 11 hours per day, plus at least 1 hour each evening at home and 5 hours on the weekend. It was easily 60+ hours per week! I’m fascinated by people who manage to work less than 40 hours per week 🥰
Oof! As a high school special education teacher, I was probably putting in 50 hours per week (9-10 hours on weekdays plus a few hours over the weekend). To do all the things I was supposed to be doing, I probably would have had to do 60 hours or so but that wasn't feasible for me. It amazes me that when I moved out of teaching, every single other role has provided me with literally weeks of prep time (or at least several hours) to facilitate one important meeting or training session. Meanwhile when I was teaching, I was given two prep periods to create all of my lessons for 3 different grade levels, grade assignments and give feedback, contact and collaborate with families, do paperwork, while also tending to all of the students who came to me for support during my prep period.
Yes, I imagine teachers wouldn't be able to reduce those hours (and for good reason!) But then, I'm surprised the role isn't hourly like healthcare workers? Especially with the amount of physical hours you need to put in to be with children!
Teachers' contracted pay is based ONLY on the hours spent with the students. Imagine: how do you prepare for each day by making digital and paper-based curriculum and related content/copies, etc., and grade, and answer emails, and handle inquires, attend meetings to solve issues, etc., without putting in time outside of the hours you spend with students? Answer: you can't do the job. So, why do teachers not get paid for all hours spent? Could be that districts don't want it known just how many hours it takes to do the job, otherwise it would be clear that expectations need to be reduced, along with content, because it is untenable to work long hours like this week after week, year after year, and unpaid to boot.
If class sizes were cut in half, teachers would at least save half their grading time and, by law of averages, would have less issues/inquiries to solve. Additionally, students would get more individualized attention and feedback during the classes and smaller class sizes would likely make the experience more personal for everyone. Win-win.
FOR SURE! I had a class of 18 once (a weird quirk that is too detailed to explain here!) and the kids made so much progress. Like, so so much. When I had 33, it was so hard to get round everyone! And then my workload was through the roof. I love teaching, but I don’t think I’d ever go back now.
Yep, here in the UK (I’m not sure where you are!) we get paid 32.5 hours per week: that’s the exact equivalent of the time children are in our classroom. It’s nuts! That pay is aggregated over the holidays though, so I consider the holidays to be less of a break and more paid overtime.
We used to joke that teaching is a job where you work before you get to work, so that you can work when you get to work, and then after work you work so that you can work the next day 😂
In the western United States.
Right, that is clearly not the way to do things. There can be no doubt that some countries have figured this out far ahead of the US.
This is interesting, I'm looking forward to results & comments!
For me, it varies -- workload is dictated by the seasonality of the videogame industry. Summer (so right now) is very quiet because all the devs are on holiday, winter after Christmas is quiet too, whereas spring & autumn are very busy. I actually enjoy this rhythm of sprint-rest cycles quite a bit. There's definitely more room for automation though...
For the poll, I averaged my weekly hours between those two "seasons" & arrived at 20-25. Still pretty good!
Thank you so much for sharing that!!!! That really is fascinating.