Makes sense, and there are definitely areas where you can get sucked into very company-specific tech, so it's important to keep broader/industry-wide skills up to date.

My devil's advocate to those questions...
- I've never seen a company actually hire anyone to specifically relieve someone of extra hours, and I'm not sure it would ever happen if those extra hours are seasonal or something like go live support, where people are working a ton more for a relatively short amount of time before going back to a much more reasonable workload.
I've worked for companies in growth spurts for sure, hiring people left and right, and while it is in the end the company's fault.... the reality is help (probably) isn't coming, and....

- The flip side of the 2nd question is -- we already have x number of people working a ton of hours, why should we give Bearcat a raise before he starts doing the same? We could just find someone else who will work 60 hours/week.
As I mentioned before, the extra hours are no guarantee of raises, just that it's the best bet in the IT world, from my experience.

And I've had it both ways... I was at one company and received a couple of ~2-3% raises over two years, and probably averaged 50-60 hours/week. So, I left, and the next company and managers there really saw the value in the extra hours, taking on more projects, mentoring, etc; and I really saw the benefits from it.

That just goes back to having those conversations with management on what you're looking for....
- What's my salary ceiling right now? How do I get there, or advance to the next level?
- I want to be making x% more a few years from now, is that possible? How so?
- I'm looking at this kind of salary trajectory, what does that take?
- I want highly visible projects, or to move to this area, how can I prove myself?

In my experience, a lot of people don't drive their own career growth or salary growth in this way, and make assumptions on whether their extra work/effort will pay off... and as I said before, set the expectation and have those discussions, and if they don't work out, either find something else or reset your own expectations (such as working less hours).

There are of course still managers who aren't transparent and still companies that get away with abusing employees.... yet, employees have more leverage these days than ever before. Specific to IT, employers know you can simply find a new job every couple years and get decent bumps on salary. The managers and companies that figure this out will do what it takes to retain their best and hardest working talent.

Nah, just under 60 hours/week during the craziest years. Granted, that's still several 70-80 hour work weeks, shit has to be completely out of control for me to kick it into that gear.
[Reply]

The only time I've experienced true burnout, is during my 2+ year stint as a truck driver

12-13 hour days on the road are a genuine grind and they dont take long to add up... over the road guys are limited to 11 hour days, but grain haulers in this state have an exemption

In bed at 9, up at 3 for a 12-13 hour day?

Piss off
[Reply]

to qualify myself....80 hour work weeks were on short contracts to restore ransom ware when the company is losing millions, sometimes 10’s of millions $’s a day. They are more than happy to compensate you for the sleepless nights. Usually I’m working 45-50 hours a week. Reasonable hours to me.
[Reply]

Yeah, I might have killed myself by now in these situations, heh... where it's either maximizing profit of my own business or $$ per mile or whatever.
[Reply]

good on you to not brain dump the cert’s. It might get you by HR that you checked that box and they pass you on to the hiring manager but unless you really know the tech, your not getting past the interview. So it’s wasted time and money to try to shortcut the tech.
[Reply]

Yeah, I've never minded 9-10 hours/day and rarely work less than that (granted, unlike when I was younger, I make it a priority to use all PTO)... feels productive, yet doesn't really impact getting home at a decent hour and doesn't impact the weekends (for the most part).

Sixty starts getting extreme when it's week after week, as you're either taking away from weekends or not doing much else besides work on the other 5 days. That's when it starts becoming more difficult to find the motivation to workout, etc.
[Reply]

When I left the Army when I turned 40, I told myself my days of working "for free" were over. When I joined my current company, if I'm supposed to work 176 hours that month, that's what I work. Now, does that mean I necessarily clock out right at 5? Nope, but if I'm 4 hours ahead come end of the time card, then I'm taking a half-day off on time-card day. Also, they allow us to work ahead so if I know I'm going to be out of town on a three-day weekend, I'll try to put in an hour here/hour there to minimize the amount of PTO I have to take.

The way I've avoided burn-out is my company is big enough and has enough projects that I've always been able to move to a new contract after 3+ years on an assignment. So, about the time I start going "I really don't want to go in to work today", that's when I start checking the internal help-wanted web pages and applying for a new assignment. That's helped a lot by being able to shift to a new assignment, new co-workers and keep me interested and fresh.

Have I maybe missed a few promotions? Yes, on-purpose. When I was hired 21 years ago, I told them I had no interest in management. I'd been a senior NCO and learned quickly the two things I hated the most were meetings and paperwork. Just give me interesting work, give me the occasional COL raise and Mrs. White's boy is a happy person. And I'm still with the company 21 years later while most of the "hard-chargers" have burnt themselves out and quit after 3-7 years.

I guess those higher paychecks were worth it to them. Me? I'd rather do my 40 and go home and spend time with my family.
[Reply]

:-)
[Reply]

Averaging 72 hours a week? Perhaps. You look at TPS and Muda, Muri, and Mura. It's obvious there's Muri here. Are there others to distribute that workload to? Are there activities that aren't fruitful and largely a waste (muda)?

I say that because I watch an owner of the company I work for do a lot of the same. He complains more than I do about burnout and how much he works.

The problem for him is likely different from you, but he feels this urge to micromanage and have his fingertips on everything that goes on. He has a great staff that can run the company without him, seriously. He's a smart guy and hires the right people. The problem is he just can't let those people do their jobs.

My advice to him has been to work smarter, not harder. It seems simplistic, but its truly the issue at hand for him. He needs, and maybe you too, to define the things that he should focus on and be responsible for and schedule them throughout his week. If its a non-value add process, should you be focusing on it? If its of no real or immediate benefit to you or the customer, dump it or at least put it on the back burner until its reasonable to work on. If its necessary for the customer, can you delegate it?

There was a company I worked for a decade+ ago where we did a specific TPS study and looked at the time we were spending on tasks. What we were surprised to find is that many of us were picking up the slack for others and working on tasks outside of our job description and what should have been our priorities. If I'm in accounting and doing 50% of an HR coordinators job, then I should probably replace the coordinator. Of course, I'm in a smaller company now and wear both hats, but my accounting workload has went down and I can absorb that adminstration segment. That is probably the case for many in a similar role. In any event, be careful the number of hats you try to wear. You find yourself becoming wildly inefficient at everything rather than efficient at a few tasks.

If I were in your shoes and I'm putting in 72 hours a week, I definitely would consider adding at least a part-time employee to delegate some workload to. Re-prioritize your workload and figure out what are the most important tasks for you to handle. Its not especially sustainable to continue on the path you're on.
[Reply]

2019 was a confluence of fuck. I'm headed for a lot of hours in 2020, but hopefully fewer. Some of it is on me, sure. But logistically it's going better.

I'm pretty efficient. I've removed virtually all the non-value added activities from my workload.

As far as the structure, there is my farm, dad's farm and a couple other ancillary entities that don't matter. I have some operations and dad has some operations that we pay each other for. In 2019 he had a full time and a part time dude working for him and I had none. I reimbursed him for the little bit of labor they did on me.

2019 had a bunch of weird shit. First and foremost Dad's fulltime and partime guys were shit they barely did anything, meanwhile dad and I were killing ourselves.

Second, I crammed a fairly big system change in our operation in the winter, which typically I work fewer hours. So that added a lot of hours to a normally slow time.

Third, the spring was goddamned wet. That did 2 things, 1, allowed us to move a lot of acres to fall crops that we hadn't planned on, which really stacked up a bunch more work in an already busy timeframe. So much so that I hired out some acres to go under one of my machines. Great way to NOT make money, but it is what needed to happen. Then when it came time to roll, it stayed wet, further compressing the busy timeframe. So I worked my ever loving ass off.

Fourth, I made some agronomic changes that needed some additional management to incorporate properly, because we hadn't done them before.

As far as moving forward, That shitheel guy isn't around anymore. The part time guy is now full time, and his work is better, but he wants a lot of time off. So the answer is obviously to hire more employees. But that's a tough ask in my part of the world. Everybody has labor problems it seems like and objectively, a lot of places can pay more than I can. Labor management will be pretty big moving forward as dad slows down.

Also, margins are ass. So it's difficult to make structural decisions which will further erode my already shit margins, which in 2020 are certainly going to be negative.

And I'm pretty efficient. I already eliminated most every non-value added activity from my life. Dad and his guy do some piddly shit, but I don't. I GTFO if I'm caught up.

There are also some functions that lend itself to screwing up my life, most importantly is irrigation, but I push the structure pretty hard, which puts me out there at 3 AM or whenever it needs swapping. But I'm doing it because it pays compared to the alternatives. So I do it. I run the numbers pretty studiously, so I continually evaluate operations and am not afraid to make systemic changes.

All that being said, I'm not burned out. I make time for my kids, and my wife does a good job of bringing them out when they can. Overall, I'm pretty happy. I'm also pretty self-aware and can objectively analyze my mental state.

It's not what I should be doing almost certainly, and definitely wouldn't be if I could secure higher level labor, but it's not in the cards and it's what I'm doing.

Well shit, I just looked at my payroll and I've already worked 2100 hours. I'll for sure be over 3000, but hopefully I can keep it around 3200 and under the 3700 I did last year.
[Reply]

3 years ago my wife and I were on top of the world financially. No mortgage, very little debt, disposable income to do whatever the fuck we wanted. And at the same time I was going through the worst work experience of my life. Went through several phases of burnout and depression. Ended up making major changes in our lives, and as a result, all that financial security is gone now. We'll probably never be back where we were, and I couldn't care any less, we're much happier now. You can't buy your sanity back for any amount of money.
[Reply]

What post? :-)
[Reply]

Good stuff Buehler. I won't quote your whole post. I'm assuming now that I've read your post that you're in grain farming based on narrow margins?

Are you big enough to make good use of crop rotation? What about GIS/Geomatics?

Just curious as I've never really been much into the farming world, just looked at it passively on how to increase margins because I work for a GIS company and was trying to see if we could fit Agri into our realm.
[Reply]

Buehler- you are a star in my book. Working 70 plus hours a week and keeping it logical/real is impressive. It takes a special kind of drive and vision to pull that off- regardless of vocation!
Good on you!
[Reply]

I returned to work today after 4.5 months off due to treatment and isolation. I have never felt such an overwhelming sense of dread and emptiness in my entire life.

The only time I've felt something similar is moving schools in third grade, going from a small, private school where multiple grades were in one classroom, to a traditional public school setting where I didn't know a single person in my class.

I think I've come to realize that I like the idea of what my job can be, but I have no taste for the minutiae of what is actually is. I feel even worse because they supported me while I was sick, and now that I'm back I feel like it's the last place in the world I want to be. I felt like that before I took leave, but I assumed that it was the stress of chemo and the uncertainty around COVID. Now I'm realizing that those were contributing factors, not causative.
[Reply]