A recruiter set me up to talk to a manager at some finance company. Normal conversation until he dropped the bomb that their employees work 60 hour weeks. 12 hour days for 5 days a week. Every week. All year. Indefinitely. I resisted the urge to laugh. Barely.

I understand hard work. I have done silly things like ridden a bicycle 400km in a single day after all. For my personal projects I often will go for long stretches working at my real job normally and as many hours writing software for myself. I’ve even had many 20+ hour days in most of my jobs including my current one. I know about long hours. But you don’t plan to do that. You don’t do that every day as a matter of habit at the expense of nothing less grand than your life.

To me it reflects poor management and possibly desperate employees. Do they have crippling debt? Immigration status problems? No home/social life? I don’t know. One could claim that everyone in the organization loves their job so deeply that they just can’t be torn away from it. In the entertainment industry, maybe. I can imagine working way more than 60/hrs a week if I were, say, Peter Jackson. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be as healthy as I am now if I were Mr. Jackson. But we’re talking about the finance industry. Even if I stood next to a big lever for 12 hours a day and every time I pulled it money dropped out of a chute (this would be a good time to read about Rat Park by the way) I still would need to have a life. But if I was just some computer support cog, the idea of 12 hour days is completely pathological.

Not only is the idea ridiculous and unhealthy, it is poorly conceived to maximize return on investment. Here is a very sensible article that dispels the myth that overworking is effective (even in a relatively fun job). Overworking is overworking.

The manager told me that usually the problem was getting people to go home after 60 hours. Well, here’s a tip. Don’t tell prospective employees that they’ll need to put in 12 hour days forever. Let that be a pleasant surprise for them. Tell them 32 hours with 8 hours to work on your own personal projects (a la classic Google). If they all want to stay for 60 hours of your project, it doesn’t matter what you say. If, of course, they don’t want to stay… Well, I’m calling BS.