I should actually be working 8h a day, but most of it is spend not working. If I’m honest I’m probably working more like 3h a day even though I enjoy my job.
Hours?
Work?
Straight answer up front: sometimes my entire ten hour shift has less than 10 minutes of work in it.
I must confess, my job is a bit of an edge case because not everybody wants to do it.
I work third shift, and usually exclusively the weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights, 11pm to 9am).
4 ten-hour shifts.
and during these shifts… bruh most of the time I’m chilling
I’m reading ebooks, I’m watching anime or youtube, I’m chatting with friends on discord
most of my job is having a pulse while babysitting an empty building.
the part of my job that makes the money, though, is when the phone rings.
I work at a towing company, and I dispatch.
When people are calling me, it’s almost exclusively because shit’s fucked up.
I am in charge of sending some unfuckery their way.Most of the calls are from companies though: Motor freight lines like Ryder, Penske, Fleetnet, UPS, FedEx, and a few other carriers that are even less customer-facing; motor clubs like Swoop, Urgent.ly, AAA, NationSafe; or insurance companies like Allstate or GEICO.
What they want to hear is how soon and how much and knowing how to rapidly generate this information while remaining accurate is where most of the expertise lies.
Then there’s the police calls.
When there has been an accident and a disabled vehicle (and its pieces) must be removed from obstructing the roadway, that’s us.
When some dumb bastard drives drunk and subsequently gets rightly caught, we impound their shit.
When a stolen vehicle is found, we recover it.Whilst my opinion regarding cops (pigs) has evolved (fuck the police) quite a bit (they’re fucking bastards) in recent years (every last one of them), my guys do the NOT Standing On Someone’s Neck bits of it AFTER the dust has settled and the blood is done being spilled (and the bullets have stopped flying…) so generally we’re one of the responders on the make-someone’s-life-LESS-horrible side of the curve. Which feels pretty nice.
There are the rare occasions where a major shitshow evolves and I’m triaging calls and coordinating multiple assets in the field though, and that’s when the pay really feels worth it.
Presently I’m 5 years in and making 20/hr
Literally at this very second, it’s a wednesday night/thursday morning and I’ve already DONE my 40 hours this week - I’m here on overtime covering the other third shift dispatcher while they’re out, and each of these hours is worth $$$THIRTY BUCKS HELL YEAAAA$$$
it’s not enough to afford rent nowadays of course, but eh, i inherited the house from my father…
(and want to transform it into a group home for low income persons and families if I can get it organized right)
(i’ll be taking a page from history and trying to turn my house into something like a multigenerational compound except for people who aren’t strictly related by blood)Multigenerational housing for the win! Also, neat job, congrats!
Doesn’t working overnight have ramifications?
for most people it does. For me, while they may exist outside of my awareness, I am nevertheless unaware of them. What health issues I had been experiencing came about as a result of other major life circumstances, and i’ve seen some pivotal improvements since some of those circumstances have been amended.
I always was a natural night-owl. I’m always more alert at night, and get eepy sweepy after the sun comes up, so it suits my proclivities perfectly.
I’ve been at it for five years already, so, if it’s a chronic issue, guess I’ll find out after another 20 years of it!
0.5 hours a day in average. I get nice pay for it. The beauty of support 🤣
11-13 hours total. I average a six-anna-half hour shift waiting tables, an hour-anna-half active commute, and about four hours of housework.
Ugh this thread makes me upset. I have a contract for 18 hrs per week and you bet your ass I’m really working 99% of the time that I’m clocked in. And then people ask me why I don’t work more hours, but looking at these comments it seems I’m actually right on par with other people who get paid for 30-40 hours per week, when it comes to productive time spent.
That’s the upside of the stable salaried job versus the potentially more lucrative contracting/consulting. I don’t get paid extra for staying late or traveling, but I also don’t get paid less if I do almost nothing on a given day. And in a laid back company, nobody notices or cares as long as it isn’t negatively affecting projects.
You have to figure out what’s the minimum amount of work you can still get away with. Then you do that amount + a little bit extra so that you don’t get fired the during the next recession.
This is the way.
Not everyone is like that tbf
Not my experience working salaried.
Yup. The less hours, the more work.
My job requires me to work 7h a day. When I am working from home I will probably work 6h-6.5h since I will take two 15 minute breaks but otherwise there is nothing to distract me. If I work from the office however that number easily drops to 4.5-5h since I will be interrupted all the time by various issues and also just take more breaks due to others taking them as well.
Edit: I don’t really know how it is to work from a hole, but I know how to work from home
Working from holes is very beneficial
- I haven’t yet got another job at my level in my field.
Depends on how you define work. I do my dayjob for maybe 2 hours a day at most and then freelance with the rest of my working day. so I’d average 5 hours of work a day betwen the two jobs.
8 hours.
To many cameras around to not do my job
Amazon warehouse worker or what?
Paper plant. We print sign up forms for 401k and other insurance and financial products. Many times it will have private data. So yeah there’s cameras everywhere.
Like 1-3 on average. Some days it can be all day but not often.
I have a fairly workload intense job and I’m happy with my pay. Of my 8 hour day I work pretty much all of it aside from running to the bathroom etc.
I do design and tech support for industry. Official hours are 7,5h/day (lunch is off-duty). 3 days in office 2 days remotely. My actual workload varies a lot. If everything works and all resources are in use, I might not have anything to do for weeks on end. If shit hits the fan, I’m on overtime working 10h days, using every second.
I might quess that on average 2h/day of actual work and varying part of this are communally beneficial activities I invent for myself to keep myself busy.
Mostly less than 30 min per day. Then every few months 10h per day.
Found the sysadmin
About 7.5 hours out of an 8 hour shift. I work a job where I am physically actually working the entire day except for my breaks. I work in healthcare.
Sometimes I wish I had an office job because I hear things like this and sometimes get a bit jealous. But I am still satisfied with my job and I feel that I am compensated well.
I have an office job and I work 8 hours a day programming. It’s nice to be able to clock out consistently at 5 but I really don’t get much down time. I rarely get my full hour for lunch.
It’s not bad work and I like my job but working 3 hours would get you fired here.
I have no idea how you can do that consistently for 8 hours straight and not burn out
Idk man. Maybe not many office jobs are that way, but there are many other types of jobs that have always been that you work for the duration of your shift. Factory work, many healthcare jobs, restaurant work, etc.
Those jobs don’t use as much of your brain as software dev. Software development isn’t meant to be a factory worker’s grind, it’s meant to be about thinking of the right way to implement something and then seeing it through.
Those jobs don’t use as much of your brain as software dev.
Whatever helps you sleep at night, dude
Look I’ve done both factory work and programming and those same points in your brain that you use for programming are tickled when the very complicated machine your running malfunctions or breaks down and needs to be fixed immediately
I mean, my healthcare job involves a lot of mental problem solving depending on the caseload I have that day.
I’m not sure you could be more condescending if you tried.
It’s not condescending. Some jobs are about using your brain, some are about using your body. Some are about both. Software dev is not about both.
Yes, it is condescending as you belittle the ‘brain’ role for the aforementioned jobs in retail, hospitality, healthcare, etcetera.
I make good money and just really, really like building things in code.
I’m the son of a programmer who is the son of a programmer…
At the end of the day I’m often tired but not burnt.
Yeah my brother also has an office job and seems to work for the majority of his shift too. He works in finance. I guess it’s dependent on what sort of office job you have then. I hope you are compensated well.
I’m compensated extremely well. 0 complaints.
It depends on how “efficient” the company is (ie how much work they can squeeze out per person).
If I was paid less I’d definitely work slower.
Curious what field exactly, from rotations in residency and previous experience it seems to vary wildly.
The ED is non-stop action, sometimes more work than you should reasonably be doing probably. But in regular wards it seems that I had my work done about 3-4 hours into the shift most days and then I was just sitting around waiting for an admission or some results back.
Similar experience doing nursing in neuro before I got my MD, of the 24h hours I would reasonably work like 1/3 of that and most of the rest was downtime, usually I would sleep through most of the night too.
I’m not a physician. I work in the laboratory grossing surgical specimens. Our work never stops. There are almost always cases to complete, except for some rare days where there is a lull in cases before the end of my shift (typically the night before certain holidays if they stop doing surgeries…or sometimes a bunch of surgeons will take their vacations at the same time lol). This does also mean that I get to have standard holidays off, unlike a field like nursing or any role in the ER.
It varies, though. Some labs are very slow where you actually do get a fair amount of downtime and some are even busier and more bustling than mine. I’d say we are a fairly busy lab, but we don’t generally get ultra complex surgical resections like hospitals even larger than mine do. We still do get large cases, just not things like pieces of people’s faces, etc.
It’s an interesting field.
You mention that you had a lot of down time in nursing, but I’d say I depends on the field and facility with that too. My mom is a nurse and has had nursing jobs similar to how you described. She said she would get a lot more downtime when she worked in large hospital settings and worked overnight. Usually overnights seemed to be the quietest. But then she was worked other types of facilities where she really hardly has time to sit down and take much of a break.
Even at my hospital, some of our pathologists will manage to fly through their cases and head out early (our director manages to make it so he always has a lighter caseload than the rest lol)…while others are always working late into the night working on additional duties like tumor boards.
So ymmv depending on what role and what type of facility you’re at yeah.
Even though I work all day, I think I have a good work-life balance and really enjoy being at work with my coworkers.
Office jobs also vary greatly. I work an office job and yesterday I worked about 12 hours with a 1-hour break to drive from one office to another. I typically work through lunch and still find myself overwhelmed with too much to do.
But the one hour “break” isn’t really a break. It’s traveling time
Yep, and that’s how I log it in my hours, too.
On a personal level, I just find driving very relaxing because it’s one of the few times I feel like I can just be alone, so it always feels good having to drive somewhere for work knowing I’m just running the clock (which…I usually end up exceeding anyways…)
Personally I find driving exhausting. Especially in a car and in a city.
When I used to work in the office I probably worked about 5 hours a day at most. The rest was spent on personal projects, fucking around, whatever
Now that I work from home it varies between two and four.
My production is exactly the same.
