Tbogg is right, soon these guys will be teaching third-graders and moving their own lawns:
One investment banker who participated in the survey described a breach of the “tacit understanding” that he or she would be well compensated. Considering “the sacrifice I make in my personal life (100-hour work weeks, canceled vacations, etc.), this business has to be more rewarding,” the person said, according to Capstone.
That banker isn’t alone. Of about 2,000 associates and vice presidents in their first three years, 67 percent identified “disappointment with compensation” as one of the biggest reasons to leave the field. Almost the same percentage described their jobs as “satisfactory,” according to Kopelan.
More than 80 percent said they don’t believe that their compensation is mainly predicated on performance. Instead, Kopelan said, young investment bankers worry that it’s “based on the profitability of the firm, based on how powerful the group heads were, based on capricious things.”
Last year, according to New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, Wall Street paid out $20.8 billion in cash bonuses, instead of the $22.5 billion a year earlier.
Disgruntled Lurker
Moving a lawn sounds difficult.
Or is that typo?
TenguPhule
Just march them out against a wall.
Their replacements will be more grateful.
different church-lady
At this point I’m pretty sure butthurt is America’s largest industry.
Yutsano
@TenguPhule:
FTFY. Greed does very odd things to humans.
Linda Featheringill
“Tacit understanding”? With your employer? Hmmmph. What a naive child.
On the other hand, if this person really did put in 100-hour weeks, he/she might not feel adequately compensated. It might be that no amount of money is worth that many hours.
And, of course, the speaker could also be a whiny brat.
Jc
Just more sel-absorption from our ruling class spreadsheet killers.
I wonder when we will start punishing these spreadsheet mass murderers?
When will enough be enough?
PurpleGirl
I’d love to see a detailed diary of those 100-hour weeks. I worked as a paralegal for four years and every minute had to be charged to a client. My firm wanted the time broken up in 15-minutes blocks and you had to explain stuff like fact checking, editing, proofreading, writing correspondence and to whom, calls to state agencies, client’s in-house staff, etc. So if these financial idiots are working 100-hour weeks, that’s close to 20 hours a day… doesn’t leave them much time to do anything else (like eat or sleep). So let’s see how those days break down.
Cause I don’t believe it for a second.
Omnes Omnibus
@PurpleGirl: Fifteen minute blocks? Every place I have worked as lawyer, we have billed in six minute blocks.
ETA: I agree with your main point though.
JPL
The lucky duckies are so fortunate because they just have to juggle three part time minimum wage jobs and as a reward they don’t pay taxes.
I can understand where the bankers are coming from.
arguingwithsignposts
@PurpleGirl: How much of that time is spent listening to Santinelli and Cramer?
Somebody call the whaaaambulance.
Tyro
One investment banker who participated in the survey described a breach of the “tacit understanding” that he or she would be well compensated. Considering “the sacrifice I make in my personal life (100-hour work weeks, canceled vacations, etc.), this business has to be more rewarding,”
They’re still making a lot of money for someone in their early-to-mid-20s. What are they whining about? How much money did they expect?
Odie Hugh Manatee
I smell a strong sense of entitlement and it smells like shit. If the fuckers are going to be “moving” their lawns then I hope they move them to the poorest neighborhoods in the country.
They need to see the reality of the shit they have rained down on everyone who is not a bankster.
Just compensation for 100 hour work weeks? How about fair compensation for working a job that actually requires that you exert yourself? When I read shit like this I really wish that the ‘system’ they profit from would fall apart, letting these assholes finally see the reality out there that everyone else faces due to their drive to enrich their masters at the top.
Fucking assholes.
Yutsano
@Omnes Omnibus: Maybe the paralegals get off easier than you do. My time at work is accounted by the six minute standard though.
Omnes Omnibus
@Yutsano: Moochers.
Yutsano
@Omnes Omnibus: I and your tax dollars thank you. :) Although keep in mind every dollar you spend on me translates into eight dollars for the government. No wonder the teatards want me unemployed.
PurpleGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: I know most firms want a 6-minute block but LeBoeuf Lamb used 15-minute blocks.
@Yutsano: The attorneys also had to bill in 15-minute blocks.
Don’t know if they still use the larger time blocks but this was back 1987 to 1991. I had to have 1820 billable hours. I think the attorneys needed 2200 hours, but even that isn’t 100 hours a week.
Mark S.
Why is the profitability of the firm a capricious thing?
Roger Moore
@PurpleGirl:
2200 hourse is about 44 billable hours a week for a 50 week work year or 50 hours a week for a 44 week work year. I don’t know what the ratio of billable to non-billable hours is, but provided you don’t have too much non-billable time that seems doable.
@Mark S.:
It’s capricious if different parts of the firm have very different performance. If my group made a ton of money but the firm as a whole did badly because somebody else screwed the pooch, I’d be angry, too.
Jason Stokes
Dear investment bankers
I want your job. True, I don’t have a degree in your field. I studied philosophy, and my knowledge of commerce and economics is limited. However, I do have two advantages: unlike you, I can add, subtract, multiply and divide, plus I have actually read and understood some actual economics in my spare time, which is obviously more than the investment banker quoted in the article has.
1. “100 hour work weeks” means 14 hours and seventeen minutes a day, seven days a week. I used to work 12 hour shifts in my taxi driver job, and was fucked by the end of it. It is simply not plausible to assert that you are working 100 hours a week, either on a regular basis, or, indeed, at all. I call bullshit.
2. Econ 101: Let’s assume you work something more sensible, like 60 hour work weeks. In fact, the rate of compensation is the reason you work such long hours, the long hours are not the reason why you deserve high compensation. In the neoclassical model, the point at which the disutility of longer hours reaches indifference on the function comparing preference for consumption against preference to leisure is further along on the graph due to the increased rate of compensation in high-wage jobs. Reduce the rate of compensation, your preference for longer hours goes down. True, this does result in lower productivity in a sense. But in a country with 10 percent unemployment, reducing compensation and consequently hiring more investment bankers to do the job you do seems to be a result.
I think six months training is enough for the average pizza slinger to learn how to spout nostrums and fallacies while fucking over your clients, the economy, and the taxpayer, and demanding exorbitant pay and conditions for comfortable and not terribly difficult work. Frankly, I’ve met electricians who seemed better trained — a lot better trained. I see no reason why investment banking should be a better compensated and a well-off electrician. Stop the protectionist cartel practices and open up your job to people who are willing to do your job for less, and probably better, at that.
Al (from Indiana)
Now maybe they can get a job that actually accomplishes something of value.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore: My experience has tended to be that it takes about 50 hours to bill 40.
Threadkiller
@PurpleGirl: I think you’re underestimating how sadistic this work environment is. I-bankers don’t bill by the hour – the hours worked aren’t predicated on actual live deals or projects.
And the bitching here seems to be among junior employees, who primarily prepare “pitches” – powerpoint presentations “pitching” various transactions for numerous prospective clients, as directed by those higher-up. Even (or especially) when there’s no deal flow, the junior guys will regularly be working 90-100 hour weeks. No billable hours – they’re on salary.
Of course, the base salary itself is usually pretty generous, so my heart doesn’t bleed for those whose bonuses don’t match expectations. But the job itself for junior folks is like boot camp meets a stockyard feedlot – you sit, work, get yelled at, and order takeout, and drink whenever you’re released.
(Aside: I had a smarmy director who informed me and my fellow analysts that if we were working fewer than 100 hours per week, we were “under-capacity” and would be given new tasks.)
ETA: @ Jason Stokes: 14 hours a day at a computer, 7 days a week is doable. You’re fucked, yes, but not driving or operating dangerous machinery. The fact that your work product deteriorates to incoherence apparently matters less than that you’re getting “schooled”.
Villago Delenda Est
@TenguPhule:
My first reaction as well.
Then I thought, no too easy.
FIRST they spend 5-10 years making little rocks out of big rocks.
THEN up against the wall.
MikeJ
@Threadkiller:
They ought to form a union. Or quit. Or shut the fuck up.
Shlemizel - was Alwhite
@Yutsano:
I have long felt if we took every dime from the top 10% and divided it equally amongst the bottom 50% The economy would race like nobody has ever seen. After a couple of years most of the ‘bottom 50’ would be poor again but a lot would be the new millionaires. Most of the ‘top 10’ would be living on the street wondering why grandpas billions didn’t spare them.
Those of us in the middle would have made out extremely well from the friction of all that money changing hands.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
And if it isn’t, fucknugget? ‘Cos you know, we’d actually like it if you’d stop gang-banging the economy, load your giant-assed ego into a Mayflower moving truck and go the fuck home.
Jesus, these assholes really are flirting with suicide by poor, tired, huddled mob.
jrg
Lulz. Shorter entitled Wall Street prick: “You all would not survive one minute if we stopped producing the absolutely fucking nothing we produce.”
This is why I only buy index funds. These people should starve to death.
lamh32
OT, but if ya’ll have never watched BET before, they are right now airing the documentary that was filmed during FLOTUS and the weeMichelles in Africa last June.
I’m sure it’s gonna be re-broadcast if ya miss this one.
Threadkiller
@MikeJ: I vote quit, and shut the fuck up.
What galls me is that they fail to appreciate that the sadism applied in their workplace is what their overlords envision for all of us, for our survival rations. Instead they’re just bitching about their comp – and believe me, these guys are all making six figures base salary. In their 20’s.
Corner Stone
@PurpleGirl: Wow, 1820 for a paralegal? You were majorly profitable for the firm if you met that goal.
Nobody makes 2200 the standard for attorneys nowadays. The cliff bonus starts at 2050, with most associates pegged at 1800.
different church-lady
@Tyro:
More. In their world that’s the only quantity that matters.
burnspbesq
@PurpleGirl:
Wrong-o. Divide 100 by seven, not by five. There is no weekend in professional services. I can show you plenty of emails that end with “let’s talk about this at the wedding,” or “are you available for a call at 7:30 on Sunday morning.”
burnspbesq
@PurpleGirl:
It’s worth noting that LeBoeuf no longer exists, having been swallowed by a larger and more profitable firm.
JGabriel
@Jason Stokes:
Actually, it takes genetics or years of abuse to turn someone into a sociopath, possibly both. That’s why businesses prefer MBAs.
.
WyldPirate
@Yutsano:
Just out of curiosity, how much time do you and OO piss away each hour/day/week accounting for your time?
burnspbesq
@Villago Delenda Est:
You’re awfully fucking judgmental about how other people earn a living. Just out of curiosity, care to disclose what you do and your educational background?
PurpleGirl
@Corner Stone: I didn’t find it all that hard to meet 1820 hours: that’s 35 hours for 52 weeks. If you were steady in your work habits and asked the attorneys for work as one project slowed down/ended, you could keep yourself busy. It also helped if you worked on several projects at the same time, in turn.
Corner Stone
@burnspbesq: All billable homeboy. Talk to salaried professional service individuals before you climb that horse.
burnspbesq
@WyldPirate:
If your firm has decent software and you stay current, less than ten minutes a day.
Svensker
@Linda Featheringill:
I worked a job for a year with 100 hour weeks. It was at a remote location and when my boyfriend came down to spend a few days with me at Christmas I slept the entire time he was there. I’d wake up and he’d give me food and I’d go back to sleep. Very sexy. Got paid really well, I thought, although my pay was in the low 6 figures, not in the high 8 figures.
Guess my heart bleeds for these poor sods.
Corner Stone
@PurpleGirl: The standard for paralegals now is 1600, and they are still profitable at that level.
Both commercial LIT and Corp & SEC activities are waaaayyy down across the board.
And IP LIT? Find a hole.
4tehlulz
And not a single fuck was given that day.
Violet
@lamh32:
I’ve seen Sasha and Malia called the “weeMichelles” a lot. Why is that? They’re her kids and independent people. Their names aren’t Michelle. They have their own names. I guess it’s kind of cute and intended as a compliment, maybe? But they’re not her Mini-Me’s. They’re individuals with their own names and own opinions on things. At what point do they stop being grouped in with their mom? When they turn 18?
PurpleGirl
@Corner Stone: Really? Wow.
Omnes Omnibus
@WyldPirate:
@burnspbesq:
Like burnspbesq, if, and it is a bit if, you stay current it isn’t that hard. Basically, when you start working on anything, you note the time; if you get a phone call you look at your watch, stop the clock on what you were doing, and start it for whatever client/case the phone call involves, etc. Go a couple of days without keeping track and then it sucks.
WyldPirate
@Threadkiller:
Sounds a lot like internship and residency training for MDs. The difference is they kill and injure a lot of people because they are fucking dead on their feet most of time.
Violet
@Corner Stone:
A lot of lawyering can be outsourced. That’s why law schools are having a hard time placing all their students and law firms aren’t hiring at nearly the same rate they used to.
Outsourcing hit manufacturing first, but it’s coming for white collar jobs. Maybe then people here will sit up and take notice. It’ll be too late then, though. Why pay the high US prices for a lot of stuff that can be done by someone in India and be sitting on your desk in the morning when you wake up because of the time difference?
burnspbesq
@Omnes Omnibus:
I was shocked when I left the IRS in the lat 1990s and went to a (then) Big Five accounting firm. The IRS had better timekeeping software. The reason the Big Four send out one-line bills with no detail, even for things they do on a time-and-expense basis, is that they would be embarrassed beyond belief if their clients had any idea what a WAG that number is.
LesGS
@4tehlulz: As my daughters say, “If I had a whole pocket full of fucks, I still would not give one.”
WyldPirate
@Omnes Omnibus:
@burnspbesq:
Ugghh. “stop the clock”? Annotating nit-noid details? Alt-tabbing between different tasks for different clients to enter some tripe on time-tracking software?
No thanks. I’ll take teaching for the pittance I receive for my efforts. Then again, given the BS we have to “track” for our “bean counters”, perhaps it is not all that dissimilar. And our software is teh suxxor as well.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@jrg:
That’s what pisses me off about our ‘system’ of managing money; the less physical labor you do, the better compensated you are. Since this is their ‘reality’, these people build up a sense that the world would collapse if they were to stop ‘producing’. In reality, if they actually could influence the economy in such a way then they would be the ones who would suffer.
I am skilled in the electrical and mechanical trades, thus I can actually do something of value to someone else. I can repair, design, improve or manufacture goods that people NEED. They can’t do much more than wipe their asses and would shit if they actually had to get their hands dirty to make a living.
The world of finance is nothing without labor. It’s that simple. They wouldn’t be making any money if someone wasn’t on a production line making the goods. You can dream about any idea you want but without labor to make it happen, it’s only a dream. These assholes have helped to take away our jobs by MBAing them to death or shipping them overseas so that now many of us can’t find a good paying job.
Then they turn around and call us lazy fucks because we aren’t working. It’s never their fault, it’s always the fault of those they look down on.
Guillotines are the solution for assholes like these people. It’s time for a National Haircut because we have some really ugly hair that needs to come off the top.
RossInDetroit
Mowing the lawn was the easiest work I did this week. And if any of those assclowns had to teach 3rd grade, after a month they’d be looking at the janitor and wondering how much of a pay cut they’d have to take to trade the youthful chaos for a nice simple broom and mop.
RossInDetroit
@Violet:
Yeah, we in mainframe IT painted ourselves into that corner during Y2K. Outsourced a lot of coding to people overseas who when it was all over decided they liked doing our jobs and could get them done cheaper.
patrick II
I am a retired now, but in the cafeteria in the building I used to work in there was a short order cook who came in at 5:00 a.m. to make breakfast. He got off at three. In the evenings he had a small janitorial business (employing mostly himself) and would clean up a few small businesses after they closed. In the few months before Christmas he also worked in as a janitor in our building for a some extra money for Christmas presents for his kids. So, his day was 5:00 a.m. to 3p.m. short order cook. Then from about 7 to 11 p.m janitorial services, and during the Christmas season add on about 3:30p.m. to 7p.m. as a janitor.
Hard work and long hours is not unusual for the working poor, in spite of the complaints I here on Faux news about the “non-productive” class. I don’t really have much sympathy for Wall streeters who claim they deserve big salaries because of hours worked.
Corner Stone
@4tehlulz:
Sigh. Sounds familiar.
Yutsano
@burnspbesq:
But oh Lawd is it picky. There is a different budget category for every possible thing in a day I could be doing which I stick into a timesheet. Which is then compared to a chart of what I should be doing. Which is THEN reconciled against a report from my computer showing my work. If it wasn’t for the fact that there are tolerance amounts my manager would literally be doing nothing else but keeping track of my time. As it stands, it only eats up her Friday.
WyldPirate
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
I admire people like you, Odie. The world would stop working without folks producing something of value to other humans in the form of goods/products. I also think that there will come a time in the not-so-distant future when fossil fuels get prohibitivly scarce/expensive that there will be a lot more people employed producing tangible goods for others in the US.
That said, there are “products” that are provide in service that are indirectly related to the production of goods. People are willing to shell out a lot of money for these sorts of “products” because they lack the skill, time or other means to provide them for themselves.
But I do hold our financial overlords at a particularly high level of disdain given they basically end up fucking someone over in the process of providing their service.
Corner Stone
@Violet: No doubt. Let me tell you a tale, a tale of lowest cost jurisdiction and knowledge management.
I keep telling people that the business of lawyering is over, essentially.
It’s a cut and paste world with Lexis dictating how valuable you are.
There’s a top 5% and everyone else. And the market doesn’t care if you spent $200K on your JD.
PeakVT
@different church-lady: Win.
suzanne
God, I should have been a lawyer, not an architect. I was really excited that my salary started with a 4.
However, I get to bill in 15-minute blocks. I had to do 6-minute blocks in advertising. I just made shit up.
Corner Stone
@suzanne: I thought you were a dancer in MTV videos?
arguingwithsignposts
@Yutsano: What category does “commenting on Balloon Juice” fall into? Random fuckery? ;)
normal liberal
I was an IP litigation paralegal in an IP boutique firm from the mid-eighties through the late nineties. We were encouraged to hit 1900 hours per year, and I think junior associates were targeted at around 2000, but if they wanted to make partner it was more. Timekeeping was the bane of my existence, but the clients were fun and had cool toys.
It was amazing how the culture changed during those years, as toward the end people were starting to sense the tech bubble wasn’t going to re-inflate.
I left when a plausible alternative career idea surfaced, and when it became clear that the partners were only going to accept so much reduction in their profit margin to keep paying me more. “Go to law school,” they said, “and we’ll keep a slot for you.”
Of course, then I would have had to practice law. As if.
Yutsano
@arguingwithsignposts: There is a bit of elbow room in the timekeeping. Plus I don’t do that on the work computer anyway.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@WyldPirate:
Agreed. They have perfected inserting themselves into the economy and extracting wealth for themselves, their ‘services’ driving up the cost of goods without providing any additional value.
They can take their ‘service’ and shove it up their asses. I’m sick and tired of being ‘serviced’ by them.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Omnes Omnibus: Half hour blocks for engineers. Of course, our hourly rates are but a minor fraction of those for you esquires, so +/- six minutes of our time is but a pittance.
RossInDetroit
Oh, how about retail? A good salesperson in high end retail can make $80K/year. I’d like to see a banker on the other side of the counter dealing with some smug prick who thinks his undershirts aren’t luxurious enough or the store owes him freebies because he spends a lot.
Turnabout/fair play.
Roger Moore
@RossInDetroit:
Though you can have some really nasty problems when you outsource your coding. You’d damn well better demand that you have control over the code you get back, or you’re completely at the mercy of whoever you got to write it. Even if you have the code, getting through it to figure out how it does its work can be a mess.
We have a Mass Spec in one of our labs whose manufacturer decided to outsource the code to a software house in India. The code works OK to control the instrument, but the coders made the insane decision to store the raw data in a MS-SQL database rather than individual data files as every sane instrument maker has done since they computerized data capture. This made it impossible to analyze or back up individual data files, since the coders didn’t provide a way of exporting the data. By the time the manufacturer realized how badly fucked the software was, the coders had apparently moved on to new projects and couldn’t be bothered to help out- at least for a price the company was willing to pay. We were eventually able to reverse-engineer the way the data was stored, but it was never easy. Needless to say, the lousy software didn’t win the company any loyalty even though the hardware performed very well; they have gotten out of the business after the one model and it’s now an orphan.
Threadkiller
@WyldPirate:
One could argue that quants and financial analysts are at risk of killing and injuring entire economies. . . Unless making sloppiness is a feature and not a bug (S&P rating CDO’s. . . )
RossInDetroit
@Roger Moore:
That’s a great story. At my first mainframe job there was an old guy with narcolepsy. His whole job was to maintain an incomprehensible CICS program improbably written in IBM Assembler and EasyCoder. Nobody else could make heads or tails of a line of it. We called the system GJS for “Grant’s Job Security”.
Matt
Note to the “dissatisfied bankers” (paraphrasing the late great Bill Hicks):
Kill yourself. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself. You are fucked and you are fucking us – kill yourself. There is no justification for what you do, you are Satan’s little helpers – kill yourself.
YoohooCthulhu
The thing that kills me about these guys is the total ignorance of how the other 90% lives. The guy chooses teaching and landscaping as cushy jobs? Those are two of the most exhausting (physically or mentally) long-hour, underpaid jobs I’d think of. He couldn’t go with DMV clerk?
Maude
There was one of those oh, poor me articles about outsourcing personal services. I wanted to be the one who clobbered the writer for her sense of deserving to be waited on because she is so important and let’s not forget special. It was sickening and I am being polite.
I just want a little 50 to 75 dollar job to help pay expenses. I don’t do much, but I can look very busy and efficient.
Woodrowfan
there’s the old joke about the lawyer who dropped dead of a heart attack at age 40. When he complained to St. Peter about dying so young, Peter said “that’s funny, according to your billable hours you’re 79.”
Woodrowfan
anybody who thinks teaching is easy either hasn’t done it, or hasn’t done it correctly.
Roger Moore
@RossInDetroit:
Ugh. I’m not primarily a coder, but I’ve put together a few helpful in-house apps. I’ve even shared a few as Open Source code. One of the things that worries me about releasing the stuff is that somebody is going to look at it and either be incapable of understanding it or mentally curse me for writing a bunch of unmaintainable spaghetti code. I honestly think there’s a lot of code out there that could potentially be released but never will be because people are just too embarrassed to show their work.
cleek
@YoohooCthulhu:
dealing with impatient, frustrated people all day long? that’s gotta be a helluva job, too.
cleek
@Corner Stone:
Time Matters, as they say.
El Cid
These people are the only people who have ever worked 100 hours a week. They do so under a lot of pressure.
No poor people have ever worked 100 hours a week. And no poor people ever work under a lot of pressure.
Therefore the good banking types deserve as much money as they want no matter how their business or investors or deposit-holders or countries do.
Why is this so confusing to you parasites?
The Spy Who Loved Me
@PurpleGirl:
Interesting that you had to break down in 15 minute increments. Most law firms bill in 6 minute increments, whether you did something for 1 minute or the full 6. Billing in 15 minute increments seems like it could lead to a lot of over billing to the client.
Oh, and those 100 hour work weeks include weekends as well. I used to log in close to 100 whenever we had a big project going on. It’s actually pretty easy to do under certain circumstances.
And Doug, how does one move a lawn? Does it require help, or just certain tools?
Cain
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Imagine what hell a sick day would be like.. for either you or your family. I can well imagine how that would turn out. Plus you can work all you want like that and after you become old, how will you retire exactly? I hope the guy spends some money tucking some of that money away for retirement or health spending costs.
AA+ Bonds
Makes enough sense. Even if you’re doing well on Wall Street, it is tied to who you know, what products and pushes people are letting you know about early. It must be weird working in a profession where everyone now knows that there are papered-over holes all over the floor and many “successes” don’t try to understand the products they’re selling.
AA+ Bonds
@burnspbesq:
The IRS has a more paranoid boss.
The legal aid office I worked at was pretty on the ball about timekeeping, and yeah, it came down to good software (integrated into an astoundingly paperless office).
Roger Moore
@The Spy Who Loved Me:
I think you cut the lawn into long strips which can be rolled up and trucked to a new location. That seems to be the way sod farmers do it.
Tehanu
@YoohooCthulhu:
Just wanted to say how much I liked your comment. And it’s 2-1/2 UNPAID months off a year. Schmucks.
honus
@burnspbesq: Burns, I am lawyer too. Yes we work some weekends, and I get calls in the evening, and talk business at social occasions. But don’t try to convince anyone that most professionals work 14 hours a day seven days a week 50 weeks a year. You don’t go to work at 8am and work until 10pm, without a break, every day of the week.
Fluffy
@honus: @honus:
Thanks. Wayyyyy too much of what gets called “work” in these professional jobs is not. work. They’re including their time on the can, because the can is at the office. They’re including meetings, in which they took back a little personal time by playing Angry Birds throughout the whole spiel. And even with those timid bits of rebellion, they’re rendered incoherent by the grind.
People are stupefied by 14 hour days. We can do it in burst, for a good reason. But, making even the young do this for months on end guarantees a fucked product.
Sophia
In my experience, the only lawyers who don’t have “too much non-billable” time are cheating. If you approach billing clients in an honest fashion (e.g. not billing .10 for each email your assistant read about scheduling a deposition) then you’re eating a lot of time doing things that are necessary but not recognized as billable. It’s quite an awful dynamic, wherein willingness to shamelessly/creatively fuck over the client is rewarded and playing by the rules as stated makes you look bad.
suzanne
@Fluffy:
Sorry, no. If I am physically at work for any reason, I am “at work”, because I am not otherwise enjoying my life or furthering any of my other interests. Even if I am sitting around at the office reading BJ and waiting for the phone to ring, I am not doing so on my couch pantsless. When I was 16 and working at McDonald’s, if I was standing at the drive-thru window making myself available for any customers to come up to the window and order, I was working.
r€nato
There also used to be a ‘tacit understanding’ that if you did a good job at a company, you could stay there for your entire career, make a decent salary or wage so that your spouse didn’t have to work and you could afford to put your kid(s) through college, you’d get a decent benefits package including health insurance, then retire with a company pension.
Welcome to 21st century America, you assholes.
r€nato
@suzanne: Friend of a friend recently got into a dispute with her boss because boss wanted friend of friend to read some work email and deal with it, while friend of friend was on vacation (at home). Boss could not understand that ‘vacation’ means, ‘I’m not available for work, you fuck, and if you REALLY need me to deal with this, you’re going to give me another day off in return.’
I advised friend of friend that in the future, just tell boss that when she’s on vacation, she’s going to be away, out of town, out of contact with computers and oh by the way her phone does not receive email nor texts so don’t fucking bother her with work shit before or after work hours. Fucking sucks how some people force us to be liars.
burnspbesq
@r€nato:
If friend of friend follows your advice they will commit career suicide. The world is not the way you imagine it to be. It may have been that way a long time ago, but I doubt it.
Lojasmo
@burnspbesq:
Fuck that noise. When I am on vacation I am incommunicado. Everybody knows that, and if they don’t like it, they can fucking lump it. What else is vacation, if not just that.
Jonathan
I know a bunch of bankers… not a single one of them works 100 hours a week, or anything like that. 50 hrs is their norm, occasionally 60.
What they like to do is claim going out for drinks with coworkers or business associates as “work”, but they love it.