The number of stated hours that a salary is allocated for is irrelevant. Nominally, professors are supposed to be working 40 hours a week. This stops exactly nobody from working between 60 and 80 hours regularly. The problem is cultural, not policy-based.
Great anecdote. Academia is, what, like 0.1% of the workforce? Browsing some polls, it looks like less than 10% of salaries people work more than 60 hours. I don't know what the ratio is for salary vs hourly in the US, but that probably puts it less than 5% for all workers.
I think these people are just the loudest and like writing articles about how much they work. No one writes about how they work 40 hours and life is fine.
There is also the other case where someone may go to the office 10 hours a day, punch some time on the weekends, claim they "worked" 60 hours, but in reality only got 4-5 hours worth of work done per day.
I'm friends with several lecturers, and while they don't work 80 hours a week, it's fair to say they work substantially longer hours than I do. That's fine, they generally enjoy their jobs and get to do interesting things (as well as deal with a lot more bullshit than I do). You're utterly crazy if you think they spend only 10 hours a week on non-research activities.
As an outsider, your estimates are finger in the air at best. How can you possibly know you've covered all their activies?
But what that salary covers is obviously only enough to maintain satisfactory employment under a certain number of hours. My employer simply doesn't pay me enough for me to work more than 40 hours per week, crunch time or not.
Complain about 60 hours/week? Rarely. Work 60 hours/week? Rarely.
Professors tend to put in roughly 40 to 80 hours depending on their scientific and organisational workload, but most others hardly ever work 60 hours/week with an average of 40-ish. But then, nobody really measures how much time they put in, and you have to keep in mind that in science, the ‘passive work’ done sort-of in the background while doing something else plays a larger role than in programming (at least that’s my impression).
That said, 40 hours is not entirely unjustified, given that 8 hours/day is relatively practical if you want to have both breakfast and dinner at home with an 2hours/day commute and that at least most universities are relatively closed-down on weekends (though some enjoy the much more quiet environment…).
I don't know about SV but in academia it is extremely common and often expected that people work 60+ hours.
Sometimes it's just peer pressure. Sometimes it's an explicit requirement.
Few years ago I spoke with an American professor who just started his tenure in Switzerland. He told me he was shocked and outraged when he was the only one to show to work on national holiday!
I see your point. I am sure that my views are heavily influenced by my experience which was good. I know that I was not supposed to work over 20 hours per week. It did not matter if that was all research or a combination of research and teaching a class. At those hours I was a part-time employee so there was not need for the university to extend any benefits to me. I also made sure that I only worked 20 hours a week. I did not feel any pressure to put in more hours than that.
My wife is currently working on a PhD and she is also only expected to work 20 hours a week. It is very much about the individual program and the department/field.
So 33 hours of work, or a bit less than a week by one person then?
Why is this thread full of academics claiming that apparently normal workloads of the sort everyone takes on, or trivial solutions of the sort high school teachers manage, is somehow impossible for them? They do realize they're accepting money in return for a commitment to do teaching activities, right?
From a physical standpoint there are enough hours in a week to work 40 hours and pursue 40 hours of university.
Except universities aren't something like an evening school that is explicitly designed around this idea. University lectures do not follow a nice time table that allows that. Lectures start at different times depending on the day of the week. Therefore your workday will start at a different hour every day, except all your colleagues still work their 9 to 5 schedule which will make you significantly less productive than them because you don't get to meet them every day. There can be gaps between lectures but you can't just go back and forth between university and work. It takes time to travel and even if you can do it in a reasonable amount of time you will end up doing multiple context switches per day. This makes working significantly more than 20 hours per week extremely hard.
This is a sample size of 1, but my wife is currently averaging about 70 hours per week at a Russell Group university. That's the average number of hours, it is frequently higher.
She works every evening and nearly every day of the week ( only seldom taking a full day off on a weekend).
As an early career lecturer in the UK she is currently (this term):
* teaching 60 students (this definition means marking the essays of 60 students, 11k words = 660k to be marked at end of this term)
* convening two modules (researching, writing the module materials, etc)
* lecturing 6 times per week to at least 50 students per time (including prepping all of the material for that)
* running large lectures for 300 students 2 times per week
She is also:
* writing and publishing 4 papers this term
* working on her book proposal (initial chapter from her PhD)
* working on a trip later this year for which she has received a research grant
* completing teacher training, this is supposed to be 160 hours of work this term that she has to find, no work has been removed from her to make time for this
* presenting 2 papers, 1 of those at Cambridge
* working in the local community, every Monday she works with a local group and this is required as the University measure "impact"
* mentoring students and having to make herself available for student consultations, this takes up at least 12 hours per week (not including the waiting time between students which is context switching and difficult to utilise)
Somewhere in here she still has to read and consume enough information in her field to be able to have ideas on where to take these things next term.
She is so very close to quitting academia after three years of sustaining these hours with only 2 weeks off per year (that's all she can afford to take).
We had the conversation again yesterday, about what she might like to do instead. She does love researching and her field, but she is being absolutely crushed by the workload.
On top of all of this, she needs to look to me to pay (fully) for her vacation as her salary is barely £30k (though if she sticks it out another two years she'll qualify for a £600 pay rise!).
All I want is for her to be happy, but it's been a long time since she's been happy in academia. The unbelievable workload is killing her love of the subject.
Hours are not measured, only "student satisfaction", "papers published", "impact"... output is the only thing measured, and the required output does not fit into less than 60 hours per week, and if you actually want any career progression or to do a quality job then the hours it takes is much higher.
Indeed. And while I get your point that it's often more than 40 hours, the reality is also that an 80 hour work week (PhD + job) doesn't work for the vast majority of people. There are people for which it works, but chances are -- statistically -- that you, the reader, are not one of those. So a PhD being a full-time job, even if that means "just" 40 hours, is indeed a reason why full-time job + PhD does not work in practice for most people.
Most occupations are settled on a 40-hour work week, sure, but that's because employers have done the math and determined paying overtime is worse than extending output. They don't cap it at 40 hours/week for optimal productivity; it's for the bottom line.
However, I can think of very few professions which involve a 40-hour work week, given that most professionals are salaried. In The U.S., 60 hours/week is more the norm (not to mention being subservient to email at all hours) and in certain competitive careers, taking vacations is eschewed.
It depends entirely on the professor and the department. My adviser once said that he expected forty hours a week, but if we really wanted to be successful we should put in sixty.
I know plenty of other people with ridiculous horror stories though. Things like professors demanding to know why a postdoc was taking so much time in the bathroom, or confiscating a graduate student's plane ticket back to China until an assignment was completed.
Academics desperately need a ratemyprofessor.com for advisers and lab environments.
But higher-paying jobs are all salaried rather than hourly, which seems to indicate that society has already decided pretty low on the scale that more valuable jobs and work has less and less of a correlation with your hours worked.
A quick google gets me this:
While 40 hours of work per week is considered full-time, the average salaried employee does not often exceed 45-50 hours per week. This is because, according to Upcounsel, “If a job requires 55-60 (or more) hours to perform, many would consider it a poorly-designed job.” Even then, The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that almost 10 million American employees in all industries work 60 or more hours per week.
So a 60 hour work week. That isn't terrible, especially if they are well compensated... Many of us salary employees end up working that much, if not more.
If you’re trying to get a PhD and your advisor expects you to work 60-hour weeks, then you either work 60-hour weeks or you consider a different path in life. That speaks volumes about what it takes to impress your superiors in a semi-feudal institution, but not much about productivity.
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