Working forty-hours a week is considered ideal but nearly impossible in software industry (don't laugh if you're working in other industries and still think that this is true as I know only software industry). As I'm pretty sure that you've been asked this question during the job interview:
"Are you capable working under pressure and long hours?"
But we've probably never been asked like this:
"Are you capable to be productive enough to work only 8 hours a day and get yor work done?"
Agree? Don't tell me, I know the answer.
Yes. Bosses don't expect you to work 8 hours a day, they expect you to work as longer as possible.
This has been puzzled me for the past 5 years: why are the bosses so dumb? Or are they really dumb?
Until this morning I fully realized that they're not dumb at all, in fact they're smart and they know their employees very well.
We're encountering some network problems this morning around 10 something. Before that the office was so silent, everybody seemed to be concentrating on work so much. But something interesting happened after the network encountered problem, people started talking to each other and the environment started become noisy. I remained silent. In this era which network is the computer, you might think that it's normal because if the network is down, we'd not able to get the resources we need to accomplish our task. It's definitely true, but the thing is that the network wasn't down, someone might say now "I know, I know, the Internet was down!". The Internet will never down, the fact is the gateway which allows us to connnect to the Internet was down. So, what really happened was we can still access our databases, our file servers, our app servers and other network resources, but we can't access the Web, email (external) and IM.
Are we still able to get our works done? Most likely I guess. It's absolutely valid to say that the Internet is the best resource to help you solve the problem on work, but the unavailability of the Internet access shouldn't be the obstacle for getting work done.
I'm a software developer, but I had never (and I never will) spent 8 hours a day on the real works. I believe if I could, I'd never have to stay any longer after 6p.m.
Beat me if you're struggling under pressure with tight project timeline and think that that's your boss' fault to make you work long hours.
For those who're literally working on real work all day and are still required to work longer hours, it's time to seek for new opportunities (OR evaluate yourself for the unproductivity).
PS: One day I might also ask: "Are you able to work long hours?"
