On Sun, 2 Sep 2007, Chris Read wrote:

"Paul Terry" wrote:

Paul Corfield wrote:

Quite frankly working those sorts of hours is either grossly inefficient

I suggest you tell that to my former teaching colleagues who, having
spent 7 hours at school with no breaks, come home to 4 hours of
marking, preparation and form-filling-in (unless there are parents'
evenings, drama nights, concerts, and the like, when it means working
weekends as well). And holidays? That's when you are expected to do
training.

That is what teachers would have you believe. No doubt some put in those
hours, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

And, in fact, that's exactly what my friends who are teachers say - it's a
very tough job, for various reasons, and it's not slack during term time,
but the gigantic holidays really are mostly holiday.

In the area in which I now work (publishing), real competition forces
down income to the extent that working long hours are the only way to
survive.

Don't understand that. If there's not enough work to go around due to
competition, why are you working longer hours?

Quite. The reason pay is so bad in publishing is because so many people
want to do it, for reasons other than pay. I've never quite worked out
what those reasons are, but they're there. It's the same in academia -
salaries are rubbish, but people do it because they love it. Well, at
first, because they love it, and after that, because they're
institutionalised and can't even think about getting out.

Now, having said all that, Paul is quite right that long working hours are
grossly inefficient. There's a pile of time-and-motion studies from last
century which show that productivity falls as the working day gets longer,
so someone working a 60-hour week just isn't getting much more done than
someone working their eight hours a day. Managers can't see this, but then
managers are mostly idiots.

tom

--
Thinking about it, history begins now -- sarah