A bigger problem is making people think that 60 hour weeks is normal, or honourable, and that a 40 hour week is lazy or disloyal or unproductive or harmful to the company. That's not true, and it's possibly leading to early death of some people. It's certainly making some people miserable.
This. My experience in the software industry has generally been positive (aside from stints at start-ups)--I've been judged on the quality of my work, and my ability to produce given reasonable time lines. When I dabbled at an interactive agency, though, all of that was thrown out the window--the print folks, especially, where just expected to work 10-12 hours a day, and it would be a matter of pride to pull an all-nighter to meet a silly deadline. At one point, the agency's owner had a mural put in a common area--it was a comic about a superhero who could manage to do anything with a ridiculous time crunch. That's when I decided that industry was not for me.
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A bigger problem is making people think that 60 hour weeks is normal, or honourable, and that a 40 hour week is lazy or disloyal or unproductive or harmful to the company. That's not true, and it's possibly leading to early death of some people. It's certainly making some people miserable.
This. My experience in the software industry has generally been positive (aside from stints at start-ups)--I've been judged on the quality of my work, and my ability to produce given reasonable time lines. When I dabbled at an interactive agency, though, all of that was thrown out the window--the print folks, especially, where just expected to work 10-12 hours a day, and it would be a matter of pride to pull an all-nighter to meet a silly deadline. At one point, the agency's owner had a mural put in a common area--it was a comic about a superhero who could manage to do anything with a ridiculous time crunch. That's when I decided that industry was not for me.