Apart from my PhD peers and I being in the office long evenings and weekends, some faculty (especially early career) also spent their weekends and evenings working. In the first half of the 20th century, employers could set normal work hours at whatever number they chose. Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, and our products. Cost of living - latest updates: Huge drop in UK house prices predicted Generally what happens is quantity increases and quality . Salary - is it normal to work 60 plus hours a week? There are some factors here that may apply less to PhD students than to undergrad students (such as loosing a lot of time between lectures). However, those PhDs did not have a time limit. Working 60 Hours Per Week? Try Out These 21 Schedules Of the 900 people included in the study, the average employee worked 8.3 hours per day. How common are historical instances of mercenary armies reversing and attacking their employing country? "This put me in a tricky financial situation, since salaries for PhD students are not terribly high especially" - Your salary is 3/4 of a full position, in public service tariff, taking into account your previous degree (master's? You cannot work more than 48 hours a week on average - normally averaged over 17 weeks. Hours per week: 65 I do it during the summer (May-October), I manage a marina in addition to my normal dayjob. You may use answers ONLY to provide a solution to the specific question asked below. As previously mentioned, 40 hours per week is the typical expectation for the number of hours a white-collar worker in the United States will work in a week. Are you wondering if the expectations from your employer about your work schedule are normal? You are paid for doing specific work, and along with that you are given the opportunity to write a thesis. You can talk to your professor, and if s/he is a decent person, s/he might should work with you to try to lighten your workload. It might be a legitimate question during the employment talks: "What workload do you expect from me?". The system has inertia." People in Denmark work hard and are just as productive as other workers, but rarely put in more than 37 hours a week, often leaving the office by 4 or 5 PM each day. Two studies from Germany that are relevant in this context although they are with Bachelor/Master students rather than PhD students are the ongoing Studierendensurveys and the ZeitLast study using online diaries (report, there were also a number of articles in the general of news, often with quite snarky headlines). While a union will not solve the bigger problems with universities, including the disparity between academics (both students and professors) and administration, the slashing of budgets in the name of "austerity," etc., and they can create other problems if they become detached from the students they represent, they are an important line of defense for students, who are essentially workers. This . Maybe focus on incremental change. Joining a union as PhD student may be one step (since I'm personally not convinced pushing for "more" employment contract is a good solution that is not the way to go for me. The question about fair wages is only one aspect here, and maybe not even the most severe one. GameStop Moderna Pfizer Johnson & Johnson AstraZeneca Walgreens Best Buy Novavax SpaceX Tesla. Update crontab rules without overwriting or duplicating. If you feel that you simply cant work eight hours per day, there are options that you can explore, which are covered in this article. ..because it is a professor's job to teach. Should You Work More Than 40 Hours a Week? - Andrew Jensen After my first glimpses into academic work and contract conditions, I decided that I need to attain a level of financial independence that allows me to negotiate at eye level, and I've let my academic employers know that I got there whenever I thought it would help my negotiation position. Work Hours Work Hours The Wage and Hour Division enforces federal labor laws pertaining to work hours, such as: Federal minimum wage Overtime pay Recordkeeping Child labor requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) Government Contractors The Wage and Hour Division also enforces labor requirements of the following: Let me add: (1) "not paid for writing a thesis" -- this is not neccearlily clear (especially for phd researcher positions it is expected that the person does a phd and writes a thesis". Self-employment however is not for everyone - but if you think this could be an option, I'd like to encourage you to use your time in academia to also gather the relevant knowledge for this (my university had e.g. Individually, there is not much you can do. Scan this QR code to download the app now. Would it be legally possible, if you called the bluff, for the students to claim ownership? I'm curious about your last advice. This law is sometimes called the 'working time directive' or 'working time regulations'. On top of it, you only get a contract for a limited amount of time after which you likely have to relocate to another city or country if you want to stay in academia. The big things is working eight hours per day, forty hours total per week, and doing it on a schedule that is more or less in line with typically expected working hours (generally, 8:00am 5:00pm-ish). A 60-hour work week usually has three blocks of time: 1) A typical work schedule like 8:00 AM - 6:00 PM, followed by 2) a one- or two-hour block of work at night, followed by ~5 hours of work on the weekend. To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. All the very best scientists I've known have never worked stupidly long hours. Here comes the weird expectation"both credits and payment must never be" into place. Happiness expert Dan Buettnertakes it even a step further. Your opinion may differ.). On top of that, if we are talking about non-English-speaking countries, almost all local students don't have the skills to express their research findings in English in a way the editors of top journals would be happy with. @cinico I added in some more details. Working sixty hours a week is dangerous | YouGov Display result as. @henning--reinstateMonica: Thanks, fixed! Get best practices and sound advice on how to create understanding and work together better. Beep command with letters for notes (IBM AT + DOS circa 1984). Ask the secretaries and lab assistants what salary they are paid, and how they are making their living. They are highly inexperienced and low-efficient, often have difficulties organizing themselves to do complex tasks, have no idea how to write research articles, and absorb a lot of time and effort of their mentors. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) states that any work over 40 hours in a 168 hour period is counted as overtime, since the average American work week is 40 hours - that's eight hours per day for five days a week. Worst of all was though, that his colleagues regarded him as a lesser colleague and constantly berated him for "taking away hours at the instruments" and his "work being useless". Working 60 Hours Per Week? cheap hobbies, e.g. Is it time to ditch the remote daily stand up? One of them is offering you a PhD position, and all you have to do to secure a white-collar job for yourself for the next few years is to simply say yes to his offer. There is nothing I can say that he didn't say better, so I'll let you search for the web archives from that time if you're interested. So to not feel starved for time, aim for a 7.6 hour workday. Or where the term 9-to-5 comes from? I may say that even though those jobs added a non-negligible income, in the end the factors reducing the money spent did more to my savings. The situation is difficult because even if you have a good supervisor, there is still a minimum amount that is needed to pass a PhD (which is outside the supervisors control), often a maximum time limit to complete it (also outside the control of the supervisor), and more often than not, a the stipend/salary paid to the student is also outside the control fo the supervisor. However, the quantity of work that you produce isn't the only important measure. You are probably right that many of us are thinking about our science when we are not doing it, but i'd venture to suggest that more time thinking about it and less time doing makes for better science. And those students will be happy to do research 60 hours a week, because that's what they are passionate about. BTW: I left the university where I did most of my PhD work without handing in my thesis when I got an offer for a full position somewhere else. I work 55-60 hrs a week if it's a good week. Atlassians approach to remote onboarding. For more info go to /r/Save3rdPartyApps/ That is why you may commonly hear the term working a "9-to-5." The normal total working hours in a week is 37.5 hours, though 40 hours per week is actually is the typical expected standard (see this email . Up to the Master thesis, the situation in Germany is very clear that there cannot be any money (work contract or otherwise) involved between the group where the student does their Master thesis and the student (a student can be employed there before and after their thesis, but not during), and also that intellectual property produced during the thesis is the student's (contracts to assign IP to the university are safest made only after the thesis is finished, incl. Also, the schedule above does not include breaks. And the results showed that there was only a one-hour difference between the workers who felt like they had a lot of time and those who felt time-pressured. ), right? Was it that easy to turn the IP argument in your favor? PhD studies in Germany have evolved from being the PhD student's "private fun" (i.e. Have you mastered the fine art of speaking up at work? 60 Hour Work Weeks? : cscareerquestions - Reddit Maximum weekly working hours: Overview - GOV.UK Don't check your email on the weekends. I did not leave the fist university in bad blood, though, and my first professor was part of my PhD commission. Buettner also recommends taking six weeks of vacation per year, which is the optimal amount for happiness. 60 x P 60 < 40 x P 40, where P 60 is the average productivity of employees working 60 hour weeks, and P 40 is the average productivity of employees working 40 hour weeks. 50 hours a week is considered full time for exempt employees. We all have to work 60 hours a week occasionally (and that goes for pretty much any professional job), but as a basic expectation it is in no ones interests. However, many employees work unusual shifts and go above and beyond this standard, putting in more than the average 40 hours. However 60 hours a week is not normal for the simple reason that very few people can be productive for 60 hours a week on a long term basis. Its a way of life at Atlassian. The employer pays higher rates for overtime hours as required in the law. The University owns inventions that are created under the direction of a faculty or staff member specifically with the object of making the invention, that are created in the course of employment by an administrative or support staff member, or that are otherwise commissioned by the University under a written agreement with the inventor. This does not mean that it is fair for the students. In the US, the Fair Labor Standards Act does not set a legal number of hours that divides full-time/part-time work and it is left to the employer. That would equate to a 38-hour workweek. While four in 10 workers put in a standard 40-hour workweek, many others toil longer than that, including nearly one in five (18%) who work a grueling 60 hours or more. All bullshit, but they'll say it. You'll have to organize and make noise is my guess. As a result, the 34.6 hours estimate accounts for people who not only work part time or full time but also those who log overtime. Dan is the founder of Best Fit Work and is a business professional with over 10 years of experience. An hour is a unit of time equal to 60 minutes, or 3,600 seconds. productivity falls sharply after 50 hours per week, and drops off a cliff after 55 hours, study from the World Health Organization (WHO), condensing a traditional workweek into four days, American employees are not taking half of their vacation days. eti base code Base code clause 6: Working hours are not excessive 6.1 Working hours must comply with national laws, collective agreements, and the provisions of 6.2 to 6.6 below, whichever affords the greater protection for workers. Particularly not if living in a village outside Cottbus or Gieen gets you the same quality of education for a fraction of the cost of living). That is why you may commonly hear the term working a 9-to-5.. This video from Dr. Brynn adds more color to the importance of taking breaks at work: For white collar workers in the United States, the most common schedule is some variation of 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Monday Friday (a 9-to-5). I don't know how this would work in practice. I passed with minor corrections and published 2 journal papers within the project. In the UK and many other countries PhD students are not considered employees at all, and so have no contract of any kind - they are not paid a salary, but a stipend (i.e. Unfortunately, sometimes it is necessary to remind people of this - but if this is necessary you need to do this. My current role is 50 hours a week but can hit 60-70 at Plan time or quarterly review time including weekends. a grant to allow them to live). CSCareerQuestions protests in solidarity with the developers who make third party reddit apps. Widen your horizon to adjust your expectations. Now that PhD stipends are fixed and can't be negotiated between professors and students, what's left to compensate for the low efficiency is working hours. But perhaps you are one of those people who brags about your 70-hour workweek. They really didn't like that idea. Did we just create the worlds first collaborative sonic brand? Controversial Post You may use comments ONLY to suggest improvements. You're not serfs, and no one should want bright talented well-meaning ambitious people to live like serfs. Let's try to figure out how to discover such a situation from outside. ago Is this an American thing? Most physicians work between 40 and 60 hours per week, but nearly one-quarter of physicians work between 61 and 80 hours per week, according to the 2014 Work/Life Profiles of Today's Physician released last year by AMA Insurance. Academia Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for academics and those enrolled in higher education. The times I've worked 80 hr weeks i've produced much less than working 50 (research that is, admin/teaching is a different matter). And of course, academic employers are used to this, and there will be those who take advantage of students/postdocs. You don't need to acquire new skills to get that job, and you don't need to send out your CV to hundreds of companies. This seems to be an increasingly common thing in the US and the arguments generally fall into one of three buckets: After we unionized, we recovered health insurance benefits for dependents, got a nice bump to our stipends, will be moving from 1099-MISC tax forms to W2 tax forms (which will lower our taxes), and now have novel ways for reporting abusive PIs whether it be work exploitation, sexual harassment, bullying, etc. fully qualified professionaly not being paid for the research work) towards PhD students being employed for their research. IMHO, like for other exams the strategy of tackling the exam is a personal decision. That adds up to an average of eight hours per day across five working days in a week. I'm afraid it's hard to change the system without addressing the factors listed above. But you should be prepared for a long, tiring fight. As a PhD student, I was given a 30 h/week contract but expected to work loads more, since this was a totally unrealistic workweek if one wants to get one's own thesis done while doing all the lab work required to do so. How to proceed? This feels like a red flag but I want to get everyone's perspective on this? For those people, an 80 hour week doesn't produce burnout because, for those people, they would just sit around thinking about their work if they tried to relax anyway - becoming stressed in the process. by being required to do far more TAing than my scholarship contract allowed, and at some other point when I had an industry offer to work 2 d/wk to have 3 d/wk for my PhD thesis by being told by my professor that if I stay there as PhD student, I still need to TA 4 d/wk during lecture time, regardless of whether I take the industry job or not. In my part of the world (German-speaking Europe), we have a terribly underfunded scientific landscape. As explained by the U.S. Department of Labor, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires that most employees in the U.S. be paid at least the federal minimum wage for all hours worked and. If I recall correctly, a set of policies we found to be in line with what we wanted have been adopted by University of Toronto. Still, there are those who do work hard and do work a lot in academia. If you do want to do something for yourself, then my advise is to accept that the rules will not change, but you can choose to play a different game. Therefore it is entirely normal, and morally right, that you are expected to work a lot more than written in your work contract. ago ellewoods_89 4 mo. There are several doubtful statements in your question. ​ It works best if you don't have to use it, but the employer believes you are willing to and that it would hurt them. You aren't afraid to get fired quickly and be left without any money to pay your bills and rent an accommodation. I also got myself a plan B (freelancing) ready to be put into action whenever there may not be a follow-up contract. Laying the groundwork for better employee health and happiness. I was cultivating microoganisms which grew for days on end to achive the necessary biomass (this included weekends ofc.) For example, I've heard that a chemist without a PhD is basically worthless, so everyone and his cat try to get a PhD, leading to a higher supply. (For example, computer science is barely floating, because even with full-time funding you'd be paying a PhD candidate roughly a third less they would get in the industry.) Heres the answer: its 38 hours. Prior role was 40 hrs a week and no weekends. Starting the Prompt Design Site: A New Home in our Stack Exchange Neighborhood. The Relationship Between Hours Worked and Productivity Regarding your first question, as everyone has asserted, yes it's typical. You actually have a bit more of a solution than others, because you can refuse to work longer hours, which would be bad for the organisms under your care, forcing your PI to hire more people to take care of them. I think to succeed in academia you need at least a degree of that type of drive - not a. I disagree. However, this improvement in money has been bought also by some drawbacks for the PhD students which IMHO need to be discussed, and at the very least the PhD students need to be aware of these consequences. You mentioned a key point: "there are tons of willing PhD candidates out there who will replace you at a moments notice, if you are not conforming to the situation". I did my PhD in Germany's most expensive city (Munich) and back then 20 h/week contracts were common. @MaartenBuis A strike is a deterrent. Business, Economics, and Finance. Also relevant: the ZeitLast report does point out that being higly stressed by workload can happen with short study hours. Now, for the shy folks: there is a way to somewhat induce the workload from other sources. Key Takeaways. Short 5-20 minute breaks are not required by federal law, but Ive found that most companies are generally pretty flexible about enabling you to take a quick coffee break, or chat with a colleague, and not add that to a tally of extra hours that you need to work. "The length of the work day fell sharply between the 1880s, when the typical worker labored 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, and 1920, when his counterpart worked an 8-hour day, 6 days a week. So, fields with lower rates have higher supply and by a previous argument, more is demanded from PhD students. Just google "Andrei Reza Ghadiri" and you'll find it. It doesn't really matter how much the strike would hurt the striking employees, as long as the employer believes they are willing to pay the price. Similarly, one could ask why profs spend time teaching and preparing for teaching when they rather could use it for research. In Germany, this is DFG. For much of our bargaining, our institution asserted that we were not employees and that, as students, we produce nothing of value whether it be in hours worked or research products. Looking at typical position offers might help, too. The Pros and Cons of a 60-Hour Workweek | Indeed.com Several points come to my mind. The normal total working hours in a week is 37.5 hours, though 40 hours per week is actually is the typical expected standard (see this email from Elon Musk to Tesla employees). Hardly ever has anyone of my colleagues commented on the situation they were in. It's the norm in the US. A related effect may be that some will choose to work hard in order to then take off some time for longer trips "back home". The best can see the key observation that no one else can see, and the single, elegant experiment to show it. What is Parkinsons Law and why is it sabotaging your productivity? Summary. Why it's OK to Work Long Hours | The Muse Look at the rates of your local funding agency. Or is just that the students know that the Institute does not want to engage in legal fights? 60 h/week are workloads that some students reach in the few weeks during and immediately before the exams. Unfortunately, the whole situation is quite susceptible to abuse of power. Working 60 hours a week to complete assignments means you'll likely be more productive. How can we change it? (Also, to avoid abuse of power of the type that the supervisor asks more and more additions to the work, the duration of Bachelor and Master theses is limited.) But thats okay. BTW, I've also worked night shifts when my experiments finally worked fine (chemist) - with a student doing the day shift as their research practicum. Why is there a drink called = "hand-made lemon duck-feces fragrance"? If you find yourself going down this path, one thing I personally would advocate is looking at your institutions intellectual property clauses in your funding agreement/contract. I suppose it was just one angle that was worked that was fruitful, YMMV. I've seen colleagues regularly work 12+ hrs daily and still work on the weekend. Currently it is illegal for companies to make employees work longer than 48 hours per week unless they opt out of the EU working time directive. their PI can legally tell them what to do and what not to do. Things won't happen overnight. Normal Work Day Hours: What Are They? - Best Fit Work My opinion is that we should analyze this situation as a "free market paradigm". ago You guys are different. Employee Hours & Overtime Labor Laws | OSHA Education Center Is it typical to work 60 hours per week as a PhD student? Convert Work Weeks to Hours Many early-career researchers get obsessed with publishing as many articles as possible, no matter the quality and actual significance. Of course, this is not a conflict-free course of action, and at least in my own estimate of the situation I never was foolhardy, only blunt [German fashion] and honest.). By the time the overtime rate hit 15.4 percent, fatigue-related problems were severe. At the end of the day, it boils down to your supervisor: pick an established scientist with a family, and you'll likely work a regular work week. What is purpose of backup-power-connectors on 826701-B21 (Riser Card)? In my experience, the most common eight hour day schedule for white collar workers in the United States is some variation of the following: Note that I mentioned that the most common work schedule is some variation of the above. Freezing and thawing them was only an option once they were harvested. Men worked an average of 40.5 hours per week, while women worked 36.6 hours per week. Such a diary may help in two ways: it will provide you with hard numbers to discuss/negotiate with the PI, and it may show potential for more efficient time management for OP. Meanwhile, I'd recommend that OP may start by keeping a personal work-time diary. In the end, they may also decide to use (part of) the time they don't spend with the local friends they don't have for work - resulting in lots of work. So a supervisor that demands this is not only exploiting the student, but also mostly likely not getting good science out of it either. This whole post even seems kinda silly in retrospect. You can't work more than 48 hours a week, which is an average of 17 weeks. A truly independent external committees judging whether the ongoing PhD work is on track may be another ingredient. In reality, though, the distinction is rarely all that clear, and most professors expected us to put in much more time than that. Research also reveals the damage to our physical health that overwork can cause. 60+ Hours/Week: Outlier or a New Normal? | Wall Street Oasis Supervisor gave my PhD project to another student, Possibility to use PhD Thesis work in another university. If the PhD student is employed for their research, legally the employer has to make sure they don't work more than allowed, and also that the salary does not fall below the legal minimum hourly wage. Be careful, though, as universities, like businesses, have been known to retaliate, and as a student, your individual position is extremely vulnerable. So in what cases would companies see 8-5 as being more acceptable than 9-5 to be "regular" (in their words) full-time? @user111388 : Sure, many professors teach because it's their passion or because they are required to teach. I won't say anything like this. 8-to-5 vs. 9-to-5 as acceptable regular work hours As it was, I did not do anything the like and also my "industry boss" advised to rather do the PhD (they themselves had experienced trouble with their PhD). So at least in theory, a student can take their existing work with them to a new university if the conditions are too bad at their old institute. Reminding them that noone can force me to sign a follow up contract turned out to be decidedly helpful in making supervisors stop misbehaving. "We only have one button - that's it. Family relations are good, relationship with my SO can get strained at times but we do our best to plan our time with one another. In such a circumstance, a way to really turn the heat up is to then say, 'Okay, by that logic, you won't mind us claiming ownership over any intellectual property we produce in self-guided projects that aren't explicitly directed by our PI or a supervisor employed directly by the institution.' Another side effect of the employment contracts for PhD students is that this is not possible any more since the resulting IP is owned by the employer. Good communication among teams is tablestakes for effective teamwork. Though there are limits for the practical + office brain work combination when the lab work needs a lot of concentration rather than elbow grease.
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