How long can you work 100 hour weeks before it get unhealthy

Mize said:
From today's resignation of a high-level Goldman Sachs investment banker:

Classy folk them investment bankers.

Meh that guy has a double moral

He has made his millions, after hes made enough for retirement he quits and lashes out at the industry. Unless he gives his money's to charity he should stfu
 
tongue_of_colicab said:
So others have no moral and just try to rip people off as much as they can? That's even worse.

They don't exactly do that, but like most environments they are sellers, living of a commission
 
well, its sitting in front of a computer aka what most people do as a leisure activity so yes
Programming takes a ton of sitting behind computer but having to actively use your brain to solve some rather complex problems from day to day is very tiresome. Of course if you are some random code monkey that doesn't actually do anything other than write some basic stuff then yeah, that can be easy.
 
I used to program for fun, funny thing my first p.c was over a thousand times less powerful than my current one, yet i did over a thousand times more work on it
 
Money worshippers make me laugh.
They actually don't make me laugh as much as they scare me - quite literally - because some people will do ANYthing for money (and perhaps as an extension - power.)
 
They actually don't make me laugh as much as they scare me - quite literally - because some people will do ANYthing for money (and perhaps as an extension - power.)

The humor is how miserable they are. Not that there aren't happy rich people, but these aren't the money worshippers. So these sad souls spend their hours chasing money, never realizing that, in a plunging airplane or bleeding out after a car wreck or at the end of a robber's gun, they'd trade it all to have done things differently and actually lived. You can never, ever "win" as a money chaser, but if you live well and in balance and have loving relationships, you can go to bed each night knowing that, if this were the end, yours was a life worth living.
 
LOL, yeah, there was no significant economy before investment banking! Oh wait, there was. It just wasn't that magical make money without making anything at all kind.

donno if this was posted, but ppl mus remember this news story
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8410489.stm

The research, carried out by think tank the New Economics Foundation, says hospital cleaners create £10 of value for every £1 they are paid.

leading bankers destroy £7 of value for every pound they generate.

This shouldnt be a surprise to anyone
 
Topic says it all. Not all things are great in investment banking
My mom and dad have been working 100+ hour weeks for the last 20 odd years and still are. I think I did that for about 10 or so. Right now, I work 80-100 hours per week. It's doable if you doing it for the right reasons and if you have a job you enjoy.
 
When you work for 100h/week and sleep 8h per night you've got about 100 minutes per day for eating, commuting, washing up and doing anything else that needs doing. So, how do you people manage it? What kind of work is worth sacrificing pretty much everything for it for decades?
 
When you work for 100h/week and sleep 8h per night you've got about 100 minutes per day for eating, commuting, washing up and doing anything else that needs doing. So, how do you people manage it? What kind of work is worth sacrificing pretty much everything for it for decades?
You basically work where you live. We lived in the motels we owned. So your always on, your sleeping and someone comes in for a room, you wake up and rent that room. You stagger when people sleep so that you cover more hours. You break your sleep so that at night you can be awake to do rooms. At one time or another we did multiple of the above. Crazy lifestyle.

edit: 8 hours of sleep??? what are you a billionaire? ;) I don't think any of us has had 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep in decades.
 
When you work for 100h/week and sleep 8h per night you've got about 100 minutes per day for eating, commuting, washing up and doing anything else that needs doing. So, how do you people manage it? What kind of work is worth sacrificing pretty much everything for it for decades?


Well, I cannot say much for bankers and the wall street typem but when starting a business it can be very time consuming. In the beginning there are days where you are focused on your business from the minute you wake up, to the minute you go to bed. Entrepeneurs have the hard task of starting a business and making it become a fully functioning money making machine. A lot of it can be simply thinking about the plans for the day or coming to a decision of quality versus cost, stupid but important stuff like that. If your business grows then there will come a point in time you can hire someone else to do the meat of the work and you focus on the long term, thus getting back to 30 - 40 hour weeks.
 
Wait a minute. We're now saying that time spent thinking about work (plans for the next day, strategy, etc.) count as work? LOL. Well then I've been working 100+ hours/week for over 13 years. My wife and I work together (former business owners now shareholders in a larger group of companies) so much of our morning/evening banter is about employees, strategy, our foreign offices, etc. and I Skype with our foreign customer and companies between 4 AM and 1 AM on a regular basis.

Of course I also where shorts and flip-flops to the office, take off in the middle of the day to do what I want like take one of my kids to do something...come in lates, etc. So you *can* work 100 hours/week and have a ton of life by this looser definition.
 
edit: 8 hours of sleep??? what are you a billionaire? ;)
Nope but I get by really well (by local standards) with 8h work/8h sleep/8h other stuff + free weekends.

I'd really love to be able to get by with <8h of sleep so I'd have more time for my hobbies (you know, all the stuff some people here seem to be missing out on :)) but so far I've only managed it when I was on a several month vacation and pretty much slept whenever I got tired, no matter what time of day it was. Needing to be in office at somewhat specific times can't quite work with that kind of schedule.


I have worked for 50-60h per week for a few months but I was extremely tried most of the time and my work performance dropped substantially. I did get used to being tired eventually but I was not able to get back to the performance I had when working normal hours and I lost almost all energy and willingness to do stuff outside work.

That 50-60h was obviously actual working time, not thinking about work while doing other stuff. That doesn't count as working in my book.
 
Topic says it all. Not all things are great in investment banking

depends on what you call work, 24x7 work week may be possible for some(that is those with nothing better to do).

I've been wondering, I know heart rate can fall below detectable range one declared dead and wake up on autopsy table or buried alive. Yoga training is said to enable one to manipulate such.

The human brain instinctively puts portions of itself to sleep after prolonged sleep deprivation, dolphins can put to sleep half a brain. While it would be dangerous could it be trainable? as heart rate, could one train resistance, such that the brain is in a state between sleep and awake with portions dynamically falling to sleep and waking up, through some form of exotic training? Like holding breath, how far can such training go?

A person may even wake from anesthesia. And there exists what seems like placebo and nocebo, one may even be able to cause feedback towards a chemical to become positive or negative hypothetically speaking.
 
I've been wondering, I know heart rate can fall below detectable range one declared dead and wake up on autopsy table or buried alive. Yoga training is said to enable one to manipulate such.
I don't think that's possible. Tales like what you describe sound like a complete crock to me. There'd have to be faulty equipment and/or grave incompetence involved for anyone to be mistaken for dead methinks.

Without a "detectable" heartbeat (any range is detectable, really - if the heart beats at all the gear will register it) the brain will die of oxygen starvation. Blood pressure will drop through the floor and you'll fall unconscious within seconds, and after more than 15ish minutes you'll be a vegetable more or less even if you're brought back to life. ...Unless you're chilled down to really low body temps of course, and then your heart will stop beating as well from the cold, but you'll last a bit longer without oxygen.

A young girl was rescued recently by her mother after plunging through weak ice covering a creek here in Sweden, the girl spent around 20 minutes under water, trapped beneath the ice while her brother ran for help and before the mother managed to break through and pull her up.

She suffered some brain trauma from the experience, but is expected to make a full recovery in time.

A person may even wake from anesthesia.
Not if the anesthesiologist know what they're doing. ;)
 
Without a "detectable" heartbeat (any range is detectable, really - if the heart beats at all the gear will register it) the brain will die of oxygen starvation. Blood pressure will drop through the floor and you'll fall unconscious within seconds, and after more than 15ish minutes you'll be a vegetable more or less even if you're brought back to life. ...Unless you're chilled down to really low body temps of course, and then your heart will stop beating as well from the cold, but you'll last a bit longer without oxygen.

Well such tales have been coming from multiple usually reliable sources and sites for decades, even coffins with buttons have been designed in response,

Doctors unable to tell even with equipment.

We know that some animals may spend more than an hour underwater, our bodies have similar oxygen holding proteins in lower concentrations, it may be that gene expression or mutations may allow some to have undetectable breathing and heart beat or it may all be BS.

But this has appeared in reliable news sites and sources for decades. So I do wonder how it was perpetuated if there is nothing to it. Is it like the wild 10% brain rumor that remains perpetually coming up despite being nonsense?
 
Not if the anesthesiologist know what they're doing.

Even the best anesthesiologist can fail, the body may respond unpredictably, though with new detectors of brain activity this traumatic possibility will remain in the past..

What''s worse is that they in some places give you a drug called versed that blocks long term memory for some individuals, so you may be consciously immobile and in pain and you won't recall it after the surgery is over you'll never know you were tortured for hours.
 
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