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CoffeeStain comments on Things I Wish They'd Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome - Less Wrong
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Depends if you count future income. Highest paying careers are often so because only those willing to put in extra effort at their previous jobs get promoted. This is at least true in my field, software engineering.
I more or less agree, but note that extra effort does not necessarily mean extra hours. Though, depending on who you work for the latter might be a good proxy for the former.
The important thing is to make the right people notice you put in the extra effort.
Woking extra hours seems like the obvious solution, but depending on circumstances it may not be the best one. If the company does not keep records (or if your boss outsources the recordkeeping to someone else), it may even be unnoticed.
The good strategy requires finding out what your boss considers an evidence of an extra effort. (Some bosses may consider extra hours an evidence of extra effort, others may consider it an evidence of incompetence.) Then produce that. If you really put in the extra effort, make sure you don't forget to provide this evidence. (And of course there is a dark path of not putting in the extra effort, just optimizing for this evidence. Even if people notice you optimize for evidence, they will probably not discount properly.)
For example, bosses are often not aware of what their subordinates are doing. And to some degree that's okay, because you are paid to take care about the details. It's just: the more you see something, the more real it seems. So you could sometimes remind your boss of what you are doing, in a way that does not make them worry about you not being able to handle it. Like: "Yesterday I had this interesting problem [keyword, keword, keyword, skip the boring details], it was really complicated, but then I solved it successfully, so no problem, everything goes according to the original plan." For example while you are together at lunch. (Dark version: describe a problem your colleague had and solved yesterday, but pretend that you contributed to the solution. The boss will be delighted that you care deeply about the company and take initiative even beyond your responsibilities.)
It is worse than you imagine. Putting in heroic hours is pure signal. Fatigue will kill your actual productivity to below that of putting in a 40 hour week if you do it for more than 3 weeks at a time. This is especially true in programming as a tired programmer can very easily have outright negative output - it will take more than an hour to fix the errors committed during that extra hour you put in. Entire industries ignore this because it has become a social norm within them that going home after regular business hours is a sign of lacking commitment, and it takes a rare level of... Sanity and towering belief in your own judgement for the boss of a firm in these industries to go against that norm and evict stragglers from the office at closing time willy-nilly. I still recommend finding one if you possibly can. Or being one. The average programming shop is run abysmally badly - it should be fairly straight forward to prosper by following a handful of simple rules of productivity (Meetings at open and close of day, not noon, no all-nighters.. ect)
If you intend to engage in pure signalling to get ahead as an employee, find signals that dont waste 20-30 hours of your time per week.
This is probably specific for USA. In my country this does not happen in IT. (Some other professions are exploited this way, e.g. doctors. Which is even more horrible, if you imagine the consequences.)
It's not just exploitation by elders in medicine though. Many young doctors work ridiculous hours by choice, and their more reasonable colleagues suffer as a consequence.
It's terrible that the expertise of doctors should make them fully acknowledge the dangers of sleep deprivation for example, yet some of them wilfully ignore the facts.
Pure signal? Some people actually like their jobs, and perhaps the extra income too.
ETA: are people expected to work extra hours for free in the US?
Depends on the kind of work you're doing. Under American labor law, workers in retail, manufacturing, or the trades can't be asked to work more than eight hours a day or forty hours a week without being paid their hourly wages plus a substantial overtime bonus. However, there's a loophole. American workers in clerical, administrative, and professional positions -- those on the administrative side of historical labor disputes, in other words -- are usually paid a fixed yearly income (salaried, or "exempt") and are not eligible for overtime pay.
This has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that the hours are usually more flexible and there's less administrative overhead; the disadvantage is that people that want to signal loyalty or overachievement are incentivized to work crazy hours without extra pay, a practice that employers often encourage, or even -- though usually only in the short term -- de-facto require. Most studies I've read find that actual productivity doesn't go up much with the extra hours in the long run, especially for knowledge workers, but it occasionally does make business sense to do a hard push right before a deadline -- and, of course, managers aren't always rational about these things.
Generally speaking, within IT, operations people are paid hourly and developers are paid on salary. This can make salary figures a little misleading, depending on corporate culture; more than once I've had friends in ops whose nominal wages were considerably lower than mine, but whose actual pay, after overtime, was well higher for the same hours. (I'm in dev.) I try not to make a habit of working those long hours, though.
Most studies I've read find that actual productivity doesn't go up much with the extra hours in the long run, especially for knowledge workers
Not as clear cut as people like to assert, see e.g.,
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour-skepticism.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-peak-60hrwk.html
If you have data for knowledge workers specifically that paints a different picture I'd like to hear about it.
It probably differs a lot from person to person.
That made the picture a lot clearer, thanks. Makes those income figures relevant to me seem a lot less enviable.
People are widely expected to work extra hours for free in IT.
This subthread started with CronoDAS pointing out that it's hard to change the amount of money you earn by changing the amount of hours you work, and CoffeeStain pointing out that even if you can't do so in the short run you still can in the long run, because the more you work the more likely you are to be promoted. So, if we talk about the people who can just decide to work more hours this month to earn more money this month, we've come full circle here.
I see, my bad. It's easy to lose the context by reading recent comments.
Yes, that happens to me all the time too.