Rockstar was in the gaming news recently because they mentioned that some of them had worked 100-hour weeks on their massive sequel to Red Dead Redemption coming out soon (no idea if I’ll play this). The idea of 100 hour weeks seemed insane to me, and it got me thinking: I’ve done some serious overtime before, have I ever gotten close to that amount of work in a week?
Luckily, I didn’t have to speculate too much, because I had data (I love data). My previous employer had us track and log our work hours, and I had kept a copy of my own data after I left. That’s working hours from 2003-2015. I crunched the numbers and I found that:
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I had 633 weeks of data in all, from 2003 to 2015
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I had 239 weeks where I worked more than 40 hours
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I had 60 weeks where I worked more than 50 hours
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I had 15 weeks where I worked more than 60 hours.
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My record for number of hours in a single week was week 34 of 2015 where I had a whopping 80.50 hours in a single week. This was when I was deployed on-site to London and was also on call for support at the same time, so basically working all the time.
So luckily I’ve not been in the “100-hour week” situation that the RDR2 team found them in (though I came close). I’m not sure if this is an accurate representation of what it’s like to work in the software industry in general, though I’m sure it’s typical of my former workplace. Hopefully, overtime is something I can avoid or minimize in my own career moving forward.
Read what I had to say before about overtime here.
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