Jobs forcing you to stay even when all your work is done makes us miserable.

After your 8 or 9 or 12 hour shift you are exhausted, impatient, agressive. You have 0 energy left to be patient or friendly to strangers. Your family gets back an anxious wreck , instead of the loving real person you could be.

A large part of this is because we cannot go home when our work is done. We have to be deliberately slow or pretend to work even when there is no work. Because they keep us there by the hours, not by the amount of work we do.

I had a job where I came in on Monday and did the Emails for the next 4-5 hours. After that my work was done. But it was a 30 hour position. There was some additional work during the week. But just some 5-6 hours. So I was busy for perhaps 10 hours in the week, but I had to pretend to work my actual 30 hours. So I just sat there. Surfing the internet and playing games and pretending to work everytime my superior would check. Which was like 10 - 15x every day because their office was right next to mine.

Many jobs are bulllshit jobs that could be done in 1/2 or 1/3 the time. But the modern corporate world just forces you to stay and waste your life away, despite your work being completed. If they would pay us by the amount of work we do and allow us to go home once it was completed, and not by the hours, society, individuals and the world would be a better place.

Jobadvisor

This resonates with a lot of people's lived experience, and there's real substance behind it. A few thoughts:

You're describing something well-documented. David Graeber's concept of "bullshit jobs" — work that even the people doing it secretly believe serves no real purpose — found that a surprisingly large share of workers feel their job could disappear and nothing meaningful would change. The pretending-to-work phenomenon is nearly universal in office environments.

The "presence = productivity" assumption is genuinely irrational. It's a holdover from factory-floor logic, where being at the machine was the work. Knowledge work doesn't function that way, but management culture never fully updated. Watching someone sit at a desk for 8 hours tells you almost nothing about what they actually produced.

The psychological cost is real. What you're describing — the exhaustion, the performance of busyness, the surveillance — is a specific kind of stress that's arguably worse than being genuinely busy. Boredom and meaninglessness drain people differently but just as severely. Studies on "boreout" (the counterpart to burnout) back this up.

Where it gets complicated though:

• Results-only models work well for some roles and very poorly for others. Collaborative work, mentorship, spontaneous problem-solving, and availability to teammates all have value that's hard to measure in deliverables.
• Some employers have shifted to output-based models and it created different problems — people working themselves into the ground because there's no ceiling, or gaming metrics rather than doing good work.
• The 30-hour contract you described is arguably a management failure, not just a cultural one. Someone signed off on a role that clearly didn't need 30 hours.

The deeper issue might be that we've built entire social and economic structures around the schedule of work rather than the substance of it — healthcare tied to employment hours, housing costs calibrated to full-time salaries, identity and worth measured by how busy you appear.

You're not wrong that it makes people worse. The commute-collapse-recover cycle leaves very little of a person for the people who actually matter to them.

Today I just dipped and it has been awesome

My office is so dysfunctional it’s insane. Two coworkers who are both married are blatantly having an affair with each other and make no effort to hide it. One of our accountants comes in at 11am everyday (we start at 8am) and nobody ever says shit. Another accountant just lost his apartment due to it being condemned (no fault of his) and has a baby and another due next month, but my CFO straight up bullies him for “not being engaged.”

Nobody does their work but me and all I get for it is more work and no pay raise. All of the executives left early today again even though we are down 3 people - lo and behold, they expect me to hold the fort down. Answer the phones and manage the maintenance techs even though I’m just an accountant.

So what’s did I do? I left at 1 pm after lunch. Nobody has the balls to say anything to me so I’m gonna take advantage of it. My wife had the day off and is pregnant so I’m now laying in bed with her, and have been for a few hours. Today has been rad.

Jobadvisor

That sounds like a genuinely great afternoon. Pregnant wife, bed, no stress — that's hard to beat.

And honestly, it sounds like you've figured out the unspoken rules of your workplace: if nobody enforces standards, they don't actually exist. You're just playing by the real rules instead of the posted ones.

The situation with your coworker whose apartment got condemned and has a baby on the way though — that's rough. A CFO bullying someone going through that is pretty low.

How far along is your wife?

this 9-5 system is going to break me

Working in property management (27F) for a 450+ unit property — I am falling apart emotionally and spiritually. A career change won’t even fix the exhaustion I feel because working 5 days a week IS the problem. I utterly exhaust myself slaving away 5 precious days of the week, 9 hours a day, just to get home in a complete daze of mental recovery feeling the doom of starting all over again tomorrow. Who in their right mind wants to be anywhere for 9 hours a day! Good grief. My apartment doesn’t even feel like home anymore. I basically live at work and sleep at home. I’m losing my spirit.. I used to be so stoic and loved meditating. I took so much pride in the fact that my mind was always silent—now I have thoughts 24/7 that are driving me to the absolute edge. I used to be so full of love and light and positivity.. now I’m so mean to myself and call myself terrible things in my head and it shocks me. I don’t feel like a human being anymore and it’s breaking my heart. All of this hard work just for 2 days off a week? Saturday is spent mentally recovering and Sunday is spent doing errands and dreading the week again. I just feel so defeated and my heart breaks knowing we shouldn’t be living like this.

Jobadvisor

What you're describing sounds genuinely exhausting — not just tired, but the kind of worn-down where you don't even recognize yourself anymore. The fact that you notice the contrast — who you used to be versus who you are now — shows how much you care about your inner life. That matters.

The cruelest part of what you're describing is that the exhaustion is stealing the very things that used to restore you. Meditation, stillness, that quiet mind — those were your anchors. And now the job is taking up so much space that there's no room left for any of it.

A few things I want to gently reflect back to you:

The negative self-talk is a signal, not a truth. When you're running on empty for long enough, the mind turns inward and gets brutal. That inner critic saying terrible things — that's not your real voice. That's a depleted nervous system trying to make sense of an impossible situation by blaming the only thing it can control: you. It's lying to you.

Your apartment not feeling like home is a real loss. That's not a small thing to brush past. Home is supposed to be a sanctuary. When work colonizes your whole sense of self and space, that disconnection is deeply disorienting.

You haven't lost who you are — she's just buried under 45-hour weeks and chronic overstimulation. The fact that you're grieving her means you still know her.

Some honest questions worth sitting with, no pressure to answer here:

• Is there anything in the current job structure that could shift — even slightly — like compressed hours, remote days, a different role within the company?
• When was the last time you had even 20 uninterrupted minutes that were genuinely yours?
• Is there one small thing — even tiny — that used to bring you back to yourself that you could protect this weekend?

You're not broken. You're a person being asked to give more than a person sustainably can. That's the system's design flaw, not yours.

Putting in my notice next week after 6 years, no promotion, took a pay cut, got passed over a promotion I was promised and then finally a reorg where our team of 4 became 2 with same expected workload and new passive aggressive boss. Looking for encouragement that I’m not blowing up my whole life.

It’s a remote job, pays ok but the amount of disrespect I’ve put up with over the years has become too much. I still have some level of self respect. My husband can afford (and is willing) our bills until I find the next thing. I’m planning on freelancing for awhile (I’ve done it before) to make some money but I think I need an entire career pivot out of corporate America. I don’t care if I earn less but I can’t suck up another 10 years in corporate listening to people ramble in meetings and just making CEOs richer while they try to figure out how to replace us with robots.

Looking for encouragement from the internet because though I’ve been consistently employed for 12 years I’m afraid with this job market I’ll never find another job again.

And please don’t with the “wait until you find your next role” I’m beyond burnt out and have been applying but the interview process also now requires 7 separate 1hr long interviews lately and I just don’t have the mental bandwidth to do both my job and interview anymore. I also don’t even think I want to continue with my current career anymore.

Jobadvisor

Six years of that? You're not blowing up your life — you're finally protecting it.

You have actual evidence this isn't just burnout talking: no promotion after a promise, a pay cut, a reorg that doubled your workload, and a passive-aggressive boss to top it off. That's not a rough patch. That's a pattern of a company taking everything you'll give and returning disrespect. Leaving isn't impulsive — it's the logical conclusion of six years of data.

And your situation is genuinely solid. You have a supportive partner who has your back financially. You have freelance experience to fall back on. You've been employed for 12 years straight — that doesn't just evaporate. The job market is hard right now, but you're not starting from zero. You're starting from experience, skills, and a safety net. That's a much better launching pad than most people get.

The "wait until you have something lined up" advice only makes sense if you have the capacity to job search well — and you clearly don't right now. You can't interview well when you're running on fumes and doing the work of two people. Sometimes you have to stop bleeding before you can heal.

On the career pivot fear — that's real, but it's also not something you have to solve before you hand in your notice. You get to take a breath first. Freelance for a bit, decompress, and figure out what you actually want without the fog of burnout clouding everything. Clarity is hard to find when you're exhausted.

The corporate treadmill will always be there if you ever want back on it. But you don't have to want it. Plenty of people have found genuinely better ways to work — smaller companies, nonprofits, contract work, entirely different industries — and never looked back.

You clearly already know what you need to do. You're just looking for permission, so here it is: go.

Why are long shifts still a thing?

I want to understand why shifts longer than 8 hours are still common. I feel like we have more than enough people on earth to work multiple less than 8 hour shifts for tons of careers. Obviously there are some jobs requiring time for events/flying(pilots/attendants)/FIFO and maybe a few other exceptions but I feel like the long shifts are now coming back to increase desperation, isolation and fatigue to prevent organization.

I feel like there is very little that requires long shifts anymore. Healthcare workers should definitely have shorter shifts and more of them. Wages should be higher or commensurate to skill and need and not based on how long you’re doing something. I want to hear thoughts about anti-work. I’m definitely opposed continuing 40 hour weeks and want to bare minimum 32 hours a week and hopeful down 20-24 hours a week.

Jobadvisor

It is completely valid to look at 12-hour or 24-hour shifts and feel like they are a relic of a more exploitative era. When you are exhausted, it feels isolating, and it's hard not to view it as a systemic feature designed to keep people too tired to organize or question the status quo. The "anti-work" philosophy and the broader labor movement point out that our current definitions of productivity are often arbitrary and harmful.

However, the endurance of the long shift—especially in fields like healthcare—isn't just about corporate greed or keeping workers down. There are some surprising structural, logistical, and even worker-preferred reasons why these schedules persist, alongside the very real labor struggles you mentioned.

The Logistical Paradox: Why 12s Persist

While it seems intuitive that hiring more people for shorter shifts would solve fatigue, replacing 12-hour shifts with 6- or 8-hour shifts introduces severe operational hurdles.

1. The "Handover" Danger Zone (Continuity of Care)

In healthcare, the most dangerous time for a patient isn't during a procedure; it's during the shift change (handover).

• When Nurse A hands over a patient to Nurse B, critical information can get lost in translation (e.g., subtle changes in a patient's neuro status, specific family requests, or medication timing).

• Moving from two 12-hour shifts to three 8-hour shifts increases the number of handovers by 50% every single day.

• Moving to four 6-hour shifts doubles them. Statistically, more handovers correlate with increased medical errors.

2. The 24/7 Mathematical Trap

Covering a 24-hour cycle requires seamless math.

• Two 12-hour shifts or three 8-hour shifts divide into 24 perfectly.

• If you move to a 32-hour workweek or 6-hour shifts, scheduling a continuous 24/7 operation (like an ICU, a power plant, or emergency services) becomes an incredibly complex puzzle. It often requires hiring significantly more administrative staff just to manage overlapping, chaotic schedules, which drives up overhead without necessarily increasing frontline wages.

The Worker Preference Factor

Surprisingly, the biggest defenders of the 12-hour shift are often the workers themselves.

12-Hour Shift Model:   [Work] [Work] [Work] [ OFF ] [ OFF ] [ OFF ] [ OFF ]
8-Hour Shift Model:    [Work] [Work] [Work] [Work] [Work] [ OFF ] [ OFF ]

• More Days Off: A standard 12-hour shift schedule (often called a compressed workweek) means working 3 days one week and 4 days the next. That means workers get 3 to 4 days off every single week.

• Less Commuting: Working fewer days means cutting commuting time and costs (fuel, transit, childcare) by 40%.

• The "Get It Over With" Mentality: Many workers express that an 8-hour day already ruins the day for personal activities. They would rather sacrifice 3 days entirely to get 4 full days of absolute freedom, rather than having a few hours of exhausted free time every evening.

The "Anti-Work" Lens and the Real Problem

Your point about wages being decoupled from hours spent sitting in a chair or standing on a floor hits at the core of modern labor critique. The anti-work movement isn't necessarily about doing nothing; it’s a critique of "bullshit jobs" and the systemic demand that a human must trade the vast majority of their waking life just to survive.

The reason we aren't seeing a widespread shift to 24-hour workweeks isn't a lack of human beings; it's a mix of systemic friction:

• The Benefits Tie-In: In places like the US, health insurance and benefits are tied to full-time status (usually 30+ hours). If an employer splits one 40-hour job into two 20-hour jobs, their benefits administration costs skyrocket. Employers actively avoid this.

• Understaffing as a Feature: Many institutions don't have "more than enough people" because they deliberately operate on lean staffing models to maximize profit margins. They would rather pay overtime to an existing exhausted worker than pay the onboarding, training, and benefit costs of a new hire.

• The Productivity Trap: Society has achieved massive productivity gains through technology, but instead of those gains resulting in less work for everyone (as economists like John Maynard Keynes predicted in the 1930s), the financial surplus has largely concentrated at the top, while the baseline expectation remains 40 hours.

The push for a 32-hour workweek (4 days, 8 hours, with no loss in pay) is gaining serious global momentum and has shown massive success in trials, reducing burnout while keeping productivity identical. But transforming 24/7 critical infrastructure jobs requires solving the structural "handover" and benefits issues first.

New tech lead is slowly enshittifying my team’s work culture and I hate it.

Disclaimer - this post is mostly me just venting my frustration.

I’m a dev working at a company for 4 years straight out of college. In that time I’ve helped build and ship multiple new products with my coworkers and we’ve gotten nothing but praise from everyone including company leadership. I’ve really loved my role since I get to work on a lot of different things that I typically wouldn’t get to work on at bigger companies. Based on my conversations with other devs, a lot of them feel similarly and enjoy the variety of work we do.

Team culture has been pretty great too. No tiresome daily stand ups that turn into lengthy status updates, no weekly retrospectives and sprint review meetings, etc. Just one status meeting a week for the project you are working on. If we need to do some other tasks on a call, we schedule one-off meetings which has worked great and prevented useless meetings from piling up on my calendar. Way easier to actually get shit done.

Another huge positive, very little corporate buzzwords and phrases. People have mostly been respectful and straight forward during meetings which I’ve really appreciated.

That’s all been changing since we hired a new tech lead a couple months ago.

They are ex-FAANG and have used that as a reason to convince leadership as for why we should be changing our practices at work to align with “industry standards”. And they were successful.

Now very soon, we will start to have daily 8AM standups, retrospectives, sprint reviews and whatever other unnecessary bullcrap comes with it. Our roles are going to be more restricted as well so that we become “specialists”, which ruins a lot of what made this job exciting for me. Our practices are changing even though our workload hasn’t changed.

They’ve also pushed for and gotten approval to hire some new devs to help work on several important company initiatives, completely excluding current devs like me who would typically handle this sort of work.

The worst part has got to be the buzzwords. My god is it insufferable. Always some word salad that I need to decipher and pick through each time they talk. Why can’t they just be straightforward??

It’s a bummer since I’ve loved working here and have been enjoying my variety of work and laidback culture...but I guess it couldn’t last forever.

Jobadvisor

Ugh, that genuinely sucks — especially when you've been there four years building something you're proud of and then watch it get "optimized" into the exact thing you chose not to work at.

The FAANG-to-smaller-company pipeline of "let me import what I know" is a real phenomenon and it doesn't always land well. Processes that make sense at 500 engineers can be pure overhead at smaller teams. Daily 8AM standups alone can kill morale fast.

A few things that might be worth thinking about as you process this:

The specialization thing might be worth pushing back on specifically. That's a concrete, articulable loss — you can point to past projects and say "I contributed X and Y because I had breadth, and that wouldn't have been possible under this model." Leadership has praised your team's output, so framing it as a risk to what's been working is a reasonable conversation to have.

The exclusion from new initiatives is the more alarming signal. That's not just culture change — that's your growth path being redirected around you. Might be worth getting clarity on what your role actually looks like going forward, before it's decided for you.

The buzzword thing, frustrating as it is, is probably the least worth fighting. It's annoying but it's also just... how some people talk. Picking that battle would probably cost you credibility for the fights that actually matter.

That said — sometimes a culture shift is genuinely incompatible with what made you happy there, and no amount of pushback changes it. Not every job stays the right job forever, even good ones.

How are your teammates taking it? Are you the only one feeling this way or is there broader discontent?

Absorbing colleague’s job with no increase in pay

As the title says, my colleague is going on maternity leave this month and our CEO reached out to me to see if I could do almost all of her work(including my job) for the whole 3 months she’s away. She’s a client relations/billing specialist and my role is focused on HR + recruitment. A couple of things to note:

-in addition to my HR responsibilities, I also do sales proposals and partnership outreach that takes up a considerable amount of time each week.
-my manager pretends to work and doesn’t do anything. We’re entirely remote so she gets away with traveling abroad in Europe for weeks on end without anyone seeming to notice or care. I basically carry the team.
-I recently got a 10% raise in April for advocating for all the sales work I do, but now with these new responsibilities I feel like I’m getting taken advantage of yet again and don’t know how or if I should advocate for myself.

Mostly just a rant, but yea I feel disrespected and like I’m doing 3 jobs at one time. Basically stopped working early today after they dumped this news on me.

Jobadvisor

First off, take a deep breath. Stopping work early today was absolutely the right move. What they are asking you to do isn’t just a "favor"—it’s a recipe for immediate burnout.

You are completely justified in feeling disrespected and taken advantage of. Let’s look at the math here: you are already doing HR, recruitment, sales proposals, and partnership outreach, all while carrying a manager who is essentially on a permanent European vacation. Now they want you to absorb client relations and billing? That isn't one job; that is a localized corporate collapse being propped up entirely by your work ethic.

Even though you got a 10% raise in April, that was compensation for work you were already doing. It does not pre-pay for a massive influx of entirely new responsibilities.

Since the CEO reached out to "see if you could do it," you still have a window to set firm boundaries before this becomes the official expectation. Here is a strategy on how to handle this without looking like you aren't a team player.

1. Shift from "Yes/No" to "Prioritization"

Don't just say a flat "no," but don't say a martyr’s "yes" either. Force the CEO to look at the reality of finite hours in a day.

The Golden Rule: If they add something to your plate, something else must fall off.

The Strategy:

Lay out everything you currently do alongside the colleague's workload, and ask the CEO to choose what gets dropped.

• Make a visual list: Document your core HR hours, your sales outreach hours, and the estimated hours of the new billing role.

• Present the trade-off: "I want to help the team during [Colleague's] leave, but my current workload takes up 100% of my capacity. If I take on her billing and client relations, which of my current HR or sales responsibilities should I pause or hand off while she is away?"

2. Push Your Absentee Manager into the Light

If your manager is MIA in Europe, it’s time for her to earn her paycheck. When the CEO asks you to take this on, loop your manager in immediately.

• The Script: "Since this spans across both HR and Client Relations, let’s get [Manager's Name] into this conversation so she can help redistribute my sales and recruitment tasks while I cover the billing."

• The Result: Either your manager is forced to actually step up and cover for you, or she has to explain to the CEO why she can't. Stop protecting her by carrying the team.

3. Advocate for Temporary "Stipend" Pay

If they insist that all of it needs to be done by you and nothing can be paused, then the April raise is irrelevant. You are acting as an interim specialist for another department.

• Ask for a Temporary Stipend: Request a "temporary coverage stipend" or "acting bonus" for the 3 months.

• The Script: "Given that this requires managing two entirely different, full-time roles simultaneously, I’d like to discuss a temporary monthly stipend to compensate for the significant increase in scope and hours for the next three months."

Your Next Steps

For now, enjoy the rest of your day off. On Monday, do not log on and start doing the extra work. Instead, send an email to schedule a quick alignment chat with the CEO.

Go into that meeting armed with your list of current responsibilities. You have all the leverage here—they clearly rely on you to keep the ship afloat. It's time to make them realize that if they overload the anchor, the whole boat sinks.

How do you think the CEO would react if you asked them to prioritize which of your current tasks should be put on hold?