To ask if your DH/DP works a 70 80 90 hour week - what exactly does he do?

[Hetty241]

I often read posts on MN where women mention their husbands/partners working very long hours and wonder what jobs they do that entail such long hours.

So I thought I'd ask.

We both do long hours - it's a mix of holidays, and working from home in evenings and weekends. Ds will start nursery when he turns one though so it's not long term.

Lawyer again , clients always setting ridiculous deadlines which involve v long hours , plus as dh says you are only as good as your last deal , very competitive market place .

Farmer.

In the summer months he will do 80-100 hrs.

Winter is a much more reasonable 60 hr week.

He works most weekends and all bank holidays including tomorrow. As it's our own business he rarely switches off - we'll go out for a meal and he'll be thinking about the next big opportunity.

Pre kids I also worked similar hrs as a farmer. I've scaled back since kids as 2 people can't work those hrs. He can't work those hrs without my support!!

To be honest though we love the life - it doesn't feel like work when you can take the kids to sit with dad on the combine.

IT consultant (programme director).

Has worked his way up through the ranks over the last 25 years, right from the bottom technical ranks (programmer) and could probably cut back to a "normal" 40 hour week if he absolutely wanted/needed. But that would be very very difficult to organise logistically (conference calls/timezones/expectations) and he wouldn't want to, he loves it.

And I wouldn't want him to, because it's a rare thing to enjoy your job and whenever we genuinely need flexibility it's there (working from home, day off at short notice) and the benefits are surreal.

I love that DH loves what he does, that he's good at it, and it doesn't impact our family life too much since when he's home he's very involved (more so than friends and family whose working parent works 40hrs a week in some cases...).

Dh works 70+ hours and I am a SAHP.

It works for us, if I worked it wouldn't improve our lives much, he enjoys his career but I never enjoyed mine. He's there when I need him, when the kids need him, he doesn't play golf or disappear off to football matches at the weekends and if I wanted him to work less he'd change jobs but his work is part of who he is, part of what makes him tick, part of the man I fell in love with and that's ok.

DH is teacher, no idea what hours he works, but he's at work 8am-4pm, picks dd up from nursery, then starts work again after she's gone to bed - About 7-midnight. If he's got marking that can take all weekend. Most teachers I know take on extra roles which bumps the hours up.

I'm on mat leave, but I work for my local authority. My hours are fairly flexible, but I can easily work 50-60.
Used to work upwards of 70+ before kids.

My family own/run their own businesses, so they basically never stop working. They have responsibilitys to their employees as well as themselves.

I used to work long hours, as a teacher with a senior leadership team post. 10 hours in school five days a week, another 2 at home four nights a week, 5 - 7 hours at the weekend. THis would then go up at busy times such as report writing, consultation evenings or when going through SEN processes. When I would work in the holidays (probably about half of the weekdays in the holiday periods) I would go in for 5 - 6 hours each day.

Following maternity leave I now work pt as something different and my life is so much better!

DH - long hours as a city lawyer.

Another head chef here. Min 60-70 hours a week plus work at home. In the past it has been much worse than that, he's had to do 100 hours before a day off. They work incredibly hard.

I'm an HR manager & regularly do those sorts of hours

I have a boyfriend who's a head chef and I don't see him very much. At the moment he starts at 10am, finishes at 2/3am and gets no breaks. It's a horrible job imo.

Not DH but I'm a PA and have worked for plenty of Directors, MDs and CEOs who put those hours in fairly easily. You just need to chuck in travel, conf calls and meetings into the mix for the hours to start eating into evenings and weekends.

If you're getting a 7am flight from LHR you're talking about leaving the house at 4.30am. Long long long days for my guys. It tires me out just thinking about it all.

Trouble is, the expectation is for me work like life depends on it too...

Musician and producer. Travels for gigs every weekend, is hard at work while everyone else is playing!

DH does as an electronics engineer in the aerospace industry and to counteract the poster upthread, he still manages very well as a husband, father, Akele of our local Cubs and does all the manual work needed for his mother on Sunday afternoons. He's a workaholic, certainly doesn't do it for the money, the pay is crap.

Both Dh and I can work 70 to 80 hours a week, we run a small retail type business and have to work these sort of hours to stay afloat. However we have a large house, a nice car each and two children in private school. Some may criticise our choice of lifestyle but we hope the hours we put in now will give us a nice retirement fund and security for our children which is something mine and Dh parents could never do.

It's nothing to do with being greedy. My husband as a lawyer earned a reasonable amount but as he had clients paying him to do work for him he had to stay and do the work. As someone said up thread if you worked it out per hour it would not be so much.
As a GP my days are long. I work 1 full day of 11-12 hours and 3 half days of 6 hours. There is so much paperwork to do that you can't leave.

Husband is a lawyer (partner in one of the big NYC firms). Hours vary between 50-80 hours, depending on deals. I have been a SAHP for the last two years, doing some freelance editing when time and inclination permits.

My SAHM friends are mostly ex bankers and lawyers who also worked 80-hour weeks, but had no option to go part-time once they had kids.

I used to before I had DC - Retail Management. Only got paid for 39hrs but if the work needed to be done then it had to be done, and the buck stopped with management. I stopped when I had DS1 after I realised I'd been averaging 60+ hour weeks whilst 8 months pregnant and everyone was treating it as a rational thing to do... (it was Christmas though - summer wasn't quite as bad) It was okay when it was just me (and DH) but I didn't want to do it with the DCs.

Dh is an offshore (and sometimes onshore if he's lucky) engineer who works up to 80 hours a week or more.

I'm the one that works the long hours around here- I'm a psychiatrist and my husband is a SAHD. Some weeks I only work 48 hours, sometimes I'm up to 60-70 hours depending on what's happening. You can't just get up and leave when someone's telling you they're suicidal! It can easily take a couple of hours to fully assess a patient and get a management plan sorted for them- often a lot more if you have to detain them, organise a transfer to a different hospital, etc. so if I start seeing a patient late afternoon I can end up there for ages. Sometimes I do a weekend on call which is Sat 9am-Mon 9am then work normal hours the rest of the week (inc all day Mon)- might barely get any phone calls all weekend, other times I am out all day on Sat and Sun seeing patients and am up during the night giving advice over the phone. It's nothing to do with being greedy- I don't get paid more if I stay late unless I do a locum shift (very rarely happens here). When I was more junior I did 7x 12 hour shifts in a row every 10 weeks. Did get a few days off after that though.

Refrigeration engineer - installations, maintenance and repairs of commercial refrigeration, freezers and air conditioning.

When he's quieter during the winter he works about a 60 hour week, in the summer it's 80+ hours.

IT,nowhere near London.

Cyber security manager. He often has to go abroad to work too and when there works in the evenings with clients etc so then the hours are even longer. He gets paid good money but not loads, and as others have said doesn't actually earn that much per hour. He works as a consultant too and some jobs take weird turns which means he ends up earning about £4 per hour. If he could work less and earn less it would be better, but the job is that amount of time or not at all. And as he actually could not do anything else we are stuck with it. Unfortunately it means i have had to sacrifice any idea of a job for myself in the near future.

There will never be equality when someone questions about DH/DP's working hours - what about females in the workplace ? dH and I both often very long hours as our jobs require it (one accountant , one Consultant). We both have excellent time management skills and have (hopefully !) raised our DT's successfully !

We both work long hours, DP is a consultant in a hospital, I am a pharmacist in the same hospital.

It's not greed related, it's just selfish when people get critically ill and need their drugs/operations in the middle of the night on too of normal shift work there's on calls too and it's nothing for DP to work 12 days in a row, doing at least 12 hours a day.

The reality is, these long hours are the culture within the professions we have chosen. Even when we have finished for the day, there is always paperwork to be done and then training and study to increase our skills further.

We chose these jobs as we love helping others, today a patient told me I had "made their Christmas". Having a complete stranger tell you that is pretty much the best feeling in the world!

We have dc, it's a logistical challenge. We have an incredible childminder and take turns to pick up/drop off so we can each start early at work. We could just stick to our contracted hours but the NHS is so squeezed that if everyone did this, things just wouldn't get done.

A consultant. Also has own business. I worked 70 hour weeks myself, pre-dcs, as a lecturer.