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And another thing .... most people have 'job offers' (no such thing as a contract really anymore) that carry the expectation of somewhere between 35 to 40 hours a week of work. Yet I have had a past boss say to his team that he expected a minimum of 50 hours a week and that he considered less than that to be 'slacking'.

Indeed. I occasionally work with a couple of small US SW companies, and it seems that 50-60 hour weeks and 5 day a year vacations is more or less a norm.

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I've spent way too much of the past year working 50, 60, 70 hour weeks to try to meet unrealistic deadlines, and the sad thing is that still I've had moments where I've felt guilty about leaving work before someone else on the team. Why is that? It's not _my_ fault that someone on the team is a single workaholic. This is exacerbated by the fact that workaholics are often rewarded with responsibility as well as recompense because most companies tie salary to position. The problem is that they often have interpersonal issues, like poor communication skills, or the inability to delegate anything except the simplest of tasks. So you end up with the scenario where a whole team is waiting around for their team workaholic to delegate tasks or communicate information necessary to complete a team goal, and the end result is that what could take a well-functioning team 40 hours to complete ends up taking 60. Does the single workaholic care?

Agreed. I think that there should be a mechanism to reward the performance regardless of position, that promotions to managerial positions should be based on relevant (organizational, communication) qualities, and that compensations should rise only modestly with hierarchical "rungs". Otherwise, we end up with incompetent managers who could have been much more useful as good engineers. And, of course, amount of time spent on work is only weakly related to performance: while dedication should be rewarded, what makes work done is efficiency.
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