After working in IT for 20 years I can't remember the last time that I had a forty-two hour twenty-two minute work week. I am luck if I get away with less than 50 hours.

I would really like to see these statistics across applications, system engineering, and data center. Not sure who actually did this study but there is no conceivable way anyone working in system engineering works 42 hours. I'd also be curious as to what companies were included in this study and what countries were used to formulate these results. In management in this area, working in systems engineering for an independent company I work 60-70 hours/week. My staff puts in 44-55 hours/week. When I worked in outsourcing a few years back, I was working 80-100 hours/week and my staff were in the 50-70 hours. I'm struggling with these results.

It would be interesting to find out the source of data and methodology used. Since the .com bust, I am working even longer hours. The 42 hours they mention would be a holiday !

I'm not sure where this information is coming from but there is no way anyone in my shop works less than 50 hours a week with the exception of the hourly shift operators and Help Desk resources. All of the programmers, managers and systems people work anywhere from 50-70 hours a week. Maybe you could provide the names of the companies where these stats were gathered - I think several people here would be interested in getting a life.

Typical goverment results totally wrong....we all know how census data is done

By the way ...was the real data on these laptops?

The U.S. Commerce Department reported that 1,137 laptops have been lost or stolen since 2001, with 249 of them containing some degree of personal data.

The department couldn't determine whose data may have been on the machines, of which 672 belonged to the U.S. Census Bureau.

From my 13 years of IT experience, I find it difficult to believe that IT workers could average less than 45-50 hours per week. Additionally, this does not even take into account the enormous time spent keeping up with new software, applications, hardware, etc. A familiar mantra I heard while starting out in this industry was that the IT field offered an environment to constantly learn new things. That learning comes at a cost which accepts no other currency than personal time.

42 hours per week?... Someone's smoking crack.. As a Program Manager for a large Storage Vendor, I and my team average 50 hours minimum per week... and that usually includes weekend nights for Migrations, upgrades and Maintenance outages... and when the End of the quarter is looming large... everyone's hours exponentially increase ...

42 hours a week, what are they smoking up there?
Must be some good stuff...

Maybe the useless hacks at the USCB that came up with these stats (pressuring their IT people, no doubt) should take up a software development or support position and try to even keep their jobs at 42 hrs/week.

Do they include the sleepless nights spent on emergency calls or the weekends spent designing systems or even the commute time used to mentally debug a problem?

Don't even get me started with government employees...

42 hours a week, what are they smoking up there?
Must be some good stuff...

Maybe the useless hacks at the USCB that came up with these stats (pressuring their IT people, no doubt) should take up a software development or support position and try to even keep their jobs at 42 hrs/week.

Do they include the sleepless nights spent on emergency calls or the weekends spent designing systems or even the commute time used to mentally debug a problem?

Don't even get me started with government employees...

Looks to me like the Computer Pros are knowledge workers...power users to utilize computers to accomplish their job. I consider a computer pro to be a Information Techology professional who either develops/maintains/supports software or configures/installs/supports hardware and operating systems.

With "lights-out" operations being common, IT Pros are signaled by cell phone or pager when one of their systems encounters a problem. Therefore, most of us are on call, most of the time. And of course any changes we make to the hardware, network or applications must be made at night or the weekend when the knowledge workers are using the systems.

Altogether, the article is pretty shallow in representing IT Pros when considering their responsibilities to keep an eye on things after hours and on weekends. While my family watches TV, I'm checking on processes at the office from my home computer. That's not counted in the survey for sure, nor is working at my desk during lunch just to get a few minutes of uninterrupted concentration on a complicated problem.

"But if government data are to be believed"

The government data is not to be believed.

Even if you take into account IT professions in operations that work shift work and averaging that with other IT professional it still is not believable.

Please post the data for careful analysis...

42 hours? That would be great if it was true. I'd like to also see the data set for those stats.

It's a very rare event if I work a 40 hour week. Sure, this is just an average, but I don't know anyone in IT who works those hours. I work on average between 45 and 50 hours per week. That doesn't include any work that I do at home or on the road on my laptop.

We're not workaholics. We're just the type that like to solve problems and make sure things are done right. Who doesn't want to go home early, but no one wants to drop the ball.

It's for sure that the people they polled did'nt work for the Federal Gov as an Information Technology Specialist for DOD. I would love to have a 42 hour work week, not only do we work the extra time and we sometimes take our work home with us. I would love to find one of those 42 hour a week jobs. Maybe I could watch my kid grow up and spend some time with my wife and maybe stop wondering way my hair is turning grey at such a young age.

As an IT Professional of 28 years I too was accustomed to the 50-60+ workweek. I have since moved into the world of contract work (in nearly the same capacity in my previous job) and now work about 40-45hrs/week on average. I attribute this primarily to working for a company who places high value on family life and recognizes the need for good planning and governance to enable appropriate funding for projects. Working smarter not harder. FINALLY!

HAHAHAHAHA, for a moment, I thought I was reading The Onion. I would very much like to take a look at a copy of said government data.

Perhaps both of the above would have shorter work weeks if they paid more attention to what they should be doing instead of what people at other companies are doing.

I have to agree with above two posts. I have been in the IT Consulting field just about from its inception. Having had management positions at two international consultancies and now as a Partner in a two-person IT boutique consultancy, I average well over 60 hours a week. While there are peaks and valleys in any IT job, probably more in consulting, there are days, especially when travelling, where the hours are just staggering.

As a software engineer I have never worked that little in any job I've ever had. I'm more accustomed to around 70-75 hour weeks on average.

No way... This job has not schedules. A serious IT professional (even in Managmenent) usually go easily over 50, probably without counting the personal time you put in researching or updating your skills. For IT people, I personally think it is difficult to count the hours you really put in a project, because many times you don't need to be in an office (as is in a regular profession) to do your job, so your hours are virtual hours too.

As an independent IT professional, I would really really REALLY love to work only 42 hours a week. Between the non-stop reading, researching, testing of technologies for clients as well as the maintaining/fixing of PCs, Servers and LANs; there is little time to do much else.

I've studied surveys and statistics enough to know that there has to be some very serious skewing going on in this study.

If we in the IT industry are so "underworked", why is industry so hell bent on increasing the number of H-1B visa? (Oh, I forgot it's about the salary!)

Lies, damned lies, and statistics....

42 hours sounds like a dream job to me. I average 50-55 hours per week as a developer, and that is probably not counting the countless number of phone calls handled when I'm not "on the clock".

I think this study is about as accurate as most of the other government studies out there. I work with 2200 IT professionals and I'd guess less than 1% work less than 45 hours each week, and the average is likely near 50.

The information used in this study couldn't possibly have been a good sampling. A typical week for me and those I know in this field is 45 - 60 hours a week with most in the 48+. Myself, I work between 50-60.

How can these numbers possibly be remotely accurate?

15 years+ in this business, and maybe 20% of the companies I've worked with kept a 40-hour work week for thier IT/Computer professionals. I'm lucky to average 45-50 hours per week over a year, and have had quite a few years that averaged much more.

Seriously, I'd really like to see where this data was collected from.

Me thinks this survey be drinking the crazy Kool Aid. I think one needs to see who has been included in this professional job title. Generally I would say I have worked 10 hour days and carried a beeper and forget end-of-month and year on call hours.

Where I work, 60+ hours is the norm. Last year, I averaged 78 and am trying to get down to 60 (and NOT succeeding...) My saying here is, "The only time we only work 40 hours a week is when we're on vacation!"

I am an IT professional now, but a long time ago I was involved in statistics and social research. We were taught that to be statisically significant we need to see a difference of greater than 15%. The figures in the chart in this article vary only slightly more than 5 hours. If we look at a 5 day work week, that is one hour a day. If a full time work week is 40 hours or 8 hours per day by labor official designation. Then the difference is no more than 12.5%. I think that some survey folks are working their 40 hours a week by designing and executing a poor survey,

If 42 hours is the average, and everyone who has responded is working 50 plus hours, then that means some people are only working 20 hours. Did they include part-time employees in the data?

I don't know about anyone else, but I put in at least 10 hours per week of non-billable time, just keeping up with new technology developments. I can't bill my employer for reading this article, so he doesn't report that time to the government. But you can't really count the time necessary to read professional journals or come up to speed on emerging technology as non-work time, either.

Given this is a government study, it is probably what they believe is based on facts; their facts. Unemployment numbers are typically off, and these use similar filters, assumptions, and governmental "formulas" to determine these figures. So, it is safe to say the comment responses here are more accurate than the official figures.

With the possible exception of Arts/Design/Sports, IT is largely a mind game, where you mentally plan things virtually several times, way before you would physically do the visual effort. Obviously, if the government only measured the visual effort, it might look lower. So, let's compare to the other categories... Are these measured only when "at the job"?

Education/Training/Library (At a school?)

Life/Physical/Social Sciences (In a building?)

Community/Social Services (Some physical venue?)

Healthcare Practitioner/Technical (Hospital?)

Architecture/Engineering (Design center?)

Legal (Law office/court?)

Management (At a workplace?)

I'm betting this category includes all the call center personnel that pulls the average way down. Those folks don't ever work 40:01 hours.

It would be extremely interesting to see how the survey was conducted, what questions were asked, and whom was surveyed.

If the survey included helpdesk personnel or other hourly workers, it probably would skew the results significatly. I don't think the other "professions" listed would include hourly/support staff in whom they conclude as professionals in their field.

I wonder if the survey asked something extremely simple as what are your regular work hours (e.g. 8-5 with an hour lunch) and then gave a limited number of choices from which to choose. Since there may have been no place for IT professionals to select/record choices that would cover all the non-standard work time the "real" hours were probably misrepresented. As other noted this additional time includes time put in on special projects or upgrades, regularly working through lunch, coming in early or staying late several days per week to handle miscellaneous problems that crop up, and answering/responding to phone calls, messages, automated pages, etc on "off-duty" time, professional reading/research on "off-duty" time, and probably many more.

When I worked only in IT, I was putting in 60-hour weeks standard. Now that I'm a hybrid in HR and IT (doing HR work in additon to HRIS work in an HR department), I average 45 hours/week.

The only ways that I can think they can come up with this number are:

1) They consider all Salary Employees working 40 hours a week, regardless of how many are actually worked. I know that my pay stub says that I only get paid for 8 hours per work day, but the actual number of hours I work are much higher than that.

2) They went to a whole bunch of small businesses where the "IT" person was the person with the server under their desk and did the IT work as an additional duty to their "normal" job.

I noticed in the second paragraph that Chabrow refers to "hours *at* work" (emphasis mine). Both the educators (of whom I was one) and computer workers (whom I trained) that I know put in many hours at home, not "at work". Perhaps that's the bias.

Check out my latest blog to get an explanation on how the government arrives at its numbers.

Check out my latest blog to get an explanation on how the government arrives at its numbers.

Whatever the purpose for skewing the data, the idea that IT professionals work 42 hours a week must be limited to those areas where IT is a union activity. I have been in IT for 40 years and have never encountered 'reasonable' hours for IT employees except at union shops where all overtime was the standard 1.5 or 2X rates. At these sites management wanted to reduce costs and employees could refuse to work without penalty. If the numbers were true there would be no USA IT professionals, they would all be outsourced. The only reason that we still exist in the USA is that we are productive, study on our own time, and our per hourly rate is very low due to the hundreds of hours of uncompensated overtime that we perform each year.