Are you working long hours? Samsung thought that a 52 hour work week limit was too low and got approval to increase this to 64 hours.
Assuming a 1 hour commute, this would be equivalent to setting off to work at 8am and arriving back at midnight.
This extension will be applied to the firm’s R&D staff focused on chip making, with the change expected to propel Samsung’s competitiveness in the industry.
So is it R&D or chip making? The former suggests different work than the later.
The article suggests overtime pay but doesn’t explain it, nor does it mention if this is voluntary or mandatory?
Too little information to form a reasoned opinion.
R&D in the field of chip making
With a 64h work-week, I’d demand to be housed and fed next to the office.
And they wonder why South Korea has the lowest birth rate on the planet ( 0.72 children per woman).
The people living in the middle ages had more comfortable lives (relatively) compared to the insanity of the working conditions in the year 2025. And we are so conceited as to think of ourselves as being a modern progressive society. What hypocricy.
If we ignore rampant disease, high infant mortality, frequent warfare, backbreaking (or mind numbing office) labour and the absence of modern healthcare or education, then yes I would agree.
1 Like
That’s some thing a serf would say under the threat of 10 lashes 
1 Like
Wondering about the quality of those phones. It’s OK to push extra hours for 2-3 weeks and then a similar time to recover. A continuous effort is just burnout and fall in productivity and quality.
They are trained at a young age:
1 Like
5 hours of sleep? I know people can do that, but I cannot function without 7-8 hours of sleep. I can pretend to, but not really working.
I did that for 4-5 years.
Heck, it’s 2am now, so I guess it will happen tonight too…
Make that 4.5 hours.. 
And…? We still die of disease and warfare and we havnt yet got the flux compensator and the medibed and who knows what else will be invented in the future.
Their lives were different but in context of the time they actually lived and died much in the same way we still do.
Infant mortality in the Middle Ages was around 30%, leading women to have many children (although childbirth itself was perilous for mothers). During frequent plague outbreaks, up to half of all children might not survive past age five. For those who did reach adulthood, life expectancy in Europe was typically in the early 50s, though events like war and epidemics could drastically lower this figure.
Steven Pinker has written extensively on these historical trends, arguing that, contrary to popular pessimism and rose tinted spectacle views of the past, we have indeed seen dramatic improvement across numerous measures e.g. lower violence, longer lifespans, reduced infant mortality, and better overall health. As a result, even a poor, overworked Samsung or Tesla employee today is still luxuriously far better off than most of their predecessors from centuries past.
I worked for samsung back in the day, and the work hours were like that then.
I Would do my 0645 to 1700(really 1900) schedule then be moved to 4x3 12 hour shift, 2 weeks later to the regular night shift, then 4x3 night shift . and so on.
I had to sleep in my car for an hour or so before heading home.
It was rough, but good for me in the end. Everything became easier after that.
(no, im not advocating for this type of work)
2 Likes
That is not what I am arguing.
It was very possible that people lived well into their eighties and nineties, the statistics are skewed to a low life expectancy because a lot of people died when young.
But if you ignore all the gew-gaws and blinky lights and do-dahs we have at our disposal our lives today are based on a society that developed in the middle ages.
I actually accounted for that, the average life expectancy for the working classes in medieval Europe is commonly estimated to have been around 30–35 years skewed heavily downward by the extremely high infant and child mortality. Take that out of the equation and it was in the 50s.
How long?
I work 100% (42.5 hours/week), sometimes a bit more for current employer. Then, it takes a week to recover.
A bit of private business pushes some weeks to 60+ hours. The lesson from the last couple years is a few kilos more and white hairs. Doing this on the long term is not sustainable.
1 Like
A year. birthday to birthday
the 4 day shifts were 12 hours each (+ 1,5-2 hours extra)
the night shift goes 4x3 and then 3x4 so was a bit nicer.
the normal night shift was somewhere like 1800 to 0450
adding a weird anecdote:
the ESD hats were somewhat annoying for me, so i would wear a hair net under it sometimes.
HR was not pleased and one night shift threatened to suspend me. I said go ahead, I could use the day off. it took 10 mins from when he informed my boss to me getting promptly unsuspended.
1 Like