Am I just broken from years of billable hour targets? I finally made the jump from audit to a role at a mid-sized manufacturing company, and the culture shock is real. In public, I was used to 80-hour weeks for three months and then a summer chill that still involved 40 hours. Here, the month-end close is a four-day sprint of pure chaos followed by three weeks of basically just staring at my inbox. I’m grateful for the downtime, but I feel like I’m losing my edge or that I should be doing more to justify my salary.

Hi. I’ve recently started at a fairly large company in practice which has an accounting team. The work is really interesting but I can’t deal with the timesheets. Having to account for every minute of the day, and being questioned if we have breaks and such.. it’s just not what I expected. It’s giving me anxiety. I understand I’d get this in almost every large accounting company, but I’m thinking about moving to industry.. does anyone know where I’d start? Anyone else made this move?

The cesspool of misery that is primary care in New York City has outdone itself yet again. Just interviewed with ACPNY, a large practice there. Straight out in the beginning of the interview the lady said "By the way, we got rid of admin time definitively, just so you know" When asked if there was any flexibility on this (at least an hour or two for charting) she said NO. And then they wonder why they can't keep docs for over a year. It's disgusting.

Working in an MSP. Theyre currently pushing for us to log all 8 hours a day with "utilized time" and threatening termination for anyone who doesnt do so. This came from a smaller MSP that got eaten by a much larger one, and now were all being punished because "some people aren't adding billed time at all" To the point of asking me and others to fill time not entered with PTO if we cant find the extra time. Is there anything i can do here?

Has anyone else been offered an interview time that’s wildly inconvenient like, 6:30am or on a holiday weekend? I get wanting to be flexible, but I also think my time should matter too. I got a request for a Sunday morning interview, and while I didn’t want to seem difficult, I couldn’t shake how disrespectful it felt. I can't figure out if it's okay to push back without risking the opportunity.

Do you get so schedule/set best times for interviews? The only day we don’t interview is Sunday and folks are able to go in and choose when they want to. We have no control over what times are available. Sometimes I don’t mind, but I day like yesterday when I was the only manager for the majority of the shift, it would’ve been nice to be able to turn them off for the day.

Most of our daily work is completed by 3:30pm CST. I log off at 4pm CST. I want to see if they’ll allow me to start 30 minutes or an hour earlier. How should I phrase it? Our year end meeting to go over our final ratings will be in a month. I’d like to bring it up. Have you negotiated your work hours as part of your salary negotiation? How did it go? What did you think helped?

Anyone else remember meeting culture before the pandemic? Pre-COVID it was considered a busy day if 50% of your time was spent in meetings. And now, it's not uncommon to have entire teams booked 9-5 multiple days per week with little time to do any real work. Everyone is just white-knuckling it from 9 a.m. Monday to 5 p.m. Friday.

For ppl who have freelanced fulltime for an in house team on a W2 ( through an agency like Creative Circle etc).. explain how you filled out your timesheet. IE, in the beginning when you spent only let's say 3 hours training etc, do you still add 7.5 or 8 hours to your timecard? I've only freelanced part time so just trying to understand. Thanks

The 5-day, 40-hour work week is a human invention. 100 years ago, many leaders demanded longer hours over 6 days. Then they learned people were more effective working 5 days. Now a growing body of evidence shows that people can be just as productive in even less time. See Four Days a Week by Juliet Schor