In response to my most recent post I’ve had quite a few adults writing me and pointing out that their job does not end once they leave the office at the end of the day. That they too have vast amounts of homework. The professions mentioned were teacher, lawyer, academic, editor, architect, and engineer.
What other jobs require lots of after hours work?
Are there any well-paying jobs that don’t?
Working on oil rigs? Alaskan crab fishing? Being Paris Hilton?
Gosh that’s a good question… I guess for most high-paying careers, there is a lot of work outside the actual job.
My husband drives a school bus, and he still has to come home and do seating charts and figure out fun quiz questions for the kids.
Well, I work as a computer programmer, and I pretty much never have homework. Occasionally I will have to stay at work late or work on weekends (but thankfully not very often), but pretty much once I’ve left the building, I’m done.
However, things in the software industry vary a lot. The company I work for is highly disciplined and well-organized, which means that our projects usually finish on time without requiring the employees to give up their private lives. There are other places, though, where things regularly turn into death marches with people working 80-hour weeks for months on end. I’ve worked at some of them, and it’s no fun.
there are plenty of poorly paying jobs in the nonprofit sector that are solid all-homework-all-the-time. but the homework is mostly networking. that is to say, you have to spend all your social time going to fundraisers, volunteering at people’s events, and schmoozing. so if you’re a social person, this is a good thing. if you’re not, maybe do something else.
and, of course, any kind of journalism, print OR online, newspaper, magazine, OR blog, written, audio, OR video, means you pretty much only let up on the homework to eat, sleep, or pee. the blank page is hungry for content. if you have an idea, you need to be researching it up to the moment you send it off to the editor. and if you don’t have an idea, you need to be looking around for one.
pretty much any job where you’re being paid for knowing more about the world, or about a particular field than everyone else, requires homework.
oh, add to the list: doctor. the only practicing ones worth their salt have to be keeping up with the research constantly.
My job as a consultant requires little homework or even on the job work and it pays well. It just requires a little knowledge that few others have and a large amount of arrogance.
And this week it has me walking up and down E 40th in Manhattan and I am convinced I have walked by you(Justine) many, many times, except I haven’t seen the Larbalestier boots. To me, all New Yorkers look the same.
What’s with this rain anyway?
I think there are many jobs where people do and can have homework, but it’s not necessarily a part of the job. Then there are people who will always bring work home, regardless of what job you give them.
But for a homework job you can add “Piano Teacher.” Now if I had a computer, internet connection and printer at the studio I COULD do all my homework there, but since I don’t, it comes home.
I thought this (Justine’s point) was kind of the obvious side issue in the original post and we were all just taking it for granted and not getting side-tracked in the comments. 🙂
I did make a note elsewhere on the web recently that professional writing (esp. fiction publishing) is one of those slightly unusual careers where there isn’t a ramp-up career path that also involves making money. You can be a junior programmer, or apprentice chef or medical resident and you get paid. But when you’re a proto-professional author (screenwriter, actor, …), there isn’t the regular income for the person just starting out that pays the bills as you go. So you get to be professionally poor for a while, which is discouraging on many levels and feeds back into problems like pensions, health plans and the like. So fiction authors are both similar and different to many other workers.
More specifically, to show there are two sides to every two-sided coin, I’m going to disagree slightly with JS Bangs (not with his specific situation, but only to note there are two sides .. did I mention that?) I’m also a computer programmer by profession, but it’s like writing and so many other jobs: you can always work to improve your craft. Like many other people, I got into my profession because I enjoyed doing it and the idea of being paid to do what I like was attractive (I’ve also been a teacher in the past, for the same reason).
When I had a “9-to-5 job”, I probably spent more time out of the office doing programming and contributing on help forums and mailing lists than in the office (at least until I worked for a start-up, where the work hours got pretty severe). These days, as a consultant, I still spend a *lot* of free time being a computer programmer. It’s fun, it helps other people, I’m a lot better programmer, writer, speaker, teacher for working on open source projects than if I left work at whatever office I was at.
Of course, there’s the counter-argument, often put forwards by my friends that I may need to get a life or seek help. And those people are my friends!
One of the nice things about my former job as an administrative assistant in a private wealth management firm was that it paid much better than typical publishing salaries AND had no homework. As soon as I left my desk my job was done.
I only think that was possible because I couldn’t care less about my job. I didn’t HATE it, but it bored me stiff so I didn’t care to put in any extra time or work into it. So I think that any career you love will have homework because you should hopefully WANT to do extra work outside of your hours.
Of course, now that I am now unemployed and revising my novel full-time, I’m eating my words. Procrastination has become my middle name!
stay at home parents don’t get homework, but the hours can be tedious.
In response to Malcolm’s comments, I’d say that I, too do a lot of extracurricular programming, spend time on forums, etc. But that’s not homework: it’s unrelated to my job, and my bosses wouldn’t care (or even notice) if I stopped doing it. Having a job that you like so much that you want to do it at home is a great perk!
If you work in the game industry you have no homework. This is because you’re never home. (Whether it pays well depends on what you do, but the sleeping in the office will still apply.)
Computer guys may seem to have a great jobm after all, all they have to do is sit in an office and look at a screen. Yet 100% of computer support people (at least that I have dealt with in 22 years in the business) are oncall 365×24. Computers are needed to be up all the time and management has no problem with the concept that all the support people must be available ALL the time to work. I’ve received calls at 2am, had to go in when I was not the oncall person (because they needed help), etc.
I agree with Mark, being an IT guy too. Companies, or the supervising employees that is, seem to think that pay you not as an employee, but instead owning you and your time. I buck that trend as best I can, and defend MY time, much to the dismay of certain fellow employees.
My father was an airline pilot, which requires little after-hours work: you can’t do a spot of flying at home to catch up, obviously. But he did have to spend home time keeping fit (6-monthly health checks – my uncle failed one at age 50, was grounded and never flew again) and reliably sober (eight, or maybe 12, hours “bottle to throttle”).
He also had to be on standby from time to time, sitting by a phone at home (50s-70s here) ready (and sober) to take on a flight if the assigned pilot was ill. He could do a bit of homework – writing up his logbooks, for instance, or boning up on a new aircraft, but it didn’t amount to much.
On the other hand, the hours were all over the place depending on the destination: he went Kuwait-Abu Dhabi-Karachi-Dubai-Kuwait one night, starting at 21.20 and arriving back at 06.30, and then two days later it was an 05.20 start Kuwait-Cairo-Kuwait, back at 12.50 (with his logbooks I have his whole flying career 1941 to 1974 written down to the nearest 5 minutes).
Years ago I went out with a junior hospital doctor (age 26) – her main hours were 9-5 Mo-Fr PLUS she was in a 1-in-3 rota with two other doctors to cover the rest of the time. So one night in three and one weekend in three she should be on duty… she would start work at 9am Friday and come off duty 5pm Monday. Obviously, she had a crash pad at the hospital but could be woken at any time to attend to some birth or whatever (and when a colleague was on holiday, the 1-in-3 rota would become 1-in-2!). But technically that is not after-hours homework, just a lot of work hours.
I used to work as a sales rep and/or marketing manager in a college publishing company, where on top of the office time or face time with customers there would be travel time, prep time, report-writing time, and staying up all night getting ready for various presentations. But a lot of that would be my fault due to bad organisation of my time in the office.
Also what would happen was that I would obsess about some issue at night, in bed, when I couldn’t do anything about it – but then not worry much about it back at work, and put it off, and then have a sleepless night the next night.
Graphic design, it’s constant work and critique. There is the endless research and training to keep up with skills and what’s happening in the field (continually changes). This is one of the reasons I switched my day job from “studio” to working for a printer. It’s a lot less pressure and I do have time to write now.
However, while it’s not “homework”, graphic design is a profession where you’re always “on.” My wife has finally broken me of critiquing restaurant menus and other graphics in the public place. Although if something is really bad or exceptionally good (the rare side of the coin) I’ll still end up making a comment. I can’t pick up a book without evaluating it’s cover, typesetting and internal layout (also the quality of print and materials used). It’s a sickness at times.
Medical jobs with direct and some indirect patient care all have continuing education requirements and homework! Never seem to get away from the homework. Even as an adult. I do xray and ultrasound and you never stop reading and learning and doing homework! The licensure and your job site require a certain amount of continuing education requirements otherwise you can kiss your job and license goodbye. It is a good thing keeping current but like everything else it is a balancing act. Our jobs are stressful and long and trying to carve a life and family time and actually do housework (which I am currently avoiding) out of that but also do homework with tests eats up your time. Such is life and adulthood and getting a paycheck.