Does anybody actually work from 09:00 to 17:00
"The 9[am] to 5[pm]" is a common term for one's regular job, on the basis that normal people start work at 09:00 and finish at 17:00. I've worked a few jobs and closest I've ever gotten to this is 08:00 to 17:00, which I gather is standard.
Are there real jobs where people actually start at 9 and finish at 5?
144
Comments84
I work from 8:30 to 16:00 with a half-hour lunch break, so 7 work hours per day.
It's paid as a full-time job.
If I collect too much over-time, I get a stern talking-to from my supervisor, who could otherwise get in trouble with the works council and the owners (cause they'd get in trouble with the union and the law). So I make sure to go home on time.
I have 42 days of paid time off I HAVE to take, plus unlimited sick days.
I could have made 50% more by chosing a different employer, and 3-4x as much in the US.
But why the hell would I? I'm able to save up 1/3 of my take-home pay as it is, and that's after pension and healthcare are accounted for.
Wait wait, what type of country treats its citizens like humans?
I live in Germany, but that's not normal here, either. I deliberately chose an employer with a strong union and high worker solidarity and was lucky enough to switch jobs when my skills were in high demand.
Plenty do. Scandinavia being among the most cited examples.
From what I've heard 9-5 was a thing before employees were given a mandatory 1 hour lunch break which was counted as non-work time. So basically the work schedule was shifted to account for break time no longer being counted as part of the work day.
Of course I've never looked into it, so there's a good chance it's not that :p
You mean, before employers stole our paid lunch breaks and gaslit everyone into forgetting about them.
Yeah that :3
This is correct, lots of places that were 9 to 5 would give people a lunch half hour or a lunch hour that would technically be on the clock. When lunch hours became mandatory employers went well fuck that and made it so you didn’t get paid for your lunch. Most people don’t realize off the top of their heads but 8 to 5 is actually nine hours.
Lunch breaks, in the US, aren’t mandatory. Your state may require it but the US labor laws do not.
Found this out when Subway was making my 16 year old niece work 10 hour shifts with no lunch break.
Somehow this does not surprise me. Seems in line with everything else in the US
No. Companies have stolen 2 extra hours from us. They used to include a paid lunch hour in those 8 hours. Now, it's not only 8-5, but we don't get paid for the lunch hour.
These gals do.
That's all it took to get the song in my head lol
Yeppers. Now I have to go listen to it to get rid of it.
I currently work 8:00 to 16:00 and no one has complained about my working hours yet. But, I'm a software dev working remote with coworkers in several different timezones, so the exact time I start and end my day really doesn't matter.
At a previous job I worked 9:00 - 15:00 for several months when I was depressed and no one complained about that either. 🤷
I could not get away with that lol
I'm at the office between 9 and 5
Drop a deuce at 10. Work gets done 10:30 to 12:30, take lunch, then fuck around pretending to work til 5
Where do you work and are they hiring?
damn thats awesome
Having done something similar it really fucking sucks. Even if you find a way to discreetly kill time, you can't shake the feeling that you're burning precious hours of your life for no reason.
I would much rather work a solid 6-7hr block at home knowing I can sign off when I'm done than spend 1 + 7 hours in cubicle hell.
All but one of my jobs (excluding hourly jobs as a teen) have been 9-5, the one that wasn’t was 9-6 with the justification that we had a 1 hour lunch in the middle… but like… I’ve taken a 1 hour lunch at every job… so I have no idea why that company was such a stickler for that. Basically no one did shit after like 4pm anyways
1 hour lunch means you are expected to leave the office (or at least not work). Some countries get really strict about a one hour lunch break where you don't do any work and so it is carefully enforced there.
I believe in wresting back any amount of control/time we can from the system.
So my job has me coming in at 8:30-9:30am and leaving at 3:30pm every day, thanks to training my boss and working the system.
And honestly I am switching to a hybrid WFH job because even this is too much office time.
They don't give me a window, so I am letting myself get recruited elsewhere.
So this gets back to why I point to the 70's as sorta being the height of things. Both the song and the movie 9 to 5 was based around how poor shlubs had to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, with barely enough to get by on including you know going out every week. Anyway I am unsure if anyone does it now but I know as recently as the 90's if you worked for certain old school businesses like banking you could actually have a job that was 9 to 5 and you got a lunch that was compensated. Get this. It was often an hour. So you worked 7 hours a day and got paid for 8.
I work 7.5 hours and get paid for it all, even my half hour lunch.
junior software developer in Europe, my work hours are 9-5, with an hour for lunch. In reality I work a bit shorter hours because the daily's at 10, and nobody really cares how many breaks I take as long as I get the work done
I attend a place of work from 0700 to 1600.
Do I work in that time?
Yeah, why not...
Most corpo drones show up for those hours but very few of them work that long.
All of my jobs have been 9-5, lunch included. I think the key is whether you’re paid hourly or by salary. I’ve almost exclusively worked at tech startups as a salaried employee.
Strict working hours are important for jobs like assembly line work where if you are not at your station nobody else can do any work. Often they do build enough slack in that they expect you can take a couple bites here and there between doing your work. Though this isn't the most sanitary so it isn't common anymore.
For anyone doing work that doesn't depend on others being at their station at the same time a strict shift doesn't make sense, and there are not many assembly lines left like that (the assembly lines I have seen lately are much shorter and your team of 10 needs to work the same shift but your team can choose lunch time, and if you get the team's work done faster everyone can even get an extended lunch.
Yes, I work 9 to 5
Software dev in Spain.
On paper it is 9:00 to 17:00, but we have flexibility to enter and leave.
In practice we do 9 hours Monday-Thursday and 6 on Friday.
8 hours + 30 min for lunch + 30 min to leave early on Friday.
I do 8:00 to 17:00 and 8:00 to 14:00.
This is not in all companies, my previous employer was like that, but I have friends on other companies for the same sector that do 9:00 to 18:00 every day, with one hour mandated for lunch.
Hostia, otro programador español! Cómo es el ambiente por tu zona? Yo justo creo que tengo uno de los 3 trabajos de programación de mi isla
No está mal, trabajo en VLC, no es Madrid o BCN pero tampoco es como otras regiones que al final o tiran de remoto 100% os se mudan a una de estas.
It would be interesting to see a filter of responses by country.
In my experience:
That being said, even with the shorter official working hours, I often end up working more than that. I may have a bunch of 6 or 7 hour days, but will also have a bunch of 16 hour days when things are hectic.
Yes. I do. Dealership mechanic. 9-5
Yes, I do.
Officially I’m 9-5 with an hour for lunch.
I could come in an hour late and skip lunch break to make it 9-to-5.
I worked IT for a community college. 8 - 4:30 Monday through Friday. If they'd asked me for any OT, my union president would eat nails and shit rust.
Retired now.
I have worked 9 to 5 in every office job I've had (salaried). Including lunch.
I work 7:30 - 15:30. I hate waking up so early but it is nice to have time to run errands.
Unionized IT.
0800-1647 , and it's generally firm; but we do take time to bottle and checkpoint our work if we didn't get to it before then. Normally it's 0800-1600 but the 0.47 hour is part of a 9x9 scheme where every second Friday is off because we already worked the hours for that pay-period.
OT needs a ticket and is charged out to the .1 hour. Standby has a shitty hourly rate, but at least there is one. They may not expect us to be sober/available otherwise.
Where are you all located. I'm in Canada. I work 8-4 or 9-5 depending. I have flexibility to choose.
I usually cut out around 430
I used to as my company was fine with me being at lunch from 5-6. Some governments don't allow that (it's technically not legal in Japan), but some also look the other way (not my current company, sadly)
Don't I wish ..I'm there 8AM TO 5 fucking PM
Kind-of. Researcher in EU, the funding source on paper mandates 7.6 hrs of work per day, so with lunch breaks it is almost exactly 09:00 - 17:00
Depending on whom you ask academia may or may not be considered a real job though... and my hours may be nice, but the folks who do experiments rarely get the 9-5 as stated on paper, and there are other aspects of the job that are much more fucked up
One of the jobs I had was 9am to 5pm for about a year. For me, that was practically heaven because prior to that it had been 9am to 6pm for a few years, and the shorter hours didn't come with a pay cut.
It got weird later because I took on a rotating shift pattern and more responsibility, but some of the day shifts were still 9 till 5.
Then I jumped ship to a different company that had 9am to 6pm again, but that turned out to be preferable to the hell of not being able to sleep properly.
I work 7-4 with an hour at lunch.
In the technology department for a fortune 500, we should be 9-5 and another team next to me is basically doing that but I'm somehow overloaded and having to do catch up at night or be on call. Also we do our deployments at night as to not disrupt operations, so that eats into my personal time.
Kinda annoyed at it since my last job I stopped thinking about work once 5pm hit
If I wanted to I could do 9h to 17h, but 8h45 to 16h45 fits better with my commute, so I go with that.
'til
I do now, and I was similarly disappointed at the realization that this is not common when I got my first office job
9-5 is a simple representation of an 8 hr work day. It’s not meant to be taken literally.
Ooooh fuck that. Not meant to be taken literally? Motherfucker, that was the standard in the 70's and 80's. Why tf you think Dolly Parton sang about "Workin 9-to-5" and not 9-to-5:30 or 9-to-6? Because that used to be normal working hours. Just another facet of workers rights that was quietly stolen from us.
Workin' 8 to 5 What a way to make a livin'
When I started my current job it was a proper 9-5 with a half hour paid lunch.
They've now switched us to an hour unpaid lunch, but everyone basically just ignores it.
And in both cases many of those hours are downtime.
There are still some of those that I'm familiar with, mostly entry-level white collar professional jobs like "receptionist" or "desktop IT".
Beyond that, the 9-5 is dead, though. A lot of the rest of American white-collar jobs are 24x7 where you're expected to respond to slack or email within a few minutes all day, and probably also be in the office 8-10 hours per day. And working-class jobs have all moved to unscheduled part time nonsense where they'll give you 29.5 hours a week (to avoid having to give you benefits), but won't tell you which 29.5 hours until the last possible moment.
Nobody wants that, but it still beats working 09:00 - 21:00
I don't know anyone that has it that strict.
On shift work it is standard to get 6:00 - 14:00, 14:00 - 22:00 and 22:00 - 6:00. And most people I know that have office work usually have some flexible arrangement like you have to work 8h and have to be here for meetings 9:00 - 13:00, so some people arrive at 9 and leave at 5 or you can arrive at 6 and leave at 2...
Other jobs like teachers, doctors... have just completely different schedules each day.
Factory jobs are 6-14 and 14-22 (and 22-6 if there's a rush), and office jobs usually 7-15, including a 30-min break. Then there's the service sector, depending on when the shop opens...
In France it's more like 9 to 6 with one hour to eat, and no paid overtime. We're fucked.
Not in the US, 38-40 hour weeks are realistic in eg. Germany.
Usually 8am to 5 30 or 6pm for me.
We are supposed to record 9 hours of work on our timesheet daily. Sometimes there isnt enough work but then you just do goals or organize shit or read some how to's. I hate those days. I like being busy.
It is long days though. A 6 hour day would be fantastic but I'd get nothing done. Today, I spent 4 hours opening a program on several different remote PCs because it kept crashing.
In the Netherlands: blue collar mostly 7:30 - 16:00, white collar half an hour or an hour later.
I have not found one. If I come in at 9, leave at 18, or 18:30, if I come in at 8, same. So I come in at 9.
But in general here it's a 9 hour day with an hour break for lunch, that makes the 8 hour workday.
I work 8:30 to 18:00 with a forced 1 hour break in-betweem
I work about 9:30 to something between 17:00 and 18:00
I've spent 20 something years ostensibly working 9 - 5. But most of those years I've also on call for server downtime, and crunch-time is sometimes a thing.
Where do you live? In Germany it's common to work only 8 hours on a work day. I've had jobs in software development where you had flexible enough times that you could choose to work 9-17:00, though flexible times isn't quite what "9 to 5 job" implies.
That would be illegal though, above 6 hours of work you are required to take a 30 minutes break.
True, it's usually 7,5h work days if you're not doing overtime or part time.
I work a 9-5 office job in the USA but it’s seasonal and there are people who work different hours so that the office can stay open til 7
I'm contracted to do 7.3 hours per day, and when I started my manager let me choose what time I start. So I do 10:00 to 18:00 with a 0.7 hour lunch break.
So you take a 42 minute break?
Exactly! Though nobody counts work time that accurately here. So my actual hours are approximately what I stated, give or take 5 to 10 mins here and there.
Technically. I work 8-17, but there is a 1h lunch break.
Usually the mandated lunch break is 30min so 8-16:30 would be the norm here.
Roughly. It's slightly offset later than that because I start late, though. Official work week here is 35h, which is usually more like 38h (with extra time provided as extra leave days).
software dev - I'm 8-5ish but the end is very flexible.
my morning is usually me waking myself up and remembering what I'm doing till 8:45, then we have a company wide and a dev team standup. then they let us loose to do what we need to do. if I run out of shit to do, I leave. sometimes I'm out by 3pm, but if there's plenty to do and my wife is working late I'm often there till 6.
so 9-5, no, but 8-4ish, which is still the same 8 hours I guess. I don't know any devs that start at 9am around here, 8 seems to be standard for some reason I can't fathom.
Not by in the US. You either work 8-5 or 9-6.
I actually do, but I’m not supposed to. I skip lunch in order to leave earlier.
US Midwest 9-5 jobs are normal even when not really sensical for all businesses. Very much a control and “you sit here cause I pay you to.” I worked a place that expected 8:30am - 5:30pm with an hour lunch break. Salaried work. I worked hourly at a distribution center that was 8:30 - 5:00pm with half hour lunch.
Technically no, in actuality, yes. I can start and finish as long as my hours are my contracted hours, but I have a daily meeting at 9 so I start my day with that meeting everyday. And then if I work normally, I finish at 5
Way back when I had fixed working hours, it was usually 0800 to 1600
I work for like 3 chosen hours per day. I often take naps