Featured Job Survey Results: Got Work?

Last month we asked you which holidays you worked on, or expected to work on, during 2007. About 10% of you reported that you expected to work on Christmas, and roughly 22% expected to work on New Year’s.
You were wrong.
We received about 1,300 responses to last Tuesday’s ATL / Lateral Link survey about whether you did, indeed, work over the holidays. Overall, a little over 36% of you worked at least one of those days. About a quarter of you worked on Christmas, and almost a third of you worked over New Year’s. Broken down by day, 22% of you worked on Christmas Eve, 10% on Christmas Day, 28% on New Year’s Eve, and 15% of you nursed your hangovers in the office on New Year’s Day.
Find out how it broke down by city, after the jump.


We would have expected associates in New York to spend much more time in the office over the holidays to justify their giant bonuses, but it turns out we underestimated the utter godlessness of California. Almost a third of respondents in Los Angeles — and nearly two fifths of associates in San Francisco — spent Christmas Eve performing pagan rituals like diligence and document production, and about half as many associates in each city kept sacrificing hours on Christmas Day. San Francisco and Atlanta kept the midnight oil burning on New Year’s Eve, and San Francisco and L.A. didn’t rest much on New Year’s Day, either.
Meanwhile, associates in New York were actually a bit more likely than their peers in other cities to take the holidays off.

Breakdown By Location: Did You Work On Christmas or New Year’s?


What drove all of this effort? Three percent of you are complete tools wanted to impress somebody. About half of you are just tools responded “Nobody asked me, but I had stuff I needed to get done.” About a quarter said a partner asked you to. About a quarter also blamed client requests. About ten percent of you needed the hours. And, for a sorry, sorry fifth of you, the office was open, and you were simply unable to resist its lures.
Was it worth it? Half of you said yes, and the offer half said no, regardless of which holiday(s) you were blowing off or why you were doing it.
There was, however, one glaring exception to that fifty/fifty breakdown: of those of you who worked over the holidays because a partner scrooged you, roughly two thirds said the work wasn’t worth it.

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