‘The long and the short. Working Hours in the IT Sector in Ireland’ in The New World of Work (2005) edited by Gerry Boucher and Grainne Collins, Dublin, Liffey Press. p 163-180. Chapter 9 The Long and the Short of It: Working Time in the Irish IT Sector Aileen O’Carroll 1. Introduction This chapter is based upon a research project that examined the working time of those employed in the Irish software industries. Twenty one high-end IT workers participated. The group comprised both men and women and a variety of occupations (programmers, technical writers and marketing executives). Some worked in large companies, some in small. Some companies were Irish owned, some were not. The participants in the project were asked, over the course of a year (from October 1999 to September 2000), to fill in weekly time diaries that noted their starting and finishing times. They were also interviewed five times throughout the year, and material from those interviews illustrates the points made in this argument. In popular mythology, computer workers are supposed to work long hours. There are stories of the programmer who slept under his desk, or programmed nude late into the night, scaring the cleaners (Bronson 1999). However, most of the respondents in this study did not report long working hours. How can this deviation from the popular myth of long hours in the IT sector be explained? 2. Working Hours in the IT sector in Ireland The Quarterly National Household Survey data produced by the Irish Central Statistics Office provides information on those working in the IT sector (Nace 72, computing and computer services). Table 1 shows a breakdown of working hours both in the Information Technology sector and among the general Irish population. The QNHS data shows that the numbers working over 40 hours (48.3 per cent) in IT are only marginally greater than the numbers working less than 40 hours (42.7 per cent of employees). The time diaries I collected captured a similar picture, though the diaries reported less long hours workers than found in the QNHS survey. The QHNS report that 48.3 per cent of computer workers work longer than a 40 hour week while the diaries record that 39.6 per cent of weeks recorded are longer than a 40 hour week. The QNHS data is gathered from the answer to the question ‘How many hours do you usually work at this job, including regular overtime, but excluding meal breaks?’. Gershuny and Robinson (1994) found that questionnaires diverged from time data indicating that those working longer hours over-estimated the number of hours worked. That is, time-diary data tends to be more accurate in measuring the working hours of long hours workers. However, taken together, they indicate that this is a sector in which long hours are prevalent but are not certainly the norm.