What Is Public Finance?

What is an average work week (in hours) for a white collar finance professional these days?

• My wife is in finance. She's a Controller for a global medical device company. She works what I feel is way too many hours....usually goes in at about 7AM and cuts out about 6PM or a little later. She's tired all the time, grumpy, and she hates it when I get on her case about her hours. We don't have kids, so it's not a big deal with that, but there's nothing much left of her when she gets home at night, and when I try to confront her about dumping some of her workload, she just gets mad and tells me that this is the way her job is and the way finance is. She says she is under constant pressure and deadlines all day long and spends a lot of her time putting out fires. She's said that about her job ever since I've known her, 5 years ago. She was at a different job then, but started this job a year ago and it seems like the same old excuses for lots of hours: "it's just finance, that's the way it is". She says she hates what she is doing, but right now, here I am on Yahoo and she is in there asleep because she "has to" be at work at 6:30AM to prepare for an 8AM meeting. I think she does this to herself and could control her workload a little better. I'm in medical sales, though, so I have no idea what a workload in finance feels like. Is it common to put in 10 hour days, five days per week, every week? Is this a normal work week these days? (She doesn't bring work home on weekends) Thanks for any advice or help. --Distressed hubby

• Answer:

  between 40 and 60hrs a week answer mine http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Am7u8iTzm.OnMyUb4Qua9MTsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20090708000912AAljwZV