Simple solution (from the software engineer's perspective): demand overtime pay. If you are officially expected to work 40h/week for certain amount of money, but in practise you're "expected" to work 50h/week, then your real wage is actually 20% lower than what your contract says. And that is pretty similar to theft.
It's time to start comparing wages instead of absolute income.
This is where being an hourly contractor really has its perks. If people expect long hours from a contractor, fair enough, but it will cost them. In my own situation, when overtime opportunities arise, I'm thinking of the money that I can make. This, versus being salaried, where I'd ponder the hit my private life going to take, with no extra compensation, to boot.
Show me one company that can accurately measure value created. It's the holy grail of management in software engineering. Anyway, in such a company you as a software engineer could be able to work (say) only 30h/week, so there's no overtime problem.
Many, many Fortune 500 companies still have plenty of old guard managers that think that hours spent is the most important metric out there. They are the same ones that can't grasp how to manage team members they can't see/touch.
Most SWEs are salary. Overtime laws are different for salaried employees(depending on jurisdiction). A lot of times, you can demand overtime all you want and the employer can simply deny it, and most will. Typically, your only options are to switch employers or file a lawsuit.
There are plenty of ways to pay for "overtime" without it being official overtime pay. eg. bonuses, time-off matching extra time worked during an unavoidable "crunch", etc.
Of course, there are still employers that won't even consider giving you any of that but make it a regular practice of overworking their employees. Don't work at these places.
Then you go try to find a job where you're actually only expected to work 40 hours per week, and everyone goes home by 5:00. But then, you find that the salary offer is at least 20% lower than the place that worked you 50+ hours/week.
High salaries come with high expectations. If you're getting paid a lot, expect to work a lot, too. If a good work/life balance were free, everyone would have it. It has a definite opportunity cost.
All 11 years of my work experience thus far is in the defense industry, so keep that in mind as I state the following.
I have yet to see an instance where salary scaled 1:1 with time put in. Where I used to work, the people that busted their asses for 50+ hours week in and week out, showing they were "team players", might get a 6% raise at review time instead of a 2% raise for a strict 8-5 engineer. They might also get a few thousand in extra bonuses, if their department has funding for them. After a while they might get to the point where they were making enough extra to justify the effort, but "a while" could be 10 years or more.
Note that I am specifically avoiding any discussion of non-monetary considerations and that my analysis sounds rather mercenary. I am specifically trying to address the issue of engineers making more money for being expected to put in more effort. Discussion of the non-monetary considerations could be a lengthy tangent on its own.
Suppose you start at $80k and work at the company for 5 years. After five years the strict 8-5 eng in your example is making $87k--barely keeping up with inflation--and the hard worker is making $101k. The total compensation difference over 5 years is $35k.
Unfortunately, real world compensation schemes often don't even work out as well as your example...
Indeed, a 4% difference compounds quite well. Unfortunately many people imagine they might get a 3% or 4% net bump, when they are really going to get 1% extra.
Working an extra 20% so that you are paid appropriately larger salary 19 years down the line is not a terrible choice if you really need the money. It is also possible you will earn true grade improvement along the way and get a one time additional bump of 5% for your effort.
Of course, if we reverse the equation, things might look differently. I have about 3 potential free hour per workday and 12 free hours per weekend day, for a net 39 hours of "my own time", earned by showing up to work. Giving 10 hours of those to the employer is a "pay cut" of 25%.
Except there are plenty of places that expect 50+ hours/week and pay 20% less than market at least. Likewise, I'm sure there are jobs that pay market or better and get close to 40 hour weeks.
The market doesn't work as efficiently as you imagine it does, nor could it since companies do all they can to hide what salaries actually are (i.e. imagine trying to buy fruit when nothing had prices, no one would tell you what they paid, and you had to negotiate in private for what they cost you).
Agreed, employers often take advantage of market illegibility as it allows them to underpay people who don't know what their market value is. The employment market has very imperfect information, and the information asymmetry is usually in the employer's favor.
In order to get the best of both worlds (reasonable hours and high pay) as an employee, you not only need to be a top-notch employee, but you also need to find a top-notch company to work for. Middling employers will either underpay you or overwork you, and the worst employers will do both.
I don't have a problem with that, as long as the 50h/week is reflected in the contract and stated during the wage negotiation. The problem is that often(?) it's not, so you can't know your true wage until you've changed the employer and there's no turning back.
Unfortunately there is a long history of management viewing overtime as equivalent to a person's 'dedication' to the project.
One of my college Computer Science professors, the one I liked and respected the most, worked at Novell for quite a while back in the day. Not sure if his entire 20+ year programming career was spent there before going back to school to get his PhD. In any event, at one point he was a team lead at Novell. He made sure to hire, train and develop the right kind of programmers for his team. The kind that write tests, solid code, and practice good engineering principles.
To my memory, when he was telling us this story, the overtime he and his team worked was somewhere between minimal to non-existant. Their code was clean, well-tested, and worked. So at 5pm they would go home.
There was another team that was always scrambling at the last minute, and clocking lots of overtime.
When it came time for company/management recognition, which team received the accolades? The team that clocked all that overtime, because they MUST have been working harder to get things done than the other team. Right?
True story: a CMM Level 5 software organization had precisely the exact same issue. There was a PM, who would literally spend the entire day wasting time and start real work around 5 PM. Then work till late night.
Once he advised me, "Always make sure that you send an e-mail, late at night to anybody in the organization, before you call it day."
"Why?"
To make it short, per his advise, the single most important thing about those e-mails, wasn't the contents, but just the timestamp.
You would think that PM would have learned about the feature that quite a few email systems have to send an email at a particular time! (e.g. Outlook has "Do not deliver before" option).
The last place I worked, 18 months ago, that required after-hours logs still used pen and paper. Plus, they left the log books out all the time, so it was easy when you signed in to see who else was coming in after hours, going back weeks sometimes.
You can get the same effect by coming early and making sure people notice that you were in ahead of them. When done correctly, you get the "behind the project"-bonus without overtime.
I find that coming in early doesn't produce the same social effect as staying late. I'm still not sure why. Maybe it has something to do with the perception of personal sacrifice? Coming in early doesn't impact your social schedule, while staying late says you're willing to sacrifice your evenings for the company. Coming in early just means you're willing to wake up earlier.
I like the article, and would love to apply, as "management" in my own company, effective measures to cure the pain instead of treat it. In fact, I generally try to do just that.
But what this is basically suggesting is "locking out" your employer. While I agree that is absolutely what should happen, doing this without the leadership AND the developer in agreement about why sounds like disaster.
I know it's likely impossible to capture all the work and discussion it takes to reshape a company's process in a blog post, but I feel like if I had a dependence on OT in my company (as the "patient"), and a lockout went into effect, I would be focusing on the lockout, not every other problem in the company that caused it (which as management, it's my job to figure those problems out). What is being suggested is basically arm twisting to get what you want :/
That never works when you cause more pain to the company than it's able to alleviate over time. They'll eventually get tired of the pain and move on to another drug unless you succeed in getting them to understand.
I feel like better advice is to tell developers that they need to discuss this with their direct reports, boss, whomever, and talk about the problem and WHY you'll actually make the company better gains at sustainable pace. And by all means, point out and suggest ways for your boss to improve things.
If after educating your "patient" the issue still persists, of course, twist away. But not everyone in this world needs these sorts of tactics to improve their workplace, and even in those workplaces, there are likely more successful ways to cure the pain, not just treat it.
The suggestion isn't to introduce the lockout after the fact. In fact, what you're describing would be the exact thing that would happen in the metaphor -- acute withdrawal symptoms. The suggestion is to institute the lockout before dependency has a chance to develop.
Ah, well, I completely agree there :) Forgive me, but I didn't really catch the preventative portion of the essay. Looking back over it, I can certainly see your point above and we're more than likely "violently agreeing", heh.
Seems like we're both saying "an ounce of prevention..." here
A preventive measure by the C-level management will yield results: a person working overtime, must take a documented approval from the PM. The incentive bonus for the PM must be negatively linked to the number of overtime hours spent by the team members.
Consider the industry you are going into before complaining about overtime. I am expected to work long over time hours on a regular (daily) basis during busy seasons without extra compensation and this is what I expected going in. Highly skilled individuals who have extensive training will be 'put to work' in order to derive the benefits of this training by their employer.
You are willing to put up with this behavior because you believe that one day your training and experience will lead you to a very high paying job. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers, the professionals, all understand that there is a necessary grind in order to prove your worth.
If you are not cut out for it, there is always work as a desk clerk making above minimum wage working 9-430. Yes, some employers have very relax policies relating to getting work done. But who are the ones producing the highest quality innovative work? The people working hard on a daily basis.
You're confusing "a necessary grind" with "a necessary period where your employer exploits you for longer hours with no additional pay." You can (and almost certainly will have to) pay your dues at some point in your professional life but your mistake is thinking that you shouldn't be compensated for it.
It has very little to do with being "cut out for it" and more to do with not being exploited. And yes, there's a whole host of exploitation of various degrees even in modern workplaces and many people have had or still have to go through with it but that doesn't mean it's a good thing whatsoever (unless, of course, you're the employer).
What a disgusting post. "Pay your dues just like I did". Just because you chose to be exploited with the hope that you'll some day get compensated for it doesn't mean the model is right. And your quip about where the highest quality innovate work comes from is unproven and probably unprovable.
That right there is the crux of the issue. You don't work for free. Period. If it is expected that you'll be working long hours during busy seasons, then the initial salary offered should reflect that. If two people are getting paid the same salary but only one is expected to take overtime constantly, one of them is getting screwed.
Considering the norms of the particular industry would be good advice, but there are often choices within the industry. Dressing up False Choices in machismo not only obscures reality, but plays right into the hands of managers inclined to take advantage.
If it really was a consistent win for the employers, then perhaps it is a non-issue in the larger sense -- employees just need to negotiate hours vs. compensation. Whatever.
I think the deeper insight of TFA is that there may be short term gains for the employer, but the long term results are muddy or outright negative -- management becomes addicted to poor management habits that hurt the company health in myriad ways.
It's time to start comparing wages instead of absolute income.