I think if I was in the position to hire people I'd always be flexible, caring and compassionate but I'd HATE hiring people who come into my company with this 40 hour white collar "that's not in my job description" attitude.
I think work isn't linear some weeks you'll only have 30 hours of work and that fine go have fun with the extra 10 hours but other times there will be 70 hour sprints to get the product out and I'd expect you to show up 100%.
No one is saying you should be working 70 hour weeks consistently. That's a recipe for burn out.
OP said his expectations are that people will deliver when push comes to shove. Which is more than reasonable, as people who actually deliver and put in extra hours when it matters, are given more flexible schedules, because management doesn't have to micromanage them.
If I work a 70 hour week and we deliver on-time or early, I can take extra time off. It's all about building trust. There's no linear workloads in software. We all know estimates are hard, and you should always pad your time. Some weeks you're stuck in meetings, some weeks you're coding like a mad man.
I've had plenty of coworkers who are content with working the 9-5, not thinking about anything that's outside the box, because "that's not in their job description". I would not want to work with people like that.
I work by the 40-hour rule most weeks because I have experience and know how to run a team. Inexperienced (or short-sighted) managers burn themselves and their employees out by planning poorly. I used to do that myself. Now I don't make anyone work more than 8 hours a day, and we deliver a working iteration of our product every week.
I'd love for my 40-hour rule to become zero hours (only doing "work" that I enjoy and is meaningful to me), because life isn't about work.
Well you'd need to work 6 hour days for 3 weeks straight just to break even, so how long do you need to do it for "extra" time off? A month, a month and a half? Never. I'd be shocked if I saw someone allowed one 30-hour week.
And what if you still deliver late? If management is poor enough to allow you in a situation where you need to work 1.75x beyond capacity just to meet a deadline, it's just as likely that you miss the deadline working that much, too. So if you miss it because management sucks you don't get your "extra" time off, I bet?
> I've had plenty of coworkers who are content with working the 9-5, not thinking about anything that's outside the box, because "that's not in their job description". I would not want to work with people like that.
The hours someone works has nothing to do with the quality of their work product or how committed they are to the business. I do plenty of things that aren't in my job description, I am well regarded professionally in my company and elsewhere, and I work 40.0 hours a week.
I've had plenty of coworkers who sit at the office all day, not thinking about anything other than work, because they have no personal life, no hobbies, and their entire sense of self worth is wrapped in what they do for a living. I would not want to work with people like that.
It's a good thing we can all decide what kind of life we want and do everything we can to live it!
Or you could just take Monday-Wednesday off the following week and go home early on Friday.
My primary point was that "extra time off" indicates that you worked a net of less than 40 hours over whatever period of time we're talking about. Me working 50 hours in week A and 30 in week B doesn't do me any good. In fact in does the opposite because I will statistically do worse work in week A. If I were given "extra time off" I'd expect to work less than 30 hours in week B otherwise why am I not just working a consistent schedule and getting the additional benefits from that?
Those two things seem rather orthogonal. I'm very much a 9-5 sort of guy these days, but I'm always thinking outside the box as it where about work projects and will happily spend my evenings and weekends reading papers and testing new models and algorithms that might be relevant to what I'm working on. Just don't expect me to miss dinner my family.
If there isn't enough work to do there are only a handful of reasons:
* Too many employees / work contracting too quickly. Some people need to go.
* Some folks are working 60-80 hours and some are working < 40. Folks need to delegate more and/or the work needs spread out more, or the employee skillset doesn't match the work coming in.
* Management isn't delegating enough of the very low priority stuff so someone does a medium priority task for 6 hours then goes home.
Likewise, if you require me to work 70 hours in a week when I worked 30 hours two weeks prior, that's piss poor management on your park. If I'm paid for 40 hours, I will work 40 hours. If my latent perfectionism has me stay longer because I want to finish something before I go home, that's my choice. You saying "well we need to meet this arbitrary client deadline so work a double shift three days this week" or "I don't have enough employees to meet my contractual deadlines, deal with it" is your problem, not mine.
I've worked at 5 companies in my career and the only time I've done more than 45h is on an intensive training course that I put my hand up for. And one or two Saturdays which were paid.
That's since 2001.
Conversely, no where I have worked would let me go home early if I got something done quickly, I'd just pick up the next task.