You can’t compensate me enough to put in more than 40-45 hours a week. I get paid because of my expertise. Not because I’m willing to work for 70 hours a week.
That's really approaching "effectively zero time to do things that are important to me". You only have one life to live and while money enables some things, free time is much more precious. It's really hard to see a justification for giving up that much capacity for self determination.
some IT companies I worked for in a past life paid for overtime. it was a lot more than what you would get regularly and lots of coworkers did it. is this not a general experience? are companies not paying for overtime?
ime for most white collar contracts: no
maybe because time tracking (esp. with remote work) is trust based and hence essentially just a formality where noone expects the employee to report under-time.
But there seems to be a lot of “time in lieu”, work extra take the time off.
But that’s only a 1 to 1 ratio, not 1.5 or 2.0, and.
That’s just not worth it for many people. I too wouldn’t give away a weekend for that money, considering I’ll be in a zombie state for the next two weeks and would probably straight get sick and waste many more days in paid leave depending on the timing. Even the money I’d spend to compensate for the stress could burn through the surplus.
It would of course be a different proposition if I was someone who could work for weeks without any impact, I know some people fit the bill, just not me.
PS: Forgot one of the most important aspect when you have family: is your overtime pay worth the time you’re not spending with them, especially on weekends ?
Cashiers where I live have those terms. And young people without children benefit alot from the deal.
Additionally those sacrifices won't count anything when it comes to select who's going away in the next layoffs round.
The guy doing 40h is getting the same as the overworked ones doing 60h plus. Plus in Germany it is illegal to do more than 10h per day anyway.
Only buy what one can afford, subscriptions only for infrastructure, credits only those that one can afford to pay from saving and no longer than 3 years.
I have been doing this for quite a while, no need to get rich, not even money can cure everything, only make it less painful.
The important part is that the mortgage was backed by an asset - I could have decided to sell the flat and pay back the debt at any time.
Not everyone needs or wants to live on the west coast.
Debt, as long as it’s backed by a sufficiently good asset can be a good option.
Right now you need a pretty good rate of return just to keep pace with inflation if you're saving.
Meanwhile that same inflation is reducing the value you the debt you've taken on to buy a house and you get to live in the house as it pays off.
Always remember that the Mortgage Bankers Association defaulted on their mortgage.
> I get paid because of my expertise.
Agree.
> You cant’s compensate me enough to put in more than 40-45 hours a week
Disagree. (There’s probably a speed to results + pay that has value here) The assumption is that there’s way more work to do than possible to finish.
In exceptional circumstances this would be true, but I seriously doubt many company's actually have those (as opposed to managers pushing the panic button at the last second after ignoring issues for months).
At my first tech lead job working for a company that sent home health care workers to take care of special needs kids. The field workers were making around $12-$17 hour (government reimbursement rates suck).
I was leading an integration effort based on my own designs and we were migrating off of their current payment platform. If the integration efforts didn’t get done by a cut off date around Christmas, they would have received paper checks late. The office salaried workers wouldn’t have been affected.
My management said that was an ok alternative - I vehemently disagreed. I fought for my team to get comp time and bonuses for working over time to meet the deadline.
I could also see mandated overtime at TurboTax. You have hard deadlines to meet and often the “requirements” aren’t set by the government until late.
Yes, in any given year, the specific nature and timing of the requirements may be out of their hands, but in aggregate, they absolutely bear some responsibility for that.
Furthermore, it should also be their responsibility to ensure they have enough trained staff on hand to handle the tax season rush without harming their employees.
There is a limit to how long you can focus on a single task for longer periods of time before you need to rest up properly to recharge your batteries. Everything beyond that will lower your productivity, up to a point where you will end up negative due to the mistakes being made. If you are lightweight on useless processes and stuff, a 30 hour week would be way more optimal for a lot of people. Crunch time should be very short and if stuff cannot be "crunched" in a single week it is useless to continue on like that, because everyone involved will be like 50% as effective as someone just working 30h per week (who can focus on the actual work).
However, the data is never available until mid-day the day before (it’s all news based). The deadline is next trading day. You have 16hrs to make the new model and data work.
The upside is that you’d be compensated a percentage of the trades. Positive is good(if you’re good, make millions), negative you get nothing.
Is 40hr a hard limit to work now?
My point is if someone was paid high enough, they’d bust that 40hr limit easy. It’s not really a hard limit of any sort. There’s a price for it, that’s for sure.
I asked in another reply would someone work for Twitter at twice their current compensation. Both of the replies were that wouldn’t.
If I had an opportunity to make twice my current compensation but I had to give up my current lifestyle - working remotely, traveling six months a year, never being on call, doing the work I enjoy, I would say no without thinking twice.
Thing is, it will damage you, and no amount of money can save your rear end from an early exit out of this world through the accumulated damages.
I wish everyone had the ability to not be afraid of their employer, it's liberating.
I declined each time. Anything we couldn’t afford from my working 40 hours a week we didn’t need.
We are settling into a grove of traveling six months, flying across the US with a couple of stays in Canada and Mexico, staying in hotels and the other six months living in what would usually be considered a second home/investment property.
There is no amount of money that would make me give up my dream.
My dad is a retired factory worker and he turned down overtime opportunities a lot during the latter part of his career. My mom (teacher) and my dad retired in their mid 50s and are still going strong at 77 and 80.
They had ordinary middle class jobs and never got involved in the rat race.
Her retirement is a combination of a government pension and social security.
My dad as a factory worker just got shares of middling performing consumer goods company (Proctor and Gamble) for his retirement.
They bought a house in 1978 in southern Georgia where they still live. It only increased in value along with inflation.
And reconcile this with some companies requiring 80+ hours a week. I guess you think they are ignorantly damaging themselves.
I find very unlikely the idea that we have found the sweet spot of hours worked per week at 40. How do you know it's not 50 hours per week which maximizes production?
80+ week schedule is not because of output effectively. One reason for it is mismanagement - a lot of wasted time and general chaos. People posturing how much they work, but not actually being productive. And second reason is creating social buble - a group of people effectively isolated from outside relationship. That allows for generaly more abusive/controlling style of management, it allows you to shape employees opinions more. That is necessary condition for companies like Enron used to be to operate.
Pencavel, "The Productivity of Working Hours", 2014
> The conclusion from the work presented in this section is that the output-hours relation is decidedly non-linear: below 49 weekly hours, variations in output are proportional to variations in hours; for those observations corresponding to 49 or more hours, output rises with hours at a decreasing rate and a maximum of output occurs at about 63 hours. Output at 70 hours differs little from output at 56 hours and, therefore, the HMWC’s recommendations about the innocuous effects for output of hours reductions are consistent with these estimates.
Note that this is about manual labour, not knowledge work.
I guess you think they are ignorantly damaging themselves.
Not the OP, but I would think they are deliberately damaging their workers. The effect on the company itself is of no concern relative to that.
> I won’t work overtime
Is personal preference.
> You *can’t* pay me enough to work overtime
Is being diva, implying that there is imaginable number of money that can convince them to do so.
So not a diva. Just honest.
I made “enough” when I was making in the $150s in 2020 that we didn’t even notice the difference when I fell into my current BigTech job where the intern I mentored got a return offer that was that much.
We already had the big house in the burbs, retirement savings, etc.
We are spending less per month now than we were when we already had “enough”.
See the story of the Mexican fisherman.
https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...