Overtime is Morphine
erniemiller.org
erniemiller.org
It's time to start comparing wages instead of absolute income.
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.
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.
Agreed, and I also have yet to see an instance where productivity scaled 1:1 with time put in. So, it works out. :)
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...
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%.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Seems like we're both saying "an ounce of prevention..." here
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.
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.
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).
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.
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I then tested your site with Internet Explorer 9.0.18 and the back button worked fine.
I then tested your site with Firefox 22 and the back button worked fine.
Sorry for the vagueness!