Unfortunately this is how it almost always works in business. I'll never forget the times I've worked harder to make a newly created deadline only for the management to gain a reward and nothing for me. Who cares I worked until 2am every day for weeks while they left at 5pm because they "weren't coders".
I'm sure most in the tech industry goes through this and it's not healthy. Yeah yeah I know you're salaried so you shouldn't expect more but when management gains more because they imposed new deadlines for you to hit, it creates resentment among the developers and eventually an exodus.
I've seen it happen 3 times so far in my career. You'd think I'd learn my lesson but it's hard finding a place that actually rewards both employees and management (or rewards none of them which would be more fair in someways and worse in others considering only the top executives benefit at that point).
Sorry, ranting a bit.
> Sorry, ranting a bit.
Rant away! I don't want to hijack this thread, but there's a story I like to share with people when they become new managers. It's from Herb Ryman, one of the first Disney Imagineers.
"The year was 1953. Walt [Disney] said, ‘Hi Herbie. I’m over here at the studio. I wonder if you could come over here. Just come the way you are, I’ll be out front waiting for you.’ I was curious, and flattered that he picked up the phone and called me. I had no idea what he wanted.
He met me out front and shook my hand saying, ‘Hi Herbie, we’re in the Zorro building.’ So we went in, and I asked what this was all about. He said, ‘My brother Roy has to go to New York on Monday morning. He’s got to talk to some bankers there. You know bankers don’t have any imagination, none at all. You have to show them what you are going to do. Roy has to show them what this place is going to look like.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d like to see what this place is going to look like, too. Where have you got all this stuff?’ I thought maybe it was in the other room. Walt said, ‘You’re going to do it.’ I said, ‘No I’m not.’ There was a brief pause. Walt paced back and forth- we were alone in the room.
He went over to the corner and he turned his head around with his back to me and said, ‘Will you do it if I stay here with you?’
‘Yes, I’ll do it if you stay here.’"
One is a google book with the exact passage, and the last is a blog post quoting said book.
Just something interesting I noticed.
I don't know if the Yesterland blog post is the one you came across, but they do a good job cataloging the different retellings of the story and even include some of the artwork Herb put together that weekend. Definitely worth a read.
We were near the end, made our schedule, when I was called into a meeting. My schedule had been cut by 2 weeks. I ran out of the meeting and called 4 software development companies, the 2 hardware teams. We pulled together and finished with the new deadline.
The day I signed the paperwork for release, I was told the reason my schedule was cut was because a senior VP was going on vacation and he wanted to take the product with him to show his grandkids. He didn't want to show them something that might have bugs...
Part of me thinks I should start invoicing employers for time spent at work over the 40hrs, charging an overtime rate, or something to increase compensation in exchange for the lost time, or modifying the contract accordingly if there's not an alternate compensation mechanism like comp time offered. The one employer I've worked at who was good about this let you disappear from the office if you hit your 80hrs for a 2wk pay period.
Obviously there's a limit, and this is highly dependent on where you work, but I love being salary vs being hourly.
That's what unions are for.
That's only because if you refuse someone else will step in to take your place under those terms. Collective bargaining can be a powerful aid with things like that.
Don't work if you don't get paid.
I'm lead developer of a project that was just submitter to Apple review an hour ago. This week haven't been easy, but both my direct manager and company CEO were in the office with us, even if they really didn't have anything to do. And needless to say, they ordered food in around 20-21 for everyone. And this has only been one week.
To some degree. The problem is every place you talk to there is a "well there could be crunch times when we're busy and you'll have to put in extra hours but those won't be frequent" conversation which seems okay at first. Then you join and you find out they're fighting fires almost every week and depending on the fire management may get compensated whereas developers do not.
It's not always an easy thing to avoid. I've seen it at big companies and start-ups. Start-ups typically seem the worst with this type of thing in fact, at least in my experience.
When writing software, I almost always reach first for Erlang these days—not because it's the most performant platform, but because it allows for an architecture where individual Erlang processes (tasklets/green threads) can crash and be restarted producing only events in a log that I can debug at my leisure, rather than waking me up at 3AM to fight a fire.
If I were a CEO (and I have been, but only as a single founder, so I've never felt that "others depend on me to not go hungry" feeling), I'd be looking for similar wins in that dimension: fault-tolerant strategies allowing me to know that nobody's going to go hungry because of one mistaken assumption, so that I can sleep at night.
If I was doing consulting, I'd try to productize it; if I had a product, I'd try to sell it to enterprises; if I had enterprise customers, I'd try to get them on a yearly pre-payment schedule; if I was in one vertical, I'd try to "clone" my product for other verticals with their own brands and marketing; etc.
Are you looking for these? Or are you prioritizing growth: trying to, effectively, sprint for three years, rather than figuring out how to run a marathon?
Choice quotes
"Apple had a problem". The blame always seems to be shared. How about - The management fucked up the release schedule.
"That gave most of Apple’s engineers more time."
"It gave a little-known executive named Johny Srouji much less."
So this makes it seem like it was harder on the executive than the people doing the actual work.