My best work experience was in Germany with a strict 35 hour week. Overtime was difficult to get approved and also required 1.5x pay. You got to the office and actually worked until you went home. Nobody had time to sit in endless meetings or to be indecisive.

It was very productive and you actually had a life during the week.

I think this whole system of paying people an hourly wage or a salary is toxic when it comes to knowledge work. I'm pretty confident that today I could do something in a day that would have taken me a month when I started out 10 years ago. (And I can do stuff that would have been inconceivable when I was at the college student/new hire level) But I'm only making about 2-3x as much as a new hire at my current company.

I wish the whole system were a lot more freeform and mercenary.. I'd love to roll in and spend a few months building some GPU firmware or debugging camera latency issues, collect $100k at the end, and then spend a few months backpacking or whatever.

I guess that only a tiny fraction of the people I've met would be OK with that sort of existence, though..

"Maybe I'll take a break on the ultra-rare deadlock and go bang out some python test scripts for a few days.."

If I quit, I can get a job within a month which gives the same or better pay.

From the company view, they need to spend several months trying to find a new employee, and then give full pay while that person is still learning the codebase, and other employees wast time getting him/her up to speed. It takes another few months before this person is 100% productive.

So as an employer, you are basically pulling on the shorter end of the string.

So my question: why is it so much different in the US?

I always told people that the difference between the US and Belgium is that you "live to work" in the former and "work to live" in the latter.

Belgian labor laws are much more enforced than they are in the US. The unions in Belgium have a lot of sway in big companies and employers tend to respond positively to work-life balance.

In the US, there's the expectation that if you're hired for a role, you should be able to onboard as quickly as possible. There's no 6 month trial period or even the concept of an indefinite contract (CDI in French, I forgot the acronym in Dutch) (EDIT: in the private sector).

Likewise, an American employer can get rid of an employee (and likewise hire one) in less time and with less cost than a Belgian one. That flexibility drives a lot of the business decisions in a way that would never translate in Belgium (or much of Western Europe, for that matter).

On the other hand, if you're in a situation where your employer goes over the line (like the person at the top of the thread describes), you can generally just walk away from the job. There's no 6-week notice.

There's for sure a lot more to it, but that's mainly where I see the difference between the two countries.

I think this is exactly what was meant by op. Why is there so much complaining? If it sucks, just walk away. It should even be easier in the US than in Western Europe.

Realistically, in the US so much of your financial health is tied to your employer that the advice to "just walk away" is only safe if you're already financially secure and don't need a job. Aside from the steady paycheck you're likely to lose: medical insurance, dental insurance, tax free retirement savings, and the unvested portion of your stock/retirement savings at a minimum. If you're in a position that tends to pay a yearly or even quarterly bonus, you're walking away from that too.

You're also going to lose a number of smaller items that can be expensive. Does your employer pay for the tools you use to be productive? How much does a JetBrains subscription cost these days? Or an MSDN license? How about all those AWS instances you use for sharpening your skills? Time to start ponying up or doing without.

This doesn't even count the other perks and benefits that companies are throwing at employees for highly competitive positions. Enjoying that free gym membership? Not anymore. How about the free snacks and lunches? That's another expense you can add back in now that you don't have any income. Free coffee in the break room? Time to find out just how cheap you're willing to get with your daily dose of caffeine.

Now factor in that for many being unemployed for extended periods of time can lead to severe depression and a lack of self-worth.

Don't forget to also factor in that 22% of divorces in the US are because of "money issues" which can usually be translated to "lack of money".

Taking the above into account I would likely put up with some pretty awful employment practices while looking for a new job rather than just walking away.

As well as your literal health, since your health insurance is so often tied to your employer. Extended unemployment could literally be fatal. It's a bit easier to get health insurance without a job than it used to be, but there's still a lot of overhead and hassle.

Likewise, if you quit voluntarily, you aren't entitled to unemployment right away.

But I agree, you'd most likely want to have your next job lined up before putting in your notice.

If you are a decent engineer in any tech hub like Bay Area or Seattle, you can absolutely walk out of your job and get a ton of interviews scheduled by the end of the week and have at least a few offers by the end of the following one.

And hiring is just as costly and difficult for employers as you described. A lot of times, we have to go through so many candidates just to fill one position, and it isn't just for something ultra-specialized like an AI researcher or a kernel dev, we are talking your run-off-the-mill solid software generalist. The estimates easily go to above 30 candidates interviewed per position filled.

Unemployment has never been lower in 40+ years (in the US). You're likely to get a pay bump moving. Always Be Interviewing. No one is going to look out for your comp and work/life balance except you.

It seems like the same people who complain about a lack of employer care & "greedy corporations" are also the same people counseling "always be interviewing" and the only priority is #1. It must be exhausting.

There's a crisis for six months? That's not a crisis; that's a management failure. Management should have fixed it by then. That's on them, not on me.

They want overtime every week? FORGET. THAT. NOISE.

It's sometimes unavoidable to work on weekends - e.g., a tight deadline. But I would ahead of time get the agreement in writing that the weekend work is going to be given back in time off in lieu after the deadline - otherwise, don't work weekends. there needs to be a feedback loop (via money or capacity) to management. Otherwise they'd just see amazing results, and keep wanting more. That's how you end up in a permanent crunch job.

It was avoidable, just not by you. That's not your problem though - it's your bosses' problem. Letting them make that your problem is a choice for you, but I would posit it is a poor choice.

Did you consider that perhaps the latter is caused by the former? When executives and managers, in the main, are rewarded for "optimizing" at the expense of humans, those humans are eventually going to push back.

Most jobs are wage and it's perfectly normal to be salary and non-exempt. Unless you are a founder or management if an employer is trying to classify you as exempt to avoid paying overtime they are breaking the law.

And while I haven't negotiated for it, I was paid overtime on a contract gig once. Pulled in ten thousand dollars a week. That was a wild summer.

Big difference here is quality of jobs. Lots and lots of underemployed and low quality work.

Set up a PC at home, logged into slack that keeps the status as available.

They didn't say anything about actually responding to messages, right?

Alternatively I'm sure there is a law they are breaking, so let them know about it.

But more simply - any company that comes up with such a rule has got things backwards and doesn't understand how to manage people, and probably doesn't understand tech. They probably love emergencies where "the team comes together" and hate spending extra time on ensuring quality and paying down tech debt. Leaving becomes a sensible option. They are shortsighted and I am guessing they don't make a lot of profit. Is my tea reading right?

My work phone goes into DnD from 5pm until 8am. I don't answer emails or phone calls, and I don't make exceptions for free.

If I'm on call for a weekend, I bill 16 hours, regardless of if I worked, because I cannot go anywhere if I'm needed at my laptop.

When I go on vacation, I leave my phone at home and take an sim-less android, and buy a new sim/number when I reach my destination.

Thankfully that never happened because while we were all quite respectful about each other's time due to the jurisdiction and industry we worked in none of us were eligible for OT even during stat holidays. Were that company within a more reasonable line of business I'd demand a setup like that and feel perfectly justified - and that's pretty much why I don't work in the games industry anymore.

It takes a lot of work to not work that much. I used to spend 20% of my time selling/pitching/quoting/etc for free.

Right now I have a semi-stable 30-35hr/week gig, so I'm not having to sell any.

So now I just need to keep upping my rate.

While you're employed? This is terrible advice. You get consulting money for combining expertise with availability. Younger employees have neither of these. If I found out one of my salaried employees was moonlighting I'd immediately be looking for evidence that it had the slightest impact on their responsibilities & performance. I'd be very surprised not to find any PDQ

a predictable response, but it's the wrong one which will surely lose your company plenty of money and valuable employees extremely rapidly while generating a tremendous amount of ill-will from the people in your network. really, it's the attitude that's creating the problematic and unprofitable approach here. aside from being disgustingly invasive and utterly reprehensible from a social perspective, you've also put yourself in a position where you're spending your company's time on something that will never generate it any financial returns, only more costs when the employee discovers your snooping and inevitably ditches you and you need you find a replacement on short notice.

the correct response here is to re-evaluate how much you're paying the employees that are moonlighting because it clearly isn't enough to keep them appeased, which means that by definition it isn't enough to keep them operating at 100% during the hours you expect to be getting 100% of their energy and potential for productive output. in other words, moonlighting employees need a raise because at the salary you're paying them, they know they can't afford to stop looking for more opportunities to work for pay. when you do find a reason to give that employee a raise proactively, you'll increase their output to the level you thought you were purchasing with the initial salary negotiations. you'll also increase their loyalty to the company, and avoid intruding on their private life, which is explicitly, irrevocably, and unimpeachably beyond your purview, consideration, or examination under any conditions whatsoever.

in a nutshell: focus on things you can change, then stay in your lane.

Might be true for some people, but it's not the primary motivation for freelancers. Usually it's the highly-skilled, highly-paid people who are in a position to pick up freelance work, not your lowest-paid workers at the bottom of the hierarchy. They do it not because they need the money, but because it's there for the taking and they get to work on something interesting while they do it.

With a salaried dayjob, your effective hourly rate goes down with each additional hour you work. With a freelance job, your effective income goes up with each additional hour worked.

Someone who has both types of job at the same time has an incentive to minimize their input to their dayjob so they can maximize the incremental income from their freelancing work. Sure, theoretically a perfect employee could keep their dayjob perfectly isolated from freelancing work, but in practice people with an hourly side hustle can't resist the temptation to sandbag at work.

The whole crux of the argument for shorter workdays and shorter workweeks is that people only have so many productive hours each week. Past the point of diminishing returns, their work quality and productivity drop. If someone is working 40 hour weeks, commuting, and also freelancing for another 10-30 hours per week, which job gets their best hours? Which job gets their least productive hours?

In my experience, side-hustle freelancers always let their dayjob work output slip, whether they expect to or not. This is why you need to watch employees very closely as soon as you get wind that they're freelancing.

It's absurd to expect 100% in the first place. All you should be concerned with is whether or not someone is getting their work done. Not whether they are capable of doing even more.

Do you also acknowledge the weeks their performance is better than average? Do you compensate them for it, or is it just a given?

You have the right to be concerned about someone's time but only while they are at work. Your employees get to do what they want outside of work hours.

I'd wager those X hours a week in the office are often not the most important part of your life, why should it be for them?

Every second you are employed, you should be keeping one eye on whether your current employer is about to screw you, and another eye on your exit strategy for when they inevitably do. Scan the job postings monthly. Never reject a feeler that comes through your network. No loyalty for the disloyal.

If I found out that my boss was cracking down on a co-worker for suspected moonlighting, I'd start looking for other work myself.

I've done some freelance work while also having a full-time job. It's great at first, when you still think that you can give 100% to your dayjob and fit the freelance work into your free time on evenings and weekends. If you can find relaxed contract work that fits to your schedule without detracting from your dayjob, then by all means go for it.

The problem is that contract work is rarely perfectly asynchronous like that. It won't take long until the company has some questions about your work that require a phone call during daytime hours. Or they find a one-liner issue that they need fixed ASAP, not when you have free time. Or they say they would like to continue paying you for contract work, but only if you can start responding faster during the day and turning requests around more quickly.

All of these pressures start adding up, tempting you to sandbag your salaried dayjob so you can have more hours to rake in that incremental hourly contracting money. In my case, I chose to give up contracting to avoid any moral, ethical, or legal breaches with my day job. However, I've seen many junior employees sabotage their own career progress by spreading themselves too thin with salaried work and freelancing work. Something has to give.

Worse yet, I've seen at least one case where someone used their company laptop and company phone for the contracting work for clients. Per your employment agreement, that puts the ownership of the code into a gray area. You don't want to go there, but when the clients are hammering your e-mail and phone for an answer it's tempting to just give in and interleave that work with your dayjob. Bad idea.

Finally, there's a myth that employees have a finite amount of work each week. When we do sprint planning, we calibrate to velocity, based on how much work the employee got done last week. I rely on my employees to help inform me about reasonable estimates and to help judge task complexity. Side hustlers have a misaligned incentive to exaggerate complexity, sandbag on tasks, and otherwise manipulate the system to minimize their dayjob workload. Less dayjob work equals more time for freelance income.

Bottom line: Some people can pull it off in rare circumstances, but more often than not a side hustler on your team will drag everyone down.

You don't own the lives of those you employ. While it's perfectly reasonable that if you see quality slippage you should react - actively searching for an excuse to fire someone for having a side gig is like a weird possessive and jealous relationship. Additionally, if folks at your company are picking up side gigs then maybe you should review your compensation because there's probably a reason people aren't content with their current working situation.

Not just compensation but other stuff like the ability to take on different types of projects and learn new stuff on the job.

If I have a job that has me do the same thing with the same tech stack for whoever knows how long, I'm going to grow stale. I don't want to grow stale, that's both boring and also denying myself future opportunities and generally just putting myself at a disadvantage. Possibly very screwed if/when the company decides I'm no longer needed.

If they're moonlighting, it means either you or they are missing something in your work contract, that should concern you.

You realize that moonlighting gives them skills they can use to help you.

If you were working as a painter, a carpenter, a landscaper etc. Would people find it acceptable if you painted for an hour and charged for 15 hours? Just because they needed you for one?

To be clear, I am not attempting to demonize you or anything, but to me, this seems like a sort of entitlement that tech workers have that some other workers just cannot experience.

How can other professionals obtain that level of freedom?

If a company puts a demand on your time, they need to pay for that time no matter what your profession. So when I'm on call on a weekend and I'm expected to answer my phone and be immediately available and connected to the client, I'm billing them for the fact that I cannot leave the confines of my internet.

I worked for one of the big tech vanity names held as a poster child in the AU. They started to introduce mandatory on-call, which was non-negotiable. For an extra $200 AUD (ex tax) a week, you had the privilege of sacrificing all your personal time. Carrying a laptop, having constant phone-signal, not drinking, and being completely available within 15-30 minutes of the first ping was mandatory; otherwise, you could be facing disciplinary action.

Effectively it's a huge pay cut at less than minimum wage. For the loss of personal hours, you'd get significantly more money taking any minimum wage job. I don't go to work for free, I go to pay the bills.

Then the management blackmail starts, you get free food...a deli counter and fridge of soft drinks which I never used anyway. Then you get the be a team player, take it for the team emotional blackmail.

I'd happily do on-call on a best attempt if I'm available I'll answer the call for free. Restrict my personal time/activities outside work, I want paying at least minimum wage per hour after your company just IPO'd and worth several billion.

I find it a bit despicable in the AU when owners who are the only ones to really benefit in case of success (never seen a stock option here) say we are a startup and have to make sacrifices to make it (big) etc.

First sight of trouble and your job is gone; I struggle to see the upside for anyone other than the owners.

The entire point is to not work during that time.

You should have to pay for on-call service.

When you are informally on-call you are unable to enjoy your time to the fullest, your employer is demanding a price from you without compensating you for your time, it is an obligation of yours for yourself, your friends and family and your co-workers to demand fair compensation for this time - that's a key component of labour exchange in the free market and good unions exist to help protect those rights for junior employees who tend to have less leverage when negotiating their rights than more senior folks.

It is perfectly common (and reasonable) to be expected to be compensated something for being available outside your normal hours.

E.g. many plumbers will charge you extra (or build into their fees) for a sunday emergency call, why shouldn't a developer ?

If I were in that consultants shoes I probably wouldn't propose 16 hours, but for sure I would bump my hourly rate (say 1.5x) or a min charge of 4 hours or something, if you wanted me available on say an hours notice over the weekend. If you wanted me available at the drop of a hat it would be more.

Scheduling normal work over weekends, etc. is a different issue, but being "on call" should always involve some compensation for the impact on your life.

By being in such demand that the people who want to hire you will agree to those contract terms. If you’re extremely good at what you do and what you do makes our saves people lots of money they’ll deal with your problems. At the other end if your client is willing to keep on paying ever escalating rates they can be massive unreasonable assholes and you’ll still keep on working with them because the money’s just that good.

In other words, no, it's not "reasonable" (reasonable being whatever people can agree on) for a painter or carpenter, but this is not intrinsic to the job itself. It's incidental to the accident that those jobs generally have less market power. If a carpenter did manage that, they could do it too.

Maybe we could compromise on everyone could working 38 or 36 hours a week for somewhere between 80k and 140k.

No amount of money would ever make me put up with this. I would rather work retail, because at least there I know I am not valued as an employee.

In UK you cannot force someone to work overtime more than 48 hours, averaged over 17 weeks. If they require you to be available over weekend, they would probably have to count it towards overtime.

I would find it unconscionable to be available 24/7, how are you meant to go along your daily life?

What's the purpose of that anyway, you are not working as a paramedic??

Speak truth to power when you can get away with it. And get away when you can’t.

There are good employers out there, reject the trash and advocate for your self-worth.

My theory is, if you are not desperate for money and the job market is reasonably good - go into the later interview with specific probing questions about their processes and policies. They might reject you as being "not a team player" or whatever - but if they do then its probably not where you want to work anyway.

If you experience that type of treatment in Seattle, NYC, SF, etc you should quit immediately. That is not the norm and you don't have to put up with it. For everyone else, maybe remote gigs? People are killing each other for great devs in the biggest tech markets and most companies know they have to take care of employee happiness and culture to be competitive in hiring.

Well, if that’s true, there’s only one conclusion that the abused/unappreciated can draw: they (we) must not be that great.

Well, here’s the thing about that: if I measure myself against the expectations that are being put on me, I’m orders of magnitude short. Compared to the expectations put on everybody who carries the title “programmer”, I’m not even qualified to be in the same room as one. But who’s setting those expectations? Not other programmers. Certainly not anybody who could walk over, roll up their sleeves and say, “See? Here’s how easy it is. Just do it like that next time.” No, these expectations come from “project management professionals” who cringe at the thought of typing a formula in to Excel. These expectations come from people who attended a two-week seminar on managing programmer “resources” and whose sole contribution to the practice of developing software is asking “are you done yet? Why not? Are you the one who’s stupid, or is it somebody else who’s stupid?”

> half the developers I have worked with are more capable than me

Really, though, how do you measure that? If you have the self-awareness and humility to consider that it’s possible that somebody might be better than you, you also have the introspective capability to improve - which makes you better than a lot of the people out there.

Nobody with valuable skills should put up with crap like that