Uh, I agree with the sentiment of not wanting to work for free, but

> I couldn't think of anything sader or more depressing that giving away my own personal time for someone else.

You just described a job.

Whether you're giving your time away or getting paid for giving it up makes no difference to the fact you are parting with it in order to produce for someone else.

Giving away pretty clearly means the objection is to the free nature. Getting paid makes a big difference - you now obtain tangible value from the interaction that you can turn into things like food or housing.

There's no concrete difference from the side of the gifter, between giving away time directly, giving away money earned from time spent, or giving away a tangible gift purchased with money earned from time spent. It's just more indirections.

So when someone says there's "nothing sadder", I think they should remember that the time is being given up either way. Doing so for free amounts to gifting the time. Or, flipped on its head, not chasing after the money.

People have their own reasons for making gifts. Feeling good about themselves, making someone else feel good, …. You can have your own reasons for not caring that there is no financial benefit to working extra hours on something. Maybe you enjoy the work. Maybe you are learning something. Maybe you take pride in your work and going the extra mile is rewarding in and of itself.

Unlike GP, I don't judge people who sometimes work for "free", as long as they don't have to and are aware they don't have to.

Let me give you the perspective from the other side of the trench:

I never ask my employees for overtime, never control their work hours. The typical work week that organically arises out of this is about 35 hours.

I would absolutely fire anyone who would close the laptop for the weekend and left a critical operation pending on Friday. It's about work ethics and personal responsibility of the outcome of personal work.

If the company is paying me for 40 hours, why would they expect me to work more? If the 'outcome of my work' is my personal responsibility, I should also be paid based on the outcome-I should also get a cut from whatever profit the company makes with my work.

If the company thinks they have the right to my personal life because they pay me for 40 hours, then its slavery. Also, threatening me with firing because I refuse slavery is threatening my livelihood, and it's mafia mentality. If a manager thinks they have the right my personal time, I should have right to their personal time too. Traffic should go both way in a bridge.

I don't hire automatons that turn on at 9h and off at 17h. I don't pay by the hour for intelligent work. I pay for results, defined to be achievable on a regular schedule.

I hire intelligent people, treat them as such, and expect intelligent behaviour in return. Part of the expectation is that everyone manages their own time responsibly. If they fail that management and have to work after hours, I do expect them to take the fall. There's no slavery and no mafia involved here; much to the contrary, it's a healthy work environment with historically excellent work/life balance.

Who defines those schedules? If it's the employees, its fine. If it's the management who sets the timelines, management should take the fall. Otherwise, its forced labor no matter how management tries to spin it. A bunch of parasites and leeches sucking other people dry. If the paycheck says 'num of hours x per hour rate", that's what the company should expect.

They're paying you to do a job. They're not just paying you to "put in the hours".

I'm on an oncall rotation. I get paid 1/3rd my normal salaried rate for all the time outside of normal working hours that I'm expected to be available to respond to critical issues. Note that I get paid this regardless of whether there actually are critical issues.

Do you have this kind of system set up? If not, do you make it clear when you're hiring people that you're expecting them to occasionally do what is effectively uncompensated oncall on nights/weekends? That's the kind of thing you have to know going in in order to be able to compare like-for-like in competing offers.

Events like these are exceedingly rare, to the rate of less than one event per year. They have been treated on a case by case basis. When it is personal mismanagement of time, there is no compensation. When people cover for systemic failures, we've historically awarded two vacation days per day used (one is a replacement, the other a compensation), or equivalent monetary compensation.

You don't see any doublethink in never asking for overtime, never controlling their work hours, and firing them if they don't work the overtime hours you want at the time you want?

No I don't. I don't hire hours. I hire people. I don't even hire people who put in hours. I hire people who produce work. If the work they produce is ok, I'm fine. If the work they produce is poor, I have a problem. In the example I gave, leaving a critical operation pending a whole weekend is poor workmanship (schedules and work hours are totally irrelevant in that assertion).

There's a second level to this, which is the definition of an acceptable workload. That is company-cultural, and you'll have to take my word for it when I say it is acceptable. We have the position that in the long run it's best that people feel happy on the job, which requires workloads compatible with life outside the company.

It's perfectly okay that you choose your values that way but it sounds very judgemental to think that's the only way to live. I won't work in a place where I'm not at least proud of what I'm doing. If that's true then whether the company makes money from it is only peripheral to me doing more than what I'm paid for - I genuinely like and enjoy what I do, I like to code and often the most interesting coding problem before me (with the most resources at my disposal by a longshot) is my work related problems so I end up spending a good fraction of my time in weekends when I feel like u want to code, working on side projects that no one asked for but are within the company's domain. Simply because they're intresting to me and I become A better coder and learn new stuff. Also coding too is about practice. 10000 hours and all that jazz. I have become a better coder because of this. I probably won't do this forever but I'll learn and get better as much as possible from this time.

If you want to build a car from scratch in your weekend or just chill out, that's an equally meaningful and respectable endeavour as well.

> "I couldn't think of anything sader or more depressing that giving away my own personal time for someone else"

The original quote was about "an interesting problem". I'm happy to spend some after hours time on technical problems if they're personally interesting to me. The fact that addressing it helps my employer and makes me look good in their eyes is just a nice little bonus.