Re:Ways to improve mental health for software developers
by PragmaticPulp on Sunday November 14, 2021 @12:38PM
(#29218804)
> - If crunch time is "unavoidable," apologize and pay me for it. 1.5x for every hour over 40 would go a long way towards making me not resent the blundering middle managers that got us into the "we have to release yesterday" situation
This doesn’t really work in practice.
You’d think that forcing the company to pay more to hit a deadline would be a disincentive, but instead it makes crunch time forgivable because the company is paying extra for it. “What are you complaining about? You’re getting time and a half to work those extra 20 hours!”
It also does nothing to address the core problem of overwork leading to burnout. If anything, it lures people deeper into burnout because for many people it’s hard to turn down extra money.
Finally, I haven’t seen good results from offering crunch time pay incentives for many reasons, but the most unexpected is that the incentives are very lopsided across the team. An experienced developer who has young kids at home may not be able to stay late, but an inexperienced junior straight of college with nearly zero external obligations may be able to put in 80 hours of poking around the codebase while racking up huge paychecks for contributing very little. Worst case, the seniors end up with even more work because they have to go back and rework a project that was done by juniors working crunch time while their usual senior/mentor peers were unavailable. The incentives of extra hourly crunch time payouts get weird very quickly.
This doesn’t really work in practice.
You’d think that forcing the company to pay more to hit a deadline would be a disincentive, but instead it makes crunch time forgivable because the company is paying extra for it. “What are you complaining about? You’re getting time and a half to work those extra 20 hours!”
It also does nothing to address the core problem of overwork leading to burnout. If anything, it lures people deeper into burnout because for many people it’s hard to turn down extra money.
Finally, I haven’t seen good results from offering crunch time pay incentives for many reasons, but the most unexpected is that the incentives are very lopsided across the team. An experienced developer who has young kids at home may not be able to stay late, but an inexperienced junior straight of college with nearly zero external obligations may be able to put in 80 hours of poking around the codebase while racking up huge paychecks for contributing very little. Worst case, the seniors end up with even more work because they have to go back and rework a project that was done by juniors working crunch time while their usual senior/mentor peers were unavailable. The incentives of extra hourly crunch time payouts get weird very quickly.