Are you in the US? Do you work for hourly wages?
I've always been confused why salaried workers think they only need to work 40 hours a week. There's an employment agreement between you and your employer with expectations on what tasks you'll perform. Rarely (never in my experience) does the agreement include you only work 40 hours a week.
I don't have an issue with your overall sentiment. I'm mostly confused about conflating things like overtime and a 40 hour work week when most folks in tech in the US are salaried workers.
Self-respect/their own lines in the sand?
I don’t think anyone is under the illusion they can’t by fired for holding this position given that you can be fired in the US for ~anything. Doesn’t mean it’s a nonsense position to hold.
I'm not sure on that. It's backed by very little legally or culturally.
Lawyers, doctors, finance professionals, and other high paying, salaried professions include the expectation of more working hours, many times unexpectedly, to get the work done.
Wanting the higher wages associated with a salaried position but the stability of hourly work seems like it's backed by little but personal entitlement.
“9-5” is a very well known cultural concept. Around the world. The 40 hour work week is a well known cultural concept. Around the world. To say it’s not is literally ignoring decades worth of media making it known.
Sure there’s nothing legally known as overtime when you’re salaried, but theres most certainly an implied cultural construct of a 40 hour work week and WLB around that number. While you may not be legally performing overtime, you most certainly are culturally if you work above 40 hours.
Having negotiating power gives you all sorts of “entitlements” that aren’t written down anywhere, that’s the point of having negotiating power.
The silly thing would be to earn all this negotiating power and then choosing to be miserable anyway because other people might call you entitled pejoratively.
Isn't it? I thought this was exactly what people fought for 100 years ago: to limit the standard work week to 40 hours. The US played a leading role in that fight, and it's incredibly sad to see how Americans have forgotten their history.
> Lawyers, doctors, finance professionals, and other high paying, salaried professions include the expectation of more working hours, many times unexpectedly, to get the work done.
If you've got a job that depends on unexpected events, then of course there's going to be some irregularity. For most software engineers, that's not really an issue because their work can be planned and won't kill someone if it's not done by tomorrow. System administrators may be an exception in that they have to fix a server right now when there's an issue. But that's a different issue than making overtime standard, and I would expect those admins to be well compensated for their work during off-hours.
At-will employment is definitely a double edged sword but it does give employees the power to tell their employer to get lost if they're being unreasonable, even if it isn't written in something legally binding.
This is the comment you replied to. It gave two possibilities if you were working a salaried job over 40 hours a week.
Employment contracts in most developed countries will specify a) hours of business/office hours and b) an expected number of hours that the employee is to work. In many countries (including the UK for example [1]), there are even laws restricting the number of working hours by default.
[1]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1998/1833/contents/made
Exactly - you can also work less if nobody notices (easy to pull off).
$400k to work 50hr/week vs $250k to work 20hr/week. What do you choose?
Let’s say 100k base salary. 5% additional comp (bonuses or stock, this is conservative number). Healthcare for you, another $300/month, not even counting employers who cover dependents. Ignoring all taxes including FICA. PTO 3 weeks (120 hours).
Base salary is 48/hour, but your total comp will bring it to more like 58/hour. Which is probably more than your contractor counterparts.
You trade a little bit more of your time (responding to outages or crunching for a product launch deadline) for the security and benefits.
If one of my employees refused to respond to an outage because it’s outside 9-5 working hours, I would fire them for cause (pending approval from legal of course).
There was a study that claimed losing a job caused the same level of grief for some as losing a loved one. Don't be that person. You are just a mercenary on contract, you are not part of a mission, or saving the world or (ugh), a FAMILY.
I am paid for completing work, I don't get paid hourly.
My employer understands I work about 40 hours a week give or take here and there.
I have interviewed for some of the biggest companies in the US and the information I received was 40hrs a week, with some crunch during fires but very rare.
This is why I would never interview for company like Tesla.
It's cultural. Living in Europe, I've always been confused how salaried workers would not have set hours per week in the US.
I'm literally selling my working hours to a company. Of course the contract is going to have to include exactly how many hours I'm selling and how much money I'm getting in return.
It is an employment contract. I'm not selling the completion of a specific task or a project (that would be a different type of contract and I would price it very differently), I'm selling specific hours my time.
All my full time contracts have had the amount of hours I am expected to work + how overtime work is to be handled.
Additinally, there's laws setting an upper limit on the amount of hours (at least in the few countries where I've worked)
In fact, it's codified into law and payroll systems have clear delineations about how this works. Companies often have 2 classes of workers referred to as "exempt" (these are salaried workers) and "non-exempt" (hourly workers), where what the "exempt" refers to is whether the worker is exempt from overtime rules and other concerns.
Point being, if you are an exempt worker (which I'm guessing is like 95%+ of W2 employed programmers in the US), you won't be getting paid overtime.
That's not what “exempt” means, though its very common for those to correlate (you can be hourly exempt and salaried non-exempt.)
Plus, the last half of that sentence was "where what the "exempt" refers to is whether the worker is exempt from overtime rules and other concerns", which very much is what exempt means. The US Department of Labor has more details: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime
For my part, I am confused why anyone would work more than 40; get your work done and leave.
"Only"? Isn't 40 hours the maximum that people once fought for? Nobody should have to work more than 40 hours per week. It's the maximum for very good reasons. If you work more, it should be compensated elsewhere.
Now if you're co-owner of the company with wide-ranging responsibilities and corresponding generous compensation and a share of the profits, I can understand that you want to put in extra work, but then you're also the person directly benefitting from that extra work. But that's a voluntary choice by someone with a direct stake in the company. It should not be abused to extort extra work beyond the 40 hour maximum from normal employees.
The rest of the hospital just kinda follows that mantra. And that makes sense -- everyone works that way in the hospital and no one dies.
That ain't how software dev works, and no one is going to die or go into insulin shock because Twitter didn't push a UI update to Prod on schedule.
This is reasonable advise if you're an average worker, who can be replaced by thousands of others, but if you're the only one being able to do the Job in your company, or even one of a hand full of people in your industry to do what you do, you need to change perspective a bit.
Almost two decades ago, before I became a PMC, I got hired as a Marketing Specialist for a Taiwanese computer components manufacturer that wanted to expand their core business into the high-end consumer segment.
When I started working there it was completely expected to show up to work two hours before you were contractual obliged and work overtime each day. Coming from a cultural background where you clock out when it's time and don't give a f*ck, I thought as well this was nuts.
But for my Taiwanese co-workers this wasn't an issue at all and they were happy, and so I adapted to their work culture, sometimes we slept in the office, showered and had breakfast there together.
It was a great time. We blew the competition completely out of the water because we simply outworked them and in return, besides getting casino money to spend on the weekends and other benefits, we each got the equivalent of a million dollars in local currency as a bonus by the end of the year and another one deposited as retainer with one of the best law firms in the country so we didn't really have to worry about anything.
My youngest brother got severely ill and needed experimental treatment. The company paid for it. My neighbor started acting up, doing parties all night. The company took care of it. My parents wanted to live closer to me, because my mom got sick not seeing me more than once a year. You guess it, they bought the flat next to me and had them move in for Christmas without me knowing.
That money helped me to start my own business and become independent later. My work ethics never changed. During my career I slept on floors, in bathtubs, once on a park bench, and never stopped working until the job was done.
I am sure that whoever survived at Twitter until now, is reaping these kind of benefits I know from my time grinding for a billionaire. There is nothing wrong with sleeping on the floor to meet a deadline, even regularly, if you know it's worth for whom you do it and why you do it.
According to the article some of those who grinded for this billionaire are recently applying for unemployment.
I do not want a company doing anything for me. I want to maximize my income TO DO whatever I WANT. I don't want my personal life getting tangled with work life.
I feel sorry for people who have to work with you. Sleeping in bathtubs, floors sounds just insane.
You sound like you have very little respect for yourself.
I don't understand at all what this means.
Except there’s basically everything wrong about it.
Also, unless it is MY business I wouldn't grind this hard.
I can put it some extra hours once a year. But if its a failure of management then I will maybe save them once. Then, they can do the job themselves after my 40 hours.
If an individual told me they slept at the office to meet deadlines, I would tell them to seek treatment as that isn't normal.