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12/7 and Overtime on a Salary?
over-timeout! asks: A company I work for (in the U.S.A.) had submitted a statement of work to a client, who waited for a month before signing the work order. The work order explicitly stated a timeline which would start from the time the order is signed. However, the client is insisting on the project being completed by a fixed date, as discussed with our company's management, instead of the deadline that starts from the signing of the work order. Although our company representatives tried to push back on the date, the client refused. Because the client is among our company's biggest customers, our company's management caved in and agreed to their deadlines. Management has told us meeting deadlines means that for the next month to six weeks all of the developers involved will have to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. The contractors involved are going to get compensated by being paid by the hour. But us salaried employees are going to get nothing in return for trading in what's left of our life so someone else in the company above us can make money. Obviously this isn't fair, but what are the alternatives in this down economy, where jobs are hard to find?" A related articles on this subject discusses suing for overtime, and California residents should find this companion article pertinent, as well. What can you do when management agrees to a timeline and a workload that may make your job, as a programmer, difficult-to-impossible?
We pretend to work.
Yeah, it really is! You go to work not even knowing what day it is, you walk around like a zombie, get less work done because you burn out much quicker. And the quality of work goes down the toilet, not to mention the moral of everyone involved.
And if you're married, it puts such a strain on your home life.
AND you're not being paid overtime either, which is icing on the cake!
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
V-I-R-U-S
The other 4 hours (and all Saturday and Sunday), simply sit at your desk with the classifieds section open, or monster.com up. Make sure everyone in your department does this. The message should get across after a few days.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Put some god aweful easter egg in the software so the client never uses your company again and your company will have to lay you all off, that'll teach them!.... oh hold on
Hiring "temorary" workers usually ends up with a bunch of buggy code that has mispeled variables. I would avoid temorary workers.
I like that. If I was the bastard employer, I would sent them home on friday at 8pm, have them return on saturday at 8pm and work 24 hours until sunday at 8pm. Just thinking like Dogbert. I'd still comply with NYS law.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
As a fully qualified whiner, I must say that these people really take the cake with their whining about 12/7. As a student, I can attest to the crazy deadlines Professors make. I'm sure we all remember those 6 day allnighters where by the sheer will of not dying we manage to finish the final project on time.
... only to be awakened by students who need the chairs for foolish purposes like sitting.
Believe me, there is worse than 12/7. My personal favorite was a ~23/6 project where my one hour rest was lining up enough lab chairs to make a makeshift bed
And the greatest part about being a student is that I make about -$40,000 / year despite being massively overworked. Overpay? Please, I'd just like to break even.
and shaving. That takes up time that you don't have obviously. After 3 or 4 weeks, management will get the message.
"--- Samuel Bellamy"
Damn, I was half expecting to see that quote attributed to "--- Gollum".
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Is The Company Publicly Traded? Is the project going to form a major percentage of their revenue?
Short the company's stock.
One thing is certain: The contractors will figure out a way to keep the contract going, wasting more money, and all the code written by your group will look something like this:
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I want to start by saying that this project is on a deathmarch and it hasn't even started yet. I doubt there is anything you can do to save it. When the project fails, there will be a lot of pissed off people and a big pile of shit will be heading for that fan at the end of the hall. Your number one priority should be to cover your own ass. Document everything. Keep copious notes. Print everything out and take it home.
That said the FIRST thing you should do Monday morning is to call your State Department of Labor. What you are being asked to do may be illegal.
NEXT, if you work at a big enough company, mention the situiation to your boss's boss or boss's boss's boss (aka Senior of Corporate Management ). They might not be in the loop about what is going on. This may be in violation of company policy. Or they may be smart enough to know the signs of a death march and take steps to stop it before it gets started.
But, if they can't help you you have a couple of options...
- Work the hours and don't complain.
- Explain to your management that it is not possible for you to put in those hours on such short notice. Explain the outside of work commitments that you have in your life. Apologise for not being able to work the extra hours, and then don't work them.
- Say nothing to them, just don't work the hours.
- Keep a log of when you and everyone else on the team comes in and goes home. Next time your review comes up show them what a good resource you are.
- Do the same as above, but put a packet sniffer on your managers PC. Next time you have a review, show them what a hard worker you are and what porn sites they have been surfing during business
hours.
- Start coming to work in a Star Trek uniform. demand that everyone refer to you as 'Commander'.
- Every day at 5pm hit the emergency power off in the server room and pull the fire alarm.
- Make generous use of the rm -rf * command.
Grin and bare what, your ass? I don't think mooning management, smiling or not, will help here. :)
everything in moderation
its not correct because the /. comment box is not a RDBMS. So I didn't bother to get out my O'Riley books on MySQL and figure out what would be technically correct.... why because im not a good little slashbot.
There is no god
quote "Wel, i gotta tell ya...I'd be very, very careful who you talk about that. Because the person who wrote that...is dangerous. And this buttoned-down, oxford-cloth psycho might just snap and then stalk from office to office with an Armilade AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and coworkers. This might be someone you've known for years...someone very...very...close to you"
Fight CLub 1999
After about 60 hours, in my experience, you start getting negative returns (the project actually starts regressing) because more bugs than good code is put in.
...For all of about five minutes. Both guys were fidgeting and sure they were feeling dozens of the critters crawling up their pantslegs. I pointed out the advantage of a skirt (company dress code)... clear scorpion visibility. The lead decided to go back to the hotel after all (where more security-camera footage would have doubtless revealed paranoid bedding-checking). We knocked the code out in a couple of hours the next morning, and drove home.
I was trying to convince a lead "programmer" of that one Friday at 11 pm... we were on an out-of-town project, and I suggested we knock off, get a night's sleep, and finish the project in the morning. Nope, he wanted to finish that night and drive home in the morning. So us programmers went back to work.
About fifteen minutes later, a scorpion turned up in his cubicle (this was the Oklahoma panhandle, and not an uncommon occurrence). After the other two programmers screamed like little girls and I disposed of it (did I mention I'm female? What I wouldn't have given for security-camera footage) we went back to work again.
Unfortunately, staging a Scorpion Incident would only work for the article-poster if the decision-making management is also working the same hours, is arachnophobic, and will fall for the same trick 28-42 times in a row...
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