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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?
If a couple of you band together, and threaten to quit, and they need to get this done right away, they may simply not have time to hire new people. As a result, they may give in to your demands to be paid overtime.
Q-U-I-T
If you cave on this, they might throw you a bone (they might give you a 3 day weekend or two). If you're succesful and you deliver a good product, your management won't have to think twice about doing this to you again. The fact that your management isn't willing to throw a carrot out there up front tells me they aren't going to make competent decisions in the future.
I know its hard to quit when you have mouths to feed, etc., but if quitting is not an option, you're really at their mercy.
Your story seems to demonstrate the needs for techs to unionize. In fact this could be a good opportunity to start in some way at your firm. It is truly absurd that they are demanding something like this from you without compensation. Any action you could take on your own (including a law suit) will probably be quite ugly in the short term (judging by your employers tendencies). However if you and your fellow developers act collectively you stand a stronger chance (plus can they meet the deadline if everyone familiar with the project leaves?).
I think if you act collectivel and keep the community informed you wil have a lot of support and could be the beginning of something.
You help the company out of a hole, then they can give you some extra time/bonus/spare computer/whatever afterwards.
If you can prove to be flexible and valuable, then the company will want to keep you around. The flip side is that you signed up for a reasonable workload, not 12/7. There is no need to be screwed.
Therefore try to figure something out to keep it win-win.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
BTW has anyone noticed this trend with MSFT? They produce a poor 1.0, and by 5.0 (a few rewrites later?) it's robust, feature-rich, and popular.
As I said, sometimes the "first version is meant to be thrown away", so it doesn't matter how many bugs. The time-to-market is more important in introducing a product. Moreover, the team can take a 2-5 day break, and come back to code version 2.0 at 8/5 pace.For projects, the more the no. of bugs, the better it is, because they can keep billing the client for the mythical man-hours put in for fixing them. Project-companies with hourly billing gain both ways (12/7 followed by bug-fixing cycles).
I worked in a thought-intensive job 12/7 for months at a time without any apparant loss in quality. My entire shop did, as well (30 people). The day shift started work at 7am, and the night shift at 7pm. The only break was on Sunday where things moved back an hour to 8.
The differences between my situation and the original posters were several:
a) We were on an aircraft carrier, and had no say in our working hours. Frankly, they could have been much worse: some groups worked 5 hours on / 5 off, or 12 on / 6 off for months at a time.
b) We had limited outside distractions. No commute, no having to mow the lawn or paint the house on weekends, no grocery shopping, no cooking. Our job was just to fix avionics boxes, and the system was optimized to keep us on task and productive.
c) You have to get used to the hours. The 8/40 work week is a relativly modern invention - our bodies will work much longer, it's just that our brains aren't used to concentrating so long.
All that being said, if my boss told me that my job depended on working 12/7 for months with no bonus, pay raise, or comp time then I'd walk.
Difference (b) above is a big one - if I have to work 12/7 as well as commute, grocery shop, and maintain my house and car there is simply not enough time left in the day for everything. I didn't go to college for 6 years to work the hours of my great-grandfather the farmer, who got up before sunrise and slept after sunset.
Difference (a) is the clincher, though. Once you enlist, they *own* your ass and you will work whatever hours your semi-literate boss dictates to you. If you tell him to fuck off, you can go to jail, be fed bread and water, or in wartime, be shot. After eight years of experiencing that environment, I'm fully aware that as a civilian I can quit at any time for any reason - this is a luxury that I've earned, and I see no reason not to use it when the conditions of my employment start being arbitrarily changed.