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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.
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.
is enquire what the bonus structure is going to be like if you get the project done on time. Asking for things like extra vacation time or serious profit participation would be very appropriate.
Is the company entitled to expect you to make this sacrifice? No. But then again, you're not entitled to expect that they will continue to employ you.
Negotiate. If you resort to lawsuit, the only people who will make money are lawyers.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Well .. you have several options:
- Do the work like a good worker bee
- Do the work, but piss and moan to
/. about it
- Do the work, but piss and moan to you supervisor about it
- Start doing the work while looking for a new job
- Quit immidately
Summing it upThe question to ask yourself is: "How much do I like my current job and position? ... and ... Is it worth the lack of a life?"
Just $0.00232 (after taxes)
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
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.
V-I-R-U-S
Listen- I hear you. "principles" of software engineering; you know, making estimates of work based upon metrics of past performance, and the idea of fully clarified requirements specification before starting a project? Yeah, its all BS. Doesn't happen where I work, and I work an enormous Software Engineering projects and my customers are the FAA and NATS (UK's equivalent). They throw tantrums, and they act like children. But they pay the bills.
So 6 weeks? Is it limited to that? Because that's do-able. You work real hard, the end date comes and goes, and then its over- time to have a party.
Can you hold this over your managers head for compensation during the next performance review? It is worth a shot to mention it to him/her in clear language- I am a team player. I am busting hump. I want this reflected in my performance evaluations.
Also, are there any perks? Lunches provided on Sunday? Foosball table? Free movie tickets?
Maybe this should be suggested to management- 12/7 does NOT improve morale, and with tight deadlines thats when you need morale the most.
IF its only 6 weeks, this can be sustained. When it grows to 6 months, to a year plus, that is NOT sustainable. You break down. You wear out. Productivity goes down the tubes. And you break out into stress-related rashes. Its not a pretty sight.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
R-E-N-T
It's easy to say "oh, well just quit, then" when they situation is purely hypothetical to you. Unfortunately, not many of us are in a position where we can just tell our boss to get fucked, as much as we'd like to.
In the last year my department has been whittled down from eight employees to me and another guy. It sucks ass, but I've got to pay the bills.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Uh, yes.
programmers are an exception to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 - 29 USCA Â 213(17) --
 213. Exemption
(17) any employee who is a computer systems analyst, computer programmer, software engineer, or other similarly skilled worker, whose primary duty is--
(A) the application of systems analysis techniques and procedures, including consulting with users, to determine hardware, software, or system functional specifications;
You can't get overtime as a salaried programmer. I am really sorry.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
There's always such a lot of non-programming, "administrative" work (read mails, write status updates, all the boring stuff), that working 60 instead of 40 hours can easily double your output, because the extra 20 hours tend to go into productive work entirely. BTDT, and for a limited time (like 6 months to a year, before people start quitting) it does actually work.
The National Labor Board has a page where you can contact your local office.
Ask them what you can do.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
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.
Ask the boss to cancel the contract, and to restart the negotiation.
They need to look at any penalities that will incur for not delivering on time, or delivering a poor quality product that would incur a lawsuit for delivering a poor quality product, and the loss of bussiness from this and other companies when you get a reputation for delivering poor quality products.
There is no way you will make the deadline, so be sure that they know the potiential for them to LOSE MONEY is greater than the possibility of EARNING A PROFIT on the contract.
The timeline unrealistic. Any bonus for being on time will not be awarded.
Expectation of quality from overworked employees is unrealistic. They will be spending money on fixing this thing, even if they don't get thier ass sued for a poor quality product.
Large potiential to lose any reputation you have for delivering on the above two.
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.
IANAL. However, I just spent two weeks in a jury on a "wrongful termination" case.
In the US, there are only three reasons you can sue for this. 1) The company promised via explicit or implied contract that they wouldn't. (Exceedingly unlikely.) 2) You complained about safety and they fired you in retaliation. 3) They fired you for your race, age or gender.
Since most companies employee people "at-will", they can essentially fire you for any damn reason they want, as long as you aren't a whistle-blower and as long as their reasons aren't discriminatory in specific ways.
The cake is a pie
Okay, I can come in on Saturday, but I can't work on Sunday. An Orthodox Jew can't work from Friday Evening until Sunday. A muslim can't work on Friday.
That is well within the demands of our religion. Get laid off? Ask why, in writing. If they say "could not work to meet the demands of our contract", that is enough to haul them into court: religious discrimination, and sue for company ownership.
No kidding, that 1-day-off is God's minimum-benefits plan. It is also extremely important for a different reason: people who don't get 1 day off tend to start making very bad decisions. Ask my brother, who was working 7 days per week on his grad program. He got an ion trap working that had never worked before, then got data; it was given to a previous student for her PhD. He accepted it, and went to get more data... but long story short, destroyed the million dollar superconduncting magnet through a series of plausible, but erroneous mistakes.
His grad professor approved every one of the decisions, but was not overseeing the work, since he too was making bad decisions...
I really think 1 day off a week is quite important, and the 3 major religions of Jewish origin provide a good means for that 1 day a week.
But if you aren't religious, that's okay. Go ahead and put bugs in the customer's code [you can't help it... it'll happen.]
Or go back and argue this one out with your management, saying "this isn't acceptable -- you need to hire more workers or the work isn't going to get done right, and you need to charge the customer the extra."
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's