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Are You On Time To Work?
gravitie asks: "I'm a developer in my local area. I'm on what is supposed to be 'flex time', so I can work the hours that my boss and I see fit for me to fullfil the number of hours I'm required to get a week. Besides this I must clock in at 7:30 AM every day I am at work. If I clock in at 7:31 I am late, no questions asked. If I am late 3 times in one quarter I get a verbal warning. Next time I get a written warning, then it just goes down hill from there (docked pay, etc..). Is this standard in todays business world? Should 1 minute late really be considered 'late'?"
One employer I worked for decided that times were tough and they would require everyone to work an extra 15 minutes a day. Everyone ended up working less. The reason was that most used to work at least an half an hour extra each day, if not more. When the edict came down (roughly phrased as "accept this or your employment is terminated in two weeks as per your contract"), everyone started working exactly the required hours, and not a second more.
I guess we had issues being treated like that, and all the managers getting Jaguars as company cars.
The respect and latitude my boss has given me has earned him a less than 3 minute pager response time and a "yes" every time there is a weekend problem or a 2 am "Can you go in and fix it?" When he needs a long day, I'm there. My record so far is 25 hours straight, on-site.
The last jobs I have had in the industry have been like this:
We need you to be in between 11 AM and 3 PM so we know we can schedule meetings with you. Please warn us if can see you aren't going to be able to make it one day.
Other than that, no monitoring, no punishment and other bullshit.
I don't want to work for someone who doesn't trust my common sense. I feel the same way about dresscodes.
Give me liberty or give me kill -s 9
What are the legalities of treating a salaried employee as an hourly wage earner?
So what company do you work for? I need to know where not to apply.
This isn't the 1950's anymore. Most companies I know of allow engineers and programmers to work on real flextime. Its much harder to manage employees in this mode but it is also easier to keep happy employees. What matters is that the work is getting done, not when its getting done. For that matter it shouldn't matter how many hours your spending if your performing at or above average. The hours one is a bit of a two edged sword though.
I know at my company many of the top engineers (in title and performance) work at home a day or two a week.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
Obviously I have no idea about your specific circumstances but the logic behind a very strict clock-in time could be...
:-)
A: "When do we want people to start?"
B: "7am."
A: "Hmm, that's a bit early. What if they're late?"
B: "We'll punish them. Dock their pay, something like that."
A: "Okay, punishing is one solution. But it would be better if we could get them to just be here on time."
B: "Tricky..."
A: "Hey, how about we say the start time is 7:30am but then we really hit them hard if they're late?"
B: "Yeah, that could work."
Really strict rules are often intended to achieve something slightly different.
But of course I could be talking a load of rubbish, it's just a suggestion
After all, the only important difference between an adult and a child is that an adult does what he/she is supposed to do (i.e, meets his or her responsibilities), even when they are tired, hung-over, etc., otherwise you are still a little boy or girl, and of no use to most employers.
By that same token, "adults" don't need to arrive at exactly a particular time of day to do thier work in a non-service field, nor do "adults" expect that of thier peers. Calling "neya-neya, you're in trouble" and givng out "warnings" and "discplinary actions" is what you do in school, not in business. It's childish, plain and simple.
No. Things don't work like that. I know there is this popular myth that contracts can transcend law, but the law always trumps. Imagine if a contract said "in this job you will be sexually harrassed and you can't complain about it". Not legal. Any contract that violates the law isn't binding.
In the scenario described, if he is 1 minute late 3 times in a month, his pay is docked. Pay docked for 3 minutes of tardiness per month? I'm sure there's a labour law that specifies a limit on penalties for tardiness. The contract cannot impose penalties higher than those limits.
Now for the rant. I'm really pissed off with cunts like you whose answer for everything is: "if you don't like it, leave". That's not a fucking answer. You're exactly like the braindead fucks who pretend that the way to fix a country is to get rid of all the dissenters. Fuck you.
I used to work for a government department that inflicted this sort of thing on me as well. It never worked for me because I would sleep in despite my best efforts.
As a result, if I slept in I would just phone in sick. Being sick was a lot more acceptable than being five minutes late, no matter how much more expensive it was to the organisation. We had rules about being sick that required a doctor's certificate only for sick leave in excess of two days, so no matter that nobody actually believed I was sick, they couldn't pull me up on it.
When I left I'm afraid I had no respect for that kind of clockwatching (well, given my behaviour I guess I didn't have a lot of respect for it to start with :-), and I still don't.
Every job I have ever worked in since then I have made damn sure that nobody gives a flying F*** what hour I leave or arrive, in general. Of course there are occasions when you need to be on time - it just isn't an every day sort of rule around any workplace I have worked at since, and it never will be in the future.
Some jobs require it, of course. If you are in a customer service position in an organisation that opens at 7:00am, then I would expect repeated lateness to be a perfectly reasonable cause for dismissal. I wouldn't expect the owners of such a place to say that your hours were 7:00am - whatever though: I'd expect them to be (e.g.) 6:30am - whatever, so that turning up 1 minute late would not be an issue.
That'll be 2c, please.
If you get your pay docked for coming in late shouldn't you get extra pay for coming in early? I doubt this guy asking the question gets extra pay for clocking in at 7:29. I bet he doesn't even get verbal praise for doing it more than 3 times in a quarter. There lies an inequity. His company wants to have its cake and eat it too. Its my experience that if you want to be a good manager you try to operate fairly. If you have to give people more work then you should try to make it so that they don't have to do something else.
In Republican America phones tap you.
More importantly, why does a professional have to 'Clock In'.
I had a near mini-riot about this at my day job. We are told we are professionals, we are asked to do jobs that OBVIOUSLY require work outside of our normal working hours. We are asked to do management (project and staff supervision) that is outside of the bounds of an hourly worker.
My boss relented in that he said we could WRITE ourselves in...but we'd have to give the administrative assistant the in / out sheet every day and that it would be best that she kept it and we should just go to her desk when we needed to...ok, the mechanical part was out of the equation, but it was still baby sitting.
A few weeks of using our sick time liberally and letting everyone know that when we were on breaks and off work that we were NOT to be contacted or bothered and the situation changed.
Heh! I think the breaking point was that I run the technical operations for a large testing operation (student testing...that sort of stuff) and EVERYTHING is online. The networks went down one Saturday and honestly there was nothing I could do about it anyways because it was a central campus thing...but when I was called to do something about it, I let them know I wasn't busy, but I had no inclination of driving a mile and holding folks hands and that Monday was soon enough and that if I had any other calls, I was going to bill it as if it were one of my clients I contract with at night for support (though thats generally another field as noted by my URL above...and I charge FAR more than the going rate for general technical duties due to the specialization I have in that area).
My boss is cool and he's one of the better ones I've had, but his hands are tied by Human Resources...but he found out quickly that you simply can't expect folks to be strapped down to rules that don't really apply to your particular situation (but make sense when you are looking at 30k of employees as a whole) but then expect everyone to contribute when its in your best effort.
Honestly, I think when we were treated as pros in our field, we all worked between 45 - 60 hours a week depending on the workflow. When we were treated like children, the 40 hours (and honestly probably a lot less) was all we put in...
Again, no offense to my boss (heh! He sometimes reads this stuff)...he was trying to follow the rules, but the rules need to be flexible for specific situation.
Your bosses are Nazis. Go somewhere else. Seriously! I have to say, that since I started working from home, my schedule goes like this:
1] Wake up at 7:50am.
2] Log into VPN, AIM, VNC right around 8:00am.
3] Work until 5pm.
4] Log off of VNC, AIM, VPN.
5] Profit!!!
Although sometimes here lately I'm working past 5pm, or working some really weird schedules because that is when things are going on. But I get comp time, which really is cool.
I'm a hard worker... and I consider myself a professional and courteous employee. I was once told to arrive 15 minutes before I was to clock in.
When I refused (that is, when I didn't show up 15 minutes early, but rather right on time), I was written up.
I was written up 5 times, the sixth time mean termination. This all went down within one pay period.
I was let go. And I was happy about it.
You see, when I asked the boss for a reference, he gave me a glowing reference simply to keep me from squealing. I kept good notes, a copy of the employee handbook, and each of my writeups. I had his balls in my fist, and I wasn't afraid to squeeze.
He knew I could cause lots of trouble for requiring me to show up early and unpaid.
I now work at a great job where my boss doesn't feel the need to keep tabs on me. We have a good working relationship that has led to my asking "how high" when he says "jump" on the occasions he needs something special done. Otherwise, he leaves me alone.
-sid
We have similar sillinesss popping up at my job occasionally. This in spite of the fact that I have in the past come in for a system upgrade or repair on a Friday and still been at work the following Monday evening.
You never get those hours back. As Scott Adams (Dilbert) says, "Work will take what give it." and never even say "Thank you." With that in mind you're nuts not to give exactly the 8 hour day work is requiring and not one minute more.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
We were expected to consult with our team and amend our hours to be reasonably coherent: an all-early-arriving team would expect new members to arrive early, for example.
Since it was my first work experience, I thought it was normal. I've since learnt that it was an outstanding system for all concerned: the company calculated its employees were working an extra 12 minutes per day for free on average, and we thought we were being treated as humans.
Don't be a GUMP. DO NOT WORK FOR FREE. It's a JOB not a HOBBY.
If you kiss enough ass, they'll give you a low-level management position which means signing responsibility with no authority or budget. All you get is the promise of middle management if you can continue to kiss your way up the hierarchy. Now you are responsible for the work that other people do, and there is so much that THEY can't do it all so YOU can't do it by yourself either. If you try to climb the corporate ladder, you will always have someone else's ass in your face: you will always be someone else's bitch. You will be OWNED like the tool that you are.
You will have no control over who you manage, but you will be ENTIRELY reliant on your direct reports. Their failure will be your failure, and you will have no way to influence them except to be an asshole because you will not have discretion over enough company resources to get results the nice way. You must achieve control, or you're going to recieve the sum of your staff's bad reviews. Being the new guy you will prolly get the scrub staff that nobody else wants. You'll have to kiss their asses too sometimes.
As for this:
Are you autistic? Do you understand the words that you are saying? Are you reciting the employee manual verbatim? Do you realize that if anyone hears you say this crap outside the scope of an HR job you will be branded a fool and laughed at behind your back? People will like you at work if they HAVE TO because they get ADDICTED to the services you provide. You are the pusher and your boss is the junkie. Repeat that. Deliver. Repeat...Being CONSCIENTIOUSLY late to work is TIME MANAGEMENT. Actually: you're on time if you accomplish what you promised to the people who are asking for your effort. As an employee, you must DRAW THE LINE to balance the priorities between your personal life and your job. If you fail to do this you are a WAGE SLAVE. You must not allow your job to expect too much for you to keep your personal life on track. YOU must manage the expectations. YOU must set the goals that YOU can deliver.
Familiarize yourself with the FLSA (if you live in the US), and avail yourself of your rights. Know that the overtime exemption for computer workers does not apply to jobs where you have no DISCRETIONARY POWERS. Usually DISCRETIONARY POWERS are interpereted that they necessarily include the discretion to come and go as you deem necessary in order to fulfil your professional responsibilities. If you do not have DISCRETIONARY POWERS to decide how to fulfil those responsibilities, then you are NOT EXEMPT FROM OVERTIME.
Get a Lawyer. Work your 50 hours. Record them carefully in a little book, and get someone on the level to initial the enties. Send your payroll department a notice of the unpayed wages. If you can't get results without involving the lawyer charge them a late fee to cover legal costs incurred in collecting what you were legally owed anyway.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Some kinds of managers have personality types that are easy to educate, and others need to be tricked into letting clues sneak in under the radar; you'll have to figure out which this is. Part of being professional is working cooperatively and doing lots of communication, and you'll need to figure out how to do this without totally pissing off your boss. Another part of the problem is finding out what your organization's core values are (at minimum that's your boss, and your boss's boss), and making sure your giving them what they need while trying to get them educated. And you'll probably have to show up at 7:15 for a while until you've got them understanding that they're working together with you, not bossing you around, even if you're just making coffee and checking email.
A typical kind of value that leads to this kind of behavior is that the boss needs to feel comfortable that work is being done, and doesn't feel that way when he/she doesn't see it, and for some of those people that means seeing bodies on chairs, but you can start to work on that with tools like progress reports, and the email messages that you're sending your boss in the evening indicating the items you need your boss to attend to the next day, and with bodies on chairs when *you* want them to be there, which means getting your boss sitting in the conference room when you and your co-workers are doing your couple-times-a-week status meetings at 5:30 PM or some other time that's half an hour after the timeclock-watchers expect to have left for the day, or making sure they're invited when you and your coworkers are going out for beer at seven to discuss the project status (and you've kept your boss at the office waiting for y'all.) Some of this is because you're trying to bring them into your value system, and some is because you're trying to create visibility in a friendly manner.
Another thing you can start doing is having discussions with your boss about development and project management methodologies. What's your boss reading? What do you need to *get* your boss reading? One really excellent book on such things is "Peopleware", by DeMarco and Lister. The second edition's from 1999, but the first was I think mid-80s, when too many organizations still thought it was the 1950s. Another is to start looking at some of the "Extreme Programming" stuff - those people seem to like working 40-hour weeks. And some of the Myers-Briggs personality type stuff can be useful, because programmers and creative types are different from clockwatcher types, and sometimes they'll get that.
Sometimes this is also an ethnic / cultural thing - I've found that the kinds of bosses who do that are often either Asians who haven't been around Silicon Valley very long, or else older white Americans who used to be in the military. You'll have to decide how to handle them, because it'll take longer for _you_ to find the values you share with them that you've got to ruthlessly exploit\\\\\\\\\\\\\ use to share your values with them. Sometimes it's a geographic thing also - at least in the US, people in some parts of the country get up earlier, and people from there don't always understand that not everybody's a morning person (that's another awareness thing you've got to work on, especially if, like 90% of programmers, you're not.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks