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Takin' Care of Business and Working Paid Overtime
theodp writes "About 800 CA-based Siebel employees who held the job title 'software engineer' or 'senior software engineer' stand to pocket $27,000 each from the proceeds of Siebel's $27.5 settlement of an overtime dispute. And while IBM's 32,000 techies won't make out quite as well, they'll still divvy up $65M in OT pay that IBM's shelling out to settle a federal class action suit."
I agree. These stories sound like the movie Office Space. There is no way that I am going to get used like that.
I used to work for a Fortune 100 company and my boss worked a minimum of 90 hours per week. She came in at 5am and left at 7 or 8pm M-F. On Saturdays at least ten hours and a six-hour day on Sunday. When I figured her hourly rate, she was the lowest paid employee in the department.
I don't understand this whole unpaid overtime anyway. If these companies are so bought into capitalism, then they ought to buy more of your labor when they need more.
I was one of those creative types. Our team conceived, designed, and built large-scale programs. Working out of a manual? Dammit, we wrote the manuals. I would be shocked if that group was covered by this lawsuit.
In the months before a product shipped we typically worked 50-BIGNUM hours a week. During the rest it was closer to 40. I probably averaged in the mid/high 40s over my last several years there.
Personally, I think anyone who is making a salary should be paid the higher of:
* 2x what he would make for the same hours at minimum wage + applicable overtime
* his regular salary
Anyone salaried worker making 80 grand who works 80-hours every week should find a job more to his liking or start a union, not complain about unpaid overtime.
It is true, after sticking it out working a 75 hour week for 12 months salary in the US, I nearly refuse to even entertain the idea of taking a salary position. I would rather make minimum wage and be paid hourly than ever do that again.
That's easy to fix. When 40 hours rolls around, you get up from your desk, look at your watch and say "Looks like it's time to go home", and leave.
They might fire you eventually, but they'll do that anyway, so there's really no loss.
People who work unpaid overtime don't deserve anything, unless their contracts says so. If they don't think they're getting paid enough they should seek employment elsewhere.
I always wonder how we've gotten to this point.
Greed and overweening pride. Greed on the part of employers; overweening pride on the part of employees who accept a title instead of what they are due (money).
So many people I know are in this position of being forced to work unpaid overtime and are constantly bitching about it. But I think that a lot of them get off on it because they think that it makes them feel like they have an important job. I actually think that it makes them unimportant--if their time was so valuable, you'd think that they would get paid for it.
Others act like they *have* to because they need their high salary (even though the hourly rate sucks) to afford their lifestyle. Then you look and see that their family of four lives in a five bedroom, 3.5 bath, 5000 square foot house. Often they say that they're "doing it for the kids," as if their kids wouldn't rather actually see their parents once in awhile instead of having stuff.
Ooops! Looks like I went off on a rant. Sorry.
The days of the lifetime job and having an employer reward you for longevity , productivity, and loyalty are long gone. This is the reason, that I will never work again as an employee if I can help it. Contracting is the only way to go. I get paid for every hour I work. I will work my ass off...I will stay and do what it takes to get a project done on time in the crunch times, but, I WILL get paid for it. My time is too valuable to me. Often, I'd rather have time off for myself than get a small amount of OT.After all, the ONLY reason I work, is to allow me to pay for my lifestyle I enjoy...if I were rich, I'd never work another day in my life.
I don't get time and a half usually....the govt. helped screw us IT guys on that years back, but, I make a good hourly rate...and straight time is good for me.
But, really....isn't the sweat off your back worth something? Since I've made the jump about a decade ago...I cannot see why I EVER, EVER submitted to that. If you know that extra hours are a 'part of the job' like the article said...why would a sane person go in there to work for free unless they are just out of school, and trying to get that foot in the door.
I'll tell ya....they aren't quite as anxious to keep you late hours and on weekends if they know they have to pay you, and when they do ask you, you know they really need you. There's nothing wrong with hard work, but, there is something wrong with not getting paid for you work. There is nothing wrong with time off for yourself....that, in fact is one of the most valuable things you have, your time....if they want to intrude on that, it must come with a price.
It is your choice as to how you will spend your time, and how much it is worth.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
In IT (at least in software development) chronic overworking not only decreases efficiency, it actually makes projects be even later than working only normal working times.
In the software development process, there's a negative feedback loop that affects the productivity of those developing the software. It goes like this:
- Those that constantly work long hours get more tired
- Tired people do more errors (bugs in the code, bugs in the design, incorrectly documented requirements)
- Fixing the extra errors consumes a disproportionatly big ammount of time - the problem has to be found (sometimes only on production), then tracked down to the root cause and then fixed (which in the case of design/requirements errors can include re-writting huge sections of the code).
I my experience from working both 8h/day and 10/day, the total daily productivity (as measured by requirement features successfully implemented) of those working 10h/day is actually lower than those working 8h/day. In other words, it takes more time to develop and deliver and application that fits the client's requirements if developers work 10h/day than it would if they work 8h/day.
From what i've observed, a similar effect might also be in play in other intelectual professions:
- From what i've seen, overworked managers are less organized, tend to forget things more easilly and do not as easilly recognize important information than those managers that work more reasonable work hours. In practice this means that they will make wrong decisions, will not make decisions on time or will not pass on all the necessary information to those that execute their decisions which results in a lot of fires and a lot of time and work (by the manager and also by those under his/her management) spent putting down the fires.
From my experience working in several countries, both with and without chronic overworking i believe the fault lies with two factors, often in conjunction:
a) Bad managers. These are usually people that are not experienced enough to realize that the negative implications of overworking in intellectual occupations and thus keep demanding long working hours from those they manage (and often themselfs) under the wrong impression that more-hours-at-work = faster-results. Also, management errors often result in a lot of extra work on the development side (say, for example, because a "simple looking" new requirement from the customer was blindly accepted) which means that in practice everybody in the group is pressured into overworking to cover up the incompetence of the manager. One can often spot this kind of managers, even during a job interview, because they are more disorganized and relly heavilly on giving soft rewards (examples: the team's night out; "ultra-flexible" hours; extra relaxed clothing standards).
b) Consultancies doing fixed priced projects for external customers. They sell a project to do "something" for $x. Bad estimations, incorrect requirements, time lost waiting for things (examples: interface specifications from the client; hardware required for the project), time lost due to issues in the choosen technologies - all these things mean more time spent working in the project. If the extra time is payed then the profit goes down. Making people work more hours seems at first sight to be a way to "keep on target" without extra costs (as to why this isn't true, see explanation above).
Henry Ford said:
We've completely forgotten that last bit over the last 50 years.
If you want to take these "radical" ideas of ultra-capitalists further, and get even wilder with a true "Free Market" -- compared to the joke we have today -- you also might like to note that shareholders are entitled to exactly one thing: a share of the residual profits. They are NOT entitled to tell buinesses how to run, nor to demand that residual profits be maximized. This whole idea of "shareholder value" is completely broken, and is anti-competitive and anti-innovation (and I mean real innovation, not the Microsoft kind). Look it up.
.Every time employers in the US get in legal trouble due to having employees, the pressure to outsource or offshore increases. We have an absolute infestation of laws, lawyers and lawsuits in the US, convincing everyone that he's been wronged.
The risk of hiring employees in the US is already high, and cases like this are driving it higher. When the risk and overhead per employee goes up there is less hiring, and more conservatism in hiring, which means the applicant with anything odd on his resume gets summarily rejected.
I often see slashdotters complaining that companies won't take a chance on them; the company demands skill X and the applicant thinks he could learn X in no time. Well suppose they hire you and you don't learn X? How hard is it to fire you? In the US, a fired employee has many ways to sue.
If we continue down this road, we'll end up like France, where it's almost impossible to fire someone. Students there recently protested against a proposed law that would let employers fire them within the first N months. Needless to say, they have high unemployment.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Stronger employee protections mean higher unemployment.
As for crazy overtime, everyone should do it for a few months at least, to find out what it's like and find his own limits. After that, you learn to probe for this when interviewing for a job. My last several jobs have all been about 40-45 hours per week, plus rare crunches.
I think before you use that in a court you might want to check that line with a lawyer first. In a proper court of law. You'll have to convince a judge the hours required were within reason. Like working 90 hours a week for one week of the entire year due to an extraordinary circumstance. That's where IBM and Siebel got hammered. Their extraordinary circumstance became normal business practice. Putting the customer first only looks during interviews and employee orientation. If you can't manage to keep a project on time with a reasonable (40hrs/wk/employee) timeline than you might have to rethink who is doing the manageùent.