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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.
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.
No kidding. That's less than $20/hour. You wouldn't need to go to college to make that. Both of my high school education brothers-in-law make way more than that and are home in time for supper.
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.
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).
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.