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Working Off the Clock, How Much Is Too Much?
The Wall Street Journal has word of yet another suit against an employer who required an "always on" mentality to persist because of easily available communications. Most of us working in some sort of tech related job are working more than 40 hours per week (or at least lead the lifestyle of always working), but how much is too much? What methods have others used in the past to help an employer see the line between work and personal life without resorting to a legal attack? "Greg Rasin, a partner at Proskauer Rose LLP, a New York business law firm, said the recession may spawn wage-and-hour disputes as employers try to do the same amount of work with fewer people. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act says employees must be paid for work performed off the clock, even if the work was voluntary. When the law was passed in 1938, 'work' was easy to define for hourly employees, said Mr. McCoy. As the workplace changed, so did the rules for when workers should be paid."
If you aren't exempt I'd say any is too much. You are screwing yourself and your fellow employees.
If you are exempt, as TFA says it get's a little murkier. I've happily put in extra time when needed but I expect my employer to be flexible when the heat is off. Otherwise my tendency is to then lean towards voting with my feet. Right now that is easier to say than do for a lot of people. But what is acceptable varies so much from person to person that it is impossible to come up with any kind of general rule to fit all those different cases.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Solution: take it anyway, you've earned it. Don't give a fuck about evaluations. Realize that the best way to get a raise is to find a new employer. If you think you're being punished for using comp time, start interviewing.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Before you even take a job, get clear on how often you'll be expected to work overtime and exactly how you're going to be compensated. If I need to have an "always on" mentality, the company needs to have an "always paying" mentality.
I realize that crunch time is the thing to do in the IT industry, but get clear up front so that kind of work cycle is something you understand when you accept the company's offer. If I need to put in an extra 10 hours every week or be on-call, I'm going to factor that into my salary negotiations. Once the deal is brokered, I'm left with a sense of satisfaction because I have the peace of mind in knowing I'm not being taken advantage of, I'm doing exactly what I signed up for.
If you're getting screwed on evaluations for taking your comp time, chances are that you're going to get screwed on your evaluations one way or another. So listen to this guy. Screw'em and take it anyways.
Firstly, get the nagios emails sent to your team at work as well as yourself.
Secondly, when you start to deal with the nagios error at 2am, send an email saying "I am looking into this now", and when you're done at 3am, send an email saying "All done now, see you at 10, I need my sleep more than ever now!". Screw what other people say, make sure your boss knows every single time you work out of hours via the aforementioned email. Bosses like reading emails that says "Problem fixed." anyway. Also make a note in a log book so you can demonstrate your out of hours company-saving efforts at review time.
Secondly, you only get one life, and within that life you only get one chance to be 20/30/40/50. Don't waste that time on work, unless you're working for yourself and doing well enough to retire well earlier than you would have otherwise. Take that time off, and be anal about it.
Thirdly, look for another job once the market picks up. If you're good, and willing to be on call, then you're valuable, and you can go somewhere where working hours aren't set in concrete, bound with leather and chained to the ground because the boss is ex-military and gets up at 6am everyday and expects everyone else to.
Yeah, comp time is a scam. At a previous job my boss insisted I track all the hours of comp time I was racking up since he was sort of an idealist. When it totalled up to 4 months during a brutal stretch (80-100 hour weeks, working 30+ days straight) it just depressed me and I stopped counting any additional comp time hours. Shortly later I got promoted ($0 raise though) and moved to a new manager who asked what the deal was with the comp time hours my prior manager mentioned. When I told him it was 4+ months I was told "No". Later a week long vacation was offered up in lieu.
I quit and lived out of my truck for 10 months instead.
Now I work my 8 hours and go home. It's a job, no more, no less. I'm not working my butt off for 1-2% raises.
let me know how well you focus when you are scheduled to work 100% on 'task X' and 4-5 unscheduled tasks come up at the same time 'oh, we just need this one thing for this customer urgently' and you can't change the deadline for 'task X' because marketing is already going and selling it
In my experience programmers are quite good at predicting how long something would take them to code if they could code in uninterrupted chunks of time, pity that rarely happens, and the problem is that when it does happen then you end up overachieving the schedule, and next time that will be the yardstick that will be used (only next time you'll have all the other additional tasks coming in, thus making sure you won't hit the scheduled target unless you do gobs of overtime).
Then you end up with coders padding their schedules, and managers assuming the schedules are padded and cutting them, it is really a no-win situation that is allowed to fester because the companies do not pay for overtime at time-and-a-half, if they did you can bet that they would majorly increase the efficiency allowing people to work better and so taking less time. If you have the power to basically tell people 'you either work 80 hours week, of which 40 are unpaid, or you get fired' then what incentive do you have in making schedules and working conditions better?
It's the same deal as why in most places you have cubes or open spaces, crappy monitors/chairs, etc. etc. etc.
-- the cake is a lie
I'm going to second (third?) this one. In my 11 years of engineering, I've found that staying with the same employer too long is a good way to have your salary limited, as companies simply don't give raises if they don't have to. If you want more money, you need to get a new job. Remember, employers (like most companies these days) are extremely short-sighted. If you're already working for you, they'll never give you a substantial raise, and instead will just give you excuses about the economy being bad, budget cuts, etc. However, when they have a position that needs to be filled (or else work won't get done), they'll pay the market rate or else they won't fill it for 6 months or more. This means that people who hop around from job to job every 2-3 years end up making much more money than people who stay in the same place for 20 years.
Because of all of this, evaluations are completely useless IMO. There's no point in "going the extra mile", or doing anything more than needed to keep your job. As long as your evaluation looks decent, or at least not bad enough to get you in trouble, don't worry about it. Stick around for 2-3 years, don't work too hard, don't stay late very often, and start looking for something new after that time. Repeat this cycle until you find yourself a more rewarding career (such as starting your own business, becoming a consultant, changing into an entirely different industry, etc.).
Must be nice to be able to do that.
Here in the Boston area, any computer job that pays enough to survive is exempt. And when I say "enough to survive" I mean "enough money to live indoors, have heat, hot water, electricity, and food".
If you insist on being paid hourly instead of salaried, most employers will refuse, and the few that will oblige will then put it in writing that you're not allowed to work any overtime without being authorized in writing in advance, and then they'll use that to screw you - if you try to put in for overtime, they'll insist that it wasn't authorized, and if you insist they pay you for it, they'll terminate you for violating the overtime policy. Of course, if you refuse to work the overtime they ask for (which you know you won't be paid for because there's no written authorization) then in your next review they'll say you have a bad work ethic, and refuse to give you a raise.
Personally, I'd like to see salary exemptions be eliminated.
As someone below posted, they can cap your accrual. As in, they can't take away vacation time that you've already accrued, but once you accrue a certain amount, they can say you stop accruing until you use what you already have. Which is almost the same thing as taking your vacation away ... but only almost. People act like the company is cheating you, but what this really is is an incentive to take your vacation time.
The GP seems to be complaining that his employer is giving him all this comp time but then there's never time to take his vacation. "Sorry, boss-man, but at this company, taking my vacation time is HR policy. I don't have any choice. If I fail to take the vacation time, they reprimand me by restricting my compensation." (In this scenario, notice the emphasis on growing a pair.)
Let me throw another one out there: Everybody hates the office martyr. You know the one. She seems to be there every night until long after everybody leaves, but she never seems to get anything done. Whenever more work lands on her plate, she complains, "OMG, can I possibly get any more work? I never have time to get anything done as it is!" You suggest that maybe she's burning out and should take some vacation time. "I caiiinnn't! Have you seen how much work they pile on me? This place would fall apart if I took three days off." Eventually everybody else starts picking up work from this employee's plate "as a favor," because she never gets anything done, and still she won't take vacation, and still she keeps complaining. Encountered one of those before?
Breakfast served all day!
I make my time back by slacking off at least 75% of my time at work.
A 40 hour week is far too much time to spend in a workplace; it does lead to slacking off, simply because most people can't maintain a high level of concentration for such long periods. And in reality we're talking about a minimum of a 45 hours a week, not 40, as most of us eat lunch at at our keyboards instead of leaving the office and taking the mandated break. This 40 hour work week minimum seems to be mostly an American tradition (misfortune?) too. Britain's typically have 35 or 37.5 hour weeks, often including lunch. I expect other European countries have similar or even shorter work weeks.
We should also not discount the effect long commutes have on our performance, either. I recently swapped a two hour daily round-trip commute for a 10 minute one and feel so much more capable each morning and much less dead at the end of the day.
I'm also unhappy about the insanity of the two weeks of vacation a year that most of us get starting new jobs, that just isn't enough to relax and recuperate, especially as it tends to be spread over a year and not taken as a single chunk. We should be aiming for a minimum of 4 weeks to start.
So to answer the original question - not a minute more and leave your work behind at the end of the day. Tell your employer that time spent outside of work with family and friends (and actually living life) will ultimately improve performance and productivity in work.
I completly agree. I've worked in IT as a contractor or full time employee in one way or another since 1997, and had my own business since 1992 prior. I have not stayed in one job longer than 3.5 years. Most have been 18-24 months. I took the training I needed, learned the new job skills, and got a few certifications the company paid for. At some point, when I felt either I was not going to get a "fair market value" raise, I'd put out resume's, take 1-2 weeks off, and interview everywhere I could, and accept an offer somewhere with both a massive pay raise and new training opportunities. Usually by this point I'd still have 3-5 weeks vacation and comp time pent up, and I'd blow that while working on addsitional certifications. In 2 cases I convinced the employer to "lay me off" instead of another poor sap, and saved a buddy's job by putting my own head on the block. In both of those cases I got severance pay added on top of my unused vacation.
I went from making less than $20K anually in 1995 trying to run a startup web publishing company, to 2000 where I was making 30K as a field technician and had about $8K in training budget access. By 2002 I was MS certified and took a job in IT analysys and helped a large firm rework their bench service and sales policy and develop a revenue model based on services making well over 40K. In 2005 I left them and joined a BVC working in DR. I quickly moved up the ladder there taking 3 promotions and leaving making over 60K, and received a massive amount of Linux/Unix training and DR planning experience in the process, and was exposed to hundreds of unique network systems in enterprise companies. In 2007 I worked for a regional reseller as a presales engineer working mostly on government bids in VoIP technology and major network systems, and learned Cisco networking as well as several other enterprise class systems and took in over 75K in just under a year. Now, I'm a contractor for a major firm in the state working in IT analytics and system architecture where we have near a dozen mainframes and about other 3,000 servers and should pull in close to 120K this year including my overtime pay, and I'm lined up to become a full time part of their group and within another year I should be on the management side of the systems architecture group and cross the 150K mark.
At this point, I'm well into my 30s, and feel I'm nearing the top of the food chain without expanding into the executive IT market. The particular firm I'm with if offering a pension plan and a lot of nice benefits, and I have lots of systems I can get experience on, and my fingers on a nearly $100m IT budget. I experience new challenges daily, and the pace the company deploys systems at is nearly frightening. I have a dozen directions my career can go in, and many of thel lead into the mid six figures, and if I play my cards right, with my vast experience and ability to manage teams and projects, I have a good shot at making the leap into the executive arena, so I'm starting night classes and working on a business degree to supplement my IT degree and numerous certifications.
If I had stayed with one of the original firms I was with (I still know some people there), I;d say I'd have a good job and a good life, but I'd be lucky to be taking in more than 60K, and that only if I was one of the top managers. Work tyour way in from the bottom, basic system services for a small retailer, move on to larger fish and consulting firms. Get into pre-sales and buff up your speaking and presentation skills, learn EVERYTHING about any system you come across. When you're coming up on your anual reviews and expecting a raise, ver WELL AWARE of what your market value is, and if possible, have an offer in your pocket to throw back at them if the raise/promotion is not at your value level. Do not let the fact that you grew up somewhere keep you from moving to a good job market area, and don't be afraid to take a job working with systems you don't know how to operate if there's training involved. Do not settle for a job that
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
We know. But the EU doesn't hire Americans.
And every time we try to make the US a livable place like Europe has become, inbred morons (aka Libertarians) start shouting "commie!" Just look at the hassle we're having trying to set up a relatively simple health insurance reform to be something akin to what Japan has (I live in Japan--it works!).
Basically, the super-wealthy here have convinced the lower-middle class that they're on the same side, and that what is good for the new nobility is good for Joe the Plumber. This isn't too hard, because Joe the Plumber is a moron.
Europe and Japan are run by the middle class. It's better that way.
Why do you say that? Americans would be welcome in the work environments I'm used to. If you're competent enough and not an antisocial prick, you'll be welcome here, as I was in the US a few years ago.
"So with that I finally got the F$#@ Work epiffany and haven't worked more than a couple 60 hour weeks since, and can count the number of weekend days I've worked in the last 6 years on one hand."
Somewhere, this is the subject of a dark European satire of life in America.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
You sound like the perfect employee that corporations love: willing to work really hard, but not interested in money.
you are doing exactly what most corporations do, which is care about the bottom line and only the bottom line at the expense of everything else.
My time is valuable to me. I choose to sell some of that time to the highest bidder. What's the problem? Why would I sell my time to a low-ball bidder when someone else is willing to pay more for my services?
If I didn't need money for housing, food, etc., I wouldn't go to work at all. I have far more interesting things I could be doing with my time than working on some boring BS for a corporation. When I figure out how to make more money doing those things than my regular job nets me, I'll quit.
What about building something you can be proud of?
WTF? What corporate job are you ever going to have where you can build something to be "proud" of? Sorry, but most of us don't work at NASA, or on some great science project like the LHC, discovering the mysteries of the universe. Instead, we do much more boring and useless things, so the only yardstick to measure by is money.
What about earning the respect of your peers?
WTF? Who cares? Besides, my peers don't care about these employers either. All my friends from my last job were laid off the same day I was. I'm sure none of them are regretting spending more time at work.
What about responsibility?
What about it? What about the responsibility of an employer to its employees? If they're not going to live up to that, then we have no responsibility back towards them. The only responsibility I have is to show up every day and do my duties for 8 hours, in exchange for a paycheck. This doesn't mean I'm going to completely slack off during that 8 hours, but I'm not going to put in heroic effort, or stay 12 hours either.
Ever tried enjoying what you do and taking satisfaction from a job well done?
I was cured of that naivety long ago. I get satisfaction from doing interesting personal projects at home, not from anything I do at work.
Don't get me wrong, if you think you deserve more you should be able to negotiate more but who do you think gets the promotions and raises?
You don't get it: there ARE no raises, dumbass! The only raises given out are bare-minimum, "cost of living" raises, like 2-3%, IF you're lucky. Usually, instead you just get a pat on the back and "sorry, but there's no money in the budget this year for raises." (And this is told to the entire team, not just you.) But switching jobs can easily get you a 15-30% raise immediately.
Go ahead, keep on never going the extra mile and doing only the bare minimum. Then stop and try to guess why *you* need to job-hop every 2-3 years to get a raise, newbie.
If you think that the vast majority of workers who spend 20 years at a single company are making top dollar, then you're a complete idiot. Keep on spending all your waking hours at work and being a complete tool, while your wife bones other men and eventually leaves you. It happened to tons of people at Intel while I was working there.