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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."
Oooo, an opportunity to whine! I'll start.
I don't mind working in the middle of the night if nagios wakes me up because something went wrong. Sure beats having to deal with it first thing in the morning. But what ticks me off is when I roll into work 30 minutes "late" the next day and it's like "Oh look, weave is rolling in late again."
But the big scam is comp time. Work after hours? Gotta take comp time. But then there's never an opportunity to use it, and if you do manage to use comp time, you don't get a chance to use all of your vacation time, and at the end of the year you lose unused vacation time. If you insist and take all of your comp time and vacation time, people are whining that you're always on leave and never around and then when projects don't get done, you get dinged on your performance eval.
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?
I make my time back by slacking off at least 75% of my time at work.
The key is to *look* busy... and leave the cursor on the minimize icon.
It is quite easy to define 'work' for employees in any field in 2009. If management don't want perform the task themselves and someone e, then it's work.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
I informed my boss that my personal life involves me choking people and applying pressure to joints, and clarify that if my work life enters my personal life, then my personal life will enter my work life. Haven't had a problem since. You can't just let people walk all over you just because they have the title of "boss".
Employers are always willing to make a push and demand you come in weekends or work late. But when slow times come around, do you get free time off? No, you do not. In fact, do you get anything at all for putting in the extra effort, besides the dubious benefit of retaining your job? No, you do not. So any at all is unacceptable, because there's no quid for that quo.
The only solution is to find another job. It may not be right. It may not be fair. That IS how it is.
Not how it is for me. Fortunately, I'm not a pussy who will walked all over. It's all fun and games until I fuck you over with extortion and blackmail. 1 primary goal of mine in any job is to infect my superior with a nice trojan. I call it "Job insurance". Any and all dirt i can get on them I will proceed to use in the event of a a legitamate excuse about family and health. I've ruined a couple of marriages this way.
No, it isn't. Retraining and hiring new people is expensive- they really do need you more than you need them. Just work your 40 and leave. They aren't going to fire you, they'll just bitch. If this is a problem across the company, organize. If your entire team refuses as a group, then they're completely up shit creek.
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.
In what I consider my best career move, more than fifteen years ago I resigned as an employee, and I've worked as a contract IT consultant ever since. Really, made not much of a difference in the kind of work I do, except that I now get paid hourly, rather than on a salary.
Funny how once you start getting paid by the hour, all the demands to work 40+ hours a week disappear all by themselves. When I was an employee, and worked together with consultants, the difference in how we were treated, even though, for all practical matters, we did the same kind of a job -- the difference was quite an eye opener.
But rather than bitch and whine about the raw deal I was supposedly getting, I figured, well, if that's where the wind is blowing, I'll just come along for a ride. So I became a consultant. I do not remember the last time I had to work +40 hours a week. Must've been well over ten years ago. Although I still get the same calls that wake me up in the middle of the night, I now keep track of my time, and make sure that, at the end of the week, I put in, more or less, the same 40 hours.
It's nice having my life back.
For me, the choice is simple, I'll do what it takes to get the job done so long as management's expectations and goals assume a 40 hour week. I'll work after my 40 hours if to help out as needs so long as their expection and goal hits that mark. If they every give me grief about being a few minutes late due to traffic, etc... but don't pay me for the 20-30 minutes I worked over the day before, we'll have a problem and I'll never work another second over 5o'clock ever again.
Aside from that, they know the law and if they want something done bad enough to tap over 40 hours, they can pay time and a half, or decide that it can wait until tomorrow.
What I cannot imagine is how an employer can reasonably expect someone to work extra without pay except as part of a "lets keep it friendly and I might need you a little late every now and again and you'll want to ditch out a little early now and again and lets not make a federal case over it" mentality. If you had to contract out work to a plumber, per-se you'd instantly assume they would get paid hourly... period. What I understand even less is geeks who work insane hours knowing their company probably considers them at best, a necessary evil, full well knowing that it is the (legal) responsibility of the employer to either fund enough positions to get the hours of service they feel they need to cover, or fully expect to pay when they use the workers post 40 hour free-time.
I feel that if you are setting the employer's expectation that a technician (or whatever) is willing to work 60 hours' for 40's pay, you're harming all the technicans who do want to pursue outside interests on their own time, and when the day comes that you're ready to scale back to 40... you could have painted yourself into a corner.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
... How many Post-It Notes can I steal before I'm fired?
One? A pack? A crate?
Working overtime and not being paid is the equivalent of the company stealing your time.
Now, I'm a reasonable guy. I'll go home half an our late and not put in for overtime / TOIL. But you better believe that I'm taking some Post-Its with me.
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
When I worked at a large studio in west LA, the VP, a recently retired Army Colonel, asked how long a project would take a group of programmers. He was given an estimate, but cut it in half, saying that people always lied about how long it would take. The project took months, and came in one week late. The entire group was fired. (They found out about it accidently when someone saw the termination notice for a friend and went and asked why they were all being terminated).
When I had the start of a similar thing with my staff, I had a meeting with him in which I pointed out the studio could be sued. He said he didn't care, the legal department was down the hall and would handle it. I left shortly after, having a standing offer at another company. In today's economy, some people may not have that option.
Maybe "that's just the way it is" where YOU work. I've had my boss' boss standing in my door tapping his watch at 5 minutes after. "It's Friday. What the Hell are you still doing here?"
Of course, that can burn the other way. There have been several occasions when shit just plain needed to get done and it didn't because my boss did the end-of-day "road runner". Sure, he takes the heat for those situations but I'd much rather spend 15-20 minutes fixing something after hours than have to spend an hour or two cleaning up the mess the next morning. It feels unprofessional to leave a simple job incomplete just to avoid working a few extra minutes.
Hate to break this to you little girl, but especially in the textile industry during this new Industrial Age, this is just the way it is. My boss, like many others, seems to think that by being my employer, he dictates what I work, where I live, what I eat, who I can associate with... even if that means I neglect my family and health. In fact, I lost an arm in one of the factory machines a few years ago - didn't see me trying to fight the system, because I know how hard it is. Don't like it? Leave and don't come back.
The laws in place to protect against such things are way too mild and useless. Someone can fire you for being maimed in their own machinery or assaulted by their own managers... you can even get fired for refusing to have sex with your manager... and then get fired for getting pregnant if you do! Sure it isn't legal, but the trouble you have to go through to fight it, then what you get in return for doing so is horribly skewed.
The only solution, my dear child worker, is to find another job. Don't bother forming a union with others - strikes have never worked and never will. Don't bother protesting, or trying to raise awareness by getting your story out. Don't try the courts - they are just a horrific waste of time stacked against you. And especially don't bother voting - except with your feet to another employer. What? You can't leave because nobody will hire a child who has already run away from a factory? You can't leave because you don't have the money to go looking for another job because you're employed 17 hours a day just to eat? Well child, the best you can do is be resigned to your life of virtual slavery, complaining to yourself that the system just doesn't work for you. It may not be right. It may not be fair. That IS how it is.
I'm a software developer on a federal contract. My hours are _capped_ at 80hrs/2wks.
If I have to stay late early in the pay period, I have to leave early later in the pay period. Working extra hours requires advance approval and enough paperwork that it is almost never done. My contracting company faces penalties if they let/force us to work "off the clock". I have been told that this is to prevent preferential treatment in future contract bids (it would not be fair if a company had a reputation for working more than they bill), but I don't know if that's the actual reason. I have also heard that it is because we are at a client site, and cannot work unless government people are there to babysit us, and they rarely work extra hours. Either way, I have a lot more free time, and better pay, compared to when I was in dot-coms.
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.
I pretty much aim for about 40 hours. I'll do maybe closer to 50 during busy times. Anything past that, I expect them to make it up to me somehow -- and they usually do just fine about that. The management know that if we are working much longer hours, it means something is probably wrong, and they regard it as evidence that they need to fix the schedule. Sometimes, they really do ask for more work, but at least so far, comp time has been real and has actually worked out pretty well. I would not stay someplace that expected me to do 50+ hours regularly; that would indicate to me that they didn't understand basic facts about engineer capabilities. So I work a reasonable amount, put in a bit of extra time when it seems like it'll make a big difference, and sometimes slack a bit when things are slower and/or I'm a bit burned out. We make deadlines, the code's decent, and everybody's happy.
I've seen people whose managers wanted a lot more than that, and I've also seen people leave and go to other jobs, and I think that's pretty closely related. It is not healthy to try to work 60-hour weeks all the time, and since it's bad for developers, it ends up being bad for companies -- it produces worse code.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Let me get my Tony Robbins on and say: You have the power to make it how you want it -- your employment is a business deal between you and your employer. And you don't have to be a slave, make it better for yourself, because no one else can do it quite like you, and no one else will do it for you, but you.
I'm hired as a "web developer" by title, and last November, my team lost our sysadmin (he quit -- well actually got a job that paid twice as much or so he claimed). We work with production systems which must serve our customers 24/7, so that guy played a pretty critical role in our department. The company decided to not hire another one, and use a consultant. Seeing I was the only guy on the team who had experience with both production systems and linux, I became the de facto guy to look after the systems. That meant carrying a pager and being called on to work on systems at their beck and call, not to mention I'm still around available as a developer. In other words: I have written enough crappy code that half my life is dedicated to maintaining it, and that world doesn't stop spinning. (that and I work for a smaller company so, having tasks bleed is part for a course)
My job description didn't include anything about carrying a pager sending me dreaded Nagios messages in the middle of the night, nor did I intend for it to... When I had started the job 2.5 years before I made sure to critically evaluate what the other developers on the team had to say about their hours, and made it clear with my boss what my role would be. At first, I was pretty steamed, my hire letter specifically said that I "could schedule no appointment to discuss compensation", and I was expected to do it. I felt punished for competence: You are able to do this, so you must do this as well -- without recompense.
But I turned it around. I started saving extra money to sock away for a rainy day -- specifically to save up to the point where I could tell my boss with authority: to make a deal or I have to hit the road. You can do the same thing: save money, or find another job offer.
Then I broke my contract, asked directly for a raise, and said that my job description had gone severely out of bounds from where it started and that I needed to be justly compensated for it and would like to have my job title, job description and financial compensation adjusted to match. It took 3 months for the company to come back to me. I had to reiterate this to my boss 3 times as well, once a month I did. I had formulated my plans for negotiating, but, I had no chance to negotiate. They came back to me and said "congratulations you got the biggest raise, percent wise in company history! but our HR consulting firm shows that web developers don't make a lot of money..." hand shake, end of story -- I wasn't satisfied.
I went home, did my homework, compared what the HR consulting firm had to say with what the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ( www.bls.gov ) had to say compared, and compared my roles with what they had listed (and stats work the same way they always do: I have my biases and clearly I saw that I was worth more than they said!). I went back to my boss the next morning and told him straight up: "Your HR consulting firm, and my HR consulting firm, don't match up... The thing is: I do actually want my job, and I do want to help and I want the deal to be good for both parties. I think I can offer you a better deal as a consultant". Maybe you can't afford to do that, but, I am a single guy and I would've wanted to.
There was no way they wanted that, I had proved my worth, AND I had shown that I put a value on myself and my time. They wanted to have me as a regular salaried employee -- I can only guess their reasons, but I'm sure it has to do with being ready and able to take on new tasks instead of getting a bill for everything they ask you to do [however a power negotiating tool, no?].
So in short: I got what I wanted, more money and now I flex my time and my place at my job (what he couldn'
I find it funny that the same group of people that encourages everyone to donate their time and labor for free has such a hard problem giving a couple extra hours to the company that is actually paying them.
Come work in the EU: we understand what you say, pay overtime and have a acceptable climate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
The U.S. is neither genuine socialist nor fascist, but a perverted development of what USED to be rampant free market. In both socialism and fascism, the state controls/directs the engine of production, either cooperatively (fascism) or by seizing it (socialism). In the U.S., the engine of production has run wild and seized control of the state, mostly through rampant corruption. To the extent the U.S. flirts with socialism, it is a distorted, perverted kind of socialism. In the real thing, the state operates with the welfare of the people at heart. In the U.S. form, the state has only the welfare of special interests at heart: narrow constituency blocks, filthy rich operators who have the goods on the pols and their appointees, and the like. Simply put, the hard working middle class is robbed to support an essentially valueless, parasitic bottom layer and top layer. All the real people get is a kick in the ass by a fat, smug, self satisfied system. And there is a similar perversion of the real thing when the U.S. flirts with fascism.
The U.S. is an inbred, self perpetuating corruptocracy, plain and simple. Uncontrolled free markets cannot exist stably. This is what they degenerate into.