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The Overtime Buck Stops Here
Ant (and others) sent in a link to this Salon story that talks about grueling overtime hours in Silicon Valley and how the traditional tech-haus 80 hour work week may conflict with assorted labor laws, especially a new bill that made its way through the California Legislature late last week. A more recent Wired piece claims California Governor Grey Davis is expected to sign the legislation into law later this week, and has a link to the full text of the bill. Will this mean fewer high-tech start-ups in California and more in places like Virginia, where there are hardly any labor laws? Or will Silicon Valley people take life a little easier now, and take a few hours each week to spend some of the money they're making? Or will labor lawyers make all the money? Hard to tell.
Here in the UK, there's an anomalous overtime regulation which is exploited by various hospitals. Y'see, doctors are paid overtime for being "on call", i.e. present in the hospital and available to be called in event of an emergency.
"On call" was originally intended to be just that -- an emergency capability. But you tend to get junior doctors working 70-110 hour weeks in British hospitals, of which 40 hours are salaried and the rest are paid the on-call overtime rate. Why?
Because "on call" wages are paid at half the standard hourly rate. Not time-plus-half, but half. So it is in the hospital administration's financial interests to work their junior doctors until they drop (regardless of the likelihood of accidents occuring, due to the peculiar insurance situation in the UK). And there's a lot of inertia in the medical establishment (from older GPs and consultants, who should know better than to think that "on call" duty today is the same as it was thirty or forty years ago).
I saw this at first hand some years ago, when working in a variety of NHS hospitals. (The NHS is the biggest culprit -- tight budgets and no insurance whatsoever because it's so huge it can settle up in cash for just about any legal action.) Junior doctors who are zombies, falling asleep over patients and making mistakes because they've had 4 hours sleep in the past 96 hours.
Seems to me that the Californian legislation simply doesn't address the problem unless it explicitly mandates that overtime rates of pay must be higher than standard rates of pay, to give the employers a financial incentive to avoid this kind of slave-driving.
Working on the East Coast of the US is, in the case of many of by friends, the same as Silicon Valley. One in particular, who happens to work for a consulting shop, regularly puts in 60 hour weeks - salaried. He's got good pay/hr. but at 60/wk it's exhausting. You have to take the time to rejuvinate, relax, cater to personal interests outside work, etc.
My employer takes a pretty unconventional approach of actually discouraging OT. After 40 hours/week, you DO NOT GET PAID AT ALL for the first 5 hours. Then it's back to the standard hourly rate.
We all make the best of our 40 hours, and then go home to our families.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
[Disclaimer: My father was his union's president for 1 1/2 years and is still active. Both of my parents come from blue-collar labor families. I'm biased. *grin*]
Good idea if done right, horrible idea if not.
The principle behind unions was, and is, a good one. The execution sometimes sucks. And unfortunately, the fact that the execution sucks quite frequently in recent years gives people who really ought to know better an excuse to go screaming "Unions BAD!"
My father's a professor at a community college. He's been there for 22 years. He has ALWAYS worked his ass off for them.
Contract negotiations go beyond simple issues of "how much are we getting paid?" or "how can we make sure we don't get fired unless we do something illegal or are completely inept at our jobs?" While Dad was union president, aside from the issue of contracts that take so long to negotiate that they make the NYS budget look timely, there were several other things that needed consideration. The two specific big issues I remember were the question of domestic-partner benefits, and the issue of how to properly compensate a professor for a class that has regular and distance-learning attendees.
Especially that second issue is something that management is utterly clueless about there. Which brings me to why I think some sort of union or professional association is a damn good idea: People IN the profession know the most about how it's supposed to work. People who aren't doing the work get really silly ideas on the subject. (Like the idea that an essentially doubled class isn't going to create ANY extra work at all and should not be compensated.)
This is sort of similar to the industry-standards argument. And I know that getting programmers to agree on things and to organize is going to be like herding cats. But programmers need to remember that they're still building the cyber-infrastructure, just as surely as the people who built highways in the 1930s were building an infrastructure. Once things are in place, demand for that sort of work is likely to go down, and jobs won't be "there for the taking" anymore. They'll still be THERE, just like we still need construction workers, but the current situation's not going to last.
Once the computing boom is over (which will happen -- it may be 5 months or 50 years form now, but it WILL happen), the industry is going to be screwed if it doesn't have some guidelines in place.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
It's already more expensive to do business in the Silicon Valley than in any other place in the world, but there's a reason people still start up new businesses there. Sure, labor is expensive, as is rent. But the access to other Silicon Valley vendors has a dollar value too, as does the easy access to a huge labor pool of highly-trained workers and easy access to the venture capitalists.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Here in British Columbia the government actually passed a law extending the work day (number of hours required before the employer is obliged to pay overtime) for technology companies because of the culture of regular excessive hours.
And the politicians wonder why we have brain drain...
I think it's actually in the employer's interest to help their employees be reasonably happy, and that might include protecting them from overwork: if people change jobs, that's very expensive for employers.
Some Swiss companies seem to have found a good solution: after the cleaning crews have gone through, the lights go out and the doors get locked in the early evening.
Hmmm, I work and live in Austin as well. I would have to agree with you, if you don't like your job, move on and get a new job. Hell, they practically throw money at CS people here. I guess I will be staying in Austin, doesn't sound like fun over in Silicon Valley.
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
RTP has a totally different focus and image from Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has leading-edge entrepeneurs, while RTP has leading-edge scientists. Why does that make a difference? Well, if you're a new computer company and you want the best case designers for your new computer, you want to be in the Silicon Valley. If, on the other hand, you want the best computer scientists to design a leading-edge mathematical encryption algorithm, you may be able to get away with being in RTP.
The biggest difference is in the realm of venture capital. Note that VA Research got lots of venture capital from Silicon Valley based firms, while Red Hat's venture capital all had to come from outside the state of North Carolina. If your business plan calls for venture capital, Silicon Valley makes sense in those terms alone.
As for why I'm not in RTP -- I'm in Phoenix, Arizona! Think of it as Sandberg's Chicago re-incarnated in the desert....
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
In a technical domain, the number of hours worked may not correlate to results as much as people like. Let's face it, if you take the economist view that as rational actors, individuals maximise their income utility then it makes sense to put in overtime in expectation of an increase in the ownership value (don't ask what happens to options in a falling share market though!) For those who don't wish to place a portion of their salary at risk, a steady income to support family activities is preferred. However, one should ask the careful question of exactly what is being produced? Is it accomplishing the desired goal at a reasonable rate of progress? Spending hours peddling around in redundant debugging cycles is a waste of energy. Also human nature indicates that there is a natural plateau of performance beyond which is difficult to penetrate. Working more than 18 hours a day in a burst mode cna lead to burnout (hence the return to simplicity that some managers are advocating).
History has shown that great leaders inspire ordinary people to achieve the extraordinary. Natural people skills are just as rare (or even more so) as creative programming skills. One shortcut is the zealotry of religion or enforced groupthink (can we say mindless corporate culture here?). However, this is self-defeating as there is a limit to people suspectible to self-delusion (no flames on actual religion please, this is just a comment on the number of gullible idiots out there). In the long-term, only bottom-up grassroots activities have any chance of sustainability as successful thoughts/habits become engrained into mainstream.
Unforunately we don't have good measures of soft factors such as human creativity and coding productivity. Absolute hours worked is not always useful as quantity != quality hours. All companies can really do is create a framework and culture that encourages the results that is desired and leave it up to individual talent and capabilities (while somehow eliminating obstructive PHBs).
LL
It's a fact of life: an overstressed, tired programmer makes stupid glaring mistakes and then can't see them. Very quickly, the programmer is doing more harm than good- i.e. they're introducing more bugs than they're fixing. Working eighty hours a week is _less_ productive than working fourty, in terms of working debugged functionality.
No, I don't have a study to back me up, only about 200 years of experience sitting around the thanksgiving table all agreeing on this.
There are two problems, I think. One is the myth of the programmer as a teenager with no life who has nothing better to do with his (ever notice how the archtype programmer is always male?) time than sit and code. The other is that, as programming teams get larger, and ever increasing amount of time is spend communicating rather than programming (see Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month"). I've known of programmers who had fifty hours of meetings per week- they were already ten hours into overtime and hadn't done anything yet.
The solution is for us to not put up with that cr*p. It's easy for programmers to find new jobs (especially if you live in SanFran or Boston, where you can't hardly swing a cat without whacking three tech companies). Also, employeers need to recognize that overworking their employees is dumb.
This is not to say that occasional periods of OT are not part of the job- they are. It is the pattern of regular massive OT that is destructive and stupid.
Maybe some people have missed the boat.
In my case, the boat ran me over. I got keelhauled. I'm a system administrator for an internet startup run by complete and total morons. In my job description *LITERALLY* is 'maintainer of the entire internet.' And I make less than a McDonald's manager.
I'm working 70 hours a week. And I'm salaried. No benefits. No 401k. And I was the 4th person within the company. Part of it is age discrimination; it always is. But that's not the point I'm here to make.
You people whine about your 50 and 60 hour weeks. Quit whining. Now. And listen good.
System Administrators typically work more hours than you could possibly hope to comprehend. Hell, I'm pulling 70 to 80 hours at the office, and another 20 hours working from home at least. That's roughly 90 to 100 hours working a week. I consider myself lucky if I get more than 4 hours of sleep.
Now, that's not typical system administrator, no. But let's take into account being on call. You may as well not bother going to bed if you work for a startup. Things will break constantly as you work out the bugs. And they have a tendency to break at 2am.
Example. The other week, the power went out. I get a page from our CEO at freaking 2:11a. Now, were this something big, I'd have no problems. But NO. I call him up, and he's all panicking because servers are down. Because they're freaking ATX PCs without the vital BIOS option 'restore to last known state' *OR* a UPS. And they're mission critical. So I ended up freaking driving an hour out to the office, turning on two freaking machines, and just crashing at my desk because I was too tired to drive home. My boss wakes me up at 9 when he gets in and starts bitching me out because his PC's UPS didn't last through the power outage, and I installed it.
You don't want to know how many programmers I've heard whine about pressure and stress and long hours. And then they whine that they're only making $18/hr. Now, excuse me, but I'm not even making *HALF* that, and I'm pulling not only more hours, but putting up with constant abuse from everyone because they won't let me purchase necessary equipment.
I don't get overtime. I'm salaried, like I said before. They act as though I should be grateful with what I'm getting, even though I turned down MANY offers that would gleefully pay me *DOUBLE* what I'm getting there, because I thought it would be a good job, with nice people.
I was wrong. Oh well. All I can do at this point is quietly hunt for new work.
Many of us, we're afraid to demand, much less ASK for overtime. It's the environment. You should take what you get and be happy with it. Nevermind the fact that you have bills the same as everyone else. Nevermind the fact that you spend more hours slaving over their silly little projects to find out how many people have clicked the 'partners' link on your webpage than they spend doing their own work.
When I die, at this rate, it's going to be very soon and very unhappily.
-RISCy Business | Rabid System Administrator and BOFH
your company here.
shelby != ford
Yup. Many of those complaining probably never have
worked *really* hard jobs. I've worked shrimp boats, pulled oyster tongs, worked on oil platforms, played army, been a paramedic, worked
on under ground teams putting in fiber optic cable, and a few other jobs. I have *no* complaints now, working in the IT industry and being able to telecommute. Its like heaven even if I do put in 80 hour weeks at times.
akma
I work with payroll software and with the exception of a few states like CA, overtime is based on the weekly total. This was reversed a year or so ago in CA...more changes, yay.
Now concerning salaried workers, I doubt programmers/engineers will be covered:
This bill would authorize the Industrial Welfare Commission to establish exemptions, with specified limitations, from the requirement that premium pay be paid for overtime work for executive, administrative, and professional employees, provided that the employee is primarily engaged in the duties which meet the test of the exemption and the employee earns a monthly salary equivalent to no less than 2 times the state minimum wage for full-time employment.
I have to admit to being slightly amused at the idea of laws changing the workplace much, 'specially in "new media" et. al. I work in Germany, where the labor laws make things in America look downright sweatshoppish...yet it's also quite normal for people in new media to work ungodly hours and get no overtime pay (the Voice of Experience(TM)).
The point is that the law is very near totally ineffective until someone actually decides to complain, thus pretty much ensuring that the job will go bye-bye (or thus creating a rather hostile working atmosphere), regardless of the legal restrictions. So no one says anything, which in effect implies consent. In a small shop--which most new media places are, i.e. less than 30 people total--there is almost no chance of anyone sticking out their necks.
This is why I got fed up and decided to go indie. At least I have a better chance of setting my own hours...and get PAID for the time I put in. Amazing how much more fun it is.
cya
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
If you go follow the link and read the bill, this is expressly allowed. It just says that your employer can't "encourage" you to do it; you have to ask them.
Existing wage orders of the commission provide that no person employed in an administrative, executive, or professional capacity is required by those wage orders to be compensated for overtime work. Those existing wage orders define an employee as employed in an administrative, executive, or professional capacity if, among other things, the employee is engaged in work that is primarily intellectual, managerial, or creative, and which requires exercise of discretion and independent judgment and the employee receives compensation of not less than a specified amount per month.
This bill would authorize the Industrial Welfare Commission to establish exemptions, with specified limitations, from the requirement that premium pay be paid for overtime work for executive,administrative, and professional employees, provided that the employee is primarily engaged in the duties which meet the test of the exemption and the employee earns a monthly salary equivalent to no less than 2 times the state minimum wage for full-time employment.
So basically, this law will not apply to most high tech workers since we're well over the 2X minimum wages, and we're definately doing "work that is primarily intellectual, managerial, or creative." I, however, sometimes question the "discretion and independent judgment" part.
I work in New Jersey, just outside Manhattan. (In fact, I can see the Lincoln Tunnel from one of the windows in the building.) I'm a contractor. As the result of Federal law, I don't GET overtime pay.
That's right. Instead of overtime, I get straight time. So, the fact I came in this weekend and worked for six hours on Saturday means I get 46 hours at straight time. No OT pay. No time-and-a-half. None of it.
If you look at that article, it mentions the federal laws that deal with overtime. Those are the ones that gut you. I make $35,000 before taxes. That exceeds the cap for contract workers, and makes your employer exempt from having to pay you for overtime.
We don't need to change the California laws, we need to change the FEDERAL laws.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
For the reasons you mentioned, most engineers or software developers will not be subject to these overtime laws. These positions are are probably salaried and I would hope pay more than 2x minimum wage. This law is primarly aimed at hourly workers.
Remember, this is something that is not new. CA had a similar law just a couple years ago that was replaced with a more standard overtime definition (ie. anything over 40 is 1.5x the pay rate). It wasn't just anything over 8 hours a day either. If you worked for 6 days or more straight, anything over 30 hours for the entire week was overtime as long as one didn't work more than a certain amount in any one given day. This was just for hourly workers. However, CA is beginning to put a 40 hour restriction on salaried workers in some industries such as retail operations.
The other states that have similar but, not as strict laws are Nevada, Alaska, and Colorado. NV and AK start calculating OT after 8 hours and CO starts calculating it after 12 hrs for a single day. While I don't live in California, this irks me because I maintain the payroll software my company uses. Before we opened a CA location, I had to rework all the software to take advantage of this. Then the law as repealed, so my changes weren't needed. Now it looks like I'll have to fold those changes back in with the Y2K version. Thank you Dale R. Worley for the emerge functions in emacs!
The other wierd things about CA: If a person quits or is fired, they have to be paid on the spot what they are owed for the current payroll period including any vacation time. Also, the paycheck has to be drawn from an account in CA bank. I guess payback to the CA bankers lobby.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Yeah, they can be a pain. But it all comes down to money, in the end. Fortunately, some things that save the company money also save you hassles.
Overtime pay is time and a half. If you ARE regularly working 80-hour weeks, it's probably likely to be more cost-effective to hire another person and let both of you work 40 hours. Either that or you're underpaid to begin with.
Besides the expense of paying for overtime, there's also the issue of increased time on the job = increased fatigue = increased likelihood of injuries. True, this was developed for hard-labor jobs, but does anyone here REALLY want carpal tunnel syndrome?
Injuries mean workers' comp claims, health insurance costs going up, loss of time from employees -- and eventually, a company that nobody wants to work for.
It is kind of sad that good business practice actually has to be regulated
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today