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The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek

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Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek

#111

Post by gwbas1c »

makecheck wrote: post #20

One red flag is this: does a company zealously track every hour of vacation time but not even give you a place to log overtime? These two things should be treated with equal importance because they are fundamentally the same measurement. If they expect you to take precisely 2 weeks of vacation a year then be sure to reward them by doing precisely 8 hours of work each day. If they have leniency in vacation, reward the…

I nearly lost it once when an employer asked me to start deducting vacation time for some appointments. My answer was a shouted, "No, I work late for you and you call me up on the weekends and make me spend half of my day looking at phony database problems. If I have to deduct time for an appointment I will find another job."

The topic was never brought up again.

Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek

#112

Post by gwbas1c »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #76
ryandrake wrote: post #55

The "paths to a saner week" seem pretty simplistic and unrealistic. Want fewer hours? Work fewer hours! Wow, you don't say?! That simple, huh? The quote from the article is "you always have the option of unilaterally normalizing your hours." Oh reeeeally? Don't like your commute? Don't commute so much. Just snap your fingers and afford to live closer to work! Got it. Want a shorter work week? Just "negotiate" (word m…

If your employer expects constant overtime from you, start looking. When you have an offer from a sane place in hand, quit your current job. On the way out, tell them why . It might help the others who are still there. In a world that complains about a shortage of programmers, you have more leverage than you may think.

No, tell them that constant overtime is a problem now, and that it needs to be rectified soon.

If the problem isn't rectified, keep informing your employer that you want to work normal and sane work hours. Escalate to your boss's boss, HR, ect.

You're free to look for another job, but do that because you want another job, not because there's a short-term problem in your current job.

Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek

#113

Post by happychappy »

Veen wrote: post #106
happychappy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wonders of missing context :) Its not mission critical or life-threatening. I know this, my team knows this, but someone up in the food chain is going to want blood for any serious outage. I'm perfectly happy to shed blood for my team and take the crap, but I need something. Even if its a text back: "Dangling on mountain. Will check email on Monday" - then I can tell my higher-ups it won't be fixed till Monday, t…

I think this attitude is the problem. If you pay me for 40 hours of work, I owe you 40 hours of work. That is all. If you want me to be on call, pay me to be on call. If my code blows up, I don't owe you 45 hours of work for 40 hours of pay. If my code blows up, it's because you haven't managed testing and quality assurance properly. I shouldn't be able to get shitty code into production — that's why you're the manag…

"I shouldn't be able to get shitty code into production"

Seriously? My job is to watch over your shoulder and double-check everything you do?

No, there's more to life than this.

Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek

#114

Post by dasmoth »

Veen wrote: post #106
happychappy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wonders of missing context :) Its not mission critical or life-threatening. I know this, my team knows this, but someone up in the food chain is going to want blood for any serious outage. I'm perfectly happy to shed blood for my team and take the crap, but I need something. Even if its a text back: "Dangling on mountain. Will check email on Monday" - then I can tell my higher-ups it won't be fixed till Monday, t…

I think this attitude is the problem. If you pay me for 40 hours of work, I owe you 40 hours of work. That is all. If you want me to be on call, pay me to be on call. If my code blows up, I don't owe you 45 hours of work for 40 hours of pay. If my code blows up, it's because you haven't managed testing and quality assurance properly. I shouldn't be able to get shitty code into production — that's why you're the manag…

Some of us would rather take some responsibility for our code than be treated as "peons".

Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek

#115

Post by happychappy »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #97
happychappy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wonders of missing context :) Its not mission critical or life-threatening. I know this, my team knows this, but someone up in the food chain is going to want blood for any serious outage. I'm perfectly happy to shed blood for my team and take the crap, but I need something. Even if its a text back: "Dangling on mountain. Will check email on Monday" - then I can tell my higher-ups it won't be fixed till Monday, t…

I am all for flexibility -- but I think the quid-quo-pro here is that the phone is only for legitimate problems. Not for example: "Oh the customer has decided that the feature we thought we implemented wasn't what he wanted. Can we have this weeks' requirement met by Monday?"

Honestly, I'm talking about problems that I'm sure are actually affecting the core business. Anything trivial I'll deflect long before I talk to an engineer

This is all something of a moot point. Looking back through my diary, I've only ever had to call our IT support out of hours, never one of my own engineers. Someone on my team has always independently began to act on whatever alert has been raised.

Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek

#116

Post by happychappy »

CodeMage wrote: post #98
happychappy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wonders of missing context :) Its not mission critical or life-threatening. I know this, my team knows this, but someone up in the food chain is going to want blood for any serious outage. I'm perfectly happy to shed blood for my team and take the crap, but I need something. Even if its a text back: "Dangling on mountain. Will check email on Monday" - then I can tell my higher-ups it won't be fixed till Monday, t…

I think @grecy was pretty clear, but FWIW, here's my interpretation: the system is either important enough to disturb employees after hours or it isn't. If it is, you need to define and implement a support protocol: on-call rotations, procedures, etc. If it isn't important enough to organize support for it, then it isn't important enough and you should not expect anyone to justify being off work and off duty.

Okay, I see.

I will talk to my team on Monday and ask their opinion.

For the record, I don't agree that life is as black and white as the first sentence. There are plenty of symptoms which "could" be serious issues, but after a phone call I know can be safely ignored.

Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek

#117

Post by AnimalMuppet »

gwbas1c wrote: post #112
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your employer expects constant overtime from you, start looking. When you have an offer from a sane place in hand, quit your current job. On the way out, tell them why . It might help the others who are still there. In a world that complains about a shortage of programmers, you have more leverage than you may think.

No, tell them that constant overtime is a problem now, and that it needs to be rectified soon. If the problem isn't rectified, keep informing your employer that you want to work normal and sane work hours. Escalate to your boss's boss, HR, ect. You're free to look for another job, but do that because you want another job, not because there's a short-term problem in your current job.

If you have a reasonable basis for assuming that the problem will in fact be short term, sure. If the management is insane, and isn't going to recover sanity soon, then you're likely to just get fired as a complainer. That leaves you no income while you're looking for a job, which can be uncomfortable.

Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek

#118

Post by kdamken »

patrickdavey wrote: post #5

I went to a talk once on leadership. One of the suggestions was to get your "go to hell kit" ready. That is, get enough money in the bank (whatever that means for you) so that you can walk away if things cross your personal lines, be they moral / work-life balance, whatever. It's a good thing if there's pressure to work silly hours. In my first job (recent grad) before I left the job, I'd been working 5 weekends stra…

It's also known as "fuck you money", and there's a really good scene with John Goodman in The Gambler about it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI

So many people, especially in tech, work jobs that pay really, really, really well compared to most people and piss it away on stupid shit. You can choose to save a lot of that money instead and still have a very good and fulfilling life.

Eventually, when you have enough savings/investments to cover you for a few years, your life changes. You don't have to worry so much if people are getting laid off, or if your job starts demanding unreasonable things.

Here's the article that brought me to that video, and goes more in depth about the concept. I highly recommend it - http://jlcollinsnh.com/2011/06/06/why-you-need-f-you-money/

Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek

#119

Post by ska »

ryandrake wrote: post #55

The "paths to a saner week" seem pretty simplistic and unrealistic. Want fewer hours? Work fewer hours! Wow, you don't say?! That simple, huh? The quote from the article is "you always have the option of unilaterally normalizing your hours." Oh reeeeally? Don't like your commute? Don't commute so much. Just snap your fingers and afford to live closer to work! Got it. Want a shorter work week? Just "negotiate" (word m…

You can certainly chose to move closer to work, if commute time is important to you. You'll probably trade off something else against it.

Similarly, you can trade off hours expectations.

And yes, you, and everyone have the option of unilaterally normalizing your hours. You may not like the results (or you may love them) but you absolutely have the option.

Similarly, you - yes you - have the option of (re) opening negotiations with your employer. One possible outcome is always that you part ways, of course.

Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek

#120

Post by kdamken »

dx034 wrote: post #31
antirez wrote: post #13

I don't know what's the perfect amount of work every week, but I'm sure anything > 40h is wrong, and you should add commute time if more than 30min/day, otherwise it's a fake figure. In 36-40h/week it's possible to do a lot of things. If you can't often is not because of the time, but because the same people wanting you to work more vaporize your time with meetings, conference calls, emails, phone calls, at a rate th…

I wouldn't necessarily draw the line there. It always depends on your situation. If you don't have a family, working 7.30am-5.30pm (my approx working hours) 5 days per week still allows you to have enough time to spend with friends and for side projects. If your really dedicated to your project and have no family waiting at home, why should you always leave after 8 hours? Sitting in front of the TV at home isn't nece…

I hope you negotiated an appropriate salary for the extra 25% a week you're apparently working as opposed to the standard 40 hours a week.

There are jobs with flexibility that don't require that amount of time.

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