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Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

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Re: Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

#181

Post by gruseom »

tptacek wrote: post #176
gruseom wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grellas writes thoughtful, balanced posts that come out of more years of experience than the median HN user has been alive, in a domain where most of us know little and are in serious need of a trusted guide. What he wrote above is a high-quality legal and historical and cultural explanation of why programmers don't get paid overtime in the US, something I've often wondered about. p.s. I'm sure it's true you didn't m…

Hm. Was it Newton? No wait! Gandhi! Nah, couldn't be. Dante? No... maybe it was something they used to say at Burroughs. Oh wait no, I know! Eleanor Roosevelt! :) Aside: I have roughly the same feeling for someone who's glazed over all Grellas' posts as I do for someone who's never watched more than a single episode of The Wire: envy. You missed out, Matt Manser! Go read his backlog. It's great stuff. Also 'anigbrowl…

Heh. What can I say? I like attributions.

Re: Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

#182

Post by gph »

gruseom wrote: post #163
mattmanser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are reading it rather more harshly than it was meant and ironically your comment has probably exacerbated that. While I wish the discourse here could be my primary focus, I can't spend hours researching each commentator, I say what I honestly feel. It is a wall of text, it's hard to really pick out what he is arguing. It is the top comment at the moment and I felt it hadn't been effectively challenged and this is…

Grellas writes thoughtful, balanced posts that come out of more years of experience than the median HN user has been alive, in a domain where most of us know little and are in serious need of a trusted guide. What he wrote above is a high-quality legal and historical and cultural explanation of why programmers don't get paid overtime in the US, something I've often wondered about. p.s. I'm sure it's true you didn't m…

You guys are taking this too far. I've not been around here that long, but I've seen much ruder posts go by without this level of chastising. It seems like the only reason this moral pile-on occurred was because he dared to challenge one of the celebrated community regulars.

I feel you guys trying to belittle someone into humbling himself before your 'special community member' has clogged up this comment section and completely detracted from the entire discussion. On top of that his argument isn't half bad, which can be justly noted by it being one of the top reply comments.

Re: Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

#183

Post by gruseom »

gph wrote: post #182
gruseom wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grellas writes thoughtful, balanced posts that come out of more years of experience than the median HN user has been alive, in a domain where most of us know little and are in serious need of a trusted guide. What he wrote above is a high-quality legal and historical and cultural explanation of why programmers don't get paid overtime in the US, something I've often wondered about. p.s. I'm sure it's true you didn't m…

You guys are taking this too far. I've not been around here that long, but I've seen much ruder posts go by without this level of chastising. It seems like the only reason this moral pile-on occurred was because he dared to challenge one of the celebrated community regulars. I feel you guys trying to belittle someone into humbling himself before your 'special community member' has clogged up this comment section and…

Fair enough about clogging. I edited my comment to tone it down.

Re: Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

#184

Post by larrys »

gph wrote: post #177
larrys wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What does this mean in practice? It means, for example, that a computer professional can be paid a salary of $100K/yr and be asked to work like a slave, all without overtime compensation. But that same professional, if paid $30K/yr, is required to be paid overtime for excess hours worked, even if that person is on salary. One case is treated as appropriate for free choice by the parties without overriding restrictio…

Yea, came here to say this. I'm not happy about it. But there isn't much I can do right now, I'm fairly confident I'd be let go if I point blank refused to do any OT. I'm unfortunately in a very expendable position at my company.

You don't have to refuse to do overtime. Just take a comparable amount of time off.

One of the things about salary vs. hourly is (at least the way I used to treat it as an employer) is that a salary employee could take off in the morning for a doctors appointment and they still received the same pay. Or for actually anything. Not so with hourly. Although a passive aggressive way to equalize the situation, it might make more sense than drawing a line in the sand. You could also try to re-negotiate your "salary" to take into account the extra work.

Re: Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

#185

Post by quatrevingts »

awolf wrote: post #45
buff-a wrote: post #22

If you lose your job you may have to pay a lot more (COBRA) for a limited time No, you'll pay the same as you were paying. Its just that before, you thought you were being paid $100,000 when in fact you were being paid $120,000, and out of that came your health insurance and the other (more-than-) half of your social security and income taxes.

You pay 10% more on COBRA than your employer was paying on your behalf. But the gist of what your saying still stands.

Plus, COBRA payments are (generally) not tax-deductible, so add another 30-40% more.

Re: Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

#186

Post by [deleted] »

neutronicus wrote: post #83
mseebach wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I agree with the point made in another comment about this not being so much about overtime, but about crap jobs. But: > the deal is an exchange of money for time It's not really, no. It's an exchange of work for time. If you're doing an exchange of time, you'll be punching in and out, and the boss worrying about your "butt in seat" productivity metric is reasonable. It doesn't necessarily follow that you should w…

There's an asymmetry here: I want to see the exchange as money for time, because my work is not valuable to me (I don't get to keep the product!), but my time is. I want an upper bound on how much of the resource that's valuable to me that the company is entitled to in exchange for their money. The employer wants to see the exchange as money for work, because they couldn't care less how the work gets done. They want…

[deleted]

Re: Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

#187

Post by gte910h »

ootachi wrote: post #147
dpritchett wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd imagine the only time you'd see an economic rationale for systematically overworking your team would be in a moon shot / burn the ships scenario, neither of which seems necessary for a service company. Perhaps if the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was a buyout in the tens of millions you'd be tempted as a part owner. Even then the front-line employees being whipped would be unlikely to get a significant pi…

Long hours are the key to profitability, as Philip Greenspun put it: "From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. A programmer probably needs to spend 25 hours per week...Thus a programmer who works 55 hours per week is twice as productive as one who works 40 hours per week.... A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks…

That only works for a short time. People do not produce good work for extended long weeks.

My business strives for a mix of long and light weeks to compensate.

Re: Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

#188

Post by forcefsck »

mseebach wrote: post #80
alan_cx wrote: post #53

I don't know much about US employment law, and what I do know, I don't like. But what I do know is this: No employer has ever, ever given me free money, and I have never expected it. There for, I have never ever given an employer free time, and never ever will. To do different is insane. It lowers one's worth since the deal is an exchange of money for time. It makes the employer think your free time is theirs to expl…

So, I agree with the point made in another comment about this not being so much about overtime, but about crap jobs. But: > the deal is an exchange of money for time It's not really, no. It's an exchange of work for time. If you're doing an exchange of time, you'll be punching in and out, and the boss worrying about your "butt in seat" productivity metric is reasonable. It doesn't necessarily follow that you should w…

It is money for time. I'm renting my skills by the hour. If my skills are poor for the job is another issue. And a lot of managers can't distinguish real work from long hours work.

Excessive overtime is the way you make a highly skilled professional useless in the long term. No time to rest, no time for recreation, no time to play and experiment with new things, no time to study more stuff. In a fast paced industry this is death in a couple of years.

Re: Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

#189

Post by phomer »

When I get paid to work I really care that the work I do is worth the money I am paid. That is, if I'm paid for 40 hours, I feel its important to give my employer 40 hours of good solid work. From time to time, I don't mind going above and beyond, things happen and sometimes it takes a significant effort to correct them, a bit of overtime is fine. But I strongly feel that any of those companies that pay people for 40 hours of work, but generally expect them to work 60 or 80 hours most weeks are abusing the relationship on their side. What they are looking for is a seriously large discount in labor costs. Unless there is some 'other' form of compensation that balances it out, then it is clearly abusive (and quickly leads to burnout, so they aren't even getting value for the hours worked).

Paul.

Re: Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

#190

Post by drcube »

BadassFractal wrote: post #31
rickmb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real world, there aren't only great jobs and crap jobs. Most jobs are just jobs. Period. You put in work, you get paid. It's not horrible, it's not always great fun either, but it's neither awesome nor crap. This is what most people do for a living. If you call that "stagnating" or "crap", you missed out half the point of the post: that the majority of people don't live to work, they work to live. They don't e…

If you live your work life, say from when you're 25 to 65, working from 9 to 5 on something that you don't really care about but you do just to pay the bills, aren't those 75,000 hours of your life you flushed down the toilet? That's almost half of your adult life, if you exclude sleep, that you throw away just so you can "enjoy" the other 8 hours a day you have. I personally have failed miserably to be happy with my…

If you live your work life, say from when you're 25 to 65, working from 9 to 5 on something that you don't really care about but you do just to pay the bills, aren't those 75,000 hours of your life you flushed down the toilet?

For most people, the alternative is to live in crippling poverty and/or starve. That 75,000 hours is the cost of survival. Do you think that the vast majority of people on earth are just ignorant of the fact that there are good jobs out there? Well thanks for alerting us! No one will ever clean a toilet again, now that you've shown us the light.

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