
Don't call me a '5:01er' (2015) - s_kilk
http://czep.net/15/dont-call-me-a-501er.html
======
closeparen
Can we stop with the implicit assumption that children are the only valid
reason to have a life outside of work?

I cook dinner, read fiction, take weekend live audio gigs, took motorcycle
class and bought one. I plan to learn to sail, get an amateur radio license,
pick up an instrument, and (money permitting) earn a private pilot rating. Oh,
and see friends who are not coworkers. And date.

When I program outside of work, it's in a domain or part of the stack I wish I
knew more about, i.e. not what I'm doing at work.

My on-call shifts are scheduled well in advance. When I'm not on call, work
stays in its timebox.

We all deserve to live full lives, not just parents.

~~~
jdmichal
I think it's just an easy fallback from an emotional perspective. It would be
a "political suicide" of sorts to argue against a parent wanting time with
their children. Not so much about a sailor wanting time with their boat, etc.

~~~
rootlocus
"political suicide" or not, I'm paid for 8h/day. What I do with my free time
is nobody's concern and I sure don't have to defend myself for respecting my
contractual obligations.

~~~
closeparen
Sure, but I'm pretty sure the problem being discussed here is specific to at-
will salary workers, who do not have specific contractual obligations and are
not paid for specific hours.

~~~
rootlocus
I'm not familiar with "at-will salary workers". How does that work? If they
don't have contractual obligations, what do they get paid for?

~~~
closeparen
Oh boy, welcome to employment in the United States.

At-will: either party may alter or terminate employment at any time for any
reason, and the other has no legal recourse. There is no contractual
specification of what you're paid for because the employer does not need to
prove anything about the relationship between actual and expected behavior to
fire you. You get paid the rate that was agreed upon for time already worked,
and then you're done. In effect, you get paid for not having been fired yet.

Salary: your compensation is per unit of time elapsed on the calendar, not at
your workstation.

These conditions describe the vast majority of professional, intellectual, and
managerial work in the United States. Working 40 hours per week, working
9am-5pm Monday-Friday, etc. are merely cultural norms, not legal standards,
and some industries (like tech and finance) have very little respect for them.

Working 40 hours per week is encoded as a legal standard for hourly workers
(via overtime pay requirements), but only below a certain wage threshold. Many
fields, including programming, are exempt from overtime requirements even when
paid hourly.

~~~
ouid
Is it reasonable to assume that you can still do alright by providing exactly
the value that you are paid for, and no more? If you can fulfill that value in
20 hours a week, then it seems like you should go home at that point.

Otherwise you're just creating an easily consolidated power vacuum above you
and contributing to the collapse of civilization.

~~~
seanp2k2
Depends on the company. Survive? Sure. Advance? There will likely be many
others competing for advancement, and longer hours will make them seem
"hungrier" than you.

~~~
ouid
That seems false. What is my incentive, as an employer, to give such an
employee a promotion or a raise? I'm not trying to get him to work harder for
_more_ pay.

~~~
falcolas
They have visibility.

"Bob was here until 7 at night fixing bugs in the code! Where was Alice?"

It won't matter that Bob didn't fix the bugs; Alice did when she came in the
next morning. It won't matter that Bob caused the issue in the first place.
Alice probably didn't even hear the above exclamation, it was an internal
dialogue in their manager's mind, so she can't even offer a rebuttal.

Bob was seen working "when it mattered". Perception trumps performance, sadly.

~~~
ouid
I meant to say that I don't see why I should give someone a raise simply as a
result of increased performance. it's my goal as an employer to extract more
value from an employee than they cost.

The only thing that would compel me to give out raises is a change in market
conditions, which can usually be detected by an employee threatening to leave
for a job which pays more.

~~~
falcolas
If you're waiting for employees to leave, you're waiting too long.

Raises, bonuses, cost of living adjustments; all are part of how you attempt
to retain talent. If you're hiring coding cogs, then no, you don't need to
give any raises. Just hire at the market rate and plan for 50% attrition every
year.

But if you want to keep your employees for more than a few years, you pay them
more than the market rate. You match the cost of living increases, you give
them performance bonuses, and you give them a minimum of 5-10% raises
annually. Bonus points if you recognize that ass-in-seat time is not a good
proxy for performance.

Do that, and they won't leave because they aren't getting paid commensurately
with their skills. Still need to give them interesting work, though.

~~~
ouid
You are making the false assumption that value is fixed for a fixed amount of
work. Programmers, and more generally engineers, do not have a fixed value for
labor. It is generally the case that it is much more efficient to have the
same engineer starting and finishing a project. This means that you as a
programmer, have negotiating power that scales with the amount of work that
you have already done. If you are not getting paid in proportion to what it
would cost to replace you at any given point of the process, then you are
getting paid well below the actual "market" rate.

This means that if you are an at will programmer, you can do less work the
closer the project gets to completion without it being a good idea to fire
you. If a small raise disproportionately discourages this behavior, then it
makes sense, but it does not count as "paying you more than the market rate".
I suspect that you receive, on average, a smaller percentage of the cost of
replacement as time goes on.

------
marcus_holmes
I manage a dev team. I don't care how many hours they work. I don't measure
when anyone comes in or when they go home.

I care about output. We don't pay people to sit at desks. We pay people to
write code. Writing code is a creative endeavour - good code can occur in the
shower as that sudden realisation strikes about how to refactor the messy
state engine.

Insisting that people sit at desks until the boss leaves is a really strong
signal of bad company culture, and probably bad code.

Because development is creative, it is affected by mental state. Worrying
about the kids or the bus timetable is counter-productive (you're not thinking
about code, you're thinking about what your colleagues will make of you
running to the bus). Good development environments minimise these worries,
allowing developers to focus on writing code.

~~~
gspetr
> I manage a dev team. I don't care how many hours they work. > I don't
> measure when anyone comes in or when they go home.

> I care about output.

I've got a personal anecdote, it's not meant as an attack on you.

Had a manager at BigCo. who claimed exactly that. That BigCo. was also the one
who won awards for being model employer.

One time he decided he really-really wanted a raise at the next review and
introduced a system of punishment where if you're late by N minutes you'll
have to do N*P (Where P is number of people in the team) tasks from the
backlog.

After work. Unpaid.

I was on vacation when this was introduced. Got into minor traffic accident
soon after I came back. Got assigned the tasks. Put in my resignation soon
after - the man could not be reasoned with.

His arguments? I broke employer's rules being late. And the unpaid overtime
part?

I asked him specifically at the interview 2 years before that if the company
had unpaid overtimes. The answer was a resolute "No".

EDIT: Formatting.

~~~
rootlocus
> One time he decided he really-really wanted a raise at the next review and
> introduced a system of punishment where if you're late by N minutes you'll
> have to do N*P (Where P is number of people in the team) tasks from the
> backlog.

I'm sorry, but I don't see how this relates to the parent. Your story portrays
a hypocritical and abusive manager. That "rule" was not enforced by the
contract, and you were not legally obliged to follow it. I would've been more
curious to see what you tried to do or say to repel it.

~~~
gspetr
What I did was try to stall to see if he would run out of steam and come to
his senses, this was on Wednesday. That day I also made the call to a team
I've interviewed with before to ask if they would still be happy to see me.
They were.

Next Monday what I said was roughly this: "We've got more important tasks than
the backlog now, let's discuss how we can fit them in later today". What I
heard next were profanities saying that I literally fucked up and I have to do
them after work.

(Mind you, this was not 1-on-1 but a team meeting, so the entire team was
present, 3 more people) Next I asked whether I would be paid for that work and
the answer, of course, surprised nobody. I asked him whether HR would share
his point of view (This is a company who cares about the image of a model
employer), to which he said that I come to work later than the hours that are
in my employment contract. (This was a guy who supposedly cared about the
output, not asses in chairs and he was OK with people showing up later) I grew
tired of this attitude and politely told him that I already made arrangements
for my next job and I quit.

Transferring my work to the team was smooth and I left in good spirits.

------
zebraflask
At my company, leaving at a reasonable time is encouraged, if not insisted
upon. Facilities locks down the building and parking lots in the early evening
and doesn't like people staying late.

Practically speaking, there's no way to put in >8 solid hours of programming
or engineering work, day after day. Like a lot of people, I have a handful of
solid programming hours each day before mental fatigue sets in. The rest of
day is spent handling the related work - planning, emails, background reading,
etc. More than 8 hours would be an absolute waste of time.

~~~
hermitdev
Totally agree. Firm I used to work for, for my first 2 years, 7 to 7 was
required M-F, and 8 hours on Saturday with 4 work from home on Sunday. It was
utter bullshit. We didn't even have that much work to do at the time. A lot of
it was inventing work. It was all about facetime to management. Result was
burnout and a lot of turnover. Once i was the only one left, i basically said
fuck it. Especially, as a team of 1, I was also on call 24/7\. Going from 7 to
7 to a 9 to 5 day increased my productivity, happiness and income.

~~~
taneq
> Once i was the only one left, i basically said fuck it.

I'm amazed it took you that long.

> Going from 7 to 7 to a 9 to 5 day increased my productivity, happiness and
> income.

Wait what, 'fuck it' meant 'I'm cutting back to a 40-hour work week', not 'I'm
walking away and not coming back except on a contract rate 10x what I'm
currently being paid'?

------
davidgerard
Our dev instances all live on AWS. We don't keep them up 24/7 - instead, we
save about £2k/mo by running them only from 08:00-18:00 UTC. (Probably we'll
move that an hour in summer.) At six o'clock, your dev instance goes _off_.
This saves me shouting "GO HOME!" a lot ...

~~~
jon-wood
That's a fantastic way or working, more companies should do it!

------
chrisbennet
C'mon, does't your company put a little extra in your paycheck once in a while
when you need it?

"Hi boss, it's crunch time at home with the new kid on the way. I'm gonna have
to ask you to put some more money in my check this month, you know, just until
she ships."

(That is sarcasm for the impaired.)

~~~
gravypod
You don't get bonuses or raises when you really need it?

~~~
dexwiz
No, and they should not. Giving bonuses or raises to employees during personal
rough times is a slippery slope. It eventually leads to mentality like, "Well
of course Tom makes 5k more, he has a family to support." Its easy to turn
this around, and for employers withhold pay or advancement, because the the
employee is perceived to not need it.

~~~
imesh
And as an employee you should do the same with your time.

------
a-saleh
Fortunately, we don't have at-will employment over here, and I have been quite
up-front to my manager that in this team I would be leaving at 5:01, because I
have a little daughter at home. And it was fine, because we already had a
senior guy, working from his house, from 7:01 to 15:01 :-) And it is fine if
somebody leaves early because of i.e. board-game night, or pub-crawl, unless
our servers are on fire or you already have a scheduled meeting :)

To be honest I kind-of pride myself on being a 9 to 5 programmer. I remember
reading about some studies that consistent work 6 hours a day is more
productive than 12 hours a day after ~3 months.

Then I saw this with my own eyes, where I worked with a friend on a project,
and I always worked every day between 8 00 and 12 00 and he tried to crunch
from like 1 pm to 1 am ... my code was less buggy, more stable and by a week
we actually had ~same ammount of working lines written.

------
elchief
They shoot tv shows and movies in my building several days per month, starting
right at 5:01, and it ain't quiet.

We were Turing Industries for a while!

------
ourmandave
I'm a 4:58er. If I don't get out before the warehouse people I might as well
stay until 5:30 by the time the parking lot clears.

On the flip side, I'm usually in at least 20 minutes early every morning.

------
knztmz
[http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation)

------
omginternets
Ha! And here my approach has always been "leave when the work is done", with a
liberal application of "time to call it a day and clear my head".

There's a latent assumption that the author hasn't touched upon, which is that
putting in more hours yields a greater productivity. I've found the opposite
to be true (to a point).

All I can say is I don't regret my decision to freelance.

~~~
Chris2048
Also consider, If you worked until you were so tired you were no longer
productive, any outside work (personal projects etc) done after work will
suffer low productivity too.

I _want_ to save a little energy for after work, not just spend it recovering.

------
vacri
This seems like an overly-passionate response to an inconveniently tight bus
schedule.

~~~
kinos
Hello,

I logged in purely just to respond to you. Inconveniently tight is an
understatement when it comes to public transport. You're dealing with a beast
that can appear ANY time within a 30 minute radius around the "estimated"
arrival time. And if you miss it, that can be an hour out of your life.
Combining the fact that now you'll miss your transfer(s). This also ignores
all the prep time that goes into catching a bus such as packing your things,
ensuring you have the money, getting out of the office (where people don't
respect or understand the bus schedule).

I also didn't account for things such as crosswalks and rude drivers. I assume
every crosswalk will be about 10 minutes to cross, given lights and drivers
general disrespect for pedestrians.

For reference, I've gotten so angry at my local Public Bus system I started a
blog to deal with my rage issues caused by it.

