It's articles like this that perpetuate the acceptance of unpaid overtime. Bosses lap in the luxury of getting their peons to work over their contracted hours for free because it's considered to be normal in the culture of the company, any employee who leaves at 5:30 is seen to be not pulling their weight in what's essentially a very masculine trait (people comparing their hours of work to others as a gauge of how hard they work.)
Unpaid overtime is nothing to show off about, I find it quite frankly abhorrent that he's actively showing off about it
Some of that culture develops pretty early, I think. Certainly by undergrad there seems to be a culture at many engineering schools where it's a point of pride to put in lots of hours. Sort of part of the "hardcoreness" to brag about 16-hour coding binges, weeks of sleep deprivation, etc.
On the other hand, there's also a culture, possibly smaller, of doing the opposite: making it a point of pride to not put in lots of hours, while still doing top-quality work. That culture emphasizes a different kind of hardcoreness, sort of the hackerly virtuoso who can bang out an A-quality semester project in a single day of in-the-zone wizardry.
I definitely notice that among adult engineers as well, at least as far as attitudes go (not sure how much variance there is in actual hours worked). There's the person who brags about how much they work and sees 9-5ers as slackers; versus the person who sees 60-hour weeks as a kind of failure, and instead brags about the time he fixed a huge problem in 3 hours and left work in time for happy hour.
I think it's a bit different when you're a student though, when you're a student, your renumeration package in terms of money is £0 at that moment in time (or -£9000+ when you consider tuition fees) and the only compensation you will get is a piece of paper detailing the results of your efforts. So the motivation isn't money, it's more like "I have to finish this project or I won't be able to graduate"
I suppose you could argue that I'm contradicting my original point, after all those who work the hardest will get the top grade in the class is directly comparable to those who work the hardest will get the most money.
But I think it's largely subjective, if you work 12 hours in a day, what percentage of those 12 hours are productive? For me I find that I tend to burn out after a while and my productivity becomes jaded and leaves me vulnerable to making silly coding errors or not seeing the bigger picture.
I've never liked this expectation. To me a lot of overtime is a sign of bad management.
It also burns out employees a lot faster. There are times where overtime is needed(if you're on-call, or around a release occasionally) but it should always be repaid in lieu time or a bonus.
If you're putting in 60-80 hours a week standard you're probably so tired and miserable most of the time that you're not going to be performing at your peak anyhow.
Burned out employees cost a lot of money to replace and a team that is working that much overtime is almost certainly not working at their peak for even half of it. I would argue they would probably only be at their peak for the first day of the week and maybe even only part of that the rest of their time spent coasting at below peak to way below peak is not really adding value.
> It's articles like this that perpetuate the acceptance of unpaid overtime.
No it's not. Unpaid overtime is perpetrated by the incentive structure at companies where it's in the culture. The same bosses that are so happily getting their peons to work overtime for free are the giving positive performance reviews to people willing to work long hours. There's an economic incentive to working longer hours, so people who are willing to work longer hours will flourish and people who aren't will languish or find a new job where the incentive structure is better aligned with their work habits.
If you don't like companies like that, don't work for them. They'll have no shortage of other employees to choose from: most engineers coming out of college have adjusted to the notion of long work hours.
(Frankly, there's nothing wrong with this: there's a lot to cover for an engineering degree, and making it easier would do a disservice to the students.)
How is there an economic incentive for working longer hours for no reward? Is it because you might get a pay rise every 2 years for your effort? Seems a bit of a poor trade off to me
I'm not showing off, I actually often hated it. I'm sorry you took it that way.
But it is what it is, and I think so-called average people fail to understand that when they talk about how they wish they got to work a high paying job at a big company.
If you are counting the hours and bringing up the subject of unpaid overtime, then the blog post isn't really directed at you.
People get paid excellent money in big companies because they are able to get results out of all proportion to a employee that's thinking about pay-per-hour. They are think more about payback-per-project or results-per-strategy.
I would strongly disagree with the author about the following:
Frankly, looking at most people I know who want to
work for big companies but don't, these people aren't
cut out for big companies.
Having spent about three years working for a large software company that is actually horrible at software, I can firmly say the following: size does not matter. A lot of the old-school large companies moved sideways into software and don't really have the competence to deliver good projects.
Also, since when do the large companies value creativity?
I would argue that these small companies are simply at an even higher level. My last paragraph deals with that type of company. Those people, the real difference makers that can do amazing things, are often better than anyone you'd find in any big company (examples like Google are outliers). Furthermore, I restrict the statement you're quoting to people who WANT to work in big companies but don't. The people you're talking about would never want to work in a big company because it sucks so much.
I'd say big companies in general don't value creativity. That's why they can't in general make good innovative products. I talk about that in some of my other posts on innovation, disruption, etc. However, I do believe that one needs to be creative to get through all the crap and problems that one experiences at a big company. It's a different type of creativity than what is required to develop a groundbreaking new product, but it's still creativity.
I can buy the argument that there's a certain kind of creativity that can help you work around management attempts to stifle initative.
But I cant help thinking the people best suited to those roles are the people without strong creative impulses that are simly very competent at handling the work assigned to them and succeed because of rather than in spite of the officially-sanctioned structures and processes.
Yes. Let's say you have a limited amount of creative energy, which based on what we know about exhaustion of Executive Function & decision-making, is probably true.
Do you want to waste a large portion of your allotted creative juice on figuring out how to make them let you do your damn job right?
That right there is why I've sworn off jobs forever. I've had high-paying jobs ($200k/yr, 5 weeks paid vacation, & a practically unlimited expense account). But when you're wasting your precious life fighting for the right to make something that IS NOT CRAP, it's just not worth it. Life's too short to make crap.
I think it really depends on what "big company" means. The author was likely talking about big software companies that recruit the best, such as Google, Facebook or Apple. Your comment makes me think of big companies that do software badly on the side, such as banks or telecoms.
edit: I see you said software companies. Maybe I have been brainwashed by their HR materials and those companies employees aren't so special.
Even apart from banks and telecoms that mainly do other stuff, there are a whole range of companies whose businesses are largely software which don't have technically-focused cultures. SAP is sort of a canonical example. Then there's the whole shadow world of large consulting firms, outsourcing firms, defense and aerospace contractors, etc.
I have had friends who've gone to work for Yahoo & the Big Goog. They've all quit save one, who is a fun guy but one who, professionally speaking, (sadly) likes to be told what to do. The reasons: boredom, not enough freedom, being stuck using inefficient tools, politicking, and at one point my friend's boss's boss pointed at my friend in a meeting like she was a secretary and asked, "Why is she here?" -- when my friend was responsible for launching a big web property for said boss just a few weeks prior.
All big companies are pretty much the same. The trappings are different but at heart, you can't grow to a huge size and maintain a great culture… unless you do something truly radical. And free lunches and nannies -- that's not radical enough.
I understand what the author is trying to say, but I find the language very confusing. To say that, you need to be creative and intelligent to be able to deal with crap sounds correct in theory, but in practice it is the worst use of these skills. To deal with crap, you have to basically "suck it up" and swallow you pride. Thats it! Ultimately if that is a large part of what it takes to succeed at your job, then you are basically adding a lot of noise to both your career and the success of your company.
I think stats where not the strong point of the article...
A top 1% (US) athlete might make it to college, but would still have little chance of becoming a professional. A top %1 musician would probably make a lot closer to $0 than $1M.
So people on a fixed yearly amount are getting paid for a 40 hour work week, then expected to work 60 just to keep their jobs? Doesn't seem like a good deal to me...
Thats just how salary works. I've never looked at it as "You're getting paid to do N hours of work", but rather, "You're getting paid get X work done."
In the UK your employer cannot force you to work more than 48 hours a week, but written into my contract was a clause waiving that maximum. I dont think I've ever worked less than 60 hours a week. The weeks where you work 80+ hours, you just try not to think about the hourly rate...
I declined to waive my rights in this regard. The 48 hour work week is evaluated over a 17-week sliding window. I strongly believe that healthy business relationships require that everyone's selfish interests be aligned. This simply isn't the case if an employer can decide to extract extra labor out of you without extra pay.
Thats just how salary works. I've never looked at it as "You're getting paid to do N hours of work", but rather, "You're getting paid get X work done."
At my previous company, the assumption was, "You're getting paid to get X work done, and if you can finish it in 40 hours/week, then we need to keep adding to X until it takes you 60 hours/week to get it done." How is that different than "You're getting paid to do N hours of work per week", with N > 60?
That's the farcical part of it. You are getting payed to get X done. Then can you go home after you do X if you did in 30 hours? Can you just tell your boss: you tasked me with doing X, it is done. I am taking a half Thursday and Friday off?
Of course not. That will be met with a look of disbelief and shock. They will probably quickly assign your another thing Y that takes another 40 hours to complete so now you have 10 hours to complete the new 40 hour job.
Because there is no payed overtime everyone is relying bonuses. And guess what happens with bonuses? "Sorry this was a tough year so we had to reduce bonuses this year, but thanks for your great work".
What's to stop them though giving you tasks in which 40 hours would the expected amount of time it would take in a perfect world then especially in software it will tend towards 60 because of unexpected bugs conflicts, waiting on others work etc.
I don't see how this could possibly benefit the employee, I mean if the job is going to require an average of 60 hours a week fair enough but the whole signing away your rights in this regard feels like a bait and switch on the employers part. It depends I guess if they were upfront in the workload expected and set the salary to reflect that.
Certainly I understand that there are times when someone would choose to waiver the rights, a startup with interesting tech and probably equity would be a good example.
I was certainly expecting that the workload would be high going in, and I have no issues with working that much (and in fact, I work less than I was expecting to when I signed up). The bait and switch would suck and probably happens to a lot of people.
I completely agree that there are times that someone would want to waive those rights (I did). And if you don't waive them for somewhere like a startup (probably more applicable early than late stage), what does that say about commitment/expectations?
This is the kind of thing that I was trying to shed light on in this post. I think people who want to get into big companies (not saying you do) don't understand that the hours can sometimes be hell. It's a truth that people don't really like to talk about, work life balance be damned.
Did you write that clause in? Because AFAIK that waiver has to be agreed by you first before they slam it in the contract as terms and conditions of employment.
I hear what you're saying and I tend to agree. I can't help but notice a huge parallel to my days in high school marching band. The state (Texas) imposed a limit on how many hours a school band could practice that our school mostly respected. However, one of our rivals did about double the allowed max by having "optional" practices. Yeah, you guessed it. Only those that showed up to all the optional practices got to march, everyone else was stuck on the sidelines.
Granted, it worked...This school's band was always awesome due to so many extra hours and handedly beat us and everyone else in competitions. :-(
Interesting story. But I wonder about the rest of these kids' lives.
Did their putting in double the amount of time practicing affect their performance on the rest of their schoolwork? Were they more stressed out, and did that affect their health? Were their social lives adversely affected? If they were interviewed now, would they say that everything they sacrificed to win that competition was worth it?
for getting into large corporates, it's mainly a matter of fitting into a particular mold. to climb up the ladder it then comes down to people skills and politics.
the ones who don't fit the mold and want to get in definitely need to be creative (though such people may get bored very quickly at most big corporates).
Amen. Actually what I've learnt from people working in big corps (be it banking, pharma, IBM, whatever) bureaucracy and politics reign supreme. I'm absolutely sure that they don't fare any better than the most despised government bodies, actually. So much for the free-market legend.
Internal corporate politics don't contradict the ideas of free markets. It's just that there's complex signalling going on (which an outsider can't be privy to) that erects barriers to entry.
These barriers are beneficial to the individuals, but don't help the corporation - a typical Agency Problem. Same thing with government : a huge corporation with monopolistic rights, and no profit motive.
>Internal corporate politics don't contradict the ideas of free markets.
I don't follow. Are you claiming that internally most big corporations could be considering free markets?
Low barriers to entry are pretty essential to free markets. High barriers discourage competition and encourage monopolies. See Microsoft, AT&T, Google.
"Free market" is a relative term, but it would be hard to describe the internal workings of most companies that way.
When I read the GPs complaint about free markets, I took it to mean that this situation was proof that free market ideas are invalid. To counter this, I was trying to say that people themselves (through creating barriers) are deliberately undermining the free market idea.
Now I see that it can be read to imply that the US (the land of free markets) isn't really so competitive after all (hence the 'legend'). True enough.
This is a quote from a cover letter I actually sent to a company I was interested in:
"On the other hand, if your company is using unlicensed software and .NET 1.1 instead of buying the current tools or is managed so poorly that the employees have to work a lot of overtime, well - we probably wouldn’t be a good match."
Some people upvote an article not because it was good or because they agree with it, but because it is thought-provoking and conversation-starting. Which this one clearly is.
If you want to work hard, feel appreciated, and have opportunity, start or join a startup.
From my experience working at Microsoft, the author sounds clueless. Large companies will eat your soul because they like the souls of naive young developers who think they can get ahead by being smart and working hard at large companies.
"Eventually, being a top guy in the corporate world is too bureaucratic, political, and constraining. One might even argue dehumanizing. But the average person on the outside looking in wouldn't understand this."
I was wondering what kind of response this article would get. It had seemed to me that opinions that tend towards pointing out the ugly truth (or approximate this) are not really appreciated here. I suspect it's because of the general level of optimism required to be productive rather than stuck in a negative stupor. My appraisal is that the comments here are mixed but generally not appreciative of the article. What is surprising is that the submission was upvoted, and the criticisms of the opinion in the article were also upvoted.
There is something wrong about "buying" loyalty. Call me old-fashioned but the reason you want someone in the company is because they want to contribute. How can you "generate" contribution from someone who wants to "leave?" Fundamentally it is wrong, and values outlast everything.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/11/12/when-google...
Well, if that were the case, people wouldn't need to get paid at all!
Salaries track two things:
Supply: If something is unpleasant, dangerous, or illegal there will be fewer people who will do it. Construction workers, drug dealers and prostitutes can make some decent cash.
Demand: If you are awesome and your skills are in demand, companies will pay more to keep you. This is why a high-class prostitute can make quite a bit more than a street walker, despite the danger of street-walking that should limit the supply.
So yes, if working at your job is pleasant, you can pay your employees less. But if your employees are in high demand, you can't pay them that much less because the whole point of work is that you're exchanging how annoyed you are to have to be there for cash.
That's not news. Like I pointed out, supply AND demand are important. If you are 50 year-old cracked out prostitute with missing teeth, you're not in high demand. They lower the average income quite a bit.
And yeah, illegality and danger does limit the supply, but unfortunately not as much as it should. That's because these illegal jobs aren't competing with careers in computer science; they're competing with jobs at McD's. All they have to do is outpay that and the risk of getting caught, which is sadly not much.
In addition to supply/demand, from the other comment, there is another point.
A high salary means that your employer consider you to have high worth. They won't waste your time -- and they will try to keep you happy (you're a valuable resource).
Edit: I should add a corollary -- for job satisfaction, stay away from situations with too little money and hard competition for few jobs. (The academic world and bureaucracies comes to mind.) It is like too many rats in a too small cage...
Another question, about 60-80 hours work weeks:
I've always read/heard that 40 hours was a work "optimum". If you do more/less hours, the productivity over time will be less. Are high paid people generally able to work 60-80 hours a week over years and be productive?
(I wouldn't know -- I'm not certain that 40-hour rule fits me personally.)
I am a well-compensated developer at a Fortune 500 company, who has to be meticulous about limiting his unpaid overtime, and I felt condescended to by this post. Who is this guy!?
What the average person should understand about high paying jobs is: it's bullshit. One guy gets paid half what another guy gets for doing the same job. You can analyze it any way you want, you can compare markets and the critical nature of the job crossed with the experience and yadda yadda. It's bullshit.
Many of us have worked with people making tons of money and they just don't seem to have a clue... That's because they're good at bullshitting. The pointy haired boss, the brainless engineer, or my favorite, the government employee who gets mid-6 figures for re-filing someone else's paperwork.
What the average person doesn't understand is they can easily get the high paying job if they can bullshit well enough. And we all suffer because people like this keep getting hired and we have to deal with their bullshit. Why some companies have great hiring practices and others are a joke, and they pay virtually the same, I have no idea. But if you can bullshit, there's a high-paying job waiting for you somewhere.
Great article, most if this rings very true to my experience in one of the large old skool web businesses. It's a shame the rest of these comments choose to moan, IMO your just telling it like it is, not making a value judgement.
The recent $6 million payout to a Google employee to keep her from running to Facebook has got me thinking a bit about what people think about jobs and compensation. Here are my thoughts! :)
I am still not sure what the author means by 'big company.' I have worked at Fortune 100 companies and the intelligence of the IT staff is nothing to brag about from a technical standpoint. In fact most 'big companies' are political quicksand for high throughput individuals.
That said, economies of scale are a wonder to behold. When you think of how little each person outputs per day yet how much money the corporation still makes and how much each executive still skims. It makes me think there must be brilliance somewhere in the organization chart to make it all work.
This has always struck me as well: given so much inefficiency, waste and corruption, how do they still survive? On a macro level, given human irrationality, such as our well-documented cognitive biases, how does the world continue to 'work'?
Yeah, I've wondered this too. How do so many incompetent people create so much value? Yet, with the recent economic trouble, it's a bit less mysterious. They don't.
Not sure I'm buying the idea that gender has much to do with this. I'm sure Google could instead find an additional 10 female programmers for $100k each - thus changing the averages without having to overpay this one employee.
Looking at organizations in general, the pay structure is definitely not a Normal distribution (which people might intuitively believe it should be). If the average there is $100k, the bunch of people earning more than $500k are in a different class altogether.
>I'm sure Google could instead find an additional 10 female programmers for $100k each - thus changing the averages without having to overpay this one employee.
Eh? This is really sad - do Google really have to choose candidates that aren't the best in order to keep a particular balance of sexes. Is that company wide, department wide, etc..
I'd have thought a progressive company, like Google appear to be, would employ the best person for the job and do away with irrelevant discrimination.
If you're amazing at what you do, and good at selling it, you can get a high-paying job without a lot of the extra bullshit. In short: earn your pay.
People who truly earn their pay are rare. For some reason, almost everyone is concerned with what they're "worth" (what they can get) but never stop to think where that worth comes from. It's not just about how much people will pay, but about how much value you create.
If you don't actually create enough value, then things like being the guy who stays late and blah de blah will matter. If you create the value, but nobody knows, it's your own fault. And if you create tremendous value, and people know it, and you are still expected to sit up and be a good little doggy, you're working for the wrong people, because a good business leader should be able to do the math where Your Value Y is Your Salary X * Some Good Multiplier -- and behave accordingly.
Because if you create that kind of value, they will have to hold on to you instead of vice versa.
Yet again, the balance of power is paradoxical: if you create great value, you hold the power, even if everyone else walks around thinking the employer is the one with the power.
"That $6 million offer isn't something that Google would give everyone. It would have to be a really elite employee, although rumors say that this time it has to do with the employee being a female engineer. Even if her gender was the catalyst for such a high offer, we can safely presume that if she weren't worth it, she wouldn't be getting the money."
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How do you determine "if she weren't worth it"? Assuming this person has been at the company for a while, she's now only worth something like this relative to the value of Facebook having her on staff. The value the person is bringing to Google was never close to $6m, otherwise she would have already been getting that (or close to it). The $6m value to Google is in keeping whatever she knows away from Facebook.
Also, FWIW, these huge payouts to a few Googlers are primarily stock payouts, not cash. Is this $6m deal just a cash payment? $6m/year salary? This person probably has some very strategic knowledge which Google simply doesn't want Facebook to have.
"The value the person is bringing to Google was never close to $6m, otherwise she would have already been getting that (or close to it)."
This is rarely true, unfortunately. Salaries are determined when you join a company, before you've had a chance to bring any value to it. After you've joined there's usually just the annual increment to look forward to and maybe some once-off bonuses for exceptional achievements. It's very unusual for salaries to be adjusted otherwise, no matter how much value you've been bringing to a company... unless you indicate that you might be leaving - which is what seems to have happened in this case.
Probably true, a huge amount of game theory there that no doubt contributed to the scenario. But just because she wasn't worth $6m when she joined, it doesn't mean that she's not worth $6m now. Almost nobody (maybe 1 in a billion, and that's if you include professional athletes) is worth $6 million if they're only just starting out. But after establishing an amazing track record, that's when a lot of people are able to cash in. I think it may be naive if we attribute the dollar amount to only what knowledge she can bring to Facebook, and disregard whatever merit she can bring herself to the table. When was the last time you heard of someone being paid millions to just shut up and do paperwork in the basement mail room? I think that stuff is just for spy novels, no?
I know of a few cases(I can think of 3 off the top of my head) where people are paid a few million to "shut up and do paperwork"(or not do so). All involving very high level people who are planning on leaving a company and that company not wanting them to go work for a competitor so they get a fat cheque and a contract saying they won't work for a year or 2.
Having assisted in negotiating a couple of those multi-million dollar offers, that is absolutely correct. Most of those offers aren't going to "successful senior people." They're going to people who were repeatedly passed over for promotions despite doing great work (i.e., people who fail to manage their careers properly).
I've read this a few times and am trying to parse exactly what you mean.
The million dollar offers tend to go to people who keep their head down and quietly work hard, possibly doing less-than-glamorous work (As opposed to the big-shot high flying 'executive' who get their photo in the company newsletter)?
That seems counter-intuitive to me - but - maybe it's because the "company newsletter types" are already getting the recognition and compensation they deserve? Or at the very least get the opportunity to discuss those factors more often?
That's because those are the people most likely to apply to another job! The people I know getting the big packages aren't waiting to be "noticed." That's not likely to happen since they weren't recognized where they were. They took a proactive approach and shopped around for a new job.
Only then were their contributions recognized internally and the big offers were required to keep them as they were already pissed off.
Trust me, it's not the fast track people who are getting the giant paydays right now. Those people are sitting pretty and already have substantial awards and wouldn't bother interviewing elsewhere.
Unpaid overtime is nothing to show off about, I find it quite frankly abhorrent that he's actively showing off about it