I agree with a lot of what you said; but stating that you will under no circumstances work more than 40 hours a week bothers me. I try to get out of the office every day on time - but shit happens, and there are instances where someone needs to fix something or else the company is losing revenue. You want financial stability with a high salary - but aren't willing to help make the company stable. Yes, a healthy work/life ratio is very important to me, but I won't walk out that door in the middle of a crisis.
40 hrs a week doesn't necessarily mean 8 hours a day. I think it's a reasonable demand by someone that if they stay late one day putting out a fire they're free to leave early on Friday or something.
It was sort of like this at one of my previous finance jobs where I was expected to work no more than 60 hours a week (due to their allotment towards me of salary + overtime). Sometimes on Friday I'd get to leave a bit after lunch, which was nice. Although that did mean earlier that week was kinda rough...
I prefer a system like this. At my current company in fact, it's formalized. We work X hours a week, and if you work any more, it goes to vacation. Actually, you work X - 4 hours a week, every week the entire year with no vacation, such that it you actually work X hours every week, you end up with (52 x 4 =) 208 hours of vacation a year.
So, for example, I'm in crunch mode for the next week working X+3 or X+4 hours a day. And then I'm taking a 2.5 week trip to Nepal a month or so afterwards. Crunch time happens, and we can't afford to thumb our nose at it, but this system means that it can never become the norm.
Yeah, you can work from home whenever, so long as you're generally in the office for core hours on weekdays, or let people know that you're going to be out. Eg, I wanted to go camping Fri-Sun, so I worked a few hours on the previous weekends.
My family and friends are vastly more important to me than any job, period. I work to live. End of story. If I have to sacrifice that most important thing to me in the whole world, then there is no point. I would rather be a homeless bum with the people I care about doing the things I care about than at any job in the universe.
And that's awesome - however I would not hire you. I would never expect someone to put their job before their family. Got a son't game to go to - go to it. Gotta pick up the kids from school one day, why are you still in the office? But I would also expect that if a server is down, or a critical bug is preventing the site from working that I could count on someone to help get things working. Not that you said you wouldn't, but the tone in how you said it would give me that impression. I want to work people who care about their job - it doesn't have to be the most important thing in the world, it should however be part of their passion not because they need to think about the company 24/7, but that I know they will give me their best work.
caring about family more than job != not caring about job
I'm not sure how you get that out of what he said, you could conceivably care more about your job than anything BUT your family which is still a lot of caring, IMO
I am looking at it from a prospective employer. As I said, it may not be the case, but stating that he would not work more than 40 hours under any circumstances would lead me to believe this and would cause him to not get hired. He could be an excellent worker, gets all his work done on time and be able to leave on time every day of the year - but in the back of my head I am still thinking about that 40 hour limit and will think that I am completely screwed to be able to use his talents when there is a legitimate issue.
It's cool that you wouldn't hire me, because I wouldn't want to work for you, even if you did offer all those nice things. I can see it right in that post "use his talents." I am not a resource to be used. I am a person. We have both agreed upon a mutually beneficial agreement, and either of us may leave that agreement at any time. If you want resources to be used, go to the hardware store.
I think its important to clarify, do you mean 40 hours, on average, or 40 hours in one week? Meaning, do you want him to average more than 40 hours a week? If so, thats definitely a red flag
Just as much employees are resources to run your business, a job is just a means to an end for me. To fund my startup.
Why should it be any different for me than it is for you?
I can't ever get as passionate about working for someone because at the end of the day, I get 1/1000 of the profits and when push comes to shove, will not be able to make many of the decisions that matter.
My free time is worth everything in the world to me. I don't mind doing extra emergency work once-in-awhile. My problem is that at many companies, this is the norm (because they hire kids right out of college that don't know any better) and you are a salaried employee and will not get paid any extra for it.
This is exactly why I keep this a secret from every company I've ever worked for. From their perspective, I'm a great employee.
See the subject line of the article. Are you prepared to pay people one way or other (extra vacation days, on-the-spot cash bonus to take family out to a fancy dinner) for stepping up? No? Why not?
I think he meant that if there is a serious crisis he might stay. Sure, every once in a while a tornado sweeps through your data center. That happens once every other year. "We need you to stay till midnight because a very serious VC is coming in and this project needs to be done" is not a crisis.
Serious stuff happens, it does not happen every other week.
Precision isn't accuracy, and pedantic precision isn't super common in casual conversation anyway.
Look I can't speak for the OP, maybe ze would quit the first week ze's expected to work 40hours and 1 minute. Saying "no more than 40 hours, unless a tornado hits the data center; or my close friend and co-worker's mother dies and he asks me to stay a little late to finish some of his paper work; or a bomb will go off killing a dozen orphans if we stop coding" might be more precise, but it's also less accurate because by listing off every one of a billion unlikely situations in which OP might be willing to work over time it creates the impression that 40 hours is a much more flexible limit than it is.
pedantic precision should be common for a programmer. This is really easy, he could have said, "I will only work overtime in exceptional cases, and those should be very rare." This is what I usually say in interviews.
"under no circumstances will I work overtime" has a very clear meaning.
How is this more precise? You said "rare", and the other party heard "rare", but guys never agreed on what "very rare" was. Believe me, people can have very different ideas about what "very rare" means in this context. :)
There is probably some circumstance I would work a little extra. Seriously, you want ever comment on every blog to be written like a legal contract or a game rulebook? I wasn't about to devote an entire paragraph covering every possible scenario where I may or may not work more or less hours. You get the idea.
Umm, I was supporting your phrasing. :) i.e., that most people get that you will work extra hours when truly required.
And that even a supposedly more precise phrasing suffers from the problem that the listener may not interpret the words the way the speaker intended them to be.
I personally feel that a categorical statement such as yours is less amenable to misunderstanding than a equivocating one. Thanks.
Anyway, we're generating heat rather light in this subthread.
rather than implying that the people who took you at your word did something wrong, you should admit that you used a poor choice of words.
As I said, you could simply have said, "I will only work OT in exceptional cases, and these cases should be rare". It doesn't take an entire paragraph to get this point across. You get the idea.
You can check my comment history and see that I don't insult people often. However, sometimes when people are being really stupid the correct response is to call them stupid.
Think about what numerous people are arguing here. OP said, "under no circumstances do I work more than 40 hours a week" and a number of people insist that these words mean "sometimes I will work OT", and that it's perfectly clear. That's stupid.
Gotcha, and I agree with you on that. Like I said in my comment, this is exactly what I say in interviews, and I haven't had a problem with it yet. If I do then I'll find a new job. After a little practice you can get a feel for reading people and companies and you can usually tell if you are on the same page. I also always ask how many hours on average people work per week, or something along those lines.
Also, I absolutely would not tell a company that I want to work for that "under no circumstances" will I work any overtime. Nor will I hire someone that says such a thing.
I see some ambiguity: this is the contract negociation; the work may be referring to the entire duration of his employment. Exceptional circumstances are exceptional, and he may choose to give up his Friday then.
Exactly - I would completely understand someone insisting on a work/life balance - I want it, and I have no problem with people wanting that; but seeing it worded that way is a red flag to me.
Well you can do plenty of living when lots of businesses do not hire you due to the fact that they realise sometimes stuff needs to get done. We all want to avoid the constantly crisis mode businesses, but you do this by being reasonable.
It was fun to play the hero and get 'That One Critical Feature' out of the door for an important demo. It is a rush. Investors like it. Engineers like it. Soon a company is always in crisis mode; pushing hard to get the next great thing out. It becomes the culture.
At one company I worked at the VP of Engineering was the hardest, longest working person I'd ever met and a driver of that culture. No matter how hard or long you worked, he could beat you at that metric without breaking a sweat. There was a lot of pressure to live up to that example. Mostly I didn't mind because solving problems on a deadline is fun. Mostly.
Eventually, inevitably, that lifestyle started catching up to us. Nerves were frayed. Small technical disagreements started to stretch on into weeks long religious cold wars. We started losing good people who had the good sense to see what was happening.
Those of us who believed in the company and product stayed on, even thrived at some level.
After a few years of this something drastic changed. Our VPoE mother died unexpectedly. It hit him hard. He realized that he had been ignoring absolutely everything but the business. Everything. And the culture shifted on a dime. Engineers were no longer /allowed/ to be called on weekends whereas before we had to respond in 20 min. He would make it a point to go out with us after the workday, or even during the workday, to chat about life, the direction of the company, whatever. Most importantly, he ran interference when it came to the clients and laid down and enforced very sane timetables for completion of projects and features. And if there was a delay, it was ok...not the end of the world.
The product did not languish. Things still got done. Turns out clients, for the most part, could not care less how hard and fast we worked. Having good information for when something would be complete was sufficient. Sometimes better because we were not breaking ourselves trying to impress them with impossible deadlines that we would sometimes miss. Good information was better than fast information.
On top of that, the quality of the product improved. Crises mode was used too often as an excuse for shipping half baked product.
Creativity blossomed. Several revenue generating products were conceived and executed in the breathing space we all now had.
People started recommending talented friends to fill positions again...
Altogether, it was just a much better scene.
Now our criteria crisis is much more strict. It is basically "Will someone (client) die or lose their house if this is not done by some certain time?" If the answer is no, go home.
If you are managing people and part of your evaluation criteria, formally or informally, is "does that person work a lot of hours" or if your 'business stability' requires that kind of sacrifice on any kind of regular basis you are doing it wrong.
TL:DR Unless a client is going to die or go bankrupt if you or your employees don't work extra hours, go home.
"The product did not languish. Things still got done. Turns out clients, for the most part, could not care less how hard and fast we worked. Having good information for when something would be complete was sufficient. Sometimes better because we were not breaking ourselves trying to impress them with impossible deadlines that we would sometimes miss. Good information was better than fast information."
This. After years of working at shops where putting out fires was the norm I took a position with a company that handles their client deliverables in the manner you describe. For the first six months I was constantly jumpy, waiting for crunch time to hit and slinking home at 5:00pm feeling vaguely guilty that I was done for the day.
I just couldn't famthom how we could be working on all of the large project initiatives in our pipeline with no screaming clients and no marathon code sprints.
After a year in a sane environment it'd take more than six figures to get me to go back to the soul-eating grind that is so typical in small dev shops.
I've seen this too. One company I worked for had a product that was deployed too soon. We as a dev team decided it was time to roll it out when it wasn't. Our fault. This created a crisis mode. It was a rush - live editing code on production servers to save an engineer rollout (nature of the product was one mistake locked us out of the box), seeing small fixes improve conversion by noticable amounts (or reduce the call queue significantly), etc. Bad engineering practice, but it made me understand the cowboy appeal, and I don't think I want to do it again.
However, this resulted in a bit of crisis addiction, followed by burnout. However, the CEO learned that crisis mode was a death march motivator. Suddenly it turned into crisis-this and crisis-that. Every small feature was a "drop everything we'll lose customers" crisis. It started wearing pretty quick. At some point he dropped the crisis act and just stated flatly that "your terms of employment state that you will work as needed, i need you now" the day before I had scheduled time off, and the "crisis" was getting a new feature complete for shipping in a year. Needless to say I got a new job.
Basically, I agree with clavalle - crisis mode if not used exceedingly sparingly can lead to a new set of expectations that will chew up a dev team.
One place I worked had an unofficial policy: Every hour of overtime allowed you to take 2 hours off some other time. If there's a crisis, things can get done quickly, but nobody gets overworked, and there's a strong incentive for management to avoid crises.
I think in cases where you may loose a client or seriously damage a relationship it could also be warranted. Honestly, if they give you flex time, I don't mind all that much. At a job I started fairly recently I had to push really hard for a couple of days (put in probably 3 extra hours a day for 2 days) but then they gave me a day off after those 2 days and then the rest of the week I basically was given nothing else to do so it was really relaxed. I think the main thing is they recognize the sacrifice and act accordingly to not burn you out.
He said 40 hours a week, not 8 hours a day. For example, he could end up working 20 hours for two days in a row. Or he could mean as an average. This is what I do. I may put in a 60 hour week, but I'll be taking time off where I can until I get back to a 40 hour average.
I'd rather suggest that we point fingers at an industry and employers that don't pay overtime for such scenarios before pointing fingers at each other.
I've grown accustomed to not getting overtime after over 15 years in the industry, and I make sure that my base salary covers a job where occasional overtime is possible. Should it be different - of course - but if you know that you are for example joining a startup, where the hours can be crazy and the expectations are high, then you should account for that. (Oddly enough, I am working less crazy nights at a startup than I did in the agency world).
You're kidding yourself if you think you can't pack productivity into 40 hours worth of work a week. Some people have this notion that their job is so important that the work they're doing can't be put off til tomorrow. Certainly, in some seats, emergencies arise, but by and large, you should never have to work more than 40 a week at your 9-5.
