Every time I have been on call while directly with Boeing we got to either take time off or we got ‘overtime’ which was regular pay $6something extra as technically we were salaried and it was just as easy to knock off early the next day instead of taking the extra money. I only did proper OT when I got holiday work or knew I wasn’t gonna be doing anything over the holiday and volunteered to monitor the ticket queue.
For CSC I have always had bosses that were good about making sure we didn’t do much more than check in for email and such the next day after we had put in off hours work for on call or patching parties since we didn’t get OT and while there were weeks that I put in over 40 hours it was never over 50 hours.
Over ten hours a day, every. Single. Day. How do you go to the doctor? Or get cavities filled? Or see your children? Or parents? Or get your car fixed? When do you get a haircut?
Life isn’t just work (which is funny that I say that, since my life is currently work).
[quote=“japhroaig, post:85, topic:74270, full:true”]Over ten hours a day, every. Single. Day. How do you go to the doctor? Or get cavities filled? Or see your children? Or parents? Or get your car fixed? When do you get a haircut?
[/quote]
You don’t.
By the end of that six-month stretch I mentioned, I had three nails through the rear tyre of my bike. I didn’t have time to get to a mechanic, but if you put air in the tyre at the start of each journey it retained just enough pressure to be rideable.
I had a one-week “break” in the middle, but that was occupied by a neuroscience conference in Colorado. Run rats until midnight Wednesday, 18 hour flight to America Thursday morning, back in the lab within 24 hours of getting back home.
After the rat running was done, I had a two-week holiday sailing a tall ship (HMB Endeavour) through the Torres Strait. Sleeping in hammocks, minimal water, never more than four hours rest at a time. As soon as we came within mobile range of Darwin, I was working the phone to speak to assorted journalists about an upcoming research paper.
When I hit the dock, I had to run to a computer to fix some typos in the draft manuscript. Before I had a shower.
I got ya beat by more than few years and yes too old for that. When I was still doing the break fix work I would routinely tell the younguns to either get some discipline to quit working after 8ish hours for the day or at the very least RECORD THE OVERTIME EVEN IF YOU DON’T GET PAID. Because that is the only way the bosses can see that we need more heads. Also if you are regularly working that much at least in my job you are going to make mistakes from being tired and those mistakes will cost the company big bucks compared to hiring another admin.
Tech workers and entitlement? As if that’s something new. Speaking as someone in the tech industry, my peers are often the most elitist, cheapest, and self entitled people I know.
“I work for so-and-so company. How dare you not offer me a discount! I’ll take my business elsewhere.”
That’s my idea of an awesome vacation, incidentally - I’m jealous.
It’s 7:30pm Saturday and I’ve been here at work since before noon. Worked a full week, too. But one of the youngsters crapped out a key hypervisor and crashed a dozen mission-critical hosts, so I’ll be here a while longer…
But my boss is excellent; she’ll ignore the fact that I’ll take off a day or two during the week to compensate.
Exactly. In software, at least, beyond a certain point of overwork - and it’s going to be different hours per day or week for each person and from one week to the next - you are subtracting value for every extra hour you put in.
I worked at a consolidated post-startup with ~20 employees, where yelling and pressure to work long hours and lowish pay was very much a part of corporate culture. While the boss was personally raking in >$5M a year (in Danish currency). The situation didn’t make sense, this is why some people want to create co-ops instead.
Maybe a factor is that this was webshop and most people there didn’t have a college degree. I only lasted 10 months, and now I’m a partner in a similarly sized software company which has none of these issues at all.
Once you overpay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Daneboss.
Maybe it’s more an aspect of Northern California culture rather than startup culture. Habitually flying off the handle is behavior that is, most generously, looked askance at. Nobody with a marketable skill puts up with a boss who acts like an infant or a drill instructor.
The preferred approach to employee relations is smiling passive-aggressive undercutting and backstabbing. Much more civilized.
Well, there’s also the somehow not that popular alternative of simply being genuinely friendly and well-intentioned. At my present job, we’re fortunate enough to have a boss who is exactly like that. There’s always negotiation and it’s important to focus on things getting done as the company has to turn the wheels (turning i high profit is not all that important, but the numbers need to be in black every year - even though it’s what we call a “black zero”), but an honestly friendly attitude and spirit in the company really helps.
This. Sure, for 4 weeks you can run people 16 hours a day. Then fatigue.
My general rule is that by 7pm, people are starting to act really dumb, if they’ve been doing actual work all day.
If people aren’t acting dumb, they haven’t been trying very hard. At all.
So you get this lovely paradox - where the clever, lazy, driven ones start beating on the clever, hardworking, responsible ones at around 7pm; by 8pm they’re done doing that and leave, and the workers carry on till midnight, taking four hours to do a 30 minute job.
