Don't call me a '5:01er' (2015)
czep.net
czep.net
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.
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.
Otherwise you're just creating an easily consolidated power vacuum above you and contributing to the collapse of civilization.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
edit: it seems this is discussed below, apologies. The OT question is one I am still curious about though.
The majority of professional positions are exempt, salaried positions. Even in California, they'd be exempt from any overtime eligibility.
> What would happen if you had a contract stipulating 10h/day in California 3 days/week. Are the 2 extra hours per day OT?Note that those 2 hours/day are particular to California, not universal to all states. California has some robust overtime laws with multiple triggers, including days >8 hours, >40 hours per work week, and > 6 consecutive days of work in a workweek. You can get a whole lot of overtime pay with far less than 40 hours of work in a week. It gets even more complex because you can't double count hours for overtime.
Many states don't have explicit overtime laws like California, and just default to the federal laws[3]. In that case, it's simply 40 hours per work week. If you work more than 40 hours per workweek, you get overtime. If you work less, then you don't get overtime. The per-day distribution of those hours are irrelevant. Again, only applicable to non-exempt employees. Exempt are still not qualified.
[1] https://justworks.com/blog/understand-differences-exempt-non... [2] http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_overtime.htm [3] https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime_pay.htm
"Wait, it's crunch time and you're not sleeping under your desk as well?"
I felt a lot of resentment like they were leaving the 'kid' to do all the heroics. It didn't take me having kids to get it, it came much before that when someone I really respected had their first and they could basically tell me my future word for word. But I did get it, at least as much as you can pre-kids.
I've had some crunch times before where I practically didn't see my kids for four days because I was getting home late and leaving early- I can honestly still handle the physical toll. The mental toll is just something else. Now, if that's going on I still peel out for dinner and bed time and head back in to the office when they're all taken care of- then it's 'just' my wife getting neglected.
Your boat won't resent you, won't ask you where you've been, or be on the other end of FaceTime crying because they miss you when you've been on a work trip for a few days. Your boat doesn't depend on you for its survival on a minute by minute basis, and your mechanic doesn't need all the physical and emotional support you can muster (and probably more). Your kids and partner do.
Parents' lives aren't full, they're literally exploding with shit (often times quite literally) they have to deal with that makes work look like a freaking vacation. There's a huge emotional component to all of it that's practically unquantifiable, but suffice to say that if I'm feeling as if I've neglected my family for a few days, I may as well just pack my shit up and go home, because I'm not getting anything else actually done, even if my body and mind should still be good to go.
At the end of the day, we're agreeing to work for a determined price for a determined period of time. Now, at salary it gets fuzzy, and you hope that it all evens out, but in practice it won't unless you decide to make it so. Whether you have kids or not, you should be fighting to keep the balance- and any boss who can't accept that is a real jerk. We all love team players and rock stars, but it doesn't mean you also have to be a doormat and afraid.
I think the person we should all be looking up to is the person that is REALLY EFFING GOOD at what they do and also has a variety of interests and hobbies that are seemingly disconnected from the day job.
What I detest is the sanctimonious, holier-than-thou attitude that, just because you have kids, you a superior or more evolved human being.
I admire that you made the decision to have and raise kids. I understand it takes huge dedication and effort, and it eats most, if not all, of your free time.
What if I choose not to have kids, and I spend the rest of my life "pre-kids"? What has that got to do with my job? Absolutely nothing. And it shouldn't come into it.
Having kids is a choice, and not a path everyone chooses to walk.
Its like soldiers - the rest of life isn't as vivid for them, as emotionally gripping as being responsible for a life yada yada. Dis it all you like; the effect is still there.
Some folks are mature enough to develop empathy while completely child-free. Others must have it forced upon them via childbirth. It does, indeed, take all kinds.
Pretty much all people care about stupid shit, you just don't empathize with people who care about things you don't personally care about.
My general theory is: you made your life choices, quit bitching and just get your obligations met. I don't care if it's kids, fur babies, Tamigatchi, or music festivals. I really don't want to hear about the corporatization of Burning Man just as much as I also don't want to hear about the ridiculousness of your kid's pre-K administration not recognizing your special snowflake's brilliance.
I've always had a lot of interests and obligations outside of work, but the thing I never had until kids, was a mental/emotional productivity nuclear bomb when you're feeling like you are shorting your family for work, or work for family, etc. Nothing will screw with your mind like the biological imperitive.
Is this in response directly to what manyxcxi wrote, or is this a response in general? I didn't pick up any such attitude in their writing, so I'm genuinely curious whether anything triggered it for you.
(I agree with you in general, and I'm a parent. For me, it's one of those things where I realized how much free time I used to have and squandered.)
Sure, there are plenty of people who are unaccomplished otherwise so they treat raising a child (something the majority of the population succeeds in doing) as the pinnacle of human achievement. But I have never worked with someone like that. In my experience these people usually don't work at all...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I'm fortunate that my manager actually does act how he talks. Personally, I don't care too much if you value the presence of my butt in my seat more than how much I get done; it's your dime, so to speak. However if you lie to me about what you are paying me for, then neither one of us is going to be happy.
every software engineer with a few years experience has a stack of these anecdotes.
they happen because non-technical management don't understand the creative nature of coding, so treat it as an exercise in numbers - "if I have x coders working for y hours then I will get x * y development done".
trying to persuade them that it's not like that, and (for instance) adding one more developer may reduce productivity over the team as the communication and training load increases, is a really hard problem
In this case it was not about ignorance or incompetence, it was about greed.
but we are part of a greater organisation, and by the time a problem arrives at our part of the system, it probably needs code written. If it could be solved by other means it would have been before it ever gets to us.
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.
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'?
I guess not if they lock it down like a bank.
OTOH, there are some high-endurance operators who not only work smarter during the regular hours, but routinely develop superior creative solutions exclusively during the extended sessions that simply require more than 8 (or whatever) hours of solid effort or concentration.
My office (a scientific lab) is open 24/7/365, and I have breakthroughs whenever I want. Anything less would be poor utilization of facilities, transportation, and personnel.
"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.)
The point I was trying to make is the how assymetric the employee/employer relationship is; they expect more than 40 hours "during crunch times" but they would laugh if you suggested working less or paying more. This is the phrase I was parodying:
"Hi Bob, it's crunch time with the new product. I'm gonna have to ask you to work a few extra hours this month, you know, just until we ship."
Never got a bonus, ever. When I wanted a raise, I would give it to myself by moving to a new company for more money. Loved going to work and worked for great companies.
(I work for myself now. My boss is a jerk.)
"Questions of need cannot be answered objectively. Need is a vague and undefinable term in this context. At the Twentieth Century Motor Company, the group voted to decide the needs of each individual, just as the group decided the projected output of each worker based on ability. As a result, each individual was enslaved to the group; his income was determined by his ability to beg rather than by his productive effort. No worker could feel the pride that comes from earning money as a direct result of hard work." [1]
I know it's a stretch, but as others have pointed out, it's a slippery slope.
[1] https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/a/atlas-shrugged/summ...
I work out an agreement with my manager for what my work schedule will be. I owe them the time and work that I agreed to. They owe me the compensation package that they agreed to.
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.
We were Turing Industries for a while!
On the flip side, I'm usually in at least 20 minutes early every morning.
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.
I want to save a little energy for after work, not just spend it recovering.
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.