Working the System at a BigCo

At a prior employer of mine, you accrued 12 sick days per year, up to a maximum of 120 in your bucket at any given time.

If you were ill, you were permitted to use as many of your accrued sick days as necessary. In any given calendar year you could take five sick days without any documentation, but the rest had to come with a note from a doctor indicating you were too ill to work.

There was also a company policy that stupidly tried to incentivize attendance at work: if you used no sick days in a year, you would receive a "bonus" vacation day to use the following year. Setting aside how this incentivizes people to come into work when they're sick, it also set up an perverse incentive after an employee actually had to call in sick.

Suppose you had to actually take a sick day due to illness. That day off cost you the free extra vacation day next year. Now you may as well just "call in sick" later in the year and exercise your remaining un-validated sick days.

In a past life, I ran a consulting team at a BigCo whose business centered on T&M contracts like OP's. BigCo had 10k employees, mostly associated 1:1 to contracts with the same "bill exactly 40 hrs, but never overhead" constrains.

Our little team had 100 employees, but we matrixed those guys across all our contracts. While the clients disliked the idea of not having "their guy," they really liked having access to the technical depth of 100 guys vs. just the 10 they could afford. Turns out being able to have a Linux kernel guy, OS X kernel guy, Android kernel guy, database expert and hardware hacker on call at all times is incredibly valuable.

Since we matrixed across contracts, we managed to instuitionalize the "overtime hack." The guys were exempt status, so they didn't get time and a half for hours over 40, but they did get paid for every hour they worked. It was a phenomenal hack - guys were routinely making 20-50% more than their base salary. We intentionally understaffed by a bit, to make sure there were always extra hours to burn.

That team is 15 years into existence at a BigCo, and the hack still lives. If you find yourself in a consulting org and think you can make something like this work, don't think for just yourself, but shoot for the moon - set it up so it works for everyone and outlasts you.

I would be interested in reading any advice for developers/engineers on how to "handle" management. Based on some limited reading I've done, the goals of management and what engineers intuitively think management wants are often very different. Basically, what behaviors do I need to adopt to make my relationship with technical or non-technical managers as mutually beneficial as possible?

I was happiest at a place where I was either paid 70% of the billed hours (client pays $100 per hour, I get $70, company get $30) with the company doing weekly paycheck (withholding the taxes, W-2, and handling the health insurance & 401k payments), or 90/10 split on a 1090 (but paid long before the client paid). I went with the 70% because I was a bit scarred of mucking up.

It is amazing how enthusiastic you can be in hour 50 with that situation. I frankly think its unhealthy but at least there was a pain point for requiring it and that pain ($) also benefited me.

Billable hours are the work of the devil. I remember my boss explaining how "I needed to work back all my vacation hours" was a good thing.

It makes complete sense (I mean from their point of view kind of sense, not the system is logical and the compensations are well structured kind of sense) but I would not have thought of the bosses point of view unless it was spelled out for me like in the OP.

In the author's case the mismatch in understanding worked out for them. I wonder how many times it works out quite badly for one party or even both. Even between two sympathetic people where both desire to understand the other, sometimes you just don't.

Most executives and managers don't know how, or don't want to, solve problems. So they dump those problems onto employees, vendors, even customers. Anyone to avoid having to do their job. Their most valued employee is the one in whom they can see value without having to work at it.

Why did the employee need to fill out any paperwork to be taken off of the performance plan? Shouldn't that happen at the direction of their manager? Feels a little bit like a deus ex machina.

There's a gray area between "good worker mode" and happily salaried. If they're taking advantage of that, then you need to leave BigCo. There are other SmallToMediumEvenSomeOtherBigCos out there who'll pay what you're worth; even if that coincides with 50 or 60 hour weeks.

I had a guy work for me once, I was trying to transition him from hourly to salaried. He had some longer weeks prior to this, and made the assumption that this would always be the case. He said, "I don't want to do this, because I will make more money this way."

Sounds like the article, right?

Except ... this extra time was a very temporary scenario, and he would be getting benefits, an effective hourly raise, etc. Even more to the point, when we didn't need his services ... and he didn't grasp this part, we wouldn't bring him in and pay him, though, as a salaried person, I would expect he would be doing self-education while we had "down" time, so he'd increase his value and utility to the organization.

Basically, I was trying to provide value to both the company and to him. As we were a very small company, I was able to see the value aspect very clearly, and I made the bet (later proven wrong as it turns out) that he would make a stronger contribution to the company if he had a steady source of income, with less worries about billable hours.

The big reason why he was getting more hours was that he was helping us set up our lab space. That project was almost complete ... maybe 2 more weeks of longer weeks, after which ... we'd need him 25%-50% time at best. I did need someone with expanded skills that he didn't have, and thought (mistakenly) that I could grow this particular individual into that role ... he expressed a strong interest in it.

The incentives aren't usually well aligned in BigCo and employee. We are, effectively, cannon fodder, for their plans, up through and including the senior exec ranks. Your incentive alignment with the corporation varies inversely as some power of the distance from the strategic decision making.

In SmallCo and employee, there are typically better alignments, though still not perfect. For someone like me, an entrepreneur CEO/CTO at the time, I was looking to build a culture, an environment, where we took a long view, beyond the next billable event. Where value took time to grow, where we cultivated it, where we grew people into roles that they wanted but might not have been able to do at the time.

The problem is, when you are sufficiently removed from the decision making process, your alignment is entirely economic. When you can't impact outcomes, and gain professional satisfaction and positive reputation from helping to steer a better course, your focus is, correctly, on other matters that benefit you personally.

To a large extent, this is the way things work. What benefits you personally and professionally, and is the compensation, work, and culture, aligned to mutually maximize the value of all of these things. In the case of the OP, no, the compensation was specifically architected to minimize cost to the BigCo, and maximize the benefit to the big co, even at the expense of the employee. Which would, undoubtedly, negatively impact the culture, and the way the employees interact with BigCo.

I am sorry to say this is to be expected ... but it isn't the first time I've heard this type of story.

For me personally, I remember working for some small silicon valley outfit in the 90s, where they treated some of the specialist developers like crap, but paid the contractors something like triple the hourly rate to use their expertise. So, a fairly sizeable cohort of my colleagues resigned, formed small consulting groups, and were hired back at (then) outrageous rates to do effectively the same work.

This misalignment is manifest in many large Cos.

TL;DR It is a case of organizational incentives being poorly aligned with individual incentives.