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Comment by djhworld | Hacker News Reader

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

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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'm sure you meant remuneration... ;)

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.

It's not bad management, it's GREAT management. From the perspective that management is about getting as much from your people as possible.

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 agree. Hours spent and performs are not synonymous.

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