Comment by JediWing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JediWing | Hacker News Reader

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I sort of disagree, and here's why:

In your assessment of the situation, the equation is:

     value brought to company without overtime + value brought to company by doing overtime = salary

but the overtime is paid, so:

     value brought to company without overtime + value brought to company by working overtime = salary + overtime pay

presumably, what's negotiated annually is salary. if overtime is compensated separately, then it really should not figure into salary discussions outside of maybe some small consideration for their not having to staff a separate on-call team.

>> but the overtime is paid

having employees that are available for overtime provide burstable capacity at a cost that scales linearly.

in comparison, adding extra employees due to a temporary requirement is a worst case scenario. hiring is very expensive, takes time, you need extra infrastructure, training, you may operate unnecesarily at excess capacity and there are diminishing returns.

I think there is another factor missing from both equations. If someone is willing to be available for overtime, that is valuable in and of itself, even if that person is never asked to do overtime. The company has the option of asking for overtime with employee x, and not with employee y, and could be persuaded by employee x to pay for that optionality.

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