As paid overtime becomes more common, people start factoring it in production costs, and standard hour salaries are adjusted accordingly. When people negociate they get told "don't worry, with X hours of overtime you'll get a pretty good pay" and we're back to square one.
For a real world examole of that, Japanese companies have had these kind of deals for a few decades.
I'm generally all for Devil's Advocate, but when it comes to giving workers reasons to _not_ demand more, I need to see some really compelling evidence of serious harm before I'm willing to tell people to reconsider.
makeitdouble isn't saying workers shouldn't demand more; they're saying that paid overtime doesn't solve the problem of crunch time. It makes crunch time acceptable, and (potentially) gets factored into renumeration packages in the long term.
If you want to solve the problem of crunch you need a solution that removes it, not one that pays people to continue doing it.
But either way: I don't necessarily view crunch time as a thing that can or will be solved. I just want the game to be more fair than it is now.
That way if you’re overflown with overtime it’s in your compensation, if you manage to not do any overtime you’ll benefit from it.
It’s arguably harder to negotiate, but I think it would be the best way forward. Now, if the choice is between nothing and paid overtime, yes it’s worth it getting paid overtime.
Creating a regulation that says “workers in this sector get overtime pay” is probably easier than creating an industry-specific minimum wage.
In France it often was a separated contract you had to sign, but most people above “junior” level were pushed into it. It works pretty well in some companies, and heavily abused in others.
And I will add that we constantly complain about how there are just a few hours daily of truly useful work. Adding more money will not change anything. Paid overtime also can give people the wrong incentives.
Edit: what I mean is that we should not plan for overtime. Of course it should always be paid.
I live in a country with a 40-45 hour max work week. After that, you pay 1.5x rates. Saturdays are 1.5x rates for salaried workers and Sundays and public holidays are 2x. There are very serious legal consequences for trying to skirt the system.
As paid overtime becomes the norm, it becomes another metric to track. Project managers that routinely run into overtime are punished. The same as any other expense caused by analysis failures.
You seem to think paid overtime suddenly incentivises a company to just up the price of their product. Like it was equivalent equivalent the rising price of materials. It just doesn't work that way.
Not everyone is a piss poor planner who can't react to changes in environments. Plenty of projects I've worked for have been pretty close to budget. When overtime is required, we talk to the customer. Their money, their decision ultimately.
If your costs unexpectedly skyrocket, you're not keeping customers.
I'm getting a little bored of these "qualification by differnce of opinion" reasoning. You've gotta actually qualify your opinion
Not everyone is a poor planner, but deadlines become firm when large marketing spends are deployed, as they are in the gaming industry.
(Of course, you can disagree with that.)
My personal take is that the overall discipline of managing software projects is so woolly and ill-understood to begin with that the incentives aren’t really there beyond the obvious fairness of actually paying people for the work they do. You don’t need a cost to competently push back against unrealistic processes.
Now, if the employees unionised like in the film industry, it might happen.