> it doesn’t mean we should just abandon work commitments or dodge uncompensated overtime.
it's not dodging! if you won't pay me for my work, i'm not going to do the work!
it's not dodging! if you won't pay me for my work, i'm not going to do the work!
Plenty of people from my college and department genuinely think they are smarter than everyone else.
This blinds them to the kind of street smarts required to understand even basic ideas of how to not get exploited, the utility of unions, power dynamics between employers and employees.
It somewhat makes sense, many devs grew up smart and were told they were smart from a young age. You need to be to do the job. It becomes part of their identity and is a glaring blind spot for many.
I’ve worked with way too many devs that were so afraid of being wrong or had to prove they were right and were taken advantage of because of it.
But apparently that makes me stupid, I don't see why that is dumb. Being manipulated to want to work is a good thing if you want the money.
See how you needed to use a teaching example to not make it sound bad?
If you could choose between starting a union or becoming a manager, then becoming a manager will almost always be a better payoff for your own time.
Not everyone is seeking to optimize local maxima while making the world worse.
I admit this was a blindspot for me, and it was mostly a representation problem. simply put, all the examples I had were blue collar jobs, paying a cut of their lesser (but union inflated) salary to a union organization they had issues with.
I saw high profile futility. Union tried to negotiate something expensive, the company collapsed and laid off the entire town. People marching in a circle for 3 months in one city, against a multinational corporation that shouldn't really need to care. The people forming unions making demands that didn't seem ambitious enough.
I felt I was optimizing my salary, based on the current reality. But I've come to a different view, mostly that others in the working class are pitted against each other. Like, other workers are dismissive to highly compensated employees because of the numbers involved. But this is only beneficial to the executives, board and owners. I'm dismayed at how this sounds like a marxist handbook, instead of looking at how other developed nations do it. I've been inspired by codetermination in Germany, where the unions has like half of the board seats by law. Its like that perspective is completely missing in the US, in favor of false dilemmas trying to avoid marxist leanings.
I think more education on this topic is beneficial. People react to what they see.
Guess who's to thank for that German policy...it begins with an 'M' and ends with 'ists.'
Even though that is not possible in the US, I think there is room for inspiration from a working system which can reach consensus. If there was more knowledge of that, plenty of people and representatives in the US would say "huh, that's actually a good idea". Worker board representation so to have influence on decisions that affect workers, not just the trendiest companies giving some shares out willy nilly.
The policy has been good for workers in Germany, and might be the best example of how universal material demands for (actual) worker power are extremely popular in practice. Not even the most conservative German politician would dare challenge the policy in public.
It is, nonetheless, unsustainable. Without the threat of the Soviet Union, pro-worker legislation is losing its necessity in legitimating the Western ruling class. Once its founding generation is gone in a few decades, the policy will dissolve along with them, short of a newfound radical workers movement throughout the EU.
Learning a trade can require very expensive tools, often time as an apprentice or journeyman, and learning at the very first stage of your career that your labor has value and you need to charge for that.
I can hire a programmer from anywhere in the world and often incredibly cheaply. I can't do that with a tradesman, they actually have to be local, often have more work than they can ever get done, and know that I can't outsource the construction project to someone 1,000 miles away.
This has been tried many times with quite predictable results and you’re incorrect that you can’t hire tradesmen from far away - happens all the time.
Sure, a 10000 hour moat is not a moat at all.
In my 20s and early 30s, if I didn’t have anything going on socially or sports on a given evening, I was pretty likely going to write code (for enjoyment). Sometimes that was for me, but often it was for the company.
Doing what I enjoy is why I was a sucker in your estimation.
I haven't met many hourly programmers that do a lot of overtime for free.
an interesting question. i am now retired, but annecdotaly at the last two investment banks i worked for:
equity trading: 5 permanent staff, 6 contractors
back office: 1 permanent staff, 5 contractors
so mostly non-salaried
Any hours past that are unpaid in that regard and effectively reduce your salary.
Similar to how oil changes are rated between a driving distance or a change by date, or how your milk and bread has a sell by date. These numbers are guidelines that generally signal to people some amount of confidence in a product/service, but do not reflect the reality of use or worthiness.
But getting RSU comp still means doing extra work may be valuable… if it's actually the right work.
Then 5 years out, their team mates were making an extra 200k a year because they got bonuses and raises in return.
So in their case it was short term uncompensated overtime , long term well compensated.
This is especially compounded by the two facts that it's not a zero-sum game, and software developers have a higher tendency to fall outside some of the social norms that normally serve as natural controls on this kind of scenario. I.e. if you can do your job for unusually long (because it's not physical labor, and/or you enjoy doing it both as a job and a hobby), and you don't have many other obligations (you don't have kids, or you can afford childcare; or you don't have a wife, or you have a wife who doesn't mind you spending little time together; or you can afford to order prepared food often or don't have a cultural/personal bias against it), what happens is the people with these properties work more hours, causing the market to adapt and pressure the other people in the same field. In other fields, this doesn't happen in enough numbers to cause this problem.
But in knowledge work, if things are hitting the wall and there is pressure to extra-contribute but you are not in a position to put in extra time, you can still respond in a way that visibly shows your commitment.
Express to your management & team your concern about the need for extra commitments and ask-for/suggest ways you can realign your work to prioritize what is most important to the situation.
Nothing makes up for limited additional capacity more than demonstrating that despite your constraints, you are all in to help everyone around you succeed.
Again, this may not work as a low level cog where management isn’t invested in the individuals that work for them. But in other cases, people do appreciate demonstrations of commitment even if you cannot contribute more on some dimensions.
It’s just important to explicitly and visibly show your flexibility and willingness to incorporate others suggestions, on all the dimensions you can adapt.
How does one identify whether one will be long term compensated or not? Would an employer agree to committing to something like this via a contract?
In my experience, switching jobs gets you there faster and without the unpaid overtime.
At the end of the year guy 2 gets an extra 40k comp raise vs guy 1. In 5 years that's a 200k difference.
So by avoiding "uncomped OT" guy 1 fucked himself out of a ton of comp.
OBVIOUSLY this depends on the company and there's no guarantees. I've been lucky enough to work on companies that were like this and this every man for himself short term thinking was poison.
YMMV.
it certainly does. i have worked for several investment banks as a contractor, and i can assure you they do not much care how many hours you put in. if you wanted a big bonus (as a contractor, i obviously didn't get one) you had to produce value to the bank. and sitting at your desk until 7pm simply does not do that - actually it costs them money; you probably have no idea what the costs of air conditioning are in the city of london.
also, how much does that 2 hours per day, per year, over 5 years add up to?
I guess another way to say it - find a place that rewards you for value, and produce exceptional value.
If you get an incremental 40k raise over someone else, every year for 5 years, you end up making 200 more than them PER YEAR after year 5.
200k is the starting developer comp at a FAANG. As you rise in level, 200k becomes the comp range within a level (eg take a look at levels.fyi range for a Google L6 SWE). Same in finance.
Agree that these jobs are few in the grand scheme of things but there are hundreds of thousands of people for whom this type of comp is reality.
People can start at the same level out of school and then make MULTIPLES of that comp depending on what they do.
If this doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to you. I am just pointing out that bailing because "this hour of overtime is not compensated" can be very nearsighted depending on your situation.
Specifically, I am talking about someone I know who had this attitude in a company that very clearly rewarded value generation. He did "ok" since it was a great company but he literally had the situation I am describing where others were making 200k more than him 5 years later.
If you get a $200k bonus after putting in those extra hours, you effectively earned $77/hr or $160k/year for your time. That's basically a 0-3 YOE tech job on top of your regular job.
Is it really a good deal, especially considering how much experienced developers make annually and the long-term effects of working 10 hours per day?
It's not the word "dodging," it's the rest of the comment: "if you won't pay me for my work, i'm not going to do the work!"
Don't know where you've worked, but the people who strictly abide by this concept are the worst types of coworkers. "it's 5:01, I refuse to respond to an email," "that's out of my scope," "I need 3 signatures before I can process this request" etc. These people belong at the DMV (for non-Americans, that's Division of Motor Vehicles), not at a dynamic company.
I just think that people who live by the attitude above and take everything so literally should be consistent: "I'm not going to do the work (I'm on vacation, I called in sick)..." "ok, cool, but don't expect us to pay you while not doing work." Of course, such a scenario doesn't exist, nobody would work (or should) for a company that didn't offer paid vacation/sick days -- nor am I endorsing one. But real companies do require effective teamwork to succeed, and the types of people who find every excuse to NOT cooperate should be purged before they turn the company into a cliche of bureaucracy and frustrate the hell out of the effective employees.
So is work without compensation. It's somewhat frowned on. Despite your absurd false equivalence.