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Comment by justrudd | Hacker News Reader

Here's how I deal with family obligations, home repairs, etc. - I do them as needed and take no PTO. I'll email my team and say "Garage door getting replaced. Be checking email sporadically". Now if the company I'm working for says nothing, that's good. If the company I'm working for says "You need to log those X hours as PTO", I give notice. It's expected that we (employees) put in a little extra effort when at the end of a project or the end of the fiscal month or whatever. And I don't ask to be paid for that extra 4 to 12 hours of work. So if I take 4 hours here and there, you'd damn well better NOT bitch at me.

Edit: fix some grammar

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I worked for a company for many years with a great attitude about flexible hours and work from home. Got a ton of work done, felt very good about my work and coworkers, and put out a great product. It was acquired by a larger company who, soon after the acquisition, announced a 9-5 butts-in-seat policy.

Nine months later, after buying a house, I was canned for violating that butts-in-seat policy, largely because I was attending to the many little things a new house requires: inspections, installations, etc. Under the old regime, coming in later and working later, or working from home, being accessible by video chat, IM, and email would have raised no eyebrows. Under the new one it was cause for termination.

I should have seen the writing on the wall and simply started to look for a new job as soon as that more restrictive company took over. I was pressured to stay by the ties I had to stock options, my good professional relationships with co-workers, and my desire to get into a house quickly. The end result was that I went into a lot of bad debt in the months following my layoff, and almost lost my house as I ran out of cash. I could have avoided it if I had planned better. Needless to say I was under a lot of stress for a while.

The long and short of it is, I agree with parent. If you have the freedom to do so, disassociate with companies who have unreasonable time-off or flex work policies, sooner rather than later. Your mental, physical, and financial health are at stake.

Maybe the acquiring company was making new rules with a no tolerance policy primarily to get rid of employees with stock options.

Butts in seat policy is the worst. It attracts the kind of talent tnat is complacent with making it seem like they are doing work as opposed to people who like to make progress.

I also think it's an open admission by management that they are lazy idiots who don't understand what their employees do well enough to judge output and don't care to learn.

This deserves more upvotes than the one that I can give it. Also, genwin is right. The zero-tolerance time-Nazi stuff was to push out people with stock options. If the policies weren't also applied (with the same penalties and enforcement) within the acquirer, you probably could have sued and, at the least, gotten a decent settlement due to their desire to avoid embarrassment.

If the company I'm working for says "You need to log those X hours as PTO", I give notice

Terminating employment without compromise because they won't let you break the rules sounds cool when you pretend you did it on the Internet, but please don't use this as an employee-employer relations strategy in real life. If you quit because they won't let you count installing cable TV or something as work time, that is almost certainly not the reason why you quit, unless your priorities are very strange.

I think you're derisively trying to trivialize something which is actually fairly significant.

I only have 14 days of PTO a year, and that includes sick time. I use almost all those days visiting family, especially my parents, all of whom live hundreds of miles from me. I took the week of Christmas off this year and still ended up committing some code. It wasn't much, but the people who weren't taking off easily could have done it (i.e., it wasn't something that only I knew how to do). I was still asked to do it.

Although I could easily pay cash for a nice European vacation, I won't go on one this year because I don't have the time.

I'm making my job sound terrible. It's not, far from it, but your extremely mechanical interpretation of the parent post is pretty frustrating for me to read. This sort of policy has real effects on real people's lives. It doesn't just affect me, either--it affects my parents who can only see me a few weeks out of the year. I don't know about you, but I don't believe in an afterlife, so this is all the time I've got for them. I don't own a home, but if I did and I had to use some of my very valuable PTO just to do home maintenance, while still being expected to commit code while taking PTO or in the evenings occasionally, you can bet I'd be pretty upset.

http://seeyourfolks.com/

I just used the "See Your Folks" site. Wow. That's really eye-opening.

Thanks for the link to seeyourfolks.com That's quite a poignant site, and a another reminder about what's really important. Great article, and a great discussion thread.

If your employer decides to obsessively focus on HR policies and petty accounting of time rather than simply getting shit done, that sounds like a great reason to quit. Particularly if the accounting is one-sided as justrudd described ("expected that we (employees) put in a little extra effort when at the end of a project or the end of the fiscal month or whatever").

I have quit a job due exactly to an obsessive focus on HR nonsense.

I did, however, wait a week to cool off just to convince myself I wasn't behaving rashly. Not as cool sounding, but whatever. I don't regret the decision.

justrudd is describing unilaterally breaking the rules because of his personal notions of what constitutes a fair contract.

I have a hard time imagining a more dysfunctional method of "negotiation". There are better ways to address differences in work expectations.

I understand the idea that you should be fairly compensated for fulfilling work expectations. I also understand that it's common for companies to have flexible PTO rules. But I've also heard of companies, very good ones to work for, that are not flexible about these things. It might not be the manager's choice. Or it might, and it might be possible to work around his/her style. Or it might not matter that much in the grand scheme of things. These are things you should be thinking about before you randomly quit over a rules quibble.

In your opinion - you're absolutely correct. I am breaking the "rules" because it is fairly obvious what we both believe is fair is very different.

For me, fair is what doesn't harm me financially and/or emotionally. It is easy to be glib and say things like "cable being installed" but what about sump pump being busted and my basement being flooded? Or a limb fell through my roof? Why is it OK for a company to expect me to put in extra effort but when I need a little kindness, empathy in return it's OK for them to say no? Sorry. You'll never convince me there are good companies to work for that do that. I am all for making money and increasing stock value (especially if I have options), but there has to be some give here.

An employment contract contains both explicitly specified terms as well as informal expectations, and sometimes the two even conflict. (For example, consider a bureaucratic corporation with a small division where managers shield underlings from the outside world.)

Justrudd isn't advocating staying and breaking the rules. He's advocating leaving when the informal expectations of the employer and employee don't match. I hardly see how it's "dysfunctional" to end a relationship that isn't making both parties happy.

justrudd is describing ordinary practice in Silicon Valley and many other tech companies, especially startups.

The person you're responding to is actually being pretty reasonable for our industry.

That's not it at all. I am an adult and expect to be treated like one. When a deadline looms I make sure it gets done. The flip side is if I need to take care of some personal items I should be able to go do those.

Now, if I'm not performing up to standards then get rid of me. If I'm excelling who cares when I take time off?

Hopefully I will never have to work in a company that cares more about office time than work done again.

My experience is that managers who are that pedantic about policy generally imply one (or both) of the following: 1) there is a culture of micromanagement and paranoia that employees are basically thieves or children who have to be monitored all the time; 2) one (or more) employees are no longer desired on the payroll, so instead of being adults and letting them go management instead chooses to make their lives hell by enforcing petty technicalities in policy in a childish, passive-aggressive way.

Neither of these is an indicator of a quality company to work for. Both are strong indicators that the company is not good to work for.

... and the second is called "constructive dismissal" and ends up in compensation for the employee in most jurisdictions, where the employee knows his/her rights.

In which jurisdictions in the US is the burden of proof for constructive dismissal permissive enough to include enforcement of company policy as detailed in the Employee Handbook, no matter how onerous, (unless the policies are not uniformly enforced or are arbitrarily enforced)?

I'm not sure I understand the intent of your question. Can you rephrase?

The middle ground of both the stated position and your reply is probably closer to the truth. Both sides look at the other, someone will take a note down in private, and the relationship will likely deteriorate.

If you work for a company that expects you to pull all nighters, but doesn't re-comp you for an extra hour or two for the unavoialble/banalities of random real life problems...that's a huge red flag if not an immediate need to hit the eject button. There is plenti of kubuki theatre in the workplace, but this is a point of fundamental fairness.

I know if I have people working for me like that, they are either getting the next friday off or a morning off or something else as an aknowledgement. Most jobs that require his kind of work and comittment are also (typically) cyclical, and there should be some 'slack' in the workflow that follows a big push.

So I don't think the only options here are bluster vs exploitation, and that goes for you or those that work for you. Just my $0.02.

Sorry if you don't believe me. I have done this, and I will do this again. If a company expects me to put in extra effort at busy times of the year, it is only fair that they are OK with me doing a 30 hour work week some weeks to take care of issues that came up while I was working that 80 hours.

Edit: To be clear, the companies where I quit when they had no empathy were body-shops.

It sounds like you quit because they were expecting some 80 hour work weeks without recompense.

It was the end of a deadline that "we couldn't miss". My sump pump had actually died, and I needed to replace it. Bought the replacement, but sat on it for several weeks because "we couldn't miss the deadline". Those last 3 weeks, I was working 7 days a week for about 15 hours a day. When I got home, I ate, crashed on my couch, slept, and went back to work. Once the release "we couldn't miss" was done, I stayed home one day and put in my sump pump. The next day I was told to record the 8 hours as PTO. So given that I had just worked 300 hours in 3 weeks, but they wouldn't bend on 8? Yeah...I quit.

And I'm glad I replaced the sump pump. It rained for 3 weeks straight after I gave notice.

Oh yeah. The deadline "we couldn't miss"? It got pushed 3 weeks.

The writing was on the wall for what they expected. But I was young and "stupid" living under the auspice of my father's work life (2 jobs his whole life - 20 years in the Army and 20 years for the State of Alabama). So I worked the hours because I wanted to be the team player. I wanted to help. In the end, I was shown that the relationship was one way. So now I'm old and more careful and less willing to put up with one-sided relationships.

wow

7 days a week and canned for a day off? That should prompt anyone with self respect or integrity to walk out the door and drop emails asking for help or pointers with the codebase.

To be fair, I wasn't canned. I did quit. And I did give them the rest of the week (Tuesday - Friday) on a strict 8 hour workday.

Which company was it? They sound like they deserve the bad publicity. You might save someone else from ending up there too...

It was Splatter Consulting in RTP. They don't exist anymore. They shutdown probably 7 months after I walked. This was back in '98. The deadline "we couldn't miss" was to build a product. This product would move them from consulting to a product company. It was actually a neat product. Had to do with camera optic systems. Writing software that interacts with hardware was really cool. It still is, but I've gotten lazy and enjoy being wasteful using a whole byte for a boolean and what not...

After I left, it was probably 4 months before everyone but the 2 sales guys and President were laid off. They lasted 3 more months before folding.

I actually left a good job to take this one. Lured me away with money :) Like I said - young and stupid.

There is no rule breaking going on here.

Where I've been handed a formal policy document at a tech employer, it's always said something along the lines of "Hours are X to Y or as your manager directs". The latter part of that means in effect "this is between you and your manager unless you can't work it out".

If you can't work it out, best to go elsewhere, because that's a toxic culture for a tech company.

Agreed. Quitting over something like this isn't a luxury most people have.

I would not take employment advice on HN as advice for the general population. I would take it as advice to the general HN audience.

Most people don't work in salaried jobs where unpaid overtime is the norm.

Really? Citation needed here; at least in the US, that's the norm for white-collar jobs.

http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/blue-and-white-collar-w...

Most people do not have white-collar jobs. Tech workers are absolutely not in any way representative of the general population.

You're right. My bad.

Norm here in India as well for the majority of the salaried people.

I like that attitude, but not everyone can afford to follow through and actually quit, that's part of the big problem, most people have relatively little leverage and can't afford to "take" leverage.

You don't have to quit the next day. It's indicative of a poor working environment, and means it's time to start looking for a new job.

Also, it's indicative of poor management skills, what means that your job may stop existing at any time.

I assume most of us have salary jobs, no employer can make you take partial days out of your PTO. If you work for 15 minutes or whatever the minimum increment for hourly employees, it counts as a full day.

I do the same thing, but I ask upfront in the interview instead of spontaneously quitting the job after the fact.

Absolutely. I'm much more selective in where I work now so I've not had to do this for the past decade. But the first decade I was working, I was drawn to money figures without paying a lot of attention to the work environment.

With that said, I would still walk out on an abusive employer...

I don't know what PTO means, but I'm assuming it's unpaid. If so, I disagree. When I work less, I expect to get paid less. But when I work more, I also expect to get paid more. There's no such thing as unpaid extra hours, and I reserve the right to refuse working extra when I've got private obligations.

If they do demand unpaid work, and for some weird reason I agree to that, then the door is definitely open for paid non-work. Whatever the deal is, it works both ways.

PTO = Paid Time Off.

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