Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

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> I knew a developer who always left at exactly 17.00, because "that's what they are paying me for".

What? But that is what you're paying him for. You realize how employment works, surely? You give him some money in exchange for the use of his time and skills to perform a task your business requires. The results of his work are owned by the business who take ownership of any benefits arising from the work. If you want him to be involved in the company, you're going to have to involve him in the rewards by giving him a part of the company.

If there is an emergency and an employee does need to stay later, you need to pay that employee overtime - generally at a higher multiple of his standard pay. The reason for this is because a business needs to avoid having emergencies and the best way to do that is to make having an emergency an expensive thing. Then everyone will work to avoid them.

For the OP: just leave and get a new job. If you're able to put together software as well as you say, then you probably don't even need a job. Find a business co-founder and start your own company.

"The reason for this is because a business needs to avoid having emergencies "

Exactly what I wrote in my post, if you'd actually bothered to read the lower half.

"If there is an emergency and an employee does need to stay later, you need to pay that employee overtime"

I didn't write anything about compensation - I would think it entirely obvious that if you work overtime you either get paid or take compensatory time off?

I read the lower half, but I still wanted to comment on the top half. You seemed to be implying that a fire in the kitchen was the developer's problem. It is not - the business takes ownership of the rewards and the business takes ownership of the fire in the kitchen. If the business wants to make the fire the responsibility of the developer, the business needs to transfer ownership of the benefits of avoiding a fire to the developer as well.

I also noticed you didn't write anything about compensation and that's why I did. That developer that insisted on leaving at 5 because that's what his job was? I can assure you that if you paid him a multiple of his standard rate and made it clear that he was doing the business a favor then he would remain there to help fix the fire.

Also regarding deploying breaking changes five minutes before leaving - I'm assuming this means it was standard procedure to deploy non-breaking changes five minutes before leaving as well. This feels like a management problem. Those changes should be deployed to a staging environment of some kind and not directly to production without some kind of testing or sign off procedure as then it doesn't matter if they break anything as it will continue to be worked on the following day without affecting customers.

1) I'm not sure I understand your first paragraph, feel free to correct: Who else than the developers can actually take responsibility for solving the fire in the kitchen? The business of course holds ultimate responsibility for any aspect of operations, but developers are particularly hired due to the business itself, as well as the managers, being unable to handle such a crisis directly. A developer who abdicates such responsibility, is in effect telling the business they can't be relied on in times of crisis, unless it happen to be at a convenient time for the developer.

Like I stated earlier, a business in which crisis are so frequent as to occur daily or weekly, is badly mismanaged and dysfunctional. Such companies will hide under false pretenses like "that's just the way the industry works", while frankly straight up abusing developers. Crisis should by all means be extremely infrequent, otherwise there's a major management problem, which of course can't be the developers responsibility. I'll restate from all my replies in this thread, that if OP is in such a company, he should leave.

2) In the variety of European countries where I've worked, compensation for over-time is a non-issue - I did not mention compensation explicitly, as it's obvious to me - it's indeed against the law not to compensate. You'd either get full-pay, 50% to 100% increase (usually for night and weekend work), or you'd get time off. From yours and other responses, I gather this is not the standard in the US.

3) Certainly there were deployment procedures, however this developer decided to bypass staging, testing and even didn't perform a smoke test which would have shown the crashed application. He deemed his code of such high quality that nothing could possibly go wrong. And while he didn't follow procedure and therefore caused a minor scandal for this particular company's public image and lots of lost customers, he didn't see why he should be involved in recovery, since it was after 5 o clock. Instead his teammates worked until long into the night, to find out what had actually happened before finally fixing it.

I get where you're coming from much better now. Looking at your original comment/OP's post, I think a lot of the replies you got substituted in information from the OP in places where you did not specify. You've cleared it up though and don't sound so draconian anymore though!

1) The fire in the kitchen isn't the developer's responsibility as he is an employee and does not own the property or the problem. The company is hiring the developer to do work for them - that work includes fixing problems regardless of who created them. If the developer were on a contract for 1 month and something he created exploded on 1month+1day then the developer is under no responsibility to fix that problem. That extends just the same to an employee and shows how the employee is not responsible for the fire. Of course, most employees are going to happily stay and fix what they broke as it's part of professional integrity - but the business owner should really be saying "thank you" in that situation as the employee has gone beyond his employment contract to help. So I disagree with you - the developer being the only one able to solve a problem does not make him responsible in any way. If the developer received the rewards of ownership then he would be responsible.

I'll admit that it doesn't work like this in most cases as employees are scared of getting fired and act more like indentured servants than anything - but as a manager you should try to be above that, I think.

2) Definitely not standard - and the OP who you wrote your comment to is clearly not being offered overtime. He is being told to work more with no mention of more pay. The company wouldn't want him working overtime if it was costing them more than hiring another employee.

3) So the developer deliberately sabotaged established company procedure. I'm not sure what it has to do with the OP so it's probably why the replies to your comment seem confused. At any rate, it's a completely separate issue and even if the dev stayed all weekend to fix the problem, he should still be getting a very stern official warning to follow safety procedures. Seems like an orthogonal issue.

>I would think it entirely obvious that if you work overtime you either get paid or take compensatory time off?

Obvious to whom? I haven't had an employer that finds this point obvious in more than 7 years.

I've only encounted unpaid overtime in chaotic sweatshops, which are similar to the companies I mentioned, of constant fires / crisis'. These are so uncommon though, and the practice by all means illegal, that I'd think it obvious that over-time is compensated one way or the other. Are you in the US? My experience is from a variety of European countries mainly, which might differ vastly from american standards.

In the US, salaried employees aren't legally required to get paid overtime, only hourly employees. The whole point of being salaried is that you're being paid for a year of work, rather than by the hour, so your pay doesn't depend on hours worked.

Typically, full time developers are salaried.

I'm in Canada and it's the same. My salary agreement says I get paid X for Y hours per week and is very vague about how overtime is treated. There is a mention that there may be "expected overtime" required on an occasional basis. I have never received compensation or time-off-in-leiu for overtime worked and during term (i work for a university) it's expected that I work 45-50 as opposed to the 35 that was agreed upon. 35 hours per week is summer only, and then I'd be lucky.

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