[tigroferoce]

Too bad I can only vote once UP for this comment. I fully agree; I have a family, my wife is a doctor and she works on shifts, so I often have to pickup kids and so on.

A huge cost that is often misunderstood is the cost of replacing an employee who leaves because the working conditions (endless hours, regular extra time, bully environment) are not compatible with his/her work/life balance.

My previous workplace was founded upon extra time (I remember our CTO and CEO clearly saying that he expected people to work 50-60 hours per week. The CEO literally said multiple times "these people are young, I expect them to work 120%").

We constantly were fixing issues and problems, we never had time to properly plan and design. Once the CTO told me that he expected our SW to have problems, but since we had no time to fix them or to build better software, he also expected the programmers to be available so fixing production issues when they happened no matter if it was night or weekend. Once he told us that he expected senior developers to check email once a day while on holiday to check if there were no problems.

No wonder that in a few month 3 out of 4 of the senior engineers left the company.

[dkersten]

Peopleware talks about this. There is a cost to overtime in terms of lost productivity afterwards and in terms of developer happiness. When developers are unhappy, their work quality drops and eventually they leave. Cost of employee turnover is mentioned as a cost that is actually quite high, but rarely factored in.

They also say that overtime can make sense if its short and a rare occurrence.

[tigroferoce]

An employee who leaves is a tragedy, especially in smaller companies. His work has to be shared among the other (implying even more extra time). Then you have to start a new acquisition process to hire someone new, train him, fit him into the existing group and so on. And if someone leaves because of the company culture, there is the possibility that other will follow, making the cost even higher.