[Veen]

I think this attitude is the problem. If you pay me for 40 hours of work, I owe you 40 hours of work. That is all.

If you want me to be on call, pay me to be on call.

If my code blows up, I don't owe you 45 hours of work for 40 hours of pay. If my code blows up, it's because you haven't managed testing and quality assurance properly. I shouldn't be able to get shitty code into production — that's why you're the manager and I'm the peon.

It may sound harsh, but demanding free work is exploitation. And trying to guilt people into working for free is immoral.

[bendixso]

I think at the very least we can agree that it is the employee's job to inform their superiors of feature creep, looming technical debt, and whatever bad practices they see.

If you're fixing bugs in production because your manager hasn't addressed longstanding technical debt, then yes, you shouldn't feel bad about the bugs that slipped through against your advice. In that case, I think your indignation at working extra hours without getting paid would be justified.

Ideally, we would do proper estimates upfront without being pushed to grossly underestimate features because so-and-so thinks it should only take a few minutes.

Pushy managers and bad employees are made for each other. It's a feedback loop.

[happychappy]

"I think at the very least we can agree that it is the employee's job to inform their superiors of feature creep, looming technical debt, and whatever bad practices they see. "

Yes, please yes. This is really where 1-1s come into their own. I can ask directly - is there any part of the code you're working on that truly sucks, and is going to break? I don't care who wrote it or when (it was probably me), I just need to know, so I can put it in the backlog

[dasmoth]

Some of us would rather take some responsibility for our code than be treated as "peons".

[happychappy]

"I shouldn't be able to get shitty code into production"

Seriously? My job is to watch over your shoulder and double-check everything you do?

No, there's more to life than this.

[Veen]

Of course there is more to life. That's my entire point. I want to be an actively engaged member of the team, rather than a peon. I want to value the work I do and the people I work with. But there's the rub. Being an active, committed, engaged member of the team shouldn't equate to giving away the one thing of value I have — my time — for nothing.

When you ask me to work for free you are making me a peon — someone of low worth whose time and effort aren't worth paying for. Someone who you don't respect enough to give them fair recompense for their work.

It would be absurd for me to demand that my employer gives me five hours of extra pay for doing nothing because otherwise I can't afford something that's of meaningful value to me. It's equally absurd for an employer to demand that I give them something they value – my work — in return for nothing.

A company is not a charity — it's a cooperative venture that exists to generate value for its owners. Every bit of work you do for the company is to generate value for someone else. I'm not going to work so that someone else benefits and I get nothing. I think any other view is either a manipulative management technique or a delusion.