[phjohnst]

Thats just how salary works. I've never looked at it as "You're getting paid to do N hours of work", but rather, "You're getting paid get X work done."

In the UK your employer cannot force you to work more than 48 hours a week, but written into my contract was a clause waiving that maximum. I dont think I've ever worked less than 60 hours a week. The weeks where you work 80+ hours, you just try not to think about the hourly rate...

[bhickey]

I declined to waive my rights in this regard. The 48 hour work week is evaluated over a 17-week sliding window. I strongly believe that healthy business relationships require that everyone's selfish interests be aligned. This simply isn't the case if an employer can decide to extract extra labor out of you without extra pay.

[ph0rque]

Thats just how salary works. I've never looked at it as "You're getting paid to do N hours of work", but rather, "You're getting paid get X work done."

At my previous company, the assumption was, "You're getting paid to get X work done, and if you can finish it in 40 hours/week, then we need to keep adding to X until it takes you 60 hours/week to get it done." How is that different than "You're getting paid to do N hours of work per week", with N > 60?

[rdtsc]

That's the farcical part of it. You are getting payed to get X done. Then can you go home after you do X if you did in 30 hours? Can you just tell your boss: you tasked me with doing X, it is done. I am taking a half Thursday and Friday off?

Of course not. That will be met with a look of disbelief and shock. They will probably quickly assign your another thing Y that takes another 40 hours to complete so now you have 10 hours to complete the new 40 hour job.

Because there is no payed overtime everyone is relying bonuses. And guess what happens with bonuses? "Sorry this was a tough year so we had to reduce bonuses this year, but thanks for your great work".

[robryan]

What's to stop them though giving you tasks in which 40 hours would the expected amount of time it would take in a perfect world then especially in software it will tend towards 60 because of unexpected bugs conflicts, waiting on others work etc.

[robryan]

I don't see how this could possibly benefit the employee, I mean if the job is going to require an average of 60 hours a week fair enough but the whole signing away your rights in this regard feels like a bait and switch on the employers part. It depends I guess if they were upfront in the workload expected and set the salary to reflect that.

Certainly I understand that there are times when someone would choose to waiver the rights, a startup with interesting tech and probably equity would be a good example.

[phjohnst]

I was certainly expecting that the workload would be high going in, and I have no issues with working that much (and in fact, I work less than I was expecting to when I signed up). The bait and switch would suck and probably happens to a lot of people.

I completely agree that there are times that someone would want to waive those rights (I did). And if you don't waive them for somewhere like a startup (probably more applicable early than late stage), what does that say about commitment/expectations?

[PakG1]

This is the kind of thing that I was trying to shed light on in this post. I think people who want to get into big companies (not saying you do) don't understand that the hours can sometimes be hell. It's a truth that people don't really like to talk about, work life balance be damned.

[gte910h]

>, but rather, "You're getting paid get X work done."

And work at least 40 hours a week. Ever try to leave after finishing your responsibilities? Works almost no where.

[djhworld]

Did you write that clause in? Because AFAIK that waiver has to be agreed by you first before they slam it in the contract as terms and conditions of employment.