[gtfoutttt]

>I know people that connect everyday from home to the office network to work one or two hours (extra) otherwise it's impossible to keep up with the workload.

Then the work doesn't get completed on time! That's bad management not hiring enough people, not the fault of the employee. SMH y'all IT people need a union.

[jusssi]

It's the difference between a junior and a senior. The latter has better expectations of what one can get done in an average workday, and the confidence to push back with "sorry, looks like this thing's more work than expected, going to need another two days for it".

Btw. Looks like the Great America is woke and hates you for the word 'union' you used in your comment.

[bonestormii_]

The "confidence" of senior people to push back is greatly enhanced by the fact that they won't be expediently fired for doing so. And even so, plenty of senior positions suffer from this situation as well. I'm living this hell right now.

[Hamuko]

>The "confidence" of senior people to push back is greatly enhanced by the fact that they won't be expediently fired for doing so.

There's a problem with your country if you can be fired for refusing overtime.

[colejohnson66]

(in America) There’s no such this as “overtime” in most salaried jobs though. You’re paid just for being an employee, not for hours worked. Whether you work 35 or 60 hours, it’s the same pay.[a] As a result, employers don’t have to worry about overtime pay, only burnt out employees (but entry and junior levels are disposable, right? /s)

[a]: This also leads to the employer expecting one to be “on call” 24/7 regardless of your position.

[Hamuko]

>There’s no such this as “overtime” in most salaried jobs though. You’re paid just for being an employee, not for hours worked.

If there's no concept of overtime in most salaried jobs, there's a problem with your country as well.

I'm a salaried, full-time employee and I'm paid to work 37.5 hours a week, no more, no less. And the collective agreement for IT services industry (which is what concerns me as a developer) dictates that 40 hours/week is the maximum.

If you want to read our collective agreement, you can find it here: https://tietoala.fi/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/TES__englanti... Working hours are on page 19 (21 on the PDF).

[treis]

And you probably get paid 1/3 to 1/2 of what a developer in the US can make.

The reality of the world is that if you're the lead developer for some product you will have times that you need to work off hours. Like if production is down how can you say: "My 40 hours is up this week, I'll look at it on Monday".

It's a balance. You shouldn't routinely be working a ton of nights and weekends. But sometimes shit hits the fan at inconvenient hours and you need to respond. If not, you have to have routine 24/7 coverage which gets really expensive really fast ultimately leading to lower salaries for developers.

[buran77]

I think the problem is usually overtime is interpreted as time doing extra work, not time to finish the work you were expected to finish anyway. The company can claim you were unproductive and probably has an easier time proving this that you have proving otherwise.

Most companies try to extract the most value from their employees and this may mean overloading them and they use "industry benchmarks" to set the bar for what you're expected to deliver. Those are very debatable but effective in supporting their point.

Then in the bulk of the push comes from incentivizing people to do overtime by offering promotions, bonuses, good projects only to those who go above and beyond. Refusing overtime may not only be received with a lack of incentives but with concrete disincentives like getting the really nasty activities and treatment. If you're building a career, want the position, or want/need the higher pay, you'll do it. Depends on the company, the job, the person.

[texasbigdata]

You guys unioned as a cross company group of 1 (or several closely related) functional roles? That’s super interesting! Do any entry level people NOT accept membership to the union or undercut in any way? Do you require your employee to be a “union” shop to work there?

I think it’s beautiful your vacation hours are set out, etc.

It seems like there could be some issues if every vertical had one of these (“oh no, the real estate team has 7 weeks of vacation but the HR team only has 2?”) but outside of that it’s beautiful what y’all did as a collective entity. This is super eye opening, thanks for sharing.

[talentedcoin]

This sort of thing makes the (Canadian) hair on the back of my neck stand up. I can see a collective agreement for a govt employees, or for a specific set of trades within an industry. But for an entire sector?

As others in the thread have pointed out, these types of arrangements don't always correspond to the reality of the business. If you are, for example, paid a yearly bonus, then the concept of "unpaid overtime" doesn't really apply.

[Mauricebranagh]

Wouldn't go down very well in UK M&P unions

I recall a delegate at my Union conference getting very upset at the thought that our members where such low grade / status employees

The Uk is possibly different that no fixed hours has a district class / social status.

Interesting to see a eu style agreemnet

[geodel]

Don't know specifics about you. But officially/legally fixed hours comes with list of measurable tasks that must be completed by certain time. Now in most places I worked things invariably get delayed due to vendors, other teams, servers, network issues and so on. When issues are finally resolved one is expected to complete allocated task in 'extra' time. Saying that my 35 hours are over is not gonna cut in my experience. Even for highly demanded skills this kind fix hour negotiations is not possible for an individual employee or contractor.

Besides one can't really compare IT jobs in UK and USA. In UK they are generally at lower end of pay and reputation compare to US.

[ingvul]

In which country are you working? My full-time work contract explicitly says that I will receive X EUR/year for working 40h/week. So, yes, they are paying for hours worked.

[colejohnson66]

USA. Should’ve mentioned that.

[reaperducer]

There’s no such this as “overtime” in most salaried jobs though. You’re paid just for being an employee, not for hours worked.

This used to be true, but has changed in a lot of states and cities in the last decade or so. Many people still think that salaried=work as long as the boss says.

In those places, being salaried doesn't mean you have to work unlimited hours with no compensation. This only applies to managers. If you don't directly manage people, you are legally entitled to overtime. Pre-pandemic, some states were cracking down on this.

It's worth checking your state and city's labor laws every couple of years because things change all the time.

[koonsolo]

Wow. It's very much regulated here in belgium. 38 hours and 20 holidays. If you do 40 hours, you get extra holidays for those hours.

It's clear in the contract how many hours you do for which pay.

Working on Saturday needs to be 150% compensated and Sunday 200%, but I might be wrong on this last part.

[aaaxyz]

Why would you ever sign an employment contract that does not even mention overtime?

[Viliam1234]

It's interesting how the same situation has completely opposite implications in different countries.

In my country, if the contract doesn't mention overtime, that's great, because it means the company must pay you nicely for overtime, and there is a limited amount of overtime per year. However, if it is explicitly a part of the contract, there may be more overtime per year (within some limits), and less compensation per extra hour (again, within some limits). So if you find overtime mentioned in your contract, that is a bad thing.

[snow_mac]

This is why being a contractor is the best idea. You need need me to work 60? I'm billing for every, single hour. 35? Great! I'm going to leave early on Friday and not check my email until Monday morning!

[BurningFrog]

Then again, a competent senior engineer can easily get another job.

I'm just one atypical person, but in my experience, the employer is usually more nervous about the employee breaking things off than the employee.

[tdsamardzhiev]

The juniors won’t be fired either, but they don’t know that and usually get abused because of it.

If a company expects you to crunch, that means there’s too much work. If there’s too much work, it’s extremely unlikely that somebody doing a decent job would be fired.

[MisterBastahrd]

I currently work at an org where the least experienced dev has over 10 years of experience. Management is fine knowing that we will say what's on our minds if we don't think something is being handled properly.

[strictnein]

> Looks like the Great America is woke and hates you for the word 'union' you used in your comment.

Someday maybe our betters in Europe will understand that the American experience with unions is different than that of Europeans. And that American unions are a very different animal. Until that time, though, keep thinking we're just idiots.

[dvtrn]

Someday maybe our betters in Europe will understand that the American experience with unions is different than that of Europeans.

In ways that no one should be proud of, and anyone with a conscience should at least recognize needs redressing-even if the outcomes are things they as an individual wouldn't directly benefit from.

[stainforth]

The destruction of unions in America was not for righteous reasons.

[eeZah7Ux]

The level of anti-union violence in US is higher that what people might think:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence

[nickff]

Previously-unionized industries declined in America, and new industries have been slow to unionize; I am not sure unions have been 'destroyed'.

[MereInterest]

So-called "Right to Work" laws mean that a union-negotiated contract may be made available to non-union members. At that point, the individually rational action is to leave the union, keep the dues, but benefit from the union's negotiation. As everybody does this, the union declines.

"At-will employment" laws mean that the burden of proof for the cause of firing is on the employee, rather than the employer. This gives free rein to employer's to fire workers considering unionizing, so long as there is the barest pretext of another cause. As forming a union becomes economically risky, unions decline, or fail to form in new industries.

Unions have been attacked in the US, through explicit policies meant to defund unions, and to prevent unions from forming.

[jusssi]

I don't feel shame for shaming unjust downvoters (that said, I've upvoted your comment, too).

A short googling for for "history of workplace safety in the us" reveals that unions had a hand in at least that. Probably in several other things you take for granted.

In my opinion it's a mistake to think that things like that cannot deteriorate away after they've been achieved once.

[theshrike79]

"Union" and "Socialism" have very different meanings on your side of the pacific :)

Just the stories about how union work is handled on US movie sets is just baffling. Directors can't even touch the lights without an Official Light Mover Union member doing it. If they do, all union people will just walk off set and that's the end of it.

In most European countries unions are more about collectively agreeing to some basic rules like wage, hours worked and other compensations.

[centimeter]

> SMH y'all IT people need a union.

Or just some balls. Don’t work more than you want to - either your employer will deal with it or you go find a new job. Not a big deal.

I work fewer hours than the median person at my company and I don’t think it has negatively impacted me much or at all. Any time someone tries to get me to do something that would require working additional hours I just say no or take extra vacation days in lieu (eg if I need to do something for a few hours on Saturday - I take an extra vacation day to make up. If it’s not worth it for the company, it doesn’t really need to get done on sat). Literally the worst case is you get fired, but probably nothing will happen.

[ericd]

Are you familiar with the mythical man month? Hiring more people might not get the same amount done as a few working really hard.

That said, burnout can make working harder worse than working a sane amount. But that doesn’t fall on the employer as much as the employee.

[aaaxyz]

>Hiring more people might not get the same amount done as a few working really hard.

That is highly dependent on when the new employee is added to the project. If it's done early (as a result of proper planning), it's most likely not gonna hurt.

[ericd]

One of the key points of the mythical man month is that communication overhead starts taking a larger and larger chunk of the total productivity as you scale the number of people involved, just to keep everyone synced up and rowing in the same direction. It's not really based on when the people are added.

[Viliam1234]

There is definitely such thing as too many people.

But with reasonable amount of people, if you start with the full team at the beginning, you can assign different responsibilities to different people. For example, one can do database, one can do web API, one can do web design, one can do integration with other systems, one can build and maintain continuous integration; you can also divide the domain knowledge among multiple people. Each person can focus on doing their part in such way that the others do not need to understand every single detail, and only use the agreed API.

However, if you add a new person late in the project... all simple things were probably already done, and all difficult things require a lot of knowledge about the existing code, that other team members already know, but if they spend their time explaining it to the new member, then their own work gets slower, so the overall speed reduces. (And yes, given enough time, the new member would learn everything and become just as productive as the old members. But the thing is, there is not enough time left at that moment.)

[gtfoutttt]

I wasn't referring to 9 pregnant women working one month to birth a child. There are a few cases where that book's core idea does make a lot of sense.

I was referring to my 40 hours ending on Friday at 5, and not returning to work until Monday morning. If management expects more from me then they need to hire more people or lower their retirement or delivery expectations.

[chrisseaton]

> Then the work doesn't get completed on time!

Do you realise in some fields work not getting completed on time could in some cases cause people to die?

Sometimes there is an emergency, and a professional saying 'sorry nope on vacation your fault for not having enough people to cover every eventuality' just isn't reasonable.

[Majestic121]

> Do you realise in some fields work not getting completed on time could in some cases cause people to die?

I'm sure there are jobs where this is true. I'm also sure it's not for 99.9% of people here.

[CalRobert]

It is reasonable. The buck stops somewhere. If you're on call sure but there are rules around that.

Don't guilt people who happen to have lifesaving jobs for taking vacations.

[chrisseaton]

> Don't guilt people who happen to have lifesaving jobs for taking vacations.

In many cases taking that job means accepting you may be forced to come in and work. Often called 'unlimited liability' for example. If you can't accept that, then leave the job to someone who can.

> The buck stops somewhere.

In this case apparently it's fine for it to stop with a dead person.

[notreallytrue]

> In this case apparently it's fine for it to stop with a dead person.

People that do a job where they can save lives accept the fact that saving lives is not granted.

People don't die because someone is slacking.

Do you realize how stupid that sounds?

[chrisseaton]

> People don't die because someone is slacking.

Not sure where you read this argument?

[notreallytrue]

That's a terrible apology...

Free time is a right

If someone dies during your free time it's not your responsibility

Besides: US have the worst life expectation of the whole west.

You should ask yourself why.

[aranelsurion]

Sounds like a poorly built strawman you have there.

How often do you believe people get asked to work extra hours to save lives in imminent danger? 1 in 10000?

This law would cover other 9999 cases.

[theshrike79]

If there is an actual emergency, there are clear rules of escalation.

The issue is escalated through different support levels up to the on-call person, if they can't handle it then MAYBE people are bothered during their vacation.

Or if production breaks at 1600 on a friday night, I can maybe work extra hours to solve the issue if it looks like I'm essential to solving it. It just means that I'm coming later on monday to make up for the hours.

[dbetteridge]

Of course its reasonable...

It may not be the decision people will make, it may be an ethical quagmire etc etc but you can't just expect people to keep working past their limits forever.

There need to be reasonable bounds.

[notreallytrue]

> Do you realise in some fields work not getting completed on time could in some cases cause people to die?

It doesn't work like that.

> Sometimes there is an emergency, and a professional saying 'sorry nope on vacation

Why are they relying on someone that is on vacation in the first place?

Are firemen supposed to not go on holiday ever during their work life?

That's simply the symptom of very bad management and on a larger scale of a very disfunctional society.

[chrisseaton]

> Why are they relying on someone that is on vacation in the first place?

Sometimes there are only so many people who can solve a problem and society can't afford to have an excess number of them sitting around doing nothing in case there is an emergency.

> Are firemen supposed to not go on holiday ever during their work life?

Firemen, police, politicians, military, are all subject to getting recalled from leave if there is an emergency and they are needed to prevent life being lost. Nobody ever said they can't ever go on leave.

> That's simply the symptom of very bad management

No it's reality!

Look at how many people criticise presidents who are 'golfing' when there is a crisis and life is being lost.

Some people just need to be able to respond no matter what.

[notreallytrue]

> Sometimes there are only so many people who can solve a problem

That's a very small subset of the entire workforce.

Maybe one in a million or less

> No it's reality!

It's not.

> Look at how many people criticise presidents who are 'golfing' when there is a crisis and life is being lost.

They are right.

The president is not a salaried worker, it's the president.

[chrisseaton]

> The president is not a salaried worker, it's the president.

He works. He draws a salary. What do you think the difference is?

Why can't the Vice President delegate out of hours? Because that's not realistic? Well there you go... sometimes it's not realistic.

[notreallytrue]

> He works. He draws a salary. What do you think the difference is?

Well... Let's say that if I have to explain it too you, we have bigger issues to solve first.

> Why can't the Vice President delegate out of hour

Because that's not how it works

By the law

[bobthechef]

While I sympathize with the need to push back on bad management, the situation is a bit like being between a rock (bad management) and a hard place (unions). Tyranny of the few vs. tyranny of the majority or the mob. The latter is worse.

It's also kind of a mediocre bandaid for deeper social problems. An employer that can get away with asking you to do unreasonable amounts of work, work ridiculous hours, or achieve impossible feats OR ELSE probably doesn't have much market competition.

Also a quote from C.S. Lewis:

“Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under the omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

[jchrisa]

Solving the market failure looks like UBI. I bet a lot of people who think unions are tyranny really don't like the idea of "free money".

[wutbrodo]

This is a bizarre generalization. I'd be willing to bet that most of the people who supported UBI before its moment in the political spotlight in the last five years are not as sanguine about unions as the average person on the left. This certainly describes me: I believe in heavy redistribution and taxation (especially of land!) but think that the left (which I consider myself a part of) has a consistent problem with being too arrogant to recognize how complex people's lives are, and damaging the worse-off in the name of helping them.

Insisting that support for unions and support for UBI must be linked is the same energy as insisting that more tightly restricting what food stamp recipients can buy is "helping" them.

[Viliam1234]

Both unions and UBI try to address the same problem: make it so that people do not have to choose between abuse and starvation.

But they are completely different approaches to this problem. For example, unions do not protect unemployed people, while UBI protects everyone. On the other hand, a union is something you could create tomorrow at your workplace without waiting for the rest of the country to change their minds.

In some sense, they are competing solutions, because if we had UBI, unions would be less necessary, because everyone who feels abused would have the opportunity to walk away... without ruining their life.

[wutbrodo]

Exactly, which is why the conflation of the two is so silly. There's a very tiny portion of humanity who actually _want_ others to starve, so competing solutions to the problem can easily show up in different views of the world.

Many people have a very simple-minded view of both politics and the world in general, which leads them to a low-resolution model that lumps things into two massive buckets and assume that everyone else takes their set of beliefs wholesale from one of the buckets.

[gtfoutttt]

I work in a union in the USA and I love it. 40 hrs every week. Paid vacation. Paid medical dental and vision. A real pension.

And CS Lewis is no expert. He's a preacher.

[xg15]

You still expect the 'mob' to work for you though, do you?

[tboyd47]

That's an amazing quote.

[minikites]

Really?

>The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated.

We wouldn't have any billionaires if this was even remotely true. If having 999 million dollars doesn't satiate you, I submit there is no amount of money that will. We look down on hoarders who fill their house with old newspapers and knickknacks but when it's money hoarding we lionize it.

[tboyd47]

I'm more interested in the bit about "omnipotent moral busybodies." If shutting down 100,000 businesses, pausing children's education including special education services for a whole year, forcing the entire populace to wear cloth masks, shutting down religious services protected by the Constitution, mandating where you can & can't stand in the grocery store, and demanding the right to censor the news on all digital platforms doesn't satisfy their thirst for power, I submit that no amount of power will.