[threentaway]

> So I'll happily work 50 hour weeks instead of 40 hours

But why? If your contract says 40/wk is expected, then just work that and set targets based on that. Why give your employer 500+ hours per year of your life that you don't owe them?

[sokoloff]

Mostly because I view the relationship with my company and CTO as a partnership rather than an adversarial one and I like what I do. (I do things a lot like it for free at home anyway...)

If there’s a crunch time or a production issue, I don’t mind going above some contractually obligated minimum that helps the company disproportionately compared to the drag on my time.

At the end of it all, I’ve also gotten promotions that I’m 100% sure I’d have not gotten if I timed each of my workdays with a stopwatch and clipboard.

[Kye]

Do you have reason to believe the company will see it the same way when things get tough? A lot of people think a relationship is strong, then they get The Talk one day and find out they were the only one who thought that.

[sokoloff]

I do, because I’ve seen behind the curtain how these decisions get made, at least here. (Given that a sizable part of business went to zero when tradeshows went away, we’ve been tested as a company in the last 12 months.)

Now, if I became no longer useful to them for whatever reason, I’m sure I’d get The Talk, but I don’t know why that shouldn’t be expected, normal, and OK.

[bobthechef]

This is a good point.

If an employer pays Y for X, but gets X+1 for the price of Y, why would he then bump you up to Y+1 if they don't have to? You're communicating through your actions that this is an okay state of affairs. You might do a bit of that X+1 work for some time to give you leverage during EOY reviews, but that's because you want that salary bump. Whether it will actually result in one is a different matter.

Jobs aren't charity and business is business. There's nothing inherently noble about doing a disproportionate amount of free work for a profit making company, especially when you have other obligations outside of work. Believing it is noble is a kind of Stockholm syndrome. The very essence of companies is to provide a service or product for a price as a just exchange of goods. The very nature of your employment is that they need someone to help make the service or product to get the money they want in exchange for a just fraction of the profits. When employees stop caring about adequate compensation, this results in a creeping exploitation.

[sokoloff]

I don't do work beyond the bare minimum to not get fired out of a sense of nobility or self-sacrifice. I do it in part because I enjoy it and I do it in large part because it pays quite well for me and my family.

By all means, if you're being inadequately compensated or exploited, quit and find a new employer (assuming you're in software).

[jmchuster]

I just checked my most recent offer letter, and there is no reference to amount of hours worked. I'd probably be surprised if that was referred to in any of my past offer letters as well.

At least in tech, hours seems to be determined moreso by the societal norms (culture) of the company, which is then an extension of the "type" of company and what is normally expected of such. You might choose to perform above or below what those norms are, and might or might not see rewards/consequences for doing so. So these are things you might gauge by, say, the size of the company, asking various people before or during the interview process about the work culture, and so on. There are of course also variations across teams and departments within the company, so you'd probably get the best information from your future boss on what they expect.

For example, one tech company I worked at was very 9 to 5. People start shuffling out around 4 and the place would be a ghost town at 6. People are also not particularly prompt about showing up in the morning, maybe rolling in at 10 or 11. So there were certainly many people there working closer to 30 hour work weeks. Some definitely had an attitude of trying to have little responsibility as possible and do as little work as possible.

I personally like working hard on interesting problems, which I guess is what the article is referring to. So having problems that I can choose to spend as many hours I like working on sounds great to me. And when I've had enough enjoyment for the day, I pack it up, some days earlier, some days later. And if there's a pressing issue or deadline, then I'll gladly put in extra hours to match, because such accomplishment under pressure is enjoyable to me as well. So, this is the type of company culture I enjoy, where no one is asking you to put in hard work and hours, but everyone who works there is intrinsically gladly doing so anyways.

Tied in with that, then, is the type of company that would most get value out of such individuals, so they would presumably be ones where the individual impact is much more amplified. Which also means that you have a much more powerful enjoyment feedback loop, in that you more directly see the impact of your effort on the company itself.

[threentaway]

I agree with most of what you're saying, but the work will still be there the next day. I just dont see the reason to give more than agreed on, with the exception of emergencies of course.

[jmchuster]

So what is "agreed on"? There's no contract or anything in place, so is "agreed on" to always do the minimum amount of work required to not get fired? I'm sure many people enjoy going through life like that, it's just not for me.