[mpat]

The narrative is that overtime hours represent hard-work and dedication towards the employer and its mission. As the average worker is looking for an opportunity to advance their position, they accept overtime as a necessity, and sometimes as a badge of honor.

However, from a management perspective, unpaid overtime is great. It lets you be lazy in your management. You have no incentive to help an employee finish their tasks in 40 hours when you know they are going to stay 55 hours to complete it by brute force.

If you assign a cost to those overtime hours, the manager now has an incentive to actively participate in your workstream by coaching or seeking efficiences to get you home in 40 hours. And you have the incentive to do likewise since your overtime hours now represent an additional cost to your employer. It will transform overtime from a badge of honor into a topic to be avoided unless truly necessary. It will no longer be the norm.

We can discuss the virtues and detriments of labor unions at length, but they seemed to at least serve as a mechanism of protecting the worker from themselves (i.e. by placing a cap on hours worked, you could not stand out by putting in more time than everyone else).

We as a society need to decide if we want to prioritize time incurred in the workplace, or if we want to judge worker quality off of other behaviors. If we want to de-emphasize time incurred, adding incremental cost to overtime hours would be a useful tool.

[CountHackulus]

I work in a game company that has paid overtime and this is exactly what's happening. Management tries very hard to not have any overtime as it's paid 1-1 into vacation time and eats directly into their budget.

Those of us working, don't really want the overtime because we'd like to go home at night and are usually brain dead by the time 7pm hits.

Really, it works for everyone involved. The company has happier, healthier, and more productive employees, and the employees get paid for all of their work. The only downside is that when doing pre-production, estimates are usually on the higher side to avoid going over the time budget.

[thirdtruck]

I would love to see exponentially expensive overtime.

That first hour of overtime isn't "just an hour," it's a whole eighth of that day's "leftover" waking time. Four hours of overtime is half of those hours left after getting a night's sleep, which cuts deeply into the limited windows of time people have for family and friends.

Beyond that, "unpaid" overtime is worse than that. The costs in productivity losses, health damage, and mental imbalance are still paid, just by the employee and society at large. Expecting IT workers to work 60-80 hours equates to dumping economic and psychological "toxin" into the local water supply. The employers don't mind, because they're buying bottled water with the profits. In short, we need an "Employment EPA."

[toomuchtodo]

> In short, we need an "Employment EPA."

http://www.dol.gov/

[thirdtruck]

Alright, an "Employment EPA" efficacious enough that I don't have to be reminded of its existence.

[toomuchtodo]

This we agree on.

[thirdtruck]

:)

[harryh]

However, from an employee perspective, paid overtime is great. It lets you be lazy in your work. You have no incentive to help the company finish it's tasks in 40 hours when you know they are going to pay you to stay 55 hours to complete it by brute force.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that there are two sides to incentives and it's not obvious that one side is more important than the other.

[chipgap98]

Quality of life is one big reason not to work 55 hours a week. Even for additional compensation, I wouldn't want to be stuck at my job for all that additional time.

Also overtime does not mean that you can just stay late at work whenever you want and bill your employer. Overtime is for when the company tells an an employee that the employee has to stay late to finish an assignment. Then the employee is compensated for staying late, rather than being told they have to stay late and having to just deal with it.

[joesmo]

There are a ton of incentives to not work the 55-hour week as an employee even when it's paid 1.5 or 2x. Health and having time to do other things are probably near the top of the list, but there are many others like morale, avoiding fatigue/burnout etc. Having a cap on hours worked and forcing employers to pay for extra hours, even if it's at the same rate as regular hours, works incredibly well in practice. Not having such a cap and not paying for extra hours doesn't. Inevitably, at the very least, the work will suffer greatly, probably to the point where the extra hours become meaningless compared to what the workers could achieve if they were not overworked.

[harryh]

Empirically employees who get paid 1.5x or 2x for overtime seem to want to get as much overtime as possible regardless of the fact that it cuts into other activities in their lives. That's at least been my perspective. I'm not sure if there are any large scale studies done on this topic.

You might be correct that the best way to balance the competing incentives is to require overtime pay but not at a higher rate.

[Retric]

In large part that relates to the low pay of anyone that still qualifies for Overtime in the US. But also because it's calculated on a week by week basis. Work 60 hours in one week with double over time and you get to take 1 full week off. Change that to a monthly or yearly basis and people are less inclined to work overtime.

[walshemj]

This should have not been down voted for non professional jobs there are a lot of "Spanish" practices around OT and Bonus's

the posties used to put some of the post posted on Friday to make sure that there was OT avable on Saturday.

And even in professional jobs I have seen some sketchy practices ie DBA's being on call 4 in 4 and getting called maybe twice a year BTW the rate was $600+ per week plus toil at OT rates

[intended]

At which point you get fired.

If you consistently can't meet deadlines and your boss isn't helping then people lose jobs.

There's - always - some variant of these laws, and all states have people who can abuse it.

For many jobs though, over time should be there, because many jobs have only a finite amount of output achievable by a human being.

[maerF0x0]

The employer holds a myriad of cards to deal with unproductive people. At will employment means they can lose that will at any sign of unproductive work. Outside of tech, and IMO, its much harder to replace a job than it is to replace an employee, so the scales are tipped in the employer's favor.