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Imagine a situation where you are 50% support engineer (meaning your teammates' tasks depend on you, let's say sysadmin) and 50% worker (carpenter, developer, D
by friendzis 10y ago
Imagine a situation where you are 50% support engineer (meaning your teammates' tasks depend on you, let's say sysadmin) and 50% worker (carpenter, developer, DBA, cleaner). Basically 20h/w are your slack hours for ad-hoc tasks.
You get a worker task, say add a button to your application, estimate it at 12h and schedule to start on Wednesday. Ok, Monday is release date. Then it turns out that the worker task actually takes more than 12h. And at the same time on Wednesday some computer/server breaks, which takes 12h to fix, so there are no slack hours this week. Basically you are left with extra X hours this week. Is this overtime? If you took afternoon off on Tuesday?
Another situation. You get a 2 hour maintenance window at 19:00 on Friday. If you get to leave 2 hours early, technically there is no overtime. But in practice your workday is 08:00-21:00 - 13 hours long on Friday.
This is the [moral] issue with yearly/monthly salary. Basically employee agrees to agree on task length estimates and then do those tasks, not much different from consultant agreeing on hourly rate and task list with estimates. And this is somewhat of a problem, because power dynamics usually favour employer and employee can be coerced to work unpaid overtime. It is easy to hourly bill production line workers, but it is much different with intellectual tasks where output is not fixed. Is watching the birds while you contemplate on the problem work or not? Maybe you start thinking about your pet parrot. A huge can of worms here. I would say that higher salaries (despite supply/demand, education, etc.) in intellectual fields are the effect of expected occasional overtime not vice versa.
If your employer takes your actual output as "best you can do" and in some way compensates for everything exceeding 40 weekly/8 daily hours I hope for them to succeed and expand so there are more places like that :)