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"I don't believe that most such employees see their work as "slavery" when they have to work excessive hours. I think they see it as career development" That m

"I don't believe that most such employees see their work as "slavery" when they have to work excessive hours. I think they see it as career development" That made me laugh. "Top executives" typically have compensation packages that, to some degree, directly tie their compensation to the overall company performance. Thus, the harder they work, the more likely it is that the company will perform to or above expectations, and thus the more likely it is that their stock or option package compensate them for the "excessive hours". These "top executives" are also incentivised, by their compensation structure, to obtain as much value as possible out of fixed-cost resources. But, as an average employee, without generous option packages, you start to rationalise the 8th week of working 80 hours as "career development", because the alternative is to confront the fact that you are helpless and beholden and powerless to refuse to work the extra hours without risking your health insurance, or your job.

orblivion 15y ago
Would they keep their job if they refused to work more than 40 hours? Is there a 40 hour a week job out there that pays and furthers their career comperably? If not, I don't know what to call it other than career development.
- campnic 15y ago
  The problem I see with many of these lines of thought are that they grossly over simplify the effects of situation and environmental factors. Even if there exists a comparable job with better hours, its existence doesn't always make it a viable alternative. Is being stuck in a mortgage or with a sick spouse license for an employer to demand you work 70 hours a week?
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Look at it from a mechanically rational perspective. Your protagonist has a mortgage and a family and we're on a tech message board so let's stipulate that this is a technology worker making the average wage for, say, a programmer in Grand Rapids, MI. That's $73,000 (before benefits), or $35/hour for 40 hour weeks. You ask, "is being stuck in a mortgage with a sick spouse license for an employer to demand 70 hours a week?". Well, at 70 hours a week, our protagonist is effectively being paid $19.78 per hour. That's almost $2 higher than the average income of employees in Grand Rapids, MI. What you're effectively asking is, should it be lawful for employers to pay people less based on their situation? On the one hand, there are plenty of circumstances where it clearly isn't lawful to do that. For instance, you can't pay people less because they're of Indian origin, or because they practice Judaism, or because they're female. On the other hand, the circumstances of individual employees play into compensation decisions all the time in every job. You are effectively being paid less because of circumstances mostly out of your control any time you take a job outside of San Francisco or New York; the premium earned by technology workers in San Francisco exceeds cost-of-living adjustments significantly. So where do you draw the line? Is the line "you can't be paid less because of illnesses in your immediate family?" I'd agree with that rule, but how often does it really come into play? For what it's worth, speaking on behalf of an employer: we don't like 70 hour weeks. We work hard to keep them from happening and, for the most part, people get out the door here in time for dinner (it's hard to say, because some people stroll in the door just in time for lunch). Making people work overtime here, paid or not, is a bad idea because it makes it hard to retain talent. I'd like to think that if there was an economic rationale for overtaxing our team, we still wouldn't do that because it's immoral... but my morals haven't been tested on this issue, because it would be irrational of us to coerce people into working overtime.
    - dpritchett 15y ago
      I'd imagine the only time you'd see an economic rationale for systematically overworking your team would be in a moon shot / burn the ships scenario, neither of which seems necessary for a service company. Perhaps if the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was a buyout in the tens of millions you'd be tempted as a part owner. Even then the front-line employees being whipped would be unlikely to get a significant piece of that pie, no?
      - ootachi 15y ago
        Long hours are the key to profitability, as Philip Greenspun put it: "From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. A programmer probably needs to spend 25 hours per week...Thus a programmer who works 55 hours per week is twice as productive as one who works 40 hours per week.... A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week)." "If you see one of your best people walking out the door at 6:00 pm, try to think why you haven't challenged that person with an interesting project. If you see one of your average programmers walking out the door at 6:00 pm, recognize that this person is not developing into a good programmer."
        henrikschroder 15y ago
        > Thus a programmer who works 55 hours per week is twice as productive as one who works 40 hours per week There is plenty of studies done on this that shows that you can get an increase in productivity by working more hours for a short time, but that if you go over ~35h/week for a longer period of time, the productivity drops and some overtime might actually result in negative productivity.
        tptacek 15y ago
        Greenspun wrote that about a software consulting business, too. Think about what else has to be going wrong with a consultancy for it to make sense for people to work 70 hour weeks. Hint: serious clients pay in 40-hour person/week increments. Anyways, it's undeniable that there's a pervasive culture of 60-80 hour work weeks in tech companies. I think it's bullshit; I think it's bad for the employers, who get substandard burnout work and become a revolving door that spins even faster for more talented team members; I think it's bad for employees for obvious reasons. But I also think (a) a slice of cheese shouldn't cost $200 and have an end-user licensing agreement attached, and (b) we don't need to outlaw that practice. When you read articles about unfair labor practices at tech companies, I'd like you to keep in mind that software developers are the. worst. at reasoning about the valuation of their own work. Software developers think Stack Overflow is worth maybe a weekend's worth of programmer time because it's just a big message board. The world probably does look a lot more unjust when you look at it through a prism of discounting your own value by 50%-150%.
- pilom 15y ago
  "Is there a 40 hour a week job out there that pays and furthers their career comparably?" The defense industry in the US is like this. It is illegal for a company to have employees work more that 40 hours a week without overtime pay. The rationale is: If Company A has a company culture of all employees working 60 hours a week and Company B has a corporate culture of working 40 hours a week, Company A could charge the government less for the same amount of work and thus would win more contracts. The government recognized this would create an customer incentive for companies to "encourage" their employees to work longer hours. So the government made a law that Defense contractor employees must be paid overtime for any hours more than 40 per week. And in my experience, no manager will pay overtime so most non-manager level people really don't work any more than that.
  - ccoggins 15y ago
    This is not true at all. I work in the defense industry and their is certainly not any law requiring my company to pay me for overtime. I think what you are referring to is the fact that any hours worked on contracts must be billed to the government. Say a company receives 1000 hours to do a job and an employee works on the project 80 hours per week. At that rate, the government will only pay for 12.5 weeks of work(1000/80), not 25 weeks. This prevents the problem you mention, but it still isn't good for the employee. It does create an incentive for the company to encourage their employees to work more. If they charge for 80 hours in one week, but only pay the employee for 40 the company just made a bunch of extra profit at the employee's expense.
    - pilom 15y ago
      The Federal Acquisitions Regulations 37.115 Uncompensated overtime. 37.115-2 General policy. (a) Use of uncompensated overtime is not encouraged. (b) When professional or technical services are acquired on the basis of the number of hours to be provided, rather than on the task to be performed, the solicitation shall require offerors to identify uncompensated overtime hours and the uncompensated overtime rate for direct charge Fair Labor Standards Act—exempt personnel included in their proposals and subcontractor proposals. This includes uncompensated overtime hours that are in indirect cost pools for personnel whose regular hours are normally charged direct. (c) Contracting officers must ensure that the use of uncompensated overtime in contracts to acquire services on the basis of the number of hours provided will not degrade the level of technical expertise required to fulfill the Government’s requirements (see 15.305 for competitive negotiations and 15.404-1(d) for cost realism analysis). When acquiring these services, contracting officers must conduct a risk assessment and evaluate, for award on that basis, any proposals received that reflect factors such as— (1) Unrealistically low labor rates or other costs that may result in quality or service shortfalls; and (2) Unbalanced distribution of uncompensated overtime among skill levels and its use in key technical positions. -https://www.acquisition.gov/far/current/html/Subpart%2037_1.html https://www.acquisition.gov/far/current/html/Subpart%2037_1.... Fair enough it isn't legally required. However it is formally discouraged by the government. Also, my particular employer explicitly discourages unpaid overtime and thus it doesn't happen often.
snowwrestler 15y ago
I work very hard, including overtime. I'm salaried and I don't have profit sharing or equity--because I work for a nonprofit. However, my excellent performance at my job has resulted in promotions that have more than doubled my salary since I was hired. So to me it seems that my hard work did result in career development.
dclowd9901 15y ago
You're not helpless and beholden. There's just simply always a smaller fish. If I turn down the job that requires 60 hours a week, they will likely find someone who is willing to do that. It's partly from a week job market, partly because people are so bad at understanding their own financial situations, and partly because the availability of financial leveraging systems like financing and credit. And, of course, a company that's willing to take on an employee who's willing to work 20 unpaid hours a week probably also has a lower level of quality demand on a per-employee basis. What's particularly infuriating about this is that they could probably pay a more qualified candidate more money and get better work, and yield the results of two poor candidates. Essentially, companies are stepping over dollars to pick up dimes, and execs are laughing all the way to the bank. How pointless.
- jberryman 15y ago
  > You're not helpless and beholden. For many people, especially those with families (not to mention those with family members with medical issues) the healthcare issue really does leave them beholden. It also stifles entrepreneurship.
  - temphn 15y ago
    If you aren't starting a company because you can't get private health insurance, you are probably not resourceful enough to be a successful entrepreneur. It is just not that hard.
    - prodigal_erik 15y ago
      It's a crapshoot. Dirt cheap for some, out of reach for others. Some people have been blackballed by the entire industry for the sin of developing a serious condition—the underwriter finds an excuse to weasel out of the coverage you thought you had, and then you can't get it ever again at any price. Group plans are a lot more likely to be available and to uphold their end of the deal.
  - WettowelReactor 15y ago
    Then instead of regulating wage and hours shouldn't we focus on providing affordable healthcare (including coverage for preexisting conditions). If healthcare is the barrier to fluidity on the supply side then this is where we should focus our efforts.
temphn 15y ago
Private health insurance is really not that hard to buy. Just save up, buy it, and quit if you have better options. If you don't, if this is the best out there for someone with your talents, why exactly are you complaining? You chose to work "80 hours", and you can choose to work less. 99% of the world would give their eyeteeth to do what we do, in which the gravest professional hazard is spilling our lattes on our Macbook Pros.

orblivion 15y ago

Would they keep their job if they refused to work more than 40 hours? Is there a 40 hour a week job out there that pays and furthers their career comperably? If not, I don't know what to call it other than career development.

campnic 15y ago
The problem I see with many of these lines of thought are that they grossly over simplify the effects of situation and environmental factors. Even if there exists a comparable job with better hours, its existence doesn't always make it a viable alternative. Is being stuck in a mortgage or with a sick spouse license for an employer to demand you work 70 hours a week?
- tptacek 15y ago
  Look at it from a mechanically rational perspective. Your protagonist has a mortgage and a family and we're on a tech message board so let's stipulate that this is a technology worker making the average wage for, say, a programmer in Grand Rapids, MI. That's $73,000 (before benefits), or $35/hour for 40 hour weeks. You ask, "is being stuck in a mortgage with a sick spouse license for an employer to demand 70 hours a week?". Well, at 70 hours a week, our protagonist is effectively being paid $19.78 per hour. That's almost $2 higher than the average income of employees in Grand Rapids, MI. What you're effectively asking is, should it be lawful for employers to pay people less based on their situation? On the one hand, there are plenty of circumstances where it clearly isn't lawful to do that. For instance, you can't pay people less because they're of Indian origin, or because they practice Judaism, or because they're female. On the other hand, the circumstances of individual employees play into compensation decisions all the time in every job. You are effectively being paid less because of circumstances mostly out of your control any time you take a job outside of San Francisco or New York; the premium earned by technology workers in San Francisco exceeds cost-of-living adjustments significantly. So where do you draw the line? Is the line "you can't be paid less because of illnesses in your immediate family?" I'd agree with that rule, but how often does it really come into play? For what it's worth, speaking on behalf of an employer: we don't like 70 hour weeks. We work hard to keep them from happening and, for the most part, people get out the door here in time for dinner (it's hard to say, because some people stroll in the door just in time for lunch). Making people work overtime here, paid or not, is a bad idea because it makes it hard to retain talent. I'd like to think that if there was an economic rationale for overtaxing our team, we still wouldn't do that because it's immoral... but my morals haven't been tested on this issue, because it would be irrational of us to coerce people into working overtime.
  - dpritchett 15y ago
    I'd imagine the only time you'd see an economic rationale for systematically overworking your team would be in a moon shot / burn the ships scenario, neither of which seems necessary for a service company. Perhaps if the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was a buyout in the tens of millions you'd be tempted as a part owner. Even then the front-line employees being whipped would be unlikely to get a significant piece of that pie, no?
    - ootachi 15y ago
      Long hours are the key to profitability, as Philip Greenspun put it: "From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. A programmer probably needs to spend 25 hours per week...Thus a programmer who works 55 hours per week is twice as productive as one who works 40 hours per week.... A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week)." "If you see one of your best people walking out the door at 6:00 pm, try to think why you haven't challenged that person with an interesting project. If you see one of your average programmers walking out the door at 6:00 pm, recognize that this person is not developing into a good programmer."
      - henrikschroder 15y ago
        > Thus a programmer who works 55 hours per week is twice as productive as one who works 40 hours per week There is plenty of studies done on this that shows that you can get an increase in productivity by working more hours for a short time, but that if you go over ~35h/week for a longer period of time, the productivity drops and some overtime might actually result in negative productivity.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        Greenspun wrote that about a software consulting business, too. Think about what else has to be going wrong with a consultancy for it to make sense for people to work 70 hour weeks. Hint: serious clients pay in 40-hour person/week increments. Anyways, it's undeniable that there's a pervasive culture of 60-80 hour work weeks in tech companies. I think it's bullshit; I think it's bad for the employers, who get substandard burnout work and become a revolving door that spins even faster for more talented team members; I think it's bad for employees for obvious reasons. But I also think (a) a slice of cheese shouldn't cost $200 and have an end-user licensing agreement attached, and (b) we don't need to outlaw that practice. When you read articles about unfair labor practices at tech companies, I'd like you to keep in mind that software developers are the. worst. at reasoning about the valuation of their own work. Software developers think Stack Overflow is worth maybe a weekend's worth of programmer time because it's just a big message board. The world probably does look a lot more unjust when you look at it through a prism of discounting your own value by 50%-150%.
pilom 15y ago
"Is there a 40 hour a week job out there that pays and furthers their career comparably?" The defense industry in the US is like this. It is illegal for a company to have employees work more that 40 hours a week without overtime pay. The rationale is: If Company A has a company culture of all employees working 60 hours a week and Company B has a corporate culture of working 40 hours a week, Company A could charge the government less for the same amount of work and thus would win more contracts. The government recognized this would create an customer incentive for companies to "encourage" their employees to work longer hours. So the government made a law that Defense contractor employees must be paid overtime for any hours more than 40 per week. And in my experience, no manager will pay overtime so most non-manager level people really don't work any more than that.
- ccoggins 15y ago
  This is not true at all. I work in the defense industry and their is certainly not any law requiring my company to pay me for overtime. I think what you are referring to is the fact that any hours worked on contracts must be billed to the government. Say a company receives 1000 hours to do a job and an employee works on the project 80 hours per week. At that rate, the government will only pay for 12.5 weeks of work(1000/80), not 25 weeks. This prevents the problem you mention, but it still isn't good for the employee. It does create an incentive for the company to encourage their employees to work more. If they charge for 80 hours in one week, but only pay the employee for 40 the company just made a bunch of extra profit at the employee's expense.
  - pilom 15y ago
    The Federal Acquisitions Regulations 37.115 Uncompensated overtime. 37.115-2 General policy. (a) Use of uncompensated overtime is not encouraged. (b) When professional or technical services are acquired on the basis of the number of hours to be provided, rather than on the task to be performed, the solicitation shall require offerors to identify uncompensated overtime hours and the uncompensated overtime rate for direct charge Fair Labor Standards Act—exempt personnel included in their proposals and subcontractor proposals. This includes uncompensated overtime hours that are in indirect cost pools for personnel whose regular hours are normally charged direct. (c) Contracting officers must ensure that the use of uncompensated overtime in contracts to acquire services on the basis of the number of hours provided will not degrade the level of technical expertise required to fulfill the Government’s requirements (see 15.305 for competitive negotiations and 15.404-1(d) for cost realism analysis). When acquiring these services, contracting officers must conduct a risk assessment and evaluate, for award on that basis, any proposals received that reflect factors such as— (1) Unrealistically low labor rates or other costs that may result in quality or service shortfalls; and (2) Unbalanced distribution of uncompensated overtime among skill levels and its use in key technical positions. -https://www.acquisition.gov/far/current/html/Subpart%2037_1.html https://www.acquisition.gov/far/current/html/Subpart%2037_1.... Fair enough it isn't legally required. However it is formally discouraged by the government. Also, my particular employer explicitly discourages unpaid overtime and thus it doesn't happen often.

snowwrestler 15y ago

I work very hard, including overtime. I'm salaried and I don't have profit sharing or equity--because I work for a nonprofit. However, my excellent performance at my job has resulted in promotions that have more than doubled my salary since I was hired. So to me it seems that my hard work did result in career development.

dclowd9901 15y ago

You're not helpless and beholden. There's just simply always a smaller fish. If I turn down the job that requires 60 hours a week, they will likely find someone who is willing to do that. It's partly from a week job market, partly because people are so bad at understanding their own financial situations, and partly because the availability of financial leveraging systems like financing and credit. And, of course, a company that's willing to take on an employee who's willing to work 20 unpaid hours a week probably also has a lower level of quality demand on a per-employee basis. What's particularly infuriating about this is that they could probably pay a more qualified candidate more money and get better work, and yield the results of two poor candidates. Essentially, companies are stepping over dollars to pick up dimes, and execs are laughing all the way to the bank. How pointless.

jberryman 15y ago
> You're not helpless and beholden. For many people, especially those with families (not to mention those with family members with medical issues) the healthcare issue really does leave them beholden. It also stifles entrepreneurship.
- temphn 15y ago
  If you aren't starting a company because you can't get private health insurance, you are probably not resourceful enough to be a successful entrepreneur. It is just not that hard.
  - prodigal_erik 15y ago
    It's a crapshoot. Dirt cheap for some, out of reach for others. Some people have been blackballed by the entire industry for the sin of developing a serious condition—the underwriter finds an excuse to weasel out of the coverage you thought you had, and then you can't get it ever again at any price. Group plans are a lot more likely to be available and to uphold their end of the deal.
- WettowelReactor 15y ago
  Then instead of regulating wage and hours shouldn't we focus on providing affordable healthcare (including coverage for preexisting conditions). If healthcare is the barrier to fluidity on the supply side then this is where we should focus our efforts.

temphn 15y ago

Private health insurance is really not that hard to buy. Just save up, buy it, and quit if you have better options. If you don't, if this is the best out there for someone with your talents, why exactly are you complaining? You chose to work "80 hours", and you can choose to work less. 99% of the world would give their eyeteeth to do what we do, in which the gravest professional hazard is spilling our lattes on our Macbook Pros.