If one is paid a fixed salary for a full time job, how much of your time have they actually bought? Are you expected to pony up extra time (by “extra,” I mean beyond 40 hours per week) as needed without complaint? If you work 12 hours one day, is it frowned upon to work only 4 the next?
i realize that much of this depends on the employer, but when it isn’t spelled out in the employment contract, how does one figure out whether it even makes sense to take the job in the first place or whether it is just going to slurp away more and more of your time until you are a red-eyed zombie shambling into the office at dawn and working at home deep into every night?
This is something that really depends on the job. This is a really important question to bring up in the job interview, about what sort of hours they generally expect, when you might have to do overtime or come in at night or on the weekends.
Speaking for myself, I’ve been salaried for most of my career, but they still pretty much limit me to 40 hours a week. The reason for that is that, even though I’m salaried, because the client was billed hourly, they generally don’t like me working overtime, and it’s even worse for both of us because they pay for my time, but I don’t get paid, so they just preferred to hire additional people instead of burning us out. But I’ve also been on some interviews in recent months where they said that most of the people in the office averaged around 50 hours a week, and some of that was because of on-call or weekend work.
To a certain extent, you can probably gauge this sort of thing based on what the environment is like. Are you supporting a smaller environment as part of a small team where you have broader responsibilities? I’d suspect you’ll be having to do a fair amount of overtime. If you’re working in a large environment with much more specific duties, especially if they have completely separate operations and engineering on their own shifts, you may be doing less or none.
But, again, definitely bring up what’s typical and what’s expected in terms of hours and comp time in the interview. Some will say that they’ll let you work a shorter day or work from home after long hours, some might just say that it’s tough luck and they need you in the office.
The philosophy behind salaried employment is that you will devote extra time to the job when you’re in crunch mode for projects or dealing with crises, and then when things are slow you have the flexibility to not work your whole 40-hours. And this is how it works at my employer.
However, many many employers require you to devote your extra time to work but never give you flexibility in return.
Definitely talk with your prospective boss about expectations surrounding job duties and responsibilities, hours worked, how things tend to be handled if you’ve been putting in a string of long days, and things of that nature. At a minimum, ask what a typical work-week entails, and use your prior experience to estimate the number of hours required to get those things done.
Yes, generally the expectation is, during crunch time, I work the hours necessary to get the job done. But if I put in two consecutive 70 hour weeks, I have not generally heard any complaints if I take Friday off for the next two weeks. Or “work from home” for a couple of days (which means I check my e-mail every hour or so).
I take responsibility for managing my time.
I am a professional, I don’t abuse the system, and I don’t expect to be abused in return. As long as I am generally productive, I don’t quibble about overtime if they don’t quibble about comp time in return.
As to how to tell beforehand if the job is going to suck you dry, ask the company. IME one can generally tell if they want your soul, or forty hours only.
The local market for this type of job is pretty scarce. Well-qualified candidates are on the scarce side as well, so there seems to be a cycle of hiring people who are marginally qualified, paying them the local market rate, which is better than most local jobs, but only a bit over half of what a similar job might pay in an urban area, and then bleeding the person until they are a disillusioned husk. The husk is then discarded or flees to start their own enterprise and a fresh worker is acquired.
As a result, an interviewee who asks too many questions is clearly a poor candidate. Only someone who seems willing to give their all will be seriously considered, as it is not really expected that they will last long, nor is it desirable. The employer starts out with the upper hand and has no built-in motivation to give an inch.
In IT, it seems that every project is underestimated and overdue. Crunch time becomes all the time and the months slip by in a whirl of nonstop effort. How can a worker keep from being taken advantage of when they’ve already made the mistake of behaving as if their extra time is available, thinking they are doing what it takes in the moment, not setting a carte blanche precedent for the employer to help themselves to whatever they want? Or is it best to move on once things have deteriorated to this degree?
I am not the worker in question, but I agree, those are the basic options.
Between “dig your heels in and probably get fired” and quit, which is preferable?
In my state, it seems that one would qualify for unemployment if fired under these circumstances, but not if one quits for this reason, so I tend to think the former, but maybe I am missing something.
Unfortunately this can be perfectly true. Or you can work at a place like Shodan does, which is much closer to my current employer. Sometime after I was hired I e-mailed my boss and told him I had a Dr appt, would be unavailable, and that I’d stay an hour late. He thanked me for letting him know but said I didn’t have to in the future and emphatically told me they really don’t need or even want me to make up the missed time, unless a deadline is approaching quickly.
It’s a really fair deal to have laid back employers most of the time if you’re prepared to put in necessary hours for rare projects that are way behind schedule. If you work someplace where every project is behind schedule and everyone works 55 hours a week, I suggest finding a new employer.
If you resign you won’t get any unemployment benefits. If you’re fired you probably will. The employer could appeal and claim you were fire for cause (based on one of your heel digging incidents, for example). If they won you’d be denied benefits but it’s very unlikely. I once went to a hearing with evidence that in 6 months my employee had never worked a full week, not even once, and was warned repeatedly for unexcused absences, but somehow that didn’t qualify as termination for cause.
I work somewhere more like yours- my boss only expects makeup time or PTO time off if we miss past half a day. Taking off a couple of hours for a doctor’s appointment gets a “See you tomorrow! Hope you feel better!” The general attitude is that it’s not the time you put in, but what you get done and how well you do it that counts. So if we occasionally take a long lunch, or show up 20 minutes later, for example, it’s not a big deal if you’re doing your job well.
Our infrastructure and product support people tend to work a lot of hours outside of the normal business hours- if the DBs crap out at 2 am, somebody’s calling them and they’re waking up to fix it before the following day starts. Or working over the weekends and holidays to apply patches and do releases outside of working hours.
I work in lower-key product support and development, and while we have deadlines, my stuff is fairly early in the lifecycle (I’m a BA and product manager primarily), so it’s rare that I work more than an 8 hour day.
I’m a salaried IT employee, though in a country with labour law that is a little more protective of the employee than US law is. Many of my friends are also salaried IT employees. From what I’ve seen, most IT employers are quite decent about work time expectations.
I’m free to not work a full 9-5 day every day, because my employer knows that sometimes I work at night or over weekends. They trust that I won’t take advantage of the situation and that it’ll all balance out overall. On the rare occasions when circumstances force me to work late at night/into the early morning (maybe three times a year) I simply tell my manager that I’m taking the morning off the following day. (Or, in one particularly extreme case, the whole following day.) I don’t have to deduct that time from my paid time off.
That’s been my experience and the of my friends, but we’ve worked mostly at non-profit organisations or at small startups. I can imagine that it might be quite different if you’re working for Big Corporate IT.
ETA: regarding “crunch times”, I work for a political party so our crunch times are tied to the election cycle. It’s well understood that we’ll have to work pretty hard in the month or two before an election, but it’s also expected that we’ll slack off in the months after the election.
Depends on your circumstances, I guess. I’ve done both, although I didn’t get fired. But my circumstances were such that I could get away with saying “Sorry, I am going to be out of town that weekend”.
It has happened, once, that I finished Phase 1 of a project, and the Manager Who Couldn’t Say No to the Users scheduled Phase 2, and Phase 2 involved sixty hour weeks for the next three months, I got another job and walked away. I take a certain amount of unworthy satisfaction from hearing from former colleagues that the project in question went forward on the same deadlines, and implementation went roughly as well as the Hindenberg landing.
The job I moved to was Y2K remediation, and that certainly involved overtime work, as did all the follow-up projects I did for the same company, but their attitude was very much like bump and **Fuzzy Dunlap ** describe.
I have never worked at a company where “use them up and throw them away” was the default. But in my job, once you have learned the systems and how things get done (or not done), it doesn’t make sense to get rid of the person and retrain someone else. Some companies are like that, no doubt.
I’ve been in both types of companies - the “use 'em up and throw 'em away” type, and the “we’re flexible as long as you don’t abuse it!” type (my current employer). It probably goes without saying that the latter is significantly more preferable.
The former wears on people, very quickly. The company I was in dealt in (many) multiple (very) small projects, where “OMG!” deadlines were literally occurring daily. The team I was on was pretty close to the end of the process, so we constantly got screwed over and unpaid OT was the norm. 50-60 hours weeks were not unusual, and when we hit our busy period (Q4) each year, you’d expect that to go up and involve some weekend time as well. It was institutionalized and “how the company work[s]”. We used to have to tell people in the interviews that it “wasn’t a 9-5 job” and that “extra time was often needed” and that “you would be rewarded”.
It was … miserable. The few perks/pay/really crappy bonus the company gave didn’t really outweigh the extra hours (though they were dangled as carrots at us good little sheep). But what was very odd about the whole situation is that people tended to stick around there for a good amount of time. You’d think maybe turnover would be really high, but in reality, it wasn’t.
After I left, I started to liken it to an abusive relationship - where you keep telling yourself that its what everyone does (it isn’t), and that you’re only staying there for your co-workers, that you don’t want to let them down, etc. It was very (and from the people I still chat with there still is) a pretty predatory environment.
My advice to anyone who’s somewhere similar is to get out. It might not seem like it, but really - life can be better on the outside in a different environment where your life and your time-not-at-work is respected.
You get sucked into the institutional mindset that this is what’s needed, but when it comes down to it - the company could easily afford to hire an additional person to cover that extra work. They just won’t, because then they wouldn’t make as much profit and the upper management peeps (whose bonuses were almost completely tied to profitability) wouldn’t be as high*.
There are definitely places out there where this doesn’t happen, or doesn’t happen as much. My current employer, for instance, has quite a bit of vacation time, plus flex time, plus a bunch of extra holidays beyond the “big 6”, plus a sick policy that’s best summed up as “if you’re sick, don’t get the rest of us sick and stay home… if you can work from home great, but don’t bring your germs here!” It’s very nice.
I know this is sometimes an urban legend or scoffed at, but where I was it was a fact. Not only did I see the bonus structure for our VPs-and-up (due to sloppy HR oopsies), but one of our moronic COO’s said as much to me in a meeting.
while not in IT, I had a job I was on call 24/7 and had to make special arrangments if wanted to go to a movie or something where a phone call was frowned upon and then meet up with them to hand off the computer. If I was up all night with phone calls and even had to pull of the expressway to take a call and solve a problem I was expected to be at my desk at 8am. I finally worked out with my boss (who came in at 7am) that she would take calls from 7am to 8am so i could shower and drive to work.
I went to a party that turned out to be a “deadzone” for my cell phone and had to leave and by the time I was back in range had calls asking why i wasn’t answering my phone.
Celidin, your comparison to an abusive relationship is all too apt.
I lost my mom to an IT job for several years. She’d leave at 6 am and come home at 10 most nights, worked most Saturdays and some Sundays. We’d barely see her for weeks at a time and when she was home, she was still working.
Now, my SO is being sucked into a similar vortex. When he isn’t working, he’s worrying about work. He gives away piles of time because he can’t say no, but gets so stressed he thinks the only way out is to quit. Instead of building up a bank of time that ought to count in his favor, instead he has unwittingly created the expectation that even he does not value his time and that any and every moment belongs to the company and must be spent scrambling to meet impossible deadlines.
I’m glad to hear that there may be hope of finding a better situation, because I was starting to fear that maybe this is just inevitable in this field.
About 20 years of IT experience here over the last 35 years.
Salaried? Expect a minimum of 45-50 hours a week, because that’s what will be expected of you even if they never say it, and they will.
Expect month-ends or deadlines (depending on what you do) to be extra time on top of that. On one job I worked from 8am to 11pm on month-end Fridays, came in at 8-9am Saturday and worked until 1-2pm, came back at 8pm and worked until 1-2am, then came back Sunday 8-9am and worked until 2-4pm. Every goddamned one. No overtime, no comp time. It was just part of the job.