Planned/Expected Overtime

[xylex]

I was talking with a recruiter yesterday who was telling me that overtime is expected of their developers to show they're committed & software deliveries schedules plan overtime in.  At which point I cut him off and told him I wasn't interested. 

 

This was right after spent some time explaining to me how they practiced XP in their company (No overtime is one of the core concepts of XP for the uninitiated).

 

With all the software development management literature that's been written now about how regular overtime is less productive than a 40 hour work week, I was kind of surprised to find a shop where this was the norm.  Have I just been sheltered in not seeing regular overtime at companies lately, or is it expected where you guys are working?

[Daniel0]

Sounds like poor project management to me. Consistent reliance would seem to indicate that someone needs to start setting more realistic goals. Besides, if you plan on overtime, how is it overtime in the first place? Seems sort of contradictory to me.

[ober]

Sounds like poor project management to me. Consistent reliance would seem to indicate that someone needs to start setting more realistic goals. Besides, if you plan on overtime, how is it overtime in the first place? Seems sort of contradictory to me.

I completely agree.  And I've turned down places like this as well.  If you're not going to hire enough people to get the work done on time, then I'm not going to kill myself to help you meet a deadline.  These are also the types of places that abuse the use of a fixed salary.

[.josh]

Sounds like poor project management to me. Consistent reliance would seem to indicate that someone needs to start setting more realistic goals. Besides, if you plan on overtime, how is it overtime in the first place? Seems sort of contradictory to me.

 

"overtime" in this context means working over 32 hours a week if you are classified as a "part time hourly" employee, or over 40 hours a week if you are classified as a "full time hourly" employee.  It's something like 50-55 hours a week or something like that if you are classified as a "full time salaried employee" (it is a common misconception that your boss can work you 24/7 if you are on salary) and also I think if you're <=16 yrs old in some states over 20hrs a week constitutes as "overtime."

 

And what that means is any amount of time you work past those hours you are supposed to by law get paid anywhere from 1.5-2x your current wages.

[akitchin]

some policies give time in-lieu / banked hours rather than actual overtime pay, and this actually seems to be more prevalent in my area with salaried employees.

 

i agree though, it should not be expected. as Daniel says, consistent reliance on overtime is poor management. it's one thing to be under the gun because of unexpected circumstances on a project (someone forgets a backup, etc.), but it's entirely another to plan the project's progression on overtime hours.

 

i'm on salary with my company (i'm not a programmer by day, i'm a chemist) and basically work under the premise that 12 hours is just a long day, and weekends when you're on site at a facility are part and parcel of the job. at best, we'll get in-lieu days for the weekends if our bosses are okay with it. that's what you get when the office people complain that field guys get too many days off. fucking office politics.

[xylex]

Actually, in the U.S., under federal law, computer programmers are exempt from being paid overtime.

 

http://www.carterlawfirm.net/federal-computer-professional-exemption.htm

 

 

California's a little stricter and current law requires programmers to be paid at least $75k/year to be exempt.

 

http://www.gotovertime.com/computer_pro.html

 

 

There aren't any limits as to how many hours they can work you, at least on a federal level nor in California.

 

 

And 14-15 y/o's can't work past 18 hours/week during school period, paying them extra to do it is still illegal.

 

http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs43.pdf

 

 

But yeah, even though it's legal to abuse developers like that, doing it all the time rarely turns out software any faster than keeping them to a 40 hour work week.  It's been awhile since I've really checked out a place that still does it, but from what I had seen, the places with a lot of overtime usually were in a cycle where they would spend their most productive hours firefighting bugs because they had coded it tired and made careless mistakes, and then they work overtime and tired to write new code, making more mistakes to firefight later.