A different way of putting it would be whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work. It's not incongruent with a balanced life. To me It just means occasdinally you might stay late at work, once in awhile an interesting problem gets you working on the company laptop all Saturday, and if something breaks you're not able to log off until you fix it. Doesn't mean you cant take Friday's off of or that you have to skip your yoga class if that's what powers your mojo.
Absolutely, 100%. I am hugely against working overtime and work life balance is far more important to me than many other factors. But I have worked 12 hour days and weekends few times in the past, because I felt the personal responsibility to either fix something or make sure a launch goes through smoothly. You know when I absolutely wouldn't do it though? If my manager told me that "they expect a level of sacrifice for the company". Nope. Just absolutely categorically nope. Now I'm a manager myself I would never ever ask someone to do this.
Same. I put in a lot of extra work on the launches of .app and .dev to ensure that they went smoothly (and they did!), because I personally believed in the product we were launching. I did it with no expectation of compensation, though I did end up being compensated for it in the long run anyway with a promotion. I took pride in that work.
But if it hadn't been my idea to do so, if it had just been expected of me to work uncompensated nights/weekends at no personal benefit? Hell no. I'm not a manager but I too would never ask someone to do this either.
Simple question - is there (some kind/means of (extra)) payment involved?
If the answer is no, then that's a resounding no (for me, at least). I might love and adore my job (and the workplace), but no way in hell will it be allowed to impinge on my private/personal time: sleeping and "regular" work already essentially takes 2/3 of it (too much), and that doesn't even include the time for "context shifting" (mental and physical) between those and the remainder that is "(free) living".
And if (the hypothetical) you considers that to be "entitled", then so be it. Your life's mission is not my mission. I am there to do my work and do it conscientiously; anything more is asking too much.
Well, that's the thing -- no one directly pays me extra when I work an odd night or weekend to make sure things get out in a timely manner, but I also definitely only have the salary/etc. I do because of the responsibility I take (which includes that willingness).
Exactly, you do you buddy. Let's just not act as if it's some God given right that you only work 40 hours for outrageous sums of money. We are not talking about minimum wage workers, and his point is they're not even putting in the 40 hours anyway. All he's asking is that he wants to have a different culture within his team. It's not his intention to force people who don't share his values to work against their will. And as much as it might be hard for some to believe, there are people who don't need a constant amount of private time that's mandated by law (especially when we are not middle class or poor). I want to work on interesting things, learn how to be as effective as I can be at them, keep improving myself in ways that matter to me, and contribute meaningfully to whatever the hell it is that I'm paid to do (and be okay with contributing to that cause). And then I want to find and work with people with similar minds. Clearly we exist.
If you are ever in position where you are recruiting people, make sure to put that statement directly into the posting. Not during a phone call or at any later stage.
I agree the expectation should be made clear but it's not obvious why it has to be at the level of the post. I try to look for indications in the resume for the type of cultural alignment and set expectations the first time we talk in an interview, and don't necessarily feel that any further "warnings" need to be given.
> whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work.
This is a good take. Something that's perhaps overlooked: those rare occasions where you need to stay late to deliver are very memorable. Isn't it true that strong bonds are often built from intense experiences? I think those few times that you stay late earn you massive respect from those who stuck around, and builds a relationship beyond your career. Especially if it isn't even your responsibility specifically, maybe it's the team lead's ass on the line or a colleague's. It's like indirectly saying "hey I got your back on this, you can trust me I'm a team player -- we ride together we die together bad boys for life"
Agreed but also with caveats - I've had talks with coworkers where after helping put out a fire we should do a bit of soul searching on how we can avoid that in the future. As a team and a company we should strive towards creating systems that don't tax its employees as well, that's the company and managers end of the deal with employees who take personal responsibility if you ask me.
And the thing that works absolutely counter to this philosophy is the peer bonus system. It sounds great in principle but seems to incentivize people to continue bad practices that are clearly mostly overworking without proper post mortem on why such out of description help was even needed in the first place. When I was new I used to cherish peer bonuses but now I'm proud that no one in my team has gotten one in a year (because hopefully none of our systems needed such help anymore).
It's one thing when you help your friend prepare for an incoming hurricane and that bonds you together, it's another when your team lead's ass is on the line because someone higher up the chain set an arbitrary deadline deliberately to squeeze you to work harder in a dark pattern of employee manipulation based around guilt and emotional appeals and intangibles like "we ride together we die together" that are a poor substitute for money.
Staying late, with the boss who is also working on the same project, to deliver for the customer, is quite different from staying late, to deliver for a deadline, because some team didn't make any decisions sooner, while the boss reminds you from far away that you should be grateful, and then sets things up so another avoidable crunch is inevitable.
Reminder that you're not actually trying to build strong bonds, you're trying to build software (or whatever). And said "strong bonds" won't stop the company from deciding your team is splitting, or your coworkers from leaving for promotions or other companies.
I wonder how much wfh and distributed teams change this dynamic. I totally get what you're saying with the whole experience of staying in the office after dark, ordering pizza, and just working through a problem, whatever it takes.
I think with people holed up in their homes doing the same thing, the experience is diminished somewhat.
I think this is slightly different from what the OP was saying, because in this scenario, you choose to do that. IMO personal responsibility and pride in one's work like this is amazing and totally compatible with a balanced life. But when a manager asks you to have some personal responsibility and balance your weekend life towards the overtime work side, that's a whole other story.
The line I draw is that the manager never knows or cares when you work. They only see the output and the occassional indication that you take your work seriously. If someone ever says you should work more or I've never seen you work in a weekend, of course I would also run away.
"whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work."
This is an incredibly important factor. It really matters to getting a team that gels and gets things done.
But here's the thing: That has to be a two-way street, or it won't work. The company needs to show responsibility towards their employees too. And that isn't yoga classes & cafeterias, that is basic respect, and a willingness to work with the employees, instead of seeing them as "resources".
This seems to be, as far as I can tell, an approach that's correlated with manager skills & inversely correlated with company size. I've done both manual & "white collar" work in small companies, and the ones where the leaders did right by their employees had employees who would go to great lengths for them.
I've done manual & "white collar" work in large companies, too. None of them had CEOs that cared that much. But some had managers who cared a lot, and were willing to bend rules if it meant doing the right thing - those teams excelled. The ones with the managers who didn't care about their people got teams who didn't care about their work.
And I know the kind of manager who's terribly upset about your 11am yoga class. Without fail, that yoga class was on your calendar, but they wanted the meeting when they wanted it, without a care about you. They could've done 1pm, they could've done 10am, but that would've inconvenienced them, and that's not in their playbooks.
> once in awhile an interesting problem gets you working on the company laptop all Saturday,
I will never do this. I havent done this since I was very very young at my first job and i didn't know better. I couldn't think of anything sader or more depressing that giving away my own personal time for someone else.
I'm not going to work on the weekend. I've got much better things to do, like play video games or literally anything else, rather than go back to work and generate wealth for someone else for free.
Uh, I agree with the sentiment of not wanting to work for free, but
> I couldn't think of anything sader or more depressing that giving away my own personal time for someone else.
You just described a job.
Whether you're giving your time away or getting paid for giving it up makes no difference to the fact you are parting with it in order to produce for someone else.
Giving away pretty clearly means the objection is to the free nature. Getting paid makes a big difference - you now obtain tangible value from the interaction that you can turn into things like food or housing.
There's no concrete difference from the side of the gifter, between giving away time directly, giving away money earned from time spent, or giving away a tangible gift purchased with money earned from time spent. It's just more indirections.
So when someone says there's "nothing sadder", I think they should remember that the time is being given up either way. Doing so for free amounts to gifting the time. Or, flipped on its head, not chasing after the money.
People have their own reasons for making gifts. Feeling good about themselves, making someone else feel good, …. You can have your own reasons for not caring that there is no financial benefit to working extra hours on something. Maybe you enjoy the work. Maybe you are learning something. Maybe you take pride in your work and going the extra mile is rewarding in and of itself.
Unlike GP, I don't judge people who sometimes work for "free", as long as they don't have to and are aware they don't have to.
Let me give you the perspective from the other side of the trench:
I never ask my employees for overtime, never control their work hours. The typical work week that organically arises out of this is about 35 hours.
I would absolutely fire anyone who would close the laptop for the weekend and left a critical operation pending on Friday. It's about work ethics and personal responsibility of the outcome of personal work.
If the company is paying me for 40 hours, why would they expect me to work more? If the 'outcome of my work' is my personal responsibility, I should also be paid based on the outcome-I should also get a cut from whatever profit the company makes with my work.
If the company thinks they have the right to my personal life because they pay me for 40 hours, then its slavery. Also, threatening me with firing because I refuse slavery is threatening my livelihood, and it's mafia mentality. If a manager thinks they have the right my personal time, I should have right to their personal time too. Traffic should go both way in a bridge.
I don't hire automatons that turn on at 9h and off at 17h. I don't pay by the hour for intelligent work. I pay for results, defined to be achievable on a regular schedule.
I hire intelligent people, treat them as such, and expect intelligent behaviour in return. Part of the expectation is that everyone manages their own time responsibly. If they fail that management and have to work after hours, I do expect them to take the fall. There's no slavery and no mafia involved here; much to the contrary, it's a healthy work environment with historically excellent work/life balance.
Who defines those schedules? If it's the employees, its fine. If it's the management who sets the timelines, management should take the fall. Otherwise, its forced labor no matter how management tries to spin it. A bunch of parasites and leeches sucking other people dry. If the paycheck says 'num of hours x per hour rate", that's what the company should expect.
I'm on an oncall rotation. I get paid 1/3rd my normal salaried rate for all the time outside of normal working hours that I'm expected to be available to respond to critical issues. Note that I get paid this regardless of whether there actually are critical issues.
Do you have this kind of system set up? If not, do you make it clear when you're hiring people that you're expecting them to occasionally do what is effectively uncompensated oncall on nights/weekends? That's the kind of thing you have to know going in in order to be able to compare like-for-like in competing offers.
Events like these are exceedingly rare, to the rate of less than one event per year. They have been treated on a case by case basis. When it is personal mismanagement of time, there is no compensation. When people cover for systemic failures, we've historically awarded two vacation days per day used (one is a replacement, the other a compensation), or equivalent monetary compensation.
You don't see any doublethink in never asking for overtime, never controlling their work hours, and firing them if they don't work the overtime hours you want at the time you want?
No I don't. I don't hire hours. I hire people. I don't even hire people who put in hours. I hire people who produce work. If the work they produce is ok, I'm fine. If the work they produce is poor, I have a problem. In the example I gave, leaving a critical operation pending a whole weekend is poor workmanship (schedules and work hours are totally irrelevant in that assertion).
There's a second level to this, which is the definition of an acceptable workload. That is company-cultural, and you'll have to take my word for it when I say it is acceptable. We have the position that in the long run it's best that people feel happy on the job, which requires workloads compatible with life outside the company.
It's perfectly okay that you choose your values that way but it sounds very judgemental to think that's the only way to live. I won't work in a place where I'm not at least proud of what I'm doing. If that's true then whether the company makes money from it is only peripheral to me doing more than what I'm paid for - I genuinely like and enjoy what I do, I like to code and often the most interesting coding problem
before me (with the most resources at my disposal by a longshot) is my work related problems so I end up spending a good fraction of my time in weekends when I feel like u want to code, working on side projects that no one asked for but are within the company's domain. Simply because they're intresting to me and I become A better coder and learn new stuff. Also coding too is about practice. 10000 hours and all that jazz. I have become a better coder because of this. I probably won't do this forever but I'll learn and get better as much as possible from this time.
If you want to build a car from scratch in your weekend or just chill out, that's an equally meaningful and respectable endeavour as well.
> "I couldn't think of anything sader or more depressing that giving away my own personal time for someone else"
The original quote was about "an interesting problem". I'm happy to spend some after hours time on technical problems if they're personally interesting to me. The fact that addressing it helps my employer and makes me look good in their eyes is just a nice little bonus.
No kidding. If you're on team "Do whatever it takes to win" then you better at the very least applaud when people do whatever it takes.
You can't tell your team "Do whatever it takes to win", and then when they work their asses off for you turn around and say "Well long hours aren't a badge of honor"
This is an asshole who wants people to work themselves to death and doesn't want to give any sort of reward or recognition for it.
No he’s right. This is vital for a growing company who is vacuuming up market share. It’s not necessary for big corps who just throw more people at a product or use their economies of scale to stay ahead.
The nasty truth is that every big Corp had a phase where it counted on key people being completely plugged in. If that was never you, then you either joined a company late or weren’t one of the key people.
Especially when, IME, people are either outright abusers (and blatantly leech until discovered and fired) or people tend to fall into a distribution whose mean centers around a WLB that's slightly tilted in favor of work. Employees in the US are already so guilt-tripped and gaslit and scared of unemployment that you end up doing things for work you feel are unfair even if they don't ask it of you.
And that's easy to say for someone who has a large equity stake in the company, who is directly rewarded for working very hard like that. Ridiculous for them to impose it on others though who are salaried employees and aren't rewarded for all this extra work.
If you want me to work as hard as you are, pay me. Take my total annual compensation, divide it by 2087, and give me 2X that amount as overtime to work nights and weekends in excess of 40 hours/week. I'd do it. If he's actually willing to put his money where his mouth is I bet he'd get plenty of takers to work that hard. But I bet he isn't; he just wants to get lots of extra work out of his employees for free.
I don't think it's a "young people" stereotype. I'm an oldster and I wouldn't want to work for someone like that who is trying to squeeze every last drop out of his "resources."
Last time I somehow ended in a company with culture/managers similar to the one above I quit after only a month and a half. And I don't exactly fit into "young people don't want to work" stereotype. You'll only get this kind of expectations in extremely toxic places.
Agree. My first question would be to ask 'win' what? The reality is, very few are working on things that are so critical if a feature is pushed off a few days because of a weekend, nothing will change.
lmao what a terrible, horrible manager. I would hate working for them, and I would not miss them leaving.
Maybe I'm just playing into their "young people don't want to work" stereotype, but if that's what working means, I don't want to do it with them.