I went to a talk once on leadership. One of the suggestions was to get your "go to hell kit" ready. That is, get enough money in the bank (whatever that means for you) so that you can walk away if things cross your personal lines, be they moral / work-life balance, whatever. It's a good thing if there's pressure to work silly hours. In my first job (recent grad) before I left the job, I'd been working 5 weekends straight (at least a Sat/Sun). Looking back, insane, now I'd be having a conversation with my manager.
Sometimes it's hard when the "norm" is to work these extra hours. Where I live now, I have worked a normal 8:45ish to 5:15ish and haven't had to stay late or work weekends in years. It can be like that, I reckon it _ought_ to be like that. If your contract says 40 hours a week, why would you work more? You're just reducing your hourly rate. Now, I don't mind putting in extra effort if needed, no worries, but if it's the culture that it's just long hours, well that's crazy.
This is how I've always explained to people who constantly work overtime in salaried positions where they don't actually get paid for that overtime.
You can at look at it one of 2 ways.
1. Your billable self stopped at the 8-hour mark on a given weekday and every hour after that, including weekends, you're just giving away free labor to the company. Just think about that every time you're working overtime, every minute after 8-hours you're freely giving away to the company. This is your personal free time.
2. Or, like patrickdavey said, you dilute your hourly worth. Say you're a dev who makes $90K, that's roughly $43.xx/hr for a 40 hour work week. But if you're actually working 50hr work weeks you're now worth $34.xx, and so on. The company just saved money on you (or they are making money off you).
For salaried employees or contract work with capped hours, overtime can also be banked goodwill or converted to flex time.
Most office environments I've worked at are not rigidly policy-driven, are populated with sensible humans, and the overwhelming majority of my teammates are working for the success of the team and each other.
Promotions are a myth told to people to get them to work harder, aren't they? They're quite rare and usually come with moderate increments. Whereas the best way to increase your salary is to move jobs. Salary is only vaguely linked to job title.
(I was once promoted en passant, when my first employer wished to inflate the number of Senior Developers assigned to a consulting proposal...)
I agree. Unless you are in an environment where there are very specific pay scales for fairly specific positions and levels, with lots of chances for advancement (e.g. Google or the like), expecting a significant raise at your current job is unlikely unless you have a lot of leverage. Put another way, you've been giving the company the extra work for free. People (and companies) don't like to pay for things they're used to getting for free. That just feels like an unnecessary expenditure, so is resisted.
I would say the vast majority (greater than 99.99%) of raises come from the threat of quitting. That can either be an active threat (where you approach management for a raise to set expectations) or a passive threat, where management wants to make sure you aren't looking around for better opportunities, and those opportunities will often pay more than they have to raise your salary to keep you, which makes retaining you after you've shopped around much more expensive.
Large companies that realize losing institutional knowledge is costly put in programs to make sure there are good expectations on what is required to achieve the next position and what the pay-scale range is for the next position (which also helps fight racism/sexism). You see this at Google (and I'm sure many other large companies), who had identified this as a problem that needed to be solved.
People are promoted and given new opportunities based on business needs, not performance, beyond some table stakes level. Overtime is not what gets you promoted.
Is that actually true? A good coder or sysadmin who is willing to work overtime is more valuable as a coder or sysadmin than as a team lead or something, where the nature of their work demands less overtime.
I have a coworker who works harder than anyone else on the team, he's the most productive and knows the codebase in depth. I can see him getting a nice bonus, he deserves it, but I don't think he will be promoted. For one, my boss just hired someone more senior and I think his plan is to move that person into management. The other thing is, it would kill our team's productivity to lose our best programmer, he's too useful in his current role.
I think a lot of people expect this to be the way it works, and perhaps it should be, but it's not the way business thinks. They see it as you volunteering free labor and that's pretty much it.
If you value your worth based off what label an organization slaps on your paychecks, sure. If you are getting better and better at your job, you can tell your company or other companies you require $x.xx salary, or want to move into management, etc. Why wait for them to promote you?
"Fact"? When you're already willing to work for 2/3rds of your market rate? No, you've advertised your commitment to being stuck in the trenches while new people are hired over your head until you burn out.
>people on HN don't want to work their way up, then want it handed to them
Yes. How terrible would that be. How terrible would it be for someone to have a title / position commiserate to their skills, not how good they are at office politics.
Regarding point number 2 - A promotion has to get handed to you in some way or another, regardless of how hard you work for it.
I just don't want my career advancement to be up to the arbitrary whims of someone in a position of authority, that's all.
There are many ways to work your way up that don't involve giving all of your free time away to someone else who may or may not decide to promote you for it.
Promoted to what? A manager? I guess in a more hierarchical organization you get to be Programmer III instead of Programmer II and maybe get a higher salary?
What about those of us who don't have strictly defined roles like that? Where I work you're basically just a programmer. Experience has always seemed to count more for me than an arbitrary title.
Sure you can put in whatever your contract says and nothing more... Or they could fire you, move you out the fast track career situation, and remove you from the "good" projects.
So many people, especially in tech, work jobs that pay really, really, really well compared to most people and piss it away on stupid shit. You can choose to save a lot of that money instead and still have a very good and fulfilling life.
Eventually, when you have enough savings/investments to cover you for a few years, your life changes. You don't have to worry so much if people are getting laid off, or if your job starts demanding unreasonable things.
There's no security in the world like knowing you can tell your boss "fuck you" and be fine for a year or more (except perhaps two years or more =P ). You don't have to do it; you can just always know that you have the cash to walk out the door and never come back.
Or you can drive a Tesla.
I bet I know which one makes you feel better when you put your head on your pillow at night.
The question is where to get that reliable rate of return.
As I've thought about my investments, I've also struggled with the notion that I'm very heavily in non-dividend paying equities. While my growth has been great, I'm not really deriving any passive investment income to offset my living expenses (presumably for the opportunity for a higher rate of growth).
Do many that aim for this tend to focus more on dividend and income-providing investments instead, despite the lower rates of return?
Another name I've seen this under is having "F You Money". Or in other words, enough money that if you ever need to tell management "F You", you can do so without fearing for you or your family's livelihood.
I think this is important anywhere, not just programming. When I was younger, I worked at several fast food places. There was a Burger King job I left within 2 weeks because they had me working insane amounts of unpaid overtime. When I told them I would be leaving they essentially tried to bully me into staying. "We may not be paying you in full, but if you leave you'll be making no money, and that's much worse. You don't have another job waiting, it's just a bad idea to quit. You could become homeless!"
Thankfully I was living with my parents at the time and could tell BK to screw themselves. But I feel really bad for other employees in that same situation who either fell for the spiel or legitimately couldn't afford to be jobless for a day.
One should always have the "go to hell kit" somewhat nearby (e.g., available with at most a few weeks of focused effort). Not having this can make one effectively enslaved to the current job (and not only job) which, at least for me, is very very not good for morale.
Sometimes it's hard when the "norm" is to work these extra hours. Where I live now, I have worked a normal 8:45ish to 5:15ish and haven't had to stay late or work weekends in years. It can be like that, I reckon it _ought_ to be like that. If your contract says 40 hours a week, why would you work more? You're just reducing your hourly rate. Now, I don't mind putting in extra effort if needed, no worries, but if it's the culture that it's just long hours, well that's crazy.