I think it's just an easy fallback from an emotional perspective. It would be a "political suicide" of sorts to argue against a parent wanting time with their children. Not so much about a sailor wanting time with their boat, etc.
"political suicide" or not, I'm paid for 8h/day. What I do with my free time is nobody's concern and I sure don't have to defend myself for respecting my contractual obligations.
Sure, but I'm pretty sure the problem being discussed here is specific to at-will salary workers, who do not have specific contractual obligations and are not paid for specific hours.
But what that salary covers is obviously only enough to maintain satisfactory employment under a certain number of hours. My employer simply doesn't pay me enough for me to work more than 40 hours per week, crunch time or not.
Oh boy, welcome to employment in the United States.
At-will: either party may alter or terminate employment at any time for any reason, and the other has no legal recourse. There is no contractual specification of what you're paid for because the employer does not need to prove anything about the relationship between actual and expected behavior to fire you. You get paid the rate that was agreed upon for time already worked, and then you're done. In effect, you get paid for not having been fired yet.
Salary: your compensation is per unit of time elapsed on the calendar, not at your workstation.
These conditions describe the vast majority of professional, intellectual, and managerial work in the United States. Working 40 hours per week, working 9am-5pm Monday-Friday, etc. are merely cultural norms, not legal standards, and some industries (like tech and finance) have very little respect for them.
Working 40 hours per week is encoded as a legal standard for hourly workers (via overtime pay requirements), but only below a certain wage threshold. Many fields, including programming, are exempt from overtime requirements even when paid hourly.
Is it reasonable to assume that you can still do alright by providing exactly the value that you are paid for, and no more? If you can fulfill that value in 20 hours a week, then it seems like you should go home at that point.
Otherwise you're just creating an easily consolidated power vacuum above you and contributing to the collapse of civilization.
Depends on the company. Survive? Sure. Advance? There will likely be many others competing for advancement, and longer hours will make them seem "hungrier" than you.
That seems false. What is my incentive, as an employer, to give such an employee a promotion or a raise? I'm not trying to get him to work harder for more pay.
"Bob was here until 7 at night fixing bugs in the code! Where was Alice?"
It won't matter that Bob didn't fix the bugs; Alice did when she came in the next morning. It won't matter that Bob caused the issue in the first place. Alice probably didn't even hear the above exclamation, it was an internal dialogue in their manager's mind, so she can't even offer a rebuttal.
Bob was seen working "when it mattered". Perception trumps performance, sadly.
I meant to say that I don't see why I should give someone a raise simply as a result of increased performance. it's my goal as an employer to extract more value from an employee than they cost.
The only thing that would compel me to give out raises is a change in market conditions, which can usually be detected by an employee threatening to leave for a job which pays more.
If you're waiting for employees to leave, you're waiting too long.
Raises, bonuses, cost of living adjustments; all are part of how you attempt to retain talent. If you're hiring coding cogs, then no, you don't need to give any raises. Just hire at the market rate and plan for 50% attrition every year.
But if you want to keep your employees for more than a few years, you pay them more than the market rate. You match the cost of living increases, you give them performance bonuses, and you give them a minimum of 5-10% raises annually. Bonus points if you recognize that ass-in-seat time is not a good proxy for performance.
Do that, and they won't leave because they aren't getting paid commensurately with their skills. Still need to give them interesting work, though.
You are making the false assumption that value is fixed for a fixed amount of work. Programmers, and more generally engineers, do not have a fixed value for labor. It is generally the case that it is much more efficient to have the same engineer starting and finishing a project. This means that you as a programmer, have negotiating power that scales with the amount of work that you have already done. If you are not getting paid in proportion to what it would cost to replace you at any given point of the process, then you are getting paid well below the actual "market" rate.
This means that if you are an at will programmer, you can do less work the closer the project gets to completion without it being a good idea to fire you. If a small raise disproportionately discourages this behavior, then it makes sense, but it does not count as "paying you more than the market rate". I suspect that you receive, on average, a smaller percentage of the cost of replacement as time goes on.
"at-will" refers to the employer being able to fire the employee "at-will", meaning for any reason or no reason (excepting reasons that it is illegal to fire for) and without warning.
Technically, it also affords the similar right to the employee to leave at any time for any or no reason. However, with employee / employer relations and power balance as they are, it is a tool that is drastically more powerful for the employer.
Are you sure? I've seen many salary situations where employees were repeatedly coerced into extra work hours with the rational given by HR that's what Salary meant. I don't know if this is accurate or not, I just am asking if you have somewhere that specifies 8h/day.
What would happen if you had a contract stipulating 10h/day in California 3 days/week. Are the 2 extra hours per day OT?
edit: it seems this is discussed below, apologies. The OT question is one I am still curious about though.
It depends on if the employee is exempt or nonexempt[1], not just if they're salary or hourly.
The majority of professional positions are exempt, salaried positions. Even in California, they'd be exempt from any overtime eligibility.
> What would happen if you had a contract stipulating 10h/day in California 3 days/week. Are the 2 extra hours per day OT?
If they're in a non-exempt position, whether salary or hourly, then they'd qualify for overtime. If salaried, California has a formula for how to calculate the hourly rate for overtime calculations[2].
Note that those 2 hours/day are particular to California, not universal to all states. California has some robust overtime laws with multiple triggers, including days >8 hours, >40 hours per work week, and > 6 consecutive days of work in a workweek. You can get a whole lot of overtime pay with far less than 40 hours of work in a week. It gets even more complex because you can't double count hours for overtime.
Many states don't have explicit overtime laws like California, and just default to the federal laws[3]. In that case, it's simply 40 hours per work week. If you work more than 40 hours per workweek, you get overtime. If you work less, then you don't get overtime. The per-day distribution of those hours are irrelevant. Again, only applicable to non-exempt employees. Exempt are still not qualified.
