Potentially, but promotions are generally given for work that exceeds expectations; isn't this the way it should be?
Producing the 'minimal expected' amount of work for a prolonged period of time (reliability) is cause for being promoted as well, I suppose, but takes more time.
@stonemetal: I think what he's saying is: if you're more interested in playing this "what's the minimum number of hours I can get away with working" game than in making your customers love you, Apple isn't the right fit for you.
Yeah just like those devs at EA. If you aren't willing to sleep in your cube then you obviously are just "doing the minimum". If making gamers love you isn't what you live for then maybe EA isn't the right place for you. Poor project planing with deadlines that can't be met without 12hr days isn't the problem. Passion, that is our problem we just have way to much of it. Cause you know if we let people have friends and do stuff outside of work then some of that Passion might leak out and we wouldn't want that to happen.
You're doing an awful lot of projecting based on one guy's account of his friend's working hours.
The web isn't exactly swamped with "Apple Wives" blogs, so you might consider the possibility that this grave injustice that you're so worked up about is primarily occurring in your imagination.
And his friends account that it is typical of the environment, and I have a friend who had an internship with Apple. The first rule of his startup was sane working hours no matter how passionate you are, which wasn't a rule he had before working at Apple.
I think that it's obvious that the work culture at Apple is not one of suggesting that you leave at 5:30pm.
It takes an effort by management to prevent working hours from ballooning out when people are working on long projects. It's very obvious that Apple are not doing that.
My company expects people to leave on the dot at 5:30pm. It's great.
It's not a matter of hours. There has to be cause for promotion, correct? Whether that is exceeding expectations (be it by working longer hours, or simply being better, etc.) or being reliable over a prolonged period of time; these are both valid reasons to get promoted. I'm sure there are others as well.
Hours are a flawed metric for engineering, usually, since different people get different amounts done in the same amount of hours. But surely there should be some meritocratic reason for a promotion?
Sure, I'm not disputing that, but it means that if you want to be treated like everyone else when it comes to promotions, redundancies, etc. that you're forced to work 12 hour days when at other companies you could just work 8 hour days to get equal treatment.
And remember while you like your job now, what happens if you start to like it less (or you have a family, etc.) but you can't reduce your hours otherwise you'll get penalized for it. One day you'll wake up and realize you're working for EA.
productive workaholics will get rewarded over regular competent staff; overlooking their contribution is a good way to lose them. as an employer, would you want to lose your most productive staff so you can give "equal" treatment to less productive members?
That being said, i think there should be no exemptions for overtime pay.
Producing the 'minimal expected' amount of work for a prolonged period of time (reliability) is cause for being promoted as well, I suppose, but takes more time.