1. It can only be demanded for exceptional circumstances, with justification. "Poor planning or lack of staff are insufficient." [1]
2. It must be compensated with 25% extra salary, or extra holiday (if the employee agrees). An employee cannot waive their right to this.
3. Even then, there is a limit by law on the number of extra hours you can do in a year, [2] says 170 hours per calendar year. Got a big crisis in January? Employer had better start planning ahead so everyone's time budget isn't exhausted by December.
4. Like many countries, Switzerland has an exception for "management". So you don't call your cleaner a "facility manager", the Swiss law specifies this as "management AND earning at least CHF 120'000 a year". [3] For context, according to expatica [4] the OECD calculated the Swiss average wage in 2017 as 62.3K.
I personally think the principle that you cannot be expected to work "all hours that are necessary" unless you're paid around twice the average salary is brilliant and gets rid of a lot of potential abuse of this rule.
In Austria, there was a new all-in(all inclusive) white collar contract type developed years ago, mostly aimed at founders, top management and executives where the expected large compensation would waive your rights to paid overtime as these positions often involved working "all hours that are necessary" but paid to match.
However, that compensation limit was so low that lots of companies started abusing this and extended this type of contract to all employees not just the ones with high pay/responsibilities to the point where in job ads you now see the lack of these all-in contracts listed as a perk.
In some scummy companies they forced all existing employees to change to these new all-in contracts and if you refused(which you were of course legally allowed to) you'd slowly be pushed out of the company via bad performance reviews and then dismissed.
Norway is much like this. There are limits on how much overtime can be worked in a given week that allow for unforeseen circumstances and another limit for the month that is a lot less than four times the allowed weekly overtime. Overtime compensation is higher I think, especially for weekend or night work.
Seems to be working here, the Norwegian economy is quite good and unemployment is low. It helps that people here 'work to live' rather than 'live to work' and that the work ethic (in most people) is fairly strong, people get on with working rather than spending a lot of time chatting round the coffee machine.
> I personally think the principle that you cannot be expected to work "all hours that are necessary" unless you're paid around twice the average salary is brilliant and gets rid of a lot of potential abuse of this rule.
You'd need to tweak the multiplier in different countries dependent on inequality.
The median salary in the UK is around 29K GBP. I wouldn't say that 58K (70K CHF) is a "should be expected to exist at all times" salary.
I know lots of people at UK universities in junior positions - sometimes even fixed-term contracts - on way less than 29K, who are still expected to work stupid hours.
Or at least, no-one tells you that you have to officially, but when you inverview for moving up to a permanent contract you don't want to be the person with the weakest publication profile.
> The median salary in the UK is around 29K GBP. I wouldn't say that 58K (70K CHF) is a "should be expected to exist at all times" salary.
No, but if someone on £58k is expected to work unreasonable amounts of overtime without sufficient compensation they probably won't suffer too much if they decide to switch jobs.
If you look at [3], you'll see that it has been simplified and "manager" isn't required anymore - if you are flexible in your working hours and earn 120k+ (which isn't that much - if you work in tech or at a bank you'll likely earn more) the company can agree with you to not record working hours (there's still legal limits to how much you can work, of course) - this is relatively new, since 2016
Can someone please enlighten me what the heck an SLA is? I skimmed through the article and felt like he teased at providing a definition several times and then never actually did.
I could have glossed over it the first time, but I am pretty confident that must have been added later. I think I even did a search for SLA to see if it got defined somewhere.
I guess some people feel all "leet" by using abbreviations without (or before) defining them and expecting everyone else to run around looking them up.
> I guess some people feel all "leet" by using abbreviations without (or before) defining them and expecting everyone else to run around looking them up.
> It's tired and lame.
It's an incredibly common term we use at my workplace, and I expect many other engineering orgs use it as well.
We use it not only for services ("five nines"), but also for tasks and human initiated things.
It's a simple and useful stand-in for a complicated and abstract concept. I don't expect to have to explain SLAs every time they are discussed.
A better approach might be: make sure everything you do for work is sustainable. When it's not, make sure you are letting beneficiaries know. (e.g. Yes, we're working weekends for this release, but it's for X and Y reason, and it won't happen regularly)
I believe working on the weekends is a failure, and we should treat it like any other engineering failure. Why did it happen, how can we improve things so this failure doesn't happen again. Track and assign AIs, and hold people accountable to them.
I think, like most things, this is dependent on circumstances. Planned weekend work (downtime needed, pre-planned release, or timing with external factors) isn't always a failure.
Separate but related, an engineering team that is able to coordinate aggressive cycles on a regular basis, with built-in time to recover, is probably more productive over the long term than one that can't.
Once you start working weekends for a release it usually will become the norm. You can deal with this by putting a price tag on overwork, e.g. two times salary on weekends or comp time. Don’t give away things for free.
The reason is that tech leadership is doing what I described. Making clear to involved stakeholders that this is not normal and can't be expected every time. As parent commenter has seen, it doesn't happen automatically.
I believe you misunderstood my comment. I am not disagreeing with you. There are organizations that properly value people's time and make sure that overwork is both rare and rewarded. I'm lucky enough to work in one. But, even in those organizations, it doesn't just happen by itself. The management in your company is working hard to keep leadership in check and communicate your value. Because if they don't, organizational inertia will result in your team getting more and more work (or losing resources to do your existing work), no matter how great your company is.
It's not magic, it's good leadership and management.
I've never had time off in compensation for time worked. If it's busy enough to require me to work overtime, it's too busy to take leave no matter how much I have built up.
1. It can only be demanded for exceptional circumstances, with justification. "Poor planning or lack of staff are insufficient." [1]
2. It must be compensated with 25% extra salary, or extra holiday (if the employee agrees). An employee cannot waive their right to this.
3. Even then, there is a limit by law on the number of extra hours you can do in a year, [2] says 170 hours per calendar year. Got a big crisis in January? Employer had better start planning ahead so everyone's time budget isn't exhausted by December.
4. Like many countries, Switzerland has an exception for "management". So you don't call your cleaner a "facility manager", the Swiss law specifies this as "management AND earning at least CHF 120'000 a year". [3] For context, according to expatica [4] the OECD calculated the Swiss average wage in 2017 as 62.3K.
I personally think the principle that you cannot be expected to work "all hours that are necessary" unless you're paid around twice the average salary is brilliant and gets rid of a lot of potential abuse of this rule.
[1] https://www.legalexpatgeneva.com/employment-law/contractual-... [2] https://www.ch.ch/en/overtime-and-extra-hours/ [3] https://www.kmu.admin.ch/kmu/en/home/concrete-know-how/perso... [4] https://www.expatica.com/ch/working/employment-law/switzerla...