Would you people seriously just *stop* doing unpaid work already?!?!
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:rolleyes: :zzz:
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. ~ George Washington
Childish.
Jeremy Falcon
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Childish.
Jeremy Falcon
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But salaried employees get bonuses, contract ones don't. The perceived effort/input/success of an individual employee can reward with significantly higher bonus than one who does the bare minimum. Contractors then moan that they don't get a bonus, well of course not, you are paid for what you do - your terms! ;P
Dave Find Me On:Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
In my 30+ years of professional experience, there has been an inverse correlation between the number of overtime hours worked and the amount of my bonuses. In other words, the smarter I worked, the less overtime I worked, and my bonuses were larger.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
But the whole team can be bitten.
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Mike Mullikin wrote:
it ain't a muscle.
Wrong. You're just arguing semantics, but it functions just like a muscle. When you work a muscle it becomes stronger. When you work your brain it becomes quicker and clearer. When you overwork either, they both break down and become damaged. Do some research before dismissing it, or else you'll get stuck in old ways of thinking. Here's a quick Google to even get you started... http://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/20/your_brain_is_like_a_muscle/[^]
Jeremy Falcon
Come on - he's not arguing semantics - you said the brain is a muscle - it is not in the least bit like a muscle. The only respect it is in any way like a muscle is that its efficiency seems to be increased with increased use, up to a point. saying "the brain is a muscle" is like saying "a toenail is a human" because they both grow when healthy.
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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No.Unbillable.Work! If the customer isn't paying for it, the customer doesn't get it. Call me crazy, but I bill for every single hour I work...like I am supposed to. It infuriates me when I get into a project with salaried employees that commit "heroic effort" to making their screw ups not look like screw ups and make my 40-45 hour a week billable commitment look diminished. I had a guy tell me first thing when we got in that he was working until 2:00 this morning completing something because the customer ballooned our scope but held firm to the original deadline. What does project management tell said customer when he did this? "Ok." The real problem is that giving project management what they want just reinforces to them that it is ok to start death marches; your reward for completing one is that you get to start your next. I get paid or you do not get work done. No. Unbillable. Work. STOP IT!!!!
"I need build Skynet. Plz send code"
What's wrong here is the entire premise of hourly pay. If you are a contractor and you are charging me for every hour you work - then I want you to be working for every hour you bill. Not having a break, stretching your legs, writing a shopping list or getting on Farcebook. with a company charging a customer for a job of work, the customer isn't paying for a number of hours - they are paying for a product - and if people need to work longer hours to get the product out the door, then that's a good thing; a happy customer is a good customer. of course, this shouldn't become a constant requirement of the employer - the next project, folk should be able to chill a little, safe in the knowledge that they have learned from the bad experience, and adjusted their estimates accordingly.
Alaric_ wrote:
"heroic effort" to making their screw ups not look like screw ups
so are you saying that, when you screw up, you charge the customer for the time it takes you to fix it? So, if a plumber comes to fix a washer on your tap, then breaks a pipe and takes all day to fix it, do you just grab your cheque book and hand over a day's work for a 1/2 hour job?
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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But salaried employees get bonuses, contract ones don't. The perceived effort/input/success of an individual employee can reward with significantly higher bonus than one who does the bare minimum. Contractors then moan that they don't get a bonus, well of course not, you are paid for what you do - your terms! ;P
Dave Find Me On:Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
What's a bonus? - Oh sorry just remembered, I work in the UK...
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Yup, you're arguing semantics. I know they technically work different, that's common sense. Seriously Mike, no duh. Any fool knows that. Guess what, circles and squares are different too. Are you trying to sound smart by finding something that silly to argue about? Everyone knows they're different. But they are both shapes they both work like shapes. Like I said, you're arguing semantics simply because I didn't use a word such as "like" in my original post when comparing the two. Do me a favor, argue about not arguing some more. That would be swell. And speaking of semantics, muscles are organs too.
Jeremy Falcon
it's weird (and this is just a pretest not a contestation) how many time is wasted on trying to state something that is simply wrong, and being wrong do not make you silly, but make the sentence "Brain is a muscle" silly. This is semantic, just say: "Hey, I am not silly. I just wrote something silly" and all the discuss stop there. Hey, we are human, we make errors such as missing "like", and we have an ego, that could be offended, it happen, just that. Saying "is a" followed by "and like a" make a shift from language to metalanguage, the "and" make that shift. English is not my mother tongue, I am sure I am doing error here too. The pretest is because maybe is for the ego that one pretends to stay on deadline, or at least this is my experience, I want to show I am good and I can do it in time, is not always a matter of money. Again, I am human, and I will stop doing unpaid work. I just did a silly thing ;) p.s. I am trying to sound smart because a silly thing to argue about, but I like to sound smart, I do not care if I am not, or maybe that is my fail (to care) and I want to change it.
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I'd have to agree. It really surprised me: I had always been in an environment where you ate at your desk, worked long hours, some weekends - mostly unpaid, but for the occasional "thank you" - then I started a new job with a different company and on the first day I was told (with some impatience) that they were waiting to lock up the building at 17:02. On the second day, one of the order processing ladies "had a quiet word" and told me to stop working my lunch hour. They suspected that if I didn't they would have to start... :laugh: So I found myself working 09:00 to 17:00 (13:00 on Fridays) even after I was given the key to the building with a full hour off for lunch. And b*gg*r me! I was getting more done... :omg: I think it has two effects: you focus better while you are working, and the breaks let you relax and become more creative at the same time. So much so that I don't work a full hour any more: I take regular breaks and do something different - come here for example - and it works. Counter-intuitive, I know.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
OriginalGriff wrote:
So I found myself working 09:00 to 17:00 (13:00 on Fridays) even after I was given the key to the building with a full hour off for lunch. And b*gg*r me! I was getting more done...
Well said. I have never known that not to be the case.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I'd have to agree. It really surprised me: I had always been in an environment where you ate at your desk, worked long hours, some weekends - mostly unpaid, but for the occasional "thank you" - then I started a new job with a different company and on the first day I was told (with some impatience) that they were waiting to lock up the building at 17:02. On the second day, one of the order processing ladies "had a quiet word" and told me to stop working my lunch hour. They suspected that if I didn't they would have to start... :laugh: So I found myself working 09:00 to 17:00 (13:00 on Fridays) even after I was given the key to the building with a full hour off for lunch. And b*gg*r me! I was getting more done... :omg: I think it has two effects: you focus better while you are working, and the breaks let you relax and become more creative at the same time. So much so that I don't work a full hour any more: I take regular breaks and do something different - come here for example - and it works. Counter-intuitive, I know.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
Nope. NOT counter-intuitive. Some years back I read an article about productivity. The author said we should schedule our work efforts at 60% of our total time. The "free" time allows us to relax, to think about what we are doing, to work "smarter", and to improve both our products and our processes. In the short term it appears to be a productivity drain, but in the long term the company gets more results from us. Problem is too many managers don't understand results, they understand butts-in-seats. By this superficial mentality, 70 hours/week is a performer, 40 hours/week is a slacker. After reading that article I started scheduling all my projects at 60% utilization. I took a LOT of flack from clients who believed that a 160 estimate for one person meant that the product would be delivered in 4 weeks. The end result? Better products delivered exactly when promised. Lower defect rates, less hours, and happier people. This doesn't mean we didn't have crunch time, but we had a lot less of it, and people feel better about putting in the extra hours when necessary.
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Quite. I read is as he's brilliant, and everyone else is shit, which is why he gets paid the big bucks as a contractor, but because the shit salaried people work longer hours than he is prepared to it makes his sticking rigidly to the clock and going home look bad. He isn't bad, he's good, he's better in fact. It's so unfair. Beats fists on floor, threatens to hold breath until passes out, and so on.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
Re-read the OP's post. You completely missed the point. When management sees an estimated 1,000 hour project complete "on time" they estimate all future projects with that project as the scale. If the project actually took 1,500 hours to complete? Guess what, the next one will, too. The worst thing is the people who KNOW this is true, but estimate that same project at 1,000 hours anyway as it's what management/clients expect.
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Re-read the OP's post. You completely missed the point. When management sees an estimated 1,000 hour project complete "on time" they estimate all future projects with that project as the scale. If the project actually took 1,500 hours to complete? Guess what, the next one will, too. The worst thing is the people who KNOW this is true, but estimate that same project at 1,000 hours anyway as it's what management/clients expect.
I didn't miss the point, I was making a joke, although some people don't understand what they are reading is a joke unless it has a joke icon. Although his point wasn't quit your interpretation in my opinion. Someone else nailed it when they talked about the phrase billable hours. Absolutely the management need to know who long something really took, but just because those on a salary stop all night to get something working doesn't mean that they were not recording their time against the project, I'd be very surprised if they were not. Even more important they they understand what those hours were spent on. Did the initial dev take longer than expected, did it come back from testing with a load of extra work needing doing. Where the devs not good enough, the spec not good enough, the requirements gathering not good enough. Maybe it really should have taken 1,000 hours, but took 1,500 because something went badly wrong. Surely better to fix what went wrong and do the next one in 1,000 hours than just keep the crap and stretch it out to 1,500 instead.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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Childish.
Jeremy Falcon
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What's wrong here is the entire premise of hourly pay. If you are a contractor and you are charging me for every hour you work - then I want you to be working for every hour you bill. Not having a break, stretching your legs, writing a shopping list or getting on Farcebook. with a company charging a customer for a job of work, the customer isn't paying for a number of hours - they are paying for a product - and if people need to work longer hours to get the product out the door, then that's a good thing; a happy customer is a good customer. of course, this shouldn't become a constant requirement of the employer - the next project, folk should be able to chill a little, safe in the knowledge that they have learned from the bad experience, and adjusted their estimates accordingly.
Alaric_ wrote:
"heroic effort" to making their screw ups not look like screw ups
so are you saying that, when you screw up, you charge the customer for the time it takes you to fix it? So, if a plumber comes to fix a washer on your tap, then breaks a pipe and takes all day to fix it, do you just grab your cheque book and hand over a day's work for a 1/2 hour job?
PooperPig - Coming Soon
_Maxxx_ wrote:
so are you saying that, when you screw up, you charge the customer for the time it takes you to fix it?
What I intended to say was salaried development employee commits "heroic effort" to making whoever made an unrealistic promise not look like they made an unrealistic promise Of course I account for my own mistakes but a lack of proper planning on "your" part does not constitute an emergency on "mine." When shit hits the fan because someone walks over to a fan, points their butt directly at it, and then takes a crap into the fan blades, they have absolutely no ability to convince me that I should do any more than the terms I agreed to in my contract say I have committed myself to and operating pooper scoopers ain't my bag, baby; especially on nights and weekends.
_Maxxx_ wrote:
f you are a contractor and you are charging me for every hour you work - then I want you to be working for every hour you bill. Not having a break, stretching your legs, writing a shopping list or getting on Farcebook.
...yeah; that's the way that works. I charge for every hour I work. The hour I take in the middle of the day for personal business? Not billable. I'm not entirely sure why you felt the need to provide that explanation.
_Maxxx_ wrote:
of course, this shouldn't become a constant requirement of the employer - the next project, folk should be able to chill a little, safe in the knowledge that they have learned from the bad experience, and adjusted their estimates accordingly.
I don't believe in "employers." I have customers, even if -for a time- I work on a W-2 for a single client on multiple projects: they are my customer. I owe them nothing more than I would owe any customer; they can expect nothing more from me than they can expect from the terms of my contract. Decomposing the "employer->employee" relationship to its basic structure where the "employer" is purchasing skill on the market and the "employee" is a single-person entity that supplies said skill to the market, you arrive at these beautiful things called contracts and with slightly more investigation, you realize that every "employee" is really a consultant. Far too many people treat the "employer->employee" relationship as if the employee is beholden to the employer like a vassal to a lord.
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But salaried employees get bonuses, contract ones don't. The perceived effort/input/success of an individual employee can reward with significantly higher bonus than one who does the bare minimum. Contractors then moan that they don't get a bonus, well of course not, you are paid for what you do - your terms! ;P
Dave Find Me On:Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
Bonuses? You mean the $50 gift card to a restaurant I got after working 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week for 2 months straight? On my subsequent annual review, I was told I was the best developer they had and because of that, I was getting a raise .5% higher than average. I left not long after that.
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Nope. NOT counter-intuitive. Some years back I read an article about productivity. The author said we should schedule our work efforts at 60% of our total time. The "free" time allows us to relax, to think about what we are doing, to work "smarter", and to improve both our products and our processes. In the short term it appears to be a productivity drain, but in the long term the company gets more results from us. Problem is too many managers don't understand results, they understand butts-in-seats. By this superficial mentality, 70 hours/week is a performer, 40 hours/week is a slacker. After reading that article I started scheduling all my projects at 60% utilization. I took a LOT of flack from clients who believed that a 160 estimate for one person meant that the product would be delivered in 4 weeks. The end result? Better products delivered exactly when promised. Lower defect rates, less hours, and happier people. This doesn't mean we didn't have crunch time, but we had a lot less of it, and people feel better about putting in the extra hours when necessary.
I've long advocated for a system where, at review time, effort is rewarded differently than accomplishment. In my system, at the end of the year/quarter/whatever, the company would have a policy that says you get x% of any overtime worked back as a 'time-off' bonus (because effort should be recognized). However, when it comes to raises and so on, it's all about what you accomplished. Don't care if you worked 90 or 30 hour weeks; did you accomplish less than, equal to, or more than what would be expected of someone at your level, and make salary adjustments based on that. Of course, HR drones' heads exploded when asked to consider two dimensions of things...
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No.Unbillable.Work! If the customer isn't paying for it, the customer doesn't get it. Call me crazy, but I bill for every single hour I work...like I am supposed to. It infuriates me when I get into a project with salaried employees that commit "heroic effort" to making their screw ups not look like screw ups and make my 40-45 hour a week billable commitment look diminished. I had a guy tell me first thing when we got in that he was working until 2:00 this morning completing something because the customer ballooned our scope but held firm to the original deadline. What does project management tell said customer when he did this? "Ok." The real problem is that giving project management what they want just reinforces to them that it is ok to start death marches; your reward for completing one is that you get to start your next. I get paid or you do not get work done. No. Unbillable. Work. STOP IT!!!!
"I need build Skynet. Plz send code"
OP: It sounds like you are expecting the salaried employees to work the way you do, which in their case I guess you assume means that they should work a 40-hour week and nothing more. That's not how it works, salaried employees aren't paid by the hour at all, they are paid to take on a role and do whatever needs to be done. Set work hours are a minimum expectation, if you are on salary then you work evenings and weekends to get things done if necessary, that's part of the job. If the salaried employees you work with took your advice and refused to work more than 40 hours in a week without extra compensation they'd likely be fired, and for good reason. I once had to work 18-hour days for two weeks straight to build a banking site that a sales guy had sold but neglected to tell anyone about until two weeks before we had to deliver it. This was at the end of December: I worked through the weekends, I left work to have Christmas dinner with family and then came back to work until 2 in the morning, I worked through New Year's, I worked every waking hour, taking a few hours to sleep, change clothes, and shower. No holiday for me. Why did I do this? Because a contract had been signed and I was the only one who could deliver. It didn't matter that it wasn't my fault, it didn't matter that it wasn't fair, it was my job. And I didn't get a dime more for doing it. That's pretty extreme and I left that place, but my point is that when you're on salary you don't have a choice about working long hours at times, other than the choice of having a job or not.
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This girl I used to work with was complaining once about all the extra time we were putting in to get a job out the door...she said, 'All this extra time we're putting in reduces my hourly pay to "do you want fries with that?"' ...made me laugh...
When I came to that same conclusion at a job, I found another job.
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When I came to that same conclusion at a job, I found another job.
I've been freelancing for 20 years now...if I'm working overtime because of something I did wrong, I don't charge them for it...if it's because of something they did wrong or just underestimated, no mercy :) The girl in question didn't really have that much to complain about...a couple of overtime nights maybe 4 times a year...I've worked 36 hour shifts to deliver on ridiculous deadlines...have the nervous tick to prove it :)
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I've been freelancing for 20 years now...if I'm working overtime because of something I did wrong, I don't charge them for it...if it's because of something they did wrong or just underestimated, no mercy :) The girl in question didn't really have that much to complain about...a couple of overtime nights maybe 4 times a year...I've worked 36 hour shifts to deliver on ridiculous deadlines...have the nervous tick to prove it :)
I understand. My situation was as a salaried employee who worked 7 days a week, 12+ hours a day, for two months straight. It stopped at 2 months because I took a previously scheduled vacation. When I returned it was more of the same with a few weekends off.
