Overtime

In a follow-up to my blog on Work Hours, I wanted to discuss Overtime. From my experience, Overtime has rarely been worth it for the employer, and my strong guilty conscience prevents me from taking advantage.

I haven’t looked into the topic, but the widely adopted “9-5 work hours, 5 days a week” must have come into play after years of theorising and research. Working past this limit will lead to burnout. After working for a few months in the 9-5 structure without additional time off, I do come to the point where I need time away. Working past this point will just push me to that point earlier.

Recently, my project has been approaching the final deadline, so overtime has been available. Some team members have taken advantage of this, whereas others have avoided it completely.

One day, I was helping out testing and was finding appropriate Test Cases to link to the Work Item. I saw that some tests I had previously wrote now were incorrect. I checked the history, and the tester that was doing overtime (I’ll call him Brian) had changed them on Sunday, late at night. He turns up late to work on Monday, looking really fatigued, and several times during the day, he calls me over to explain Work Items to him; which was unusual. So basically, the employer paid him a full days work on Sunday, and then he fails to perform on a Monday when he is actually contracted to work. So it seemed that we gained a day, but then lost it straight away.

There was another Work Item I was looking at, and I saw there was an Overtime Task from Colin assigned to it. Weird, since the tests were written by Brian, someone else wrote the fix, and it hadn’t been tested yet. I check the history, and Brian had removed all the tests that Colin had written, and rewrote them during work time. Colin was claiming 7 hours overtime on it. A full day at the weekend for no benefit.

There was a day where I overheard Colin talking to the Product Owner, saying that he had lost his work over the weekend. Now, I didn’t hear his reason, but I was thinking “how the hell can you lose your work?”. Let’s say it was a hard-disc failure; well, you wouldn’t be complaining that you lost your work – you would be moaning about losing everything. Let’s say it was a server failure and his Shelveset was gone; many other people would be complaining. So the only thing I can think of is that he didn’t create a Shelveset, then undid his changes; which is just incompetence. The only other alternative, is that he had nothing to show for his several hours of development, so came up with a “dog ate my homework” excuse to try and get paid anyway.

Yesterday, I was sat with Colin discussing the work we had left. He then told me that he was sick of the project and felt overworked. Since we are roughly on track, he was gonna take a couple of days off work. He then asks me why I don’t do overtime. Well, I think this proves my point.

We were seemingly behind, he does all this overtime and the end result is that we’d probably be in the same position if there was no overtime available, but now we have fatigued, demotivated team members.

I don’t know what the end result is going to be, but there was a time were promotions were dished out, but I didn’t get one despite it being a widely accepted fact that I was among the highest performers in the team. In a meeting with my line manager, he said the reason why Tim was picked over me, was that Tim did overtime when the company really needed it. I was like “WTF, I’m contracted to do a job, and I do it in normal hours, or stay behind and get it done. Tim wastes time doing person shopping on Amazon, then when his work isn’t done, he volunteers to do overtime at an extra cost to the company”. Nice guys finish last.