Concerning Working Hours
Background
Jason Fried and DHH tweeted about long working hours and how it might be a reflection of broken company processes rather than the fault of an individual employee. Sidu tweeted his own thoughts and in a conversation asked if I can write a more nuanced version that can be shared with the members of our graduate training program. That sounded like a good idea to both clear my own thoughts on the issue and potentially share those with more people hoping that those are useful to people.
Disclaimer
I do not want to give direct advice about job choices because it is a function of privilege and luck. Especially because it affects a person’s financial security and life-choices, any blanket advice will likely be wrong. I will also call out my own privileges as a cis-het, upper-caste, middle-class born male. I will also clarify that I have worked overtime and no doubt benefited from it in some aspects. This article only covers issues pertaining to the IT industry in India as I have only worked here.
Consequently, I can only give information, thoughts and opinions based on which I would recommend people to read more, think more, try a few things and then make choices.
What is Overtime ?
The Shops and Establishment Act under which IT employees fall, defines normal working hours as 9 hours per day or 48 hours a week. Anything above is considered as overtime and requires double wages for that duration. That is limited to 1 hour a day and a maximum of 50 hours in a period of 3 months.
Some IT companies however, have also adopted a 40–45 hour/week approach.
At-Will Employment ?
Before we consider options and make choices, we should first examine the work situation and what are the constraints on our choices. Currently working overtime falls into a spectrum of consent as a result of the following factors
- Inequality of Bargaining Power
- Coerced work
- Social Pressure
- “Impact”
To make a well informed decision, we will need to look at these factors. Lets look at them one by one.
Inequality of Bargaining Power
In India at-least, practically, an unemployed person with no money has little to no access to healthcare and food. They have to rely on support from family, friends or goodwill of society. Ergo without employment and support a person will die and naturally everyone seeks to avoid this state. While this system is potentially effective at encouraging more people to work. However it gives more power to employers.
Employers in most places have used this to their advantage by keeping wages low, reducing benefits such as insurance and paid leaves, and increasing working hours. This is done by colluding with other employers, anchoring candidates on past salaries
Coerced work
Multiple studies [1 in references] point to that some managers and employers will blatantly coerce employees to work longer hours by citing “delivery pressure”. This delivery pressure however can be due to over-optimistic timelines given by someone from sales to “complete their quota” or just poor project management. This is often not necessarily the fault of the individual employee (often the developer in an IT company). In service companies, this fact of overworked employees is hidden from clients from Western countries as the clients would be distressed at such conditions.
Thus while there are labour laws which limit the working hours to 48 hours with some provisions for overtime, these are hardly enforced in companies and shops. Employees are dis-incentivised against lodging complaints for fear of retribution and a lengthy judicial process.
Social Pressure
Oftentimes, the decisions we make are a result of our environment and people around us. Due to other people in our office working late, replying to emails/messages on the weekend and while on leave, we internally feel obligated to conform. We fear non-conformism will result in some manner of punitive action, whether that is in the form of chiding by colleagues or missing out on promotions. These fears are often not without cause and many companies (for better or worse) actively encourage this.
I’ll caveat this by saying that this is an anecdotal belief based on personal and heard experiences. However peer pressure as general category, under which this falls, is well known and studied.
“Impact”
Many companies advocate beliefs such as, the work will impact millions and “change the world”. They will often tout various statistics and potential impact to validate this claim. However we must be careful about getting bought into these statistics without considering contrary perspectives. As an example, a claim that “We will provide income to thousands of people” sounds great but we should go further in depth. What form of income is that ? Is it through the gig-economy ? What are the pros and cons of that ? How sustainable is this income ? Is there a lock-in of any form ? What is the balance of power between the company and employee during this lock-in period ?
Pros and Cons of Working Overtime
Now that we have looked at the the various factors affecting our decision, lets look at the pros and cons of working overtime
Pros
Potentially faster Financial Security & faster growth of skills
Some companies have a broken culture of promoting people based on a perception of hard work. This perception can often be built by not actually working more, but being in the office longer. Hence depending on the company, working overtime might help to retain our job, progress faster. This might contribute to being financially independent faster. I don’t support this situation, but it is a reality in many places currently.
Sometimes, depending on the work, putting in more time on problems related to work can result in faster development of different skillsets. E.g someone can be doing a dual role of a developer and a PM.
Personal freedom to spend time on work you like doing
A lot of people genuinely like the work that they do and derive meaning from it. Like some programmers genuinely like building great artistic software. It gives them great joy and purpose in life. Consequently, they would enjoy doing more of it. There are also people who are financially independent and working purely for pleasure. Such people are closest to truly working “at-will”. It can be argued, that restricting or limiting such work infringes upon individual liberty. However that is a deeper philosophical debate left for the references [2].
There are two counter points to this, one that the work need not be office work. E.g. it can be done on open-source projects as well. Secondly, in both cases the influence on colleagues who may not be similarly inclined or privileged cannot be ignored. Perhaps the person would need to take additional effort to make it explicit that everyone need not do the same.
Cons
Less Personal Time to:
- Increase breadth of our knowledge : Why do whales strand themselves? Why did the 2008 recession occur ? How do stars die ? Do the needs of the many outweigh those of the few ? Is gender an artificial construct ? Should the suffering of non-human beings be treated differently than those of humans ? These are questions which offer us new information and perspectives on the world around us. Learning about them changes our thinking process and can perhaps making us kinder to our fellow beings.
- Less time to share responsibilities at home : Longer working hours contribute to less time to share responsibilities with the dishes, cooking and care-giving for elderly and children. These can lead to burdening our partner(s).
- Or just do whatever you like : What we may like and may want to do in our own time is entirely upto us, after all this is our life. Whether that thing is pizzas, hanging out with friends, cycling, hiking or even just doing nothing at all !
Less time to improve our skills outside those immediately required at work
Learning about technology for examples can be improved much faster by reading books / blogs / podcasts and actually applying this knowledge. Sometimes work does not give these opportunities. Consequently, if we are only doing office work then it might not give opportunities to increase our knowledge. This knowledge can well be the differentiator to do our work better, more efficiently and potentially get better paying opportunities.
Lower efficiency at work
There is no dearth of studies [3] which point towards lower efficiency as a result of additional workload. Overwork leads to acute stress and health issues, it lowers creativity and effective interpersonal communication and people make more mistakes. Although these are not ideal arguments for problems of overwork, but these studies do make it clear to companies that overwork is just bad for business.
The flaw with this argument is that there can (and are) be employers who are ok with factory farming their employees, by overworking them and when their efficiency drops, then conveniently firing them over “performance reasons”.
Concluding thoughts
Respecting our Colleagues choices
If we do choose to work extra hours we need to be mindful of our privilege and the choice of doing so. Many people may not be able to do so due to physical or mental illnesses, disabilities or care-giving responsibilities. Others may simply not want to do so. I feel we should be respectful of those constraints and choices. I understand that the environment may not be conducive to this, especially if the employer expects us to spend overtime. However we must try.
If we are in a position of relative power, we can create a culture of respecting people’s constraints and choices and not burden them with guilt.
Personal Opinion worth 2c
I feel that education, healthcare should be free and accessible to all. Everyone should have a basic income to provide for food and shelter. This balances the Inequality of Bargaining Power and makes employment truly “at-will”. People in offices could respect constraints and choices of everyone including wanting to not work more than 40 hours or choosing to stay back and work. That could hopefully reduce the social pressure as well.
Making choices
As I said earlier, I cannot make direct suggestions for anyone without context. So I would encourage folks to use this information and read more, try out a few ways of working and see what works for you and then choose what works best for you.
That’s it ! Let me know your thoughts and feedback in the comments.