At one of my old jobs, some of the software engineers would work nights and weekends without being paid extra. I said we shouldn’t do that. Management gave me a talking to about how I was demoralizing the team and it doesn’t hurt me if they want to work extra. It didn’t seem the appropriate time to argue that them devaluing the same labor I do does hurt me.
In my experience people who systematically work long hours have crap productivity because they’re much more tired and tired people produce a lot more negative work (in the form of bugs, bad design decisions, inflexible code that will need to be rewritting if changed, weirdly structured code that’s hard to work with, “stupid lazy” bad practices that shave seconds from coding time upfront whilst adding hours latter on, and so on) which adds to the total work that needs to be done (as those things either have to be fixed or make later work be harder to do in that codebase).
So the people working like that were only devaluing your labor in the eyes of incompetent managers (competent managers measure results to determine “productivity”, not “bums on seats”).
Then again, if those manager actually applauded them for doing it, those manager were most assuredly incompetent.
PS: Not saying that any of this make it right, just saying that it’s a symptom of stupidity and incompetence all the way to the top.
At one of my old jobs, some of the software engineers would work nights and weekends without being paid extra. I said we shouldn’t do that. Management gave me a talking to about how I was demoralizing the team and it doesn’t hurt me if they want to work extra. It didn’t seem the appropriate time to argue that them devaluing the same labor I do does hurt me.
In my experience people who systematically work long hours have crap productivity because they’re much more tired and tired people produce a lot more negative work (in the form of bugs, bad design decisions, inflexible code that will need to be rewritting if changed, weirdly structured code that’s hard to work with, “stupid lazy” bad practices that shave seconds from coding time upfront whilst adding hours latter on, and so on) which adds to the total work that needs to be done (as those things either have to be fixed or make later work be harder to do in that codebase).
So the people working like that were only devaluing your labor in the eyes of incompetent managers (competent managers measure results to determine “productivity”, not “bums on seats”).
Then again, if those manager actually applauded them for doing it, those manager were most assuredly incompetent.
PS: Not saying that any of this make it right, just saying that it’s a symptom of stupidity and incompetence all the way to the top.