Book: Bullshit Jobs

The first place I worked after I got out of college (in England, as a computer programmer) used flex-time. The base was a 35 hour week. Essentially, a 9-5 day with an hour off for lunch. Each day, Monday through Friday, you could sign in between 8:00am and 10:00am, and sign out between 4:00pm and 6:00pm. You were required to accumulate hours equivalent to working 35 hours a week, But if you wanted to have an early start or a late start, or a short day here and a long day there, that was fine. And if you accumulated 7 or more extra hours during a month, you got a day off as compensation. I was actually in a car pool, so I typically signed in at 8:30 and out at 5:00 every day, because that was when the rides were. So I got a flex day every month, and that was in addition to the usual paid vacation and holidays.

It was a crappy place to work, in a lot of ways, but that flex-time system was great.

Contrast to a place I was working in New York, about 20 years later. We were having trouble hiring new software engineers. We interviewed a number of candidates who seemed OK and appeared to want the job, but then they were interviewed by Human Resources, and were either rejected by HR or turned us down. My boss had a discussion with HR to find out what the problem was. It seems HR was informing candidates that the "standard corporate day" was 10 hours (with no paid overtime).

They were telling the truth, actually, but they should have been lying like the HR departments in all the other companies. And the American corporations' approach to their workers needs to catch up with the middle of the last century.

Working in California, I have never met another software engineer who would not have been delighted by a 10-hour work day, even without overtime pay. When I retired, my typical work week was something over 100 hours, and that was fairly common. And there was no overtime pay or "flex" days off. On the other hand, there was that one year where my bonus was just under a million bucks.

I typically worked 50-60 hours a week, and that was enough for steady consumption. Once a project got busy and the hours went up to 70 or 80, I found that after just a few weeks I was too frazzled to work to the necessary standard.

What's a bonus?

a bonus was primarily stock options, but a couple of times we had profit sharing.

I was kidding, of course, but bonuses were rare where I was. I got one after one project where I saved their asses (they had screwed up, and needed a system to reprocess about 18 months worth of transactions, generating corrections for all the accounts that were incorrect). I wasn't even leading a team at that time, but I volunteered, explained how the system would work, and told them I wanted three programmers to help build it. They gave me one, so I basically not only designed the system but also did 90% of the coding, working about 80 hours a week for 6 months. For that, I got the princely sum of $26,000 as a bonus. And I was so burnt out after that effort that I was in zombie mode for the next two years.