I like the new company that I’m working with. I have an excellent team - great rapport with my team members and my team lead is a guy who knows his stuff. The project I’m doing is interesting. I also like the guy who got me into this company. However, recently, upper management has been rearing its ugly head.
Firstly, I understand that time management is important and part of time management is punctuality. It would be superfluous to say that all jobs are different thus the flexibility we allow our employees when it comes to time management differ.
For example, if you are in customer service and if you are not at your job at 9.00am but 9.30am, it could or rather would hurt operations. I appreciate the need for stringency in working hours for such job scopes.
However, there are some jobs like mine where we have a very well defined project schedule. Besides this very well planned schedule, the nature of our job is such that most of the time, I’m working independently from my team. This is the beauty of investing time when designing the architecture of the system as well as good modularization of code with well thought out classes and interfaces.
With my job scope, it is not critical to daily operations or project delivery to come in on the dot. In fact, I would say it is perfectly fine to come in way pass the dot.
Now, don’t get me wrong. If the company is paying a salary, they should expect results. But let’s look at this from a programmer’s perspective.
Firstly, the schedule isn’t being delayed. In fact, we are working fast enough to give ourselves a larger buffer for more unit testing, integration testing and bug fixing.
Secondly, the communication between the team hasn’t been affected when people come in at different times.
Thirdly, we don’t come in late and leave early. At worse, we work the exact stipulated amount of hours. At best, and this is usually the case, we work more than that. Why? I won’t say that everyone of us love coding till we gladly continue doing it even if it is pass the time we can go home but I do believe in such a concept of ‘being in the flow’. A lot of times once we get into it, we stay in it until lots of work do get done even if it takes us pass normal working hours.
Lastly, companies like to get us in on time and even more willing to keep us pass the time we are supposed to leave. In Singapore, there isn’t the concept of overtime pay. I think that’s a bad thing. Now, I understand one of the reasons for this - we want to make our labor force attractive. However I believe there are many other ways to do it like making ourselves more productive or more innovative.
Without overtime, and the tendency for upper management to be fixated with how long someone stays in the office, we create a situation where employees get exploited and employees just stay in the office to put on a wayang show for their bosses. Do you actually think all the employees who stay long hours are doing work at all times during the day? In fact, I would wager most people drag out their work just to fill the time leading in a decrease of productivity.
Now, some bosses will come and say they make up for the lack of overtime by awarding bonuses. After all, if you put in the effort, management will notice and compensate. Also, sometimes, work just needs to be done.
I call bullshit on all that.
Firstly, something is wrong when long working hours are a daily fixture of your job. I understand the occasional burst of effort needed but daily? Someone is being exploited. And if there is really that much work, two people should be hired and not one person pushed to do more work.
Secondly, bonuses depend on the goodness and fairness of management and owners. Do you honestly believe humans have the general capacity to be fair when in comes to monetary compensation of their employees?
They will always pay you just enough not to leave never compensate you fairly and well for your efforts.
Like I said, I like this company. But upper management has been rearing its ugly head when they started nitpicking on our punctuality which to be honest isn’t bad at all.
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