SubscribeIn one TGIF in Kirkland, an employee informed Eric Schmidt thatWow.
Microsoft’s benefits package was richer. He announced himself
genuinely surprised, which genuinely surprised me. Schmidt, in the
presence of witnesses, promised to bring the benefits to a par. He
consulted HR, and HR informed him that it’d cost Google 22 million a
year to do that. So he abandoned the promise and fell back on his
tired, familiar standby (”People don’t work at Google for the money.
They work at Google because they want to change the world!”). A
statement that always seemed to me a little Louis XIV coming from a
billionaire. ...
Google’s net income for 2006, when I left, was 3 billion. 22 million a
year? Less than 1% of their *profit*.
It'd be really nice if people wouldn't put up with 60-80 hour work weeks. In many fields, you pretty much have to do it, because it's the standard and everyone you're competing with does it. So I can understand why people do it now... but it should never have been allowed to get to that point.If you're in a field that you're passionate about, and your work gives you an opportunity to create things that you find exciting, it is inevitable that you will go through phases of pouring stupid-time into stuff that excites you. Sleepless nights? Weekends? Totally! Awesome stuff! Eat free dinner at work and keep on plowing through until midnight? Yes. Why not? You're getting paid to do what you would do anyways, because this is the thing that gets you fired up.
I never understood why all of the recruiters were contractors, given that Google showed no signs of slowing down its hiring. All this meant was that a lot of the recruiters had to spend a lot of time training new recruiters, since they were replaced so frequently.This was exactly my experience... my HR contact throughout the phone-interview process left the company the week before I flew to Mountain View, and when a "snafu" outside my control led to them canceling my interview, no one had picked up the ball, and no one let me know. With hilarious consequences.
I was never asked to work more than 40 hours a week while being a software engineer there. Nevertheless, I wound up working greater than 80 hours a week, easily. This is largely due to the pace and goals I set for myself. Others felt like this as well. Perhaps this feeling varied to the opportunities available to each person? (Obvious downside: the lack of attention paid to my personal life became intensely damaging.)As I said, the measure of a company is not whether they demand that you work 80 hours a week when you already are. The measure of a company is what they do when you stop, and decide to balance your life in a healthier way, or when your family needs you, or when you decide that you need to chill lest you burn out at 30.
I don't think 80-100 hour work weeks are "unethical" in the first place. Nobody is forcing them to work that hard.This reminds me of the scene from Zoolander, where Will Farrel's character explains to a vapid male model that evil people want to keep bored children from working in the exciting world of clothing manufacturing.
So I set out to find work that I enjoyed, and jobs that would allow me to spend significant amounts of my time at the workplace doing things I wanted to do, or things that if I had to do them I could derive satisfaction from them, or at very least to do them in places I wanted to be. And as short a 'work week' as possible.That sounds nice! Do you make enough money to buy a house and have a few kids under that plan? And what do you do for a living?
In fairness, Microsoft owns their own hospital. Not a clinic. A hospital.Wait, what? Googling (heh) turned up nothing that seemed likely to fit what you wrote. More details, please?
Mitrovarr, of course, is just aesthetically offended by work weeks longer than 40 hours, and nothing but a ban would satisfy him. This doesn't strike me as a good use of lawmaking powers, though.That's like saying that opponents of child labor are just aesthetically offended by short workers.
The computer employee exemption does not include employees engaged in the manufacture or repair of computer hardware and related equipment. Employees whose work is highly dependent upon, or facilitated by, the use of computers and computer software programs (e.g., engineers, drafters and others skilled in computer-aided design software), but who are not primarily engaged in computer systems analysis and programming or other similarly skilled computer-related occupations identified in the primary duties test described above, are also not exempt under the computer employee exemption.The PDF describes in some (but not definitive) detail just which computer-related jobs are exempt from overtime pay.
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posted by Roman Graves at 6:02 PM on January 18 [4 favorites has favorites]