If you work in Software Industry, it’s certain that you would have worked beyond office hours and over the weekends. And if you are working in Indian Software companies then the ratio of working beyond office hours and over the weekend is pretty painful.
The worst part is that it’s become a norm, a trend and nobody questions it and everyone falls into the mold without much fuss. Even so cribbing and complaining about it at the same time.
However, some argue that the software industry is unlike other industries. In other industries usually, people follow a set of instructions, operate regular machinery, make the same kinds of products every day. IT is the knowledge industry and creative industry and wherever there is creativity involved, it’s hard to timebox it. (At the same time managers/clients do try to do just that every day “logo design in 6 hours“, “add the login feature in a day“, etc.)
But if we buy the above argument then a contrasting argument can also be made. In today’s IT industry, there is not too much creativity or knowledgeful work left in the industry which needs a whole lot of time to accomplish. This is actually a good thing, it’s a sign that the industry is maturing. Now we have templates, code snippets, boilerplate, mock designs, tools that can do almost everything. Today a developer is not creating a linked list or a stack first and then a collection and then group the customer info on top of that.
Even in the UI, there are tons of templates, mockups, available and tools that make designing super easy for regular kinds of work. Almost, in every department of IT, there are tools or help out in the open that has made most of the tasks routine.
So the question that begs the answer is why working overtime is still required in the IT Industry?
The argument by the ‘experienced‘ that they used to work 16 hours a day and the new guys can’t stretch for a couple of days literally stinks. The world is different now than what it used to be and not everyone needs (or should need) to work in the same manner, spend the same insane hours as before.
Younguns who don’t want to work beyond 8 hours or over the weekends are not arrogant or disrespectful. They simply don’t have the same notion about the job that you might have. And why should they? The world is quite different for them today and there are several other things that they want to do in their lives. You had your own reasons for spending endless hours at the office. It could be your passion for the job or maybe you had nothing better to do. For today’s folks, it’s just a job. That’s completely alright and you should be fine with it too.
Today’s commercial projects are more about joining the building blocks rather than inventing. You want a networking site, an e-commerce store, ERP, CRM system, or just about any commercial (and many non-commercial) solutions, all you got to do is join the blocks.
So you are basically looking for people who have a good enough IQ to search, copy, mimic and do it in the fastest possible time and with fewer defects. That’s the long and short of it.
The reason that employees need to work overtime and over the weekends is more of a cultural flaw, faulty planning, or mismanagement rather than anything else.
It interests nobody to find the root cause of the problem. Every time a project crisis happens, a ‘work overtime‘ band-aid is put on that to stop the bleeding. And this quick fix is done so many times that it’s gotten in the subconscious mind of all employees that this is the only solution whenever a crisis happens.
No one is even interested in knowing or debating about what are we gaining by having the people work overtime. There is no check that the employees are even effective in the 8 hours of regular work. Or are they whiling away time, because they know that they will need to stay overtime so why rush things?
There is no calculation of the damage done to the project, to the organization, to the employees because of this one dreadful habit. Even if we are talking pure economics, having employees work overtime doesn’t even make economic sense for the organizations.
It’s high time, that a crusade is launched against this wrong trend of employees having to work overtime and weekends. Enough attention needs to be paid to this problem and solutions devised rather than reverting to the band-aid.
The solutions could be different for different organizations. A solution might not alleviate all the pains but it will certainly help even to curb this practice. And if you can’t understand and fix the problem on your own, reach out to others. Reach out to people in your organization even beyond your organization. Try and understand if something can be done better or differently. At the very least understand the problem and the root cause better and conduct some experiments to improve.
So Industry and Industry Patrons, Developers, QA, Project Managers, Architects, CTO, CEO, CXOs et al. arise and act against this menace and put an end to this loathsome practice.