1

How many of you work overtime on a weekly or daily basis? (I’m guessing all of you).

Reason I ask is because for the last several months my tasks and responsibilities have increased and on average I was working 4-10 hours a week of overtime. However, recently I have been told I am no longer allowed to work overtime unless it’s a dire emergency (network down, server down). If I come in early or take a short lunch and hit my 8 hours for the day, I HAVE to leave early. On the one hand, it’s nice. After 8 hours I’m out and don’t have to worry about shit… until the next day when I come back into work. I then start to feel overwhelmed due to the fact that I’m constantly playing catch up as my work load piles up.

Have any of you run into this problem? How do you (or would you) handle your workload without working OT? I always figured working off-hours and occasional weekends was the norm for the IT industry. But now I feel as if my hands have been tied and sooner or later I’m going to get bitched at for not completing all my work without doing OT.

Oh, and to top it off. My cell is paid for by my company and as such I’m expected to be “on-call”. But at the same time I’m told that if I’m off-hours, I should not answer my phone if it’s work related as it will result in OT. Wtf?!?!

41 Spice ups
2

If you ever do find a solution to this please fill me in. I am stuck in a constant back and forth of “NO OT FOR YOU!” followed by “Well you need to finish all this work” then back again.

9 Spice ups
3

Sounds like the salary talk needs to be had.

13 Spice ups
4

in a 1/2 month pay period I typically have 10-20 hours of OT, so far they havent said anythign about it, but it’ll happen sooner or later

5

Take the middle of the road on this one. Factor 6 hours of overtime a week, and that’s your requested salary. Then if you can, try and get anything over 6 hours a week as comp time. They don’t incur extra “cost” and you can justify getting some work done without it breaking the bank.

6 Spice ups
6

No overtime for me unless the sky is falling, but with development there is no real rush or emergency.

1 Spice up
7

Why play catch up? Just do 8 hours of work and call it a day. If things don’t get done, they don’t get done. If things start to fall apart and it becomes a problem, then management will notice and make adjustments. What are you worrying about?

25 Spice ups
8

I think the solution is to hire an appropriate amount of people to get the work done. We’re facing that right now here. I just presented an informal “State of the IT dept” stack with visual metrics showing our workload, specifically backlog which is increasing. We’ve had an intern come in when school’s out, and you can notice a change in metrics with an extra person. We’re probably getting an additional intern this summer, so having 5 people instead of 3 should have a huge impact. Then when things go back to crap in the fall, we have to say “This is our company with 3 employees, this is our company with more. You decide how you want the whole company to run.” The IT dept isn’t just some janitors. We do as much as anyone else, but if you’re not an IT company, no one has any perspective. That’s what a ticket system and metrics do for you (hopefully). At least you can generate the evidence to present an argument.

You also don’t staff for the amount of people you need. Rarely is everyone at work. You have vacation, sick days, jury duty, or just working somewhere else that isn’t in the office, and you’re down an employee. You have to staff at 105% or so to accommodate people not being around, so you still have the bare minimum. And when you have a surplus of manpower - you get to make progress!

5 Spice ups
9

Stop giving a shit, put in lots of tickets so shit doesn’t get forgotten, keep asking the boss for more help.

It’s funny how many things are fixed by the time I get around to calling them back. It’s just not not ideal.

10

Wait, you get paid for overtime?

Once that would have started happening here, they made me salary. I come in 10-15 minutes early every day, I stay late when I need to, and whenever there is a major project or emergency I work weekends. No OT or bonuses, it’s just the only way the work will get done. But, it’s a trade-off because if something ever came up and I needed to come in late or leave early, I could without losing pay. When my great aunt went into the hospital before passing away, I left work after being here only about 20 minutes. She passed away that night and I took the next 3 days off as well. I was never docked any pay and my boss told me to take all the time I needed. So, the lack of OT is a fair trade and I’m actually happy to work somewhere where they’ll take care of me like that.

15 Spice ups
11

No OT here either. Its not needed tho, Im caught up on all my tickets.

1 Spice up
12

We’re union. Overtime = time and a half (paid or comp). That doesn’t help you with a solution to your dilemma but it might help with perspective. The workload is in Spiceworks. Use the metrics to either justify more bodies, prioritize work load or show the boss that they need to “step off”.

In the mean time, take 3 deep breaths and carry on.

1 Spice up
13

I’m salary and have been for so long I don’t know what OT looks like. I have worked for some great folks though. Some times I work 80 hours a week, some weeks I barely put in 20. It all evens out in the end. I have friends who are salary who work for horrible companies. They work 60 hours every week and if they were to try to take off early, they would probably lose their job.

2 Spice ups
14

Salaried here too and still getting 41-44 hours a week average. Maybe more depending.

15

I don’t agree with the stop caring crew. I am all about taking pride in my work even when no one else does.

The two keys have been hit on. Appropriate number of staff to avoid anyone having OT unless it is an emergency, and salary vs hourly pay. We were an hourly environment a few years back and in the same boat you are now due to being under staffed. We switched to salary wages utilizing comp time instead of OT and hired a few new bodies.

The amount of OT work dwindled to only those issue that can’t be handled during office hours.

4 Spice ups
16

Couple thoughts.

The company can’t just make you salary. Your job description must meet certain federal labor law requirements otherwise every company would say you were salaried to avoid overtime. You typically need to have supervisory position.

Your company is right on the cell phone. If you are hourly ALL work is on the clock. You can’t NOT be on the clock and doing work. If you answer the phone outside of work then you are back on the clock; if they don’t want to pay you for OT then maybe you can trade it as comp time but legally this may not be possible.

If you are required to be on call there are specific requirements there, too, regarding compensation.

I agree with ITSlave, do your 8 hours and leave. Pick it up again in the morning.

2 Spice ups
17

well… the tickets and support to users is what I was mainly hired for and that’s what I keep up on. As well as prepping new computers for new hires, testing new hardware and software, fixing PBX issues, ordering new equipment. It’s the off-hour stuff that I did before that I cannot get around to doing anymore. Maintenance type stuff… Cleaning up computers and running scans when users report errors and issues, installing specific software for certain users (it’s tough to do these during “normal” hours as the users don’t want to be interrupted). Often I would remote in from home off-hours to do these things, but since it’s OT, I can’t anymore.

oh… and if I’m not allowed to answer my phone off-hours because of OT unless it’s an emergency, how will I know if it’s an emergency or not if I don’t answer the phone? I brought this question up to the higher-ups and got no response :\

18

Overtime is just a part of the maintenance world, that is why a lot of us are hired as salary people. I have worked hourly positions and I just always stayed and worked on my own time so the company would leave me alone.

19

Not about stopping caring but why should the OP care more than the company? Why worry about something that he has no control over?
We’re not advocating for him to do a shitty job, either.

1 Spice up
20

The boss that won’t give us more staff is in the office next door right now.
It’s not about stop caring while at work. It’s about dropping everything that is day-to-day at 5pm, go home and not care, then start back at 8am the next day still working your ass off for only 8 hours.