> My suggestion: if a single week of overtime will help you meet a critical deadline, and you can promise your team it’ll be an extremely rare occurrence (like, once a year, at most), consider asking for overtime. Otherwise, just take your lumps and accept the late project.
I am of the strong opinion that there are very few projects where the benefits of a couple more hours of work out of your employees a day is worth the cost on morale.
Project gets out tomorrow versus a month from now? Will anyone still care two years from now? No? Wasn’t worth it.
The human propensity for screaming “I want it now!” about things that don’t really matter never fails to frustrate me.
And please don’t get me wrong. There are certainly cases where people’s jobs or the entire company hang in the balance. That is a legitimate reason for overtime. There’s also cases like the UI redesigns with no effect on the bottom line the last time I had to work overtime - and in my experience anyway this is way more common.
I am of the strong opinion that there are very few projects where the benefits of a couple more hours of work out of your employees a day is worth the cost on morale.
Project gets out tomorrow versus a month from now? Will anyone still care two years from now? No? Wasn’t worth it.
The human propensity for screaming “I want it now!” about things that don’t really matter never fails to frustrate me.
And please don’t get me wrong. There are certainly cases where people’s jobs or the entire company hang in the balance. That is a legitimate reason for overtime. There’s also cases like the UI redesigns with no effect on the bottom line the last time I had to work overtime - and in my experience anyway this is way more common.