Yes, but this form of gambling is a terrible thing to encourage implicitly. It's awful for society to ask people who have worked to attain a "normal" education, trying to apply to "normal" companies, to choose between life-harm and potential future compensation. For specialized cases like a silicon valley moonshot startup or whatever, fine. But this scenario, allowed to progress naturally, will work itself into more and more "normal" cases.

This is especially compounded by the two facts that it's not a zero-sum game, and software developers have a higher tendency to fall outside some of the social norms that normally serve as natural controls on this kind of scenario. I.e. if you can do your job for unusually long (because it's not physical labor, and/or you enjoy doing it both as a job and a hobby), and you don't have many other obligations (you don't have kids, or you can afford childcare; or you don't have a wife, or you have a wife who doesn't mind you spending little time together; or you can afford to order prepared food often or don't have a cultural/personal bias against it), what happens is the people with these properties work more hours, causing the market to adapt and pressure the other people in the same field. In other fields, this doesn't happen in enough numbers to cause this problem.

In my experience, I agree: not everyone can put in the same kind of extra effort. And in areas where people are replaceable cogs, this can really hurt some people.

But in knowledge work, if things are hitting the wall and there is pressure to extra-contribute but you are not in a position to put in extra time, you can still respond in a way that visibly shows your commitment.

Express to your management & team your concern about the need for extra commitments and ask-for/suggest ways you can realign your work to prioritize what is most important to the situation.

Nothing makes up for limited additional capacity more than demonstrating that despite your constraints, you are all in to help everyone around you succeed.

Again, this may not work as a low level cog where management isn’t invested in the individuals that work for them. But in other cases, people do appreciate demonstrations of commitment even if you cannot contribute more on some dimensions.

It’s just important to explicitly and visibly show your flexibility and willingness to incorporate others suggestions, on all the dimensions you can adapt.

The few companies I've worked at, by 5 years the company either has sold up and everyone was replaced / let go, maybe a select few get to stay out of dozens - the vast majority lose out and were exploited or the company goes on a hiring spree and there aren't pay raises or bonuses because company growth is valued over employee satisfaction. Feels like you're talking about the exception rather than the rule or perhaps the tech industry 10+ years ago but certainly not today.

> So in their case it was short term uncompensated overtime , long term well compensated.

How does one identify whether one will be long term compensated or not? Would an employer agree to committing to something like this via a contract?

In my experience, switching jobs gets you there faster and without the unpaid overtime.

I have seen loyal people get exploited, frustrated and leave more often.

5 years is short term? do the maths. anyway, few people stay with a company that exploits them for 5 years.

I feel like you mentally inverted every thing in my post and then replied to that.

I feel otherwise, but please expand a bit.

Alright. Two guys working in a great company. One had the attitude of "no uncomped OT" and leaves at 5. The other guy works till 7.

At the end of the year guy 2 gets an extra 40k comp raise vs guy 1. In 5 years that's a 200k difference.

So by avoiding "uncomped OT" guy 1 fucked himself out of a ton of comp.

OBVIOUSLY this depends on the company and there's no guarantees. I've been lucky enough to work on companies that were like this and this every man for himself short term thinking was poison.

YMMV.

> YMMV

it certainly does. i have worked for several investment banks as a contractor, and i can assure you they do not much care how many hours you put in. if you wanted a big bonus (as a contractor, i obviously didn't get one) you had to produce value to the bank. and sitting at your desk until 7pm simply does not do that - actually it costs them money; you probably have no idea what the costs of air conditioning are in the city of london.

also, how much does that 2 hours per day, per year, over 5 years add up to?

The fact that it even occured to you to think that I am talking about sitting pointlessly for 2 hours vs creating value means we are coming at this from different directions.

I guess another way to say it - find a place that rewards you for value, and produce exceptional value.

You went from '200k a year' to '200k over five years'.

I didn't... But to make it crystal clear.

If you get an incremental 40k raise over someone else, every year for 5 years, you end up making 200 more than them PER YEAR after year 5.

We get the math, what is less plausible is 40k raise every year for five years while remaining on the same team doing the same job. Few jobs pay $200,000 at all, very very few pay so well that two people with the same role could be $200k apart. It's not impossible, of course, but that would be an extremely rare situation.

HR generally won't allow pay differences that large for the same role.

Like I said, YMMV.

200k is the starting developer comp at a FAANG. As you rise in level, 200k becomes the comp range within a level (eg take a look at levels.fyi range for a Google L6 SWE). Same in finance.

Agree that these jobs are few in the grand scheme of things but there are hundreds of thousands of people for whom this type of comp is reality.

People can start at the same level out of school and then make MULTIPLES of that comp depending on what they do.

If this doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to you. I am just pointing out that bailing because "this hour of overtime is not compensated" can be very nearsighted depending on your situation.

Specifically, I am talking about someone I know who had this attitude in a company that very clearly rewarded value generation. He did "ok" since it was a great company but he literally had the situation I am describing where others were making 200k more than him 5 years later.

That's more like an exception than a general rule, IMO. I've seen a lot of opposite examples and none like you're describing.

dream on

Isn’t the point of the article that this tends not to happen? That managers tend to see loyalty as an opportunity to extract unpaid labor?

Guy 2 sold more of his time and compromised his health and personal life by working 50+ hour weeks. He probably also made more mistakes than guy 1 because he wasn't well rested. Nobody got screwed out of comp but their manager who values bums on seats.

An extra 2 hours of work per day, assuming 260 work days per year, comes out to 520 hours. Over 5 years that adds up to 2600 hours of extra work.

If you get a $200k bonus after putting in those extra hours, you effectively earned $77/hr or $160k/year for your time. That's basically a 0-3 YOE tech job on top of your regular job.

Is it really a good deal, especially considering how much experienced developers make annually and the long-term effects of working 10 hours per day?

The way I see it, companies know that there will always be people who would sacrifice quality of life for money, and adjust compensation for that. This wouldn't be a problem if only a few companies do this. But when every company does this, it results in forcing everyone to just keep working long hours in order to stay afloat.