I recently came back to work after a nice vacation. The project my team works on is about to end in a month. We are all scheduled to move to another project in our company that is similar to ours. Just about all of us had interviewed with members of this project, and received officials letters informing us of our upcoming transfer.The first thing I heard when I got back was that there was another round of interview with this project. This seemed strange as the transfer was supposed to be a done deal. But here was the real kicker. A developer told me he was grilled about being required to work 60, 70, or 80 hours a week on the new project. And apparently they are all on call 24 hours a day.
There must be more to this than meets the eye. I am awaiting another round of interviews myself to get to the bottom of this nonsense. All of my team members are salaried employees. It makes no sense to be working on a death march. We get paid the same regardless of hour many hours we work.
I hope my first task on my new project is not to write a white paper on the drawbacks of working extra hours. However this may be the route to go. There comes a time when you need to make a stand against insanity. I think the right way to go about this is to come in with some hard data on the price the business will have to pay if the old "more hours mean more productivity" is not dispelled.
