2003-01-21 - 10:19 a.m.

This is a letter I'm pondering sending to the owners of the firm I work for, and I'm posting it here for feedback. I'm not sure if I'm off base here, in this economy maybe I should just be happy I have a job that pays more than flipping burgers, but I needed to vent, and this letter is what came out. Constructive criticism is welcome in the guestbook.

(Begin Letter with normal business salutation)

I'm writing this not to be a whiner, or to demand change, or anything of that sort, but to point out some problems which are occuring that you may not be able to see.

The programming team is paid on a salary basis. That means that when we are kept late, we do not receive any benefits for the extra time at all.

In theory, this is balanced by the fact that we are hired to do a job, and we are paid for completion of that job, regardless of the time it takes. However, in practice that doesn't seem to be how it goes.

Programmers are assigned a billable hours target of 1800 hours per year. Typically there are 52 work weeks in a year, at 40 hours per week that adds up to 2080 hours over 260 working days.

Subtract the 8 holidays (firm) allows, and it brings the total down to 2016 over 252 days.

Subtract the 18 PTO days we receive annually, and it brings the total possible down to 1872 over 234 days.

We are expected to be account for at least .2 hours per day doing miscellaneous non-billable items such as bathroom breaks or getting drinks from the vending machines (and in fact if we don't record that time, we are told to alter our timesheets). 234 working days x .2 hours per day = 46.8 hours, leaving 1825 hours available.

Allow 30 additional minutes a week to deal with the cumbersome timekeeping process, and we have 1799 hours remaining. That's already below the target, and we're still working at 100% billable efficiency.

Now, add in the occasional Non-billable projects we end up with, ranging from maintenance of our computers, to office closings for weather, to company meetings, to database upgrades, and you can see how there are not enough hours in a 40 hour week to meet this target.

It gets even worse when you consider that industry standards say that just in order to keep your skills current with changes in programming languages and styles, about 10% of a programmer's time should be spent on education in various forms, such as prototyping new functionality, reworking previously written code to improve the structure, or researching new languages or technologies. It's something like the professional ongoing education I know lawyers have to do to keep their license, except that programmers aren't licensed (although there are certification programs out there).

I understand that attorneys have a higher billable target than programmers do. However, attorneys also have an incentive that programmers don't. Attorneys can hope to someday be promoted to status of Partner in the firm, and thereby share in the ownership of the firm and whatever profits the firm generates. To the best of my knowledge, Programmers cannot acheive this benefit, so we have no carrot to push us to excel.

Just this would not be such a large problem, were it not for the rather sudden and arbitrary way in which demands for overtime are placed upon us. The typical scenario, of late, has been that a crisis descends when an attorney realizes an issue, generally because the programmers were given inadequate or incomplete requirements for a task we have completed in the past, and we are told at the very end of the day "You need to stay until this is resolved".

Even that sort of push wouldn't be such a burden, if once the problems lessened, we were able to take comp time, but the project list and deadlines we face make it impossible to do this. If we take 4 hours this week, it just means that we'll need to work 44 hours next week to catch up, regardless of the fact that we worked 48 last week to meet a deadline.

This is unreasonable. Yes, situations like this happen on occasion, and yes, sometimes one or several of the programmers need to go above and beyond the normal course of business to accomplish a goal, but it seems as though this pattern is becoming the norm for operation here. When this happens, it appears that no consideration at all is given to the possibility that one or several of the programmers have committments in the evenings. We are expected to drop everything and just stay until the attorney or analyst has reworked their report desires repeatedly and are completely satisfied with everything, or else we aren't "taking responsibility for our jobs". We aren't asked if we can stay, we are *ordered* to stay, as though we were chattel. If we dare to mention that we had plans in the evening, they are discarded as being unimportant.

When we stay late, the firm profits. I don't know exactly what our billing rate is (although judging by industry norms, it should be around $100/hour), but I do know how much benefit the programmers who have to sacrifice their plans get...zero.

Again, I am not saying this should never happen, because that is unrealistic. I am stating that it appears that this is becoming the normal course of operations at this company, and that is going to do nothing but burn out your programming staff in short order. More forethought and intelligent planning needs to be done to minimize these crises, and consideration should be given to Programmer's families or plans when late nights are foreseen.

Alternatively, some sort of financial consideration should be considered to compensate for the schedule disruptions these incidents cause.

A plan that I know has worked for other firms is this: Programmers are still considered salary employees, and are expected to bill 34 hours per week on average (vacation time taken and holidays are factored into this calculation). 34 hours a week x 52 weeks/year = 1768 hours, 34.5 would make it 1794 hours, tolerably close to the current 1800 to not affect the firm's bottom line). If a programmer bills a significantly higher number than this, say over 1825 hours in a calendar year, they receive a bonus equal to their hourly rate for each of the extra hours. So as an example, a Programmer who is paid $52,000 a year (amount chosen to make the math easy), and bills 1850 hours would receive a bonus of (52,000/2080)*(1850-1825) = $625.

This way the programmers who are going significantly over and above the normal needs of the job receive some consideration for the extra income they are bringing into the firm by their extra committment.

This could be calculated monthly, or quarterly, or semi-annually, if it was desired to attempt to level these bonuses out over the calendar year.

Thank you for your attention, and I hope these issues can be worked out.

(end letter)

I don't know if it's a good letter, or if the idea is feasible, or even if I'm just off my rocker...but it needed to be said.

�

previous - next

�