No overtime?

No problem!

But just don’t expect an employee to put in even one second of extra work if you put that demand on them.

What did this person do?

Read on and get all the details below.

No overtime moving forward.

“I used to be an hourly developer contractor at a major financial services firm and specifically focused on developing various tools and automation within a language called Perl.

For those that don’t know, Perl is very…unique looking… and isn’t terribly easy to read, but it could do quite a bit.

Anyway, I probably had about 50 various Perl applications and scripts running across the various teams and, while MOST of them were not mission critical, there was one that was ABSOLUTELY critical.

A big part of my day was developing new things based on various automation requests and the other part of my days was focused on keeping the existing stuff running as upstream data sources would change, etc.

They were very busy.

Now, I wasn’t terribly expensive, but did have to bill them about 45 hours in straight time a week (while actually working about 50, where I’d be at my desk by 8 AM and out the door by 5:30-6:00) in order to keep up with demand.

There wasn’t any time-and-a-half or any other kind of rate increase once I went over 40 hours.

Anyway, my boss was awful and went on a huge power trip one day and declared loudly that she was taking over reviewing my time sheet from her boss and there was “no overtime moving forward. 8 hours a day AND THAT’S IT”.

This didn’t seem fair…

Up to this point, I had been giving them free hours each week and worked really hard, so this declaration completely rubbed me the wrong way.

Flash forward to a couple days later… My most critical application crashed at around 3 PM because its upstream data feed had completely changed and that system owner hadn’t notified me (or participated within any other change control process).

Once folks realized it was down, my boss and her boss appeared at my desk and watched over my shoulders in panic as I started updating my code to deal with the new structure.

I found what the problem was and started on a new version…then 4 PM hit.

Welp, time to go!

As they stared at my monitor, I locked my computer, grabbed my jacket, and started walking out. Their look of surprise and panic was met with me stating as I walked out “I’m only allowed 8 hours a day. That’s the rule.”

I can’t imagine what happened after I left that day, but when I came into the office the next day, my boss’s boss saw me, pulled me aside, explained that I was now allowed to work and bill whatever hours that were needed, and he would be taking over my time sheet again.

Extra bonus – I left the job a few months later and a couple months after that, the entire office got laid off (about 200 people) – except for one mainframe guy and the guy that I hired to replace me and maintain my code.”

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Sorry boss, I’m outta here!

Can’t help ya!

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.