Imagine working at a company where your job often takes longer than an 8 hour day to complete. If you were told you could no longer work overtime, would you work overtime anyway for free or leave after exactly 8 hours?

In this story, one employee is in that situation and chooses the second option. It actually ends up being a really effective way to get the attention of the higher ups who make the rules about overtime.

Keep reading for all the details.

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.

He worked overtime every week.

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 8AM 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”.

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.

There was an emergency at the end of the day.

Flash forward to a couple days later…

My most critical application crashed at around 3PM 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 4PM hit.

No overtime means no overtime, right?

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.

It would’ve been really interesting to hear the conversation that happened after he walked out the door. I really hope he starts billing every hour of overtime though and not working extra overtime for free.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

One person sings the praises of PERL.

I completely agree.

This is a problem.

There were multiple people who messed up, but OP wasn’t one of them.

You can’t always avoid working overtime.

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.