There’s a toxic work culture that has become all too prevalent in societies across the world.

Don’t want to be seen to be the last one to arrive or the first to leave? Expected to work overtime without compensation. Expect to answer calls and emails outside of your working hours?

None of this is acceptable, unless it was explicitly mentioned in your contract.

But the pressure of judgement in a job means that people are still feeling that opposing this weird lack of boundaries will be detrimental to their professional progress.

That’s really unfair – and, as the person in this story shows, it has a huge impact on mental health too.

Read on to find out what’s going on here.

AITA for not working un-compensated overtime to complete a project?

I recently joined my company’s Systems Engineering team. My company doesn’t pay overtime and my manager doesn’t want to give out time off in lieu.

The arrangement for if you work out of hours (weekend server maintenance for example) is that you can come in a bit later or leave earlier if you had to work more than your regular hours, but this time isn’t 1:1.

I am discouraged to leave earlier because I am the only engineer based outside of the US time zone, and I need to have an overlap with them.

You must also email the team if you plan to come in later or leave earlier but you shouldn’t specify why this is (which feels dodgy to me).

Let’s see how this is working out for him.

The problem with this is that my job responsibilities make it difficult to come in a little bit later. Given my role I am of course expecting to have to work late from time to time, however the work-life balance is so far off.

Last week I worked an extra 25 hours due to a multitude of issues, project deadlines etc.

The burnout was real, and because of the frequency that I was having to work late, it was causing me issues in my personal life and impacting mental health.

At the end of that 65-hour week I was sitting at my desk feeling miserable and un-motivated, and my underlying feeling was that by working so many un-compensated hours that my time value was decreasing.

And this is only getting worse.

This week, I have been making a conscious effort to leave work on time so I can go home and relax and spend time with my girlfriend, work on my side-business and study.

However, there is project this week that came back to me after a few issues came up, and because it’s a related to a specialist platform that my team isn’t trained on only I can really resolve the issues.

Instinctively I thought about working late to plough through it, which is my traditional approach.

But I know that I won’t get any sort of appreciation or acknowledgement for that and I’ll end up just making myself miserable.

Let’s see how he’s feeling about this now.

Because of my core proactive responsibilities I only really have an hour or two that I can work on this per day, and this is the kind of project where I need to be able to lock myself in a room and give it my un-interrupted attention.

I am keeping my team posted on this, but I feel like they are expecting me to work late on this.

I can’t shake this feeling that I am being unfair for not putting in the extra effort – am I wrong for not giving up my personal time to get this project completed?

AITA?

Our culture of constant productivity is really harming us.

He describes the burnout that he’s suffering, and with a workload like this isn’t not going to get any better.

For his own health, he needs to put in some clear boundaries.

Let’s see what the Reddit community made of this.

This person had firm boundaries of their own.

While others thought that working overtime would be at his peril.

Though this Redditor warned that his boundaries may be held against him.

It’s really unfair that we’re so often expected to work unpaid overtime.

It would be one thing if we were being generously compensated for our time, but this is really unfair – and has effects on a worker’s productivity too.

He needs boundaries, and he needs them fast.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.