Woman Keeps Working Unpaid Overtime, So Her Boyfriend Helps Her Tell Her Manager She’s No Longer Willing To Do It
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Imagine watching someone you love work more and more overtime without any extra pay. Would you mind your own business or try to help them fix the problem?
In this story, a boyfriend watches his girlfriend take on more and more overtime at the insistence of her manager. Since she’s on salary, she doesn’t get paid extra. She also seemed to do the overtime work without complaint.
But then her boyfriend stepped in to try to help her get out of working so much overtime. Did he help or hurt the situation?
Let’s read the whole story to decide.
AITA For the Way Me (25M) and my gf(25F) tried to draw a line regarding OT at her company
My gf has been working at a MNC in SEA for the past 1.5 years as a software developer.
Ever since she joined, there seems to be an underlying expectation for them to work after hours to get things delivered (with no OT pay).
To add to this, most of the deadlines were set by the manager with little to no room for discussion with the people that are the ones delivering the feature.
She works quite a bit of overtime.
The OT has been as frequent as 2-3 nights every week where she would start work at 7am and end at 9pm.
Don’t get us wrong, we both agree and understand that as salaried employees, it is also our responsibility to deliver on our work items and totally would not mind the occasional overtime to get things done.
But as it stands, this has happened nearly every single week since she started working at this company.
He seems to feel really bad for his girlfriend.
Recently, their boss had committed a deadline to production release a product right after a holiday weekend (which was just 3 weeks away); causing immense crunch and stress to my gf and her peers.
They were working 7am-9pm nearly every single day to try to hit that release date.
Not going to lie, it was heartbreaking watching that unfold.
She really is working a ton.
The manager would start a teams call with my gf and her peer near the end of the day and essentially just sit there and watch them work in order to pressure them to work longer.
On one day, my gf had been working the whole day (eating lunch infront of the computer) only for the manager to set a work meeting for 6.30pm that would last until 9pm at 5.30pm without so much as consulting her dinner plans or schedule.
His attitude was simply a “I’ll see you at 6.30”, taking all these free OT they have been doing as a given.
The girlfriend sent her manager a message.
At this point, me and my gf decided it was better to draw the line regarding the OT expectation with the manager.
She basically messaged him the following: “Hi, I would not be able to continue to work OT as frequently as we do now as I would still like to have some time with family. I will try my absolute best during working hours but I’ll no longer be working long hours after work.”
The manager took this poorly.
Here’s what the manager said…
He started making comments about how this was irresponsible and how it showed that she could not handle pressure. He also mentioned that the message she sent him was rude and should be phrased better so that she does not come off as “stand-off ish”.
Are we awful for wanting to draw a line and set expectations regarding the work culture?
Also AITA for helping her phrase that message she sent to him as it could be considered rude?
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If she was hired with the expectation that she would need to work overtime, and if she agreed to that, refusing to work overtime might be crossing the line. It sounds like her boyfriend is the one who really wants her to stop working so much overtime, which is considerate, but was sending that message the right thing to do?
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
This person thinks it could’ve been handled better.
This isn’t always true unless you’re paid hourly.
This person explains why the boss was upset.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who can’t complete her work-from-home duties because her mom’s houseguest won’t stop talking.
Here’s a suggestion of what to tell the manager.
Working that much overtime does seem unreasonable especially on a consistent basis. He was trying to help, but hopefully he didn’t get her in trouble with the boss. It really would’ve been better if all the coworkers had sent the email together. There’s power in numbers.
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