A man resigned on his first day of work after his Indian boss scolded him and dismissed the concept of work-life balance as a ‘fancy term’ and ‘western behaviour’.
Absolutelly the right decision - that kind of work environment is caustic and should be avoided like the plague.
I’ve made a career as a Software Developer, and as a Portuguese I started by working in Portugal, were that kind of shit is pretty common, and I had a metal breakdown within 2 years of starting on my first job (and we’re talking back when I was in my early 20s).
So after that I moved the The Netherlands which has a completelly different work environment, 100% respectful of employees’ work-life boundaries and of work-life balance. The funny bit is that my productivity working 8h/day in a Dutch management system was so vastly superior that I produced more in those 40h/week than I did before working 60h/week in Portugal and the product of my work was even higher quality.
You see, it’s not just that unpaid overwork is a fucking insult and that overworked people are more tired hence make more mistakes ending up wasting all those extra work hours and more fixing the mistakes they do from being overworked, it’s also that the kind of manager who thinks “more hours worked” = “more results” is invariably deeply incompetent at managing, at various levels: not just in their obvious inability to adequatelly balance the load on actual humans for maximum output (only an incompetent simpleton thinks more operating hours = more output for humans in a creative area), but also in things like operating in constant or near-constant reactive “firefighting” mode, doing little or no preparation and upfront analysis of what’s supposed to be done in a project, measuring all the wrong metrics (“bums on seats at late hours” rather than “requirement points implemented”), never accounting for unknown-unknowns and barelly for known-unknowns and hence always overrunning deadlines, generally causing massive wastage by having the wrong things done thus requiring and vastly inflating the costs of any issues because of, rather than having them spotted and prevented early one, only going after them when they’re turned into full massive problems at much later stages of a project when they cost many times more work to solve (and when fixing it generally leaves a trail of barelly-working hacked code prone to break and even outright bugs).
It’s the absolute total management incompetence of such managers than leads them to try to use the time of those employees put under their management way beyond what’s contractually agreed, always with no overtime pay so that their own extreme incompetence doesn’t stand out to upper management as massively inflated budgetary costs due to overtime pay.
Mind you, nowadays any manager who tries shit like that with me or my team gets an outright and firm “No” and if they push I’ll make sure they get fucked - almosts 3 decades of working in companies of all sizes - from the tiniest to massive multi-nationals - has made me pretty able at playing company politics if I need to and getting the right words to the right ears - I’m not the wide-eyed recent graduate who let himself be exploited in his first job anymore.
Absolutelly the right decision - that kind of work environment is caustic and should be avoided like the plague.
I’ve made a career as a Software Developer, and as a Portuguese I started by working in Portugal, were that kind of shit is pretty common, and I had a metal breakdown within 2 years of starting on my first job (and we’re talking back when I was in my early 20s).
So after that I moved the The Netherlands which has a completelly different work environment, 100% respectful of employees’ work-life boundaries and of work-life balance. The funny bit is that my productivity working 8h/day in a Dutch management system was so vastly superior that I produced more in those 40h/week than I did before working 60h/week in Portugal and the product of my work was even higher quality.
You see, it’s not just that unpaid overwork is a fucking insult and that overworked people are more tired hence make more mistakes ending up wasting all those extra work hours and more fixing the mistakes they do from being overworked, it’s also that the kind of manager who thinks “more hours worked” = “more results” is invariably deeply incompetent at managing, at various levels: not just in their obvious inability to adequatelly balance the load on actual humans for maximum output (only an incompetent simpleton thinks more operating hours = more output for humans in a creative area), but also in things like operating in constant or near-constant reactive “firefighting” mode, doing little or no preparation and upfront analysis of what’s supposed to be done in a project, measuring all the wrong metrics (“bums on seats at late hours” rather than “requirement points implemented”), never accounting for unknown-unknowns and barelly for known-unknowns and hence always overrunning deadlines, generally causing massive wastage by having the wrong things done thus requiring and vastly inflating the costs of any issues because of, rather than having them spotted and prevented early one, only going after them when they’re turned into full massive problems at much later stages of a project when they cost many times more work to solve (and when fixing it generally leaves a trail of barelly-working hacked code prone to break and even outright bugs).
It’s the absolute total management incompetence of such managers than leads them to try to use the time of those employees put under their management way beyond what’s contractually agreed, always with no overtime pay so that their own extreme incompetence doesn’t stand out to upper management as massively inflated budgetary costs due to overtime pay.
Mind you, nowadays any manager who tries shit like that with me or my team gets an outright and firm “No” and if they push I’ll make sure they get fucked - almosts 3 decades of working in companies of all sizes - from the tiniest to massive multi-nationals - has made me pretty able at playing company politics if I need to and getting the right words to the right ears - I’m not the wide-eyed recent graduate who let himself be exploited in his first job anymore.