Re: How not to attract staff!

["Wing, Michael J" <mjwing -at- INGR -dot- COM>]

>
>I'll ride in you life boat any time.  My following comments refer to
>salaried employees only.  What all this regularly scheduled overtime
>boil down to is a cut in pay.  If you regularly work an extra 10 hours
>a week (without compensation), you have just taken a 25% pay cut.  If
>you work this way for four years, you have just given away the
>equivalent of one year of pay.  Will your employer give you one year of
>paid vacation after four years of this kind of work?  I think not.  I
>don't know about all of you, but I can get a job anywhere doing
>anything--as long as I'm willing to work for free.  And that's just
>what regularly scheduled overtime is; it's free work.  I don't object
>to the occasional overtime because the give and take between employer
>and employee works out in the long term.  But I view regularly
>scheduled overtime as poor planning or maybe it's a management tactic,
>I don't know.  In any case, if that's what the job requires, you can
>have it.  I'll find work where the company values the employee as much
>as they value their product.  And I'll come to your funeral when you
>die of a heart attack or stroke at age 45; as long as I don't have to
>work because of a deadline.
>
>Don Timmerman, dtimmerman -at- anl -dot- gov
>

Judging from the responses on this list, I am definitely in the
minority.  I am one of those Tech Writers that you see still working
when you leave.  I'm here many Saturdays.  I do what I need to do and
more to get the job done.  (By the way, I'm real near 40 and nowhere
near a heart attack; in fact I'm in better shape than I was in my 20s or
30s)

However, there are some incentives for the extra effort.  I have found
my niche in documentation.  I am working with programming reference
guides for object-oriented applications.  Instead of asking Programmers
for example code, I develop my own.  This puts me directly in my
reader's position.  I am forced to read my own help as a guide to
programming the applications.  Writing and testing my own code brings to
the surface those nuances that the user will run into that may never
come to surface during a technical review.  I expose many unknowns and
after resolution, address them in the help.

This methodology comes with a price and that price is time.  Between the
writing and the programming, I have enough variety that the hours fly
by.  It helps that I am just plain interested in the stuff!  It also
helps that our company compensates us for overtime in excess of 8
hours/week.  I've worked plenty of places where they didn't.

I also spent a year unemployed and Tech Writing jobs could not be found.
 I was left with whatever I could fit in my car.  Every place was
downsizing.  As a result, survivors had to pick up the load.  Forced or
implied-forced overtime can really be a pain;  but it beats unemployment
hands down.

Spend a year unemployed looking for a decent job, go through massive
downsizing and restructuring, find something you're really interested in
and then tell me if your attitude toward difficult work
tasks/environment doesn't soften.  If anyone thinks that an impossible
deadline is stress, try facing a foreclosure and only one more
unemployment check.

Mike Wing
 _____________________________________________
|   Michael Wing
|    Principal Technical Writer
|    Infrastructure Technical Information Development
|    http://www.ingr.com/iss/products/mapping/
|    Intergraph Corporation
|    Huntsville, Alabama
|    (205) 730-7250
|    mjwing -at- ingr -dot- com

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