I'm an Italian junior developer at my first work experience, I was hired barely 1 year ago. I'm currently working in a project for a start-up, one of my company's clients. I joined this project a few weeks ago, but there are some of my co-workers who are on this project since the beginning of the year. The project is immense, there are a lot of things to do and management is quite demanding, plus the client is very very in a hurry. There are deadlines to meet.
My contract states I have to work from 9am to 6pm, but it happened once that I had to stay 1 hour longer, so I left at 7pm. The next day, I left on time but I had to work 1 hour from home, always because of a close deadline.
Both times I didn't request to be paid extra for my overtime, also because the process is quite difficult. To be paid for the overtime, it needs to be approved from my line manager, who isn't at the client office, but in my company headquarter. Also, I talked about this with one of my coworkers, who is also a junior developer, and he puts a lot of unpaid overtimes. He often leaves at 7pm, sometimes even at 8pm or 9pm, but he didn't get paid for this, because he simply didn't tell this to my line manager.
He said "If I need more time to work on my task, from the manager's perspective it could mean that I'm not good at doing my job, hence why I need more time. So, I shouldn't be paid, because it's my fault if I couldn't leave the office at 6pm"
Should I do the same, aka not request to be paid for my overtime whenever there is a deadline and I can't complete the task on time, and there is need to stay longer? What should I say or do the next time it happen?
The project is immense, there are a lot of things to do and management is quite demanding, plus the client is very very in a hurry. There are deadlines to meet.
- Welcome to workplace!! – Sourav Ghosh Sep 26 '19 at 14:02