Role of team members in increasing the team capacity

Question

So, I am in a team where everyone is overloaded with 1-2 hours of work every day. This has become the norm and everyone has accepted it.

And yet, there is a lot of backlog in the project. So, the team leader and the manager told everyone of us that there would be a meeting with the higher management and that we need to inform them about the need for more employees.

In the meeting, the management told everyone that we were working 1-2 hours extra, when 2-3 hours of extra work is expected from us and hence there would be no new recruits.

This baffled me and the rest of the team too. More importantly, I was concerned that the manager wanted his teammates to request the higher management for new recruits. As a developer, that is not my role. I shouldn't even been a part of such meetings.

Is this a norm in the software industry?

Edit: This is a US based company, based in both US and India, I am located @ Pennsylvania location. We have had a meeting with the Indian team and management at both the locations.

Answer 1

You don’t mention the country. In most countries you get paid for the hours you work. In the USA, you can have exempt status, meaning you have to work more hours for the needs of the business. Since management could hire more people, there is no business need. Management trying to exploit the employees doesn’t create a business need.

I suggest that everyone starts looking for new jobs at a less exploitative company, and stop working overtime altogether. If you are afraid of negative consequences, you can all stay in the office for the extra two hours, putting your feet on the table.

It’s absolutely not the norm in the software industry. Actually, most people know that working over 40 hours a week destroys your productivity. I can guarantee that a team working 55 hours a week gets less work done than a team doing 40 hours.

Quote from a wiser man than me: “You can make people stay at the office for 80 hours a week. You can’t make them work more than 40 hours a week.”

Answer 2

On overtime

Stack Overflow's developer survey 2020 asked a question about overtime and the result was that around a quarter of respondents often worked overtime 1-2 days a week or more. It's not the average situation to be working multiple hours of overtime every day.

On the meeting

This is situational. Software development is a diverse field.

At one end there is software developers practiced as a profession, with practitioners providing expert services and responsible for producing outcomes. This generally means that anything required to do the job is the job. Including advocating for the resources required to meet the project goals.

At the other end are developers who are only responsible for their output, with things like team composition, recruitment, process improvement, product direction, and outcomes all the responsibility of someone else.

So is it normal to be expected to do this? It depends on your approach to practice and the expectations of your employer.

Whether such a meeting is appropriate depends on the circumstances but rather than ask if it was appropriate it might be more important to ask whether it was effective. Given the result of the meeting is that the team are baffled and you're concerned it's hard to imagine it functioned as intended.

A couple of questions that might be worth asking your manager and team lead may be:

1. What did they expect to achieve by having developers in the meeting?

The obvious answer here might be "to get more recruits" but it's not the only possibilty. For example, your manager may have wanted to demonstrate how unreasonable higher management are being on the issue, and so to explain why your manager is unable to reduce overtime.

2. What factors are preventing them effectively advocating for the resources they need?

Is the company in bad financial shape? Is the project not a high priority? Are internal salaries out of line with market prices and there is concern that bringing in new members at the current market price would create friction with existing employees? There are many possible explanations and knowing which one it is will help you make decisions about how to approach solving the overtime problem.