So I've read through How do I maintain a work-life balance when company culture tends towards frequent overtime? and that is very similar situation that I found myself in.
There's no explicit guidelines or any instructions to stay late to work, but it seems like half of the developers here seem to stay overtime without receiving extra pay for it.
I have 10 minute lunch break while lot of people go out for 45~1 hour lunch breaks.
It feels bad everytime I have to leave on time while some of the other developers on my team are still working.
All in all, I make sure that I am on schedule and meeting deadlines. However, I just don't understand why the other developers work extra hours even when there's no real pending reason. It seems like they end up with more work to do because they are working ahead of time. I double checked that there's no overtime pay or compensation at all with HR. So what is the explanation of this behavior? Should I follow or not?
This is quite stressful to think about. There's no set guidelines of when to start working or when to stop. As long as projects are completed on time is what they keep telling me and they are, but why are some of the other developers staying behind to do extra work? Is that how you get promoted or get a salary bump?
We have this web app where we have the option of recording how much hour we spend each day but this is for project managers and definitely not for calculating overtime pay. It seems like me and another person are the only ones to actually leave and not do overtime work. Sometimes I do but that's because the project is urgent and I do not mind that at all. But it's like this group behavior that worries me because if I have to keep working overtime like that it wouldn't work for me. I need to have a set time limit to concentrate and work in bursts, I can't do coding marathons....