I started a software development job a few months ago. Previous jobs I would go above and beyond, do things efficiently, and my reward was more responsibility, longer hours, and being told I can’t take time off because I’m the only one who can do all the responsibilities I had. Overworked and unappreciated. I had no life outside of work and was on call 24/7.
This new job they asked me to work late — and they told me this at 5pm. It wasn’t an emergency. They just said it was “last second.”
Cool. But no. If they want to fire me, that’s fine. I’m putting my foot down early.
In my second week they said there was something I needed to do every Saturday night at a certain time. And I said “I’m not available then.”
These problems are simply because they don’t plan well and then everything becomes an emergency.
For example, they have a client send a printout of an excel file through the U.S. mail system, then someone at our office manually inputs it into a spreadsheet. “We go the extra mile for the customer,” my boss proudly explains. We’re talking pages and pages of this stuff that someone has to work over the weekend to put in. Every. Week. (The client’s reasoning is they don’t trust the information to be sent over the internet. You’ll never guess what generation these people are.)
Yeah. I know. He’s an idiot. Seems like a nice enough guy and he doesn’t yell at me and is always friendly, but he’s an idiot.
And they won’t take the time to fix their insanely inefficient processes because that takes a modicum of change and oh no we can’t have change we just work in software which is a static industry. So they won’t take suggestions on how to improve things.
In the last two months, they’ve stopped asking these unreasonable requests from me. My coworkers are overworked and complain how the demands are last-second and unfair and I keep telling them to just stand up and say no, but they’re scared.
Instead, their behavior enables management to walk all over them and they’re stressed and work on weekends.
But I do my job well when during business hours. (Not too well. I never want to exceed expectations, just meet them. So replacing me isn’t worth it. I work in a niche industry and it’s moderately hard to find people who know this particular software.)
And because I set boundaries, they skip over me when making unreasonable requests because they know I’m just going to say no.
Don’t let them take advantage of you. Let them know you have a life outside of work and if they have a problem with that, then find someone who doesn’t.