The problem is not so much the volume of work or the hours, it’s the effect on the body. The overwhelming majority of IT workers I know are drinkers, many of us are overweight, and at least half have health issues related to obesity, lack of sleep, and work-related musculoskeletal issues. I often go for 90 - 120 minutes between breaks at the office due to the volume of work. My managers require that I be available anywhere at any time, because if something in the office goes down, they’re losing money.
I don’t mind being needed, but I don’t expect compensation over the already very generous salary I make.
Using a one friend in the field of many as an example, please explain what good ‘generous compensation’ does for a person, disregarding effects on the body from either long hours or abuse, when that person wakes to work, arrives home so late from work it’s bedtime and, with regularity, ends up getting contacted for work on days-off...
I haven’t seen one friend in 2 years, he’s so jammed up. He swears he’d quit in a heartbeat, as it’s killing him, but it pays the mortgage. (I’m not even going to get into the worker visa threat to careers)
The irony is he doesn’t have the free personal time to enjoy absolutely anything he has the $$ to buy.
And no life.
And aging twice as fast as I.
A wise man once gave me some advice I too-easily dismissed in my youth: Work to live; don’t ‘live to work’...I refuse to return to IT as a profession and am on career #3 (my last). Another wise man told me ‘have not one career, but 2. I’ve got that covered now.
The ‘computer’ exemption during the genesis of the internet & computers may have made sense, but now it’s simple sweatshop-rules, hypocritically propped up by politicians & bureaucrats that crow ‘fair labor standards’ for everyone else...just not for IT...because of the exemptions.
.02
(I make these comments in support of those in IT/programming and against liberal hypocrites demanding sweatshop labor out of those that make our evolving economy possible while simultaneously making it easier to replace those salaries/positions with Hindis et al, whether direct or outsourced)