10-Hour Days

I love them.

At my last contracting assignment, I did not work even an hour of overtime, but at this one, I am working 10-hour days every day, plus the last two Saturdays.  (This should end in a couple of weeks.)  And this is one of the great benefits of being a contractor;  10-hour days, and weekends, are no problem.

With hourly pay, the incentives are aligned much better.  Consider the average salaried employee; better yet, consider me, an average salaried employee, at my job at Farmers.  I worked long hours sometimes, and weekends sometimes, basically every quarter end.  And while you could correctly argue that those overtime hours were worked into my base salary, my incentive was to work as few of them as possible.  Those extra hours made me tired, used up my leisure time, interfered with family plans, screwed up my commute.  And if I worked an extra 100 hours per year, I got paid $0 for that.  Sometimes I got a free meal; that was it.

On the other hand, Farmers had every incentive to have me work as much overtime as possible.  After all, they couldn't care less whether I'm tired or don't have time with my family (trust me, they couldn't have cared less), and more importantly, any extra hours they could get out of me were free.  The only disincentive was that I might quit, which isn't much of a factor in a crappy economy.

By contrast, in the contracting world, the incentives are aligned nicely.  The company does not want me to work overtime unless they really need the hours, because they have to pay time and a half after eight hours.  The extra hours are still an inconvenience to me, but I don't really mind, because I am getting paid lots of money.  I really love the idea that a company won't ask me to work additional hours unless they really need it; believe me, that isn't how it normally works.

One thing I am finding out about the contracting world is that you had better make hay while the sun shines.  In Seattle, we don't get much sunshine.  So bring on the ten-hour days, weekends, whatever.  I'm your guy.