If you're a profitable SaaS, and some feature you're working on takes a few weeks longer than planned, odds of a big problem are probably low. Even if an important customer is a little annoyed by waiting for some promised feature a bit longer than planned, you just tell them that you're focusing on quality and to ensure that security and everything else is perfect. In many cases, this isn't going to be a big problem for the individual developers.

But say you're a consultancy that's making some web experience for an ad agency's Super Bowl commercial for some client. You sort of have a strict deadline that cannot be pushed back, and that's going to fuck over your business and reputation if you don't meet your ultimate deadline. You're very likely going to be asked to work extra to ensure that things are done. (You might think that companies take care of important stuff far ahead of time for strict deadlines, but sometimes you'd be surprised.)

But, all that said, the responsibility of meeting the deadline - or the risk and consequences of failing to meet the deadline, are the responsibility of the employer/client's business, and are not the responsibility of the individual employee or contractor. Often deadlines may be set politically, scope and schedule is not actually estimated, complexity is ignored, projects are incompetently managed, business decisions are made to under-invest in QA or system resiliency or resourcing in the attempt to reduce operating costs at the risk of increasing the chance of project failure if anything does not go exactly to plan.

If the individual employee or contractor hasn't previously negotiated and signed a contract stating that they agree to work overtime at the employer or client's request (presumably with some language around hours, what they receive in compensation for offering this, etc), it's entirely at the discretion of the employee or contractor if they are willing to consider working overtime, and what they request in exchange for it, to see if a new commercial deal favorable to both parties can be negotiated.

I don't disagree with the ethics of what you said, but it seems like the trickiness of this situation is that in many/most cases, the developer doing the work is the one giving the employer the initial estimate for how long something might take. This is a bit tricky because the employer is put in a bad situation because of the incorrect estimate from the developer.

And many times when developers give honest estimates that are too long, management simply ignore it or ask developers to revise estimates until they get it down to acceptable level.

I'm sure that technically ignorant sales people promising the moon and pulling random estimates out of their butt for complex features happens, but how common is that in reality?

In my experience working through multiple consultancies (even not so nice ones), there was always a budget available for scoping out new work. Either the technical lead or at least one of the senior developers were usually given X amount of hours to read the available documentation about the work, possibly have a meeting with the client to answer any questions they had, and try to plan out the project estimate as best as possible for client approval. The only exception to this is when a technically experienced project manager, who had a budget of hours already available for use on the project, agreed that some pretty simple features were easily doable as part of an already agreed payment for general project work.

We have high flexibility in terms of when we work - we can do 4x10 hour days or work a weekend to take some days off in the middle of the week, things like that. But this is an option for the employee, not something the employer can enforce on anyone - the choice is always your own.

If there is a deadline that cannot be met, this means:

1. The company needs to work with the stakeholders to set proper expectations about what will and will not be delivered, perhaps cutting up the work into multiple iterations.

2. The problem should be raised in advance so there is time to address it and prepare the stakeholders to face the facts. If an engineer speaks up on the last day of a 4 month project and says "actually we cannot deliver it, we need one more month" then that is a problem with that engineer's performance (he should have communicated the problem earlier) and/or a lack of leadership (someone should have noticed/cared by then!). It does not change the facts of #1.

This is based on a bit more than 15 years of experience, very consistent from mid-size company to megacorp.

Early in my career, yeah I did a fair bit of unpaid overtime. With enough experience and clout, you learn 1) this is bullshit and I don’t actually have to take it and 2) now that I have clout, no one’s even going to dare whisper an expectation of such nonsense.

How do you earn that clout? By taking responsibility for when you were involved in setting the scope & schedule and it’s genuinely your fault and so you volunteer to do OT to fix it.

However it's fairly common among my peers back in Canada. I guess it comes down to local work culture, and who you work for.

Truth be told, I'd refuse to work overtime, and gladly risk being fired for it. Perhaps they can find and train a replacement fast enough to make up for the loss.

If a team can't meet deadlines within office hours, management should pay the price, not employees. Don't reward incompetence with Stakhanovist feats.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for operations & anyone else working at the "pointy end" of service delivery.

Please make sure you are negotiating and advocating hard for your own & your fellow operations colleagues interests and are getting compensated fairly for being willing to carry the pager. On call responsibilities if any, along with the corresponding conditions and compensation are things that should be negotiated and explicitly written up in contracts.

Some companies attempt to push employees into providing free labor and doing production support for free. "You build it, you run it" is a fun slogan, but what sometimes happens in practice is that management want people to work both jobs but are only willing to pay for one of them.

Not doing it again - seeing first hand how it is due to managerial incompetence more than anything else. The "reward" ratio is just not worth it: if I pull something off; managers will claim its due to their "processes" and "leadership". If I don't pull it off; managers won't promote me.

No win, so... just don't take fake "deadlines" too seriously.

In my current position, I don't have that. Deadlines need to be moved if they can't be done in the normal working time. I think it's also because I am older and have more commitments outside of work.

E.g. Twitter

These days, we give regular status updates and if a deadline is gonna be missed, we either find things to cut and/or push the deadline. Sometimes a date can't be pushed and there can be a crunch. This is viewed as an organizational failure. However, not considered overtime because devs are exempt employees. Managers usually give some time off after.

When I was new out of college at a start up, FREE OT was very common. You could say when averaged, the work week was 50 hours.

Later I was at a company that did not pay OT if you worked only 44 hours, but if you had to work 45 or more, then they paid OT on all of the hours after 40. OT was straight pay. Later they got rid of OT and the standard was to expect people to put in a few free hours a week.

My current job. All OT is compensated, typically by giving you your time back.

I should have left my first job much earlier than I did. Biggest regret there.

Especially annoying as more than once I got a desk phone call from my manager (harassing me about whatever latest poorly defined task he expected me to create) from his home meanwhile the idea of me, the only person in the office who had to travel two hours both ways every day, was laughable to them.

I too should have left it sooner.

If you are getting more salary than you should. Over hours make sense because you need the money and there is no one else to pay the same

If you are getting less salary, find another job.

The point is that startups with fundings usually pay for the weekends but corporates do not.