Are you overworked, IT guys?

I have come across so many friends who are overworked by their employers, especially those from the IT field, the issue of underpaid sounds serious in Malaysia. I could be wrong, so feel free to drop a comment if you have other opinions.

In Malaysia, our salary has been stagnant for years, and I believe that's part of the reason why it attracts foreign investors. When it comes to the argument of employees being overworked, there are two factors that we can look into:

1. Employees are not being efficient.
2. Management is being unreasonable, in terms of deadline and human resource.

Most of the time, both are valid. For an old-school manager who is not willing to adopt to new methodologies, his interest is to squeeze the most out from the project and his employees for a high ROI. Driven by this, he is likely to commit to an unreasonable deadline and cut down the cost by hiring just-sufficient (usually turned out to be not, due to inefficiency) human resources.

Sounds familiar to you? I am happy that I am not working for this kind of company.

In the end, the development team faces huge pressure, as the deadline comes closer it turns worse, and they stay late to work even on the weekends. Driven by this, the employees are no longer efficient and neither they are happy and motivated -- They will choose to leave.

What will happen when they leave? The company has to hire and train new guys again, that's a terrible investment and due to their management style the company will forever be haunted by high turnover rates. And generally (yes, I say generally, not all, based on my experience) since most Asian companies share the same management style, the employees will end up in the same type of company and they will.. be forever unhappy until they are retired.


I have created a Jyte claim: You are overworked and your employer is not hiring sufficient human resources. When I'm writing this, one of my friends is making the decision to leave her company. Why? The project has to be delivered on April, but she has been working 7 days per week since late-January. On Friday, she was talking with me on MSN when she was still in the office, the time was 1am morning.


- yc, what do you feel?