Typical exploitation.. very common, too.Originally Posted by MutantJohn
This occurs when management -- especially middle management in larger organizations; in smaller organizations, those managers who have been promoted to their position with little to no actual management training or experience -- thinks they can enhance their own position by squeezing just a bit more from the workers/production teams. They may, for example, have a financial incentive to do so: if they wring a bit more out of the teams, they themselves get a bonus.
Of course those "managers" love self-taught engineers; they're the most pliant workers!
Unfortunately, I for one am at a loss as to how to effectively counter the pressure. I know from my own experience that increasing your efficiency and/or output does not work; they simply ask for more, until you burn out and quit, at which point they just hire someone new. If you have my kind of luck, you also get very little to no attribution for your efforts, and possibly even get badmouthed behind your back. Such experience wreaks havoc on anyone who just wishes to do their work well, and is not worth the work experience. You may just end up burned out and spending years in therapy, trying to re-learn how to cope.
Suggested counter-strategies include pointing out that work product quality (and even the volume, especially for creative work) drops when weekly work load exceeds about 40 hours, or daily work load exceeds about 10 hours (depending on how often you get a rest day, how long the commute is, and what kind of breaks (voluntary and forced) you get). There is actual research on this, so it's not just verbal fluff.
A more common approach is to find out the underlying reason, and to try to counter-manipulate the manager to use better management techniques; a lot of people do this instinctively, as a social survival strategy.
Perhaps someone here has been successful in countering such pressure, and could give us hints?
