Answer the following question honestly...

[Flatty]

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/187/1051187/it-crowd-34-days-unpaid-overtime

OK, so I am not really working in the IT field anymore, but I remember the days when I was (charging for the hours spent was impractical, so it works out the same as overtime):

Do you ever charge for the actual amount of hours that you worked?

[Voicy]

no.

[Megnut3025]

No. Maybe charge on how difficult it was to do?

[Stool]

got a nice agreement with my boss where any overtime I do translates into a day or two off depending on how much it accumulates.

[Voicy]

got a nice agreement with my boss where any overtime I do translates into a day or two off depending on how much it accumulates.

That would've been awesome for me when I did 120hrs overtime in October last year.

[CarRi0n]

No, you can't always do that. Sometimes something will take 10 - 15 minutes and it will be useless to charge for that. So the minimum rate is an hour and after that it will go up by 30mins. So if a job takes anything from 1min - 59min and hour will be charged, etc etc.

[Arbythep00nage]

Stinky will back me on up this after we covered a contract with standard bank and their electronic banking, for that if you went 5 mins over an hour it was 2 hours!
That would be because of no basic salary or retainer and terrible rates.

In reality I work a fair amount of overtime, in IT its par for the course. I run about 90 mission critical servers that account for the majority of the company I work for's income so if something is down I lurk around at work or remotely from home until its up again.

[WondaWoman]

Most of my work is done after work hours. I think I get 'paid' for that with all the holidays :) Which is why we have so many.

[SintaxErr]

:eek: you guys get paid to do work?

[rainy]

When I was still a freelancer, if I had had to charge the actual hours worked, noone would have wanted to pay me.

[Flatty]

When I was still a freelancer, if I had had to charge the actual hours worked, noone would have wanted to pay me.

That reminds me of ALL the overtime I worked. People phoning at 20h30 at night begging me to come around because they have an assignment to complete by the morning and the emails aren't working, or some such. Five minutes drive and I am there sitting in front of a PC with an ice cold beer in my hand :) Luckily, East London is a small place. Charging for after hours call-outs didn't really enter my mind - people talk & good news travels. You might be losing out on a little extra cash, but you'll be gaining so much in rep.

With virus-infected BIOS'es I'd weigh the amount of hours needed to rid HDD & BIOS of said virus (R250ph was the going rate a few years back), and replacing MB, etc wth brand new items. Generally it worked out cheaper for them to replace. I'm silly like that - I could have had more cash in my pocket if I just removed the virus & didn't give them the option. I have always believed in giving value for money.

Ultimately I worked out my fee based on each person's situation. I recall a pensioner that brought his PII 266Mhz for me to repair: I walked out to his 1970'ish Datsun to fetch the computer & concluded that this man was definitely not in any financial situation to pay my going rate. Four hours later, I charged him R120.00 & even felt bad about that. He was smiling from ear to ear when he fetched his computer. Granted, he might have had a Benz parked in the garage at home - if people want to be devious, it's their problem. I do what my conscience dictates.

I really have a lot of sympathy for IT guys, nobody understands the pressures unless they have actually done it themselves.

[stinkthumb]

I find that most my time at the office is spent managing. The real work gets done at night when I can concentrate properly, with some series showing on one of my monitors :) Soooo much extra, unpaid time gets put in in the IT industry. It's really a skari phenomenon.

@ RB... I was never at a Standard Bank client for 40 mins or 50 mins. It was ALWAYS and hour and 7 minutes or so :D Even if I had to update their anitivirus in that extra time!

[EyeBall]

In our business we have support contracts in place where our clients pay us a monthly fee to have us on standby after hours and they don't have per call out fees.

Hardware get replaced for their account if it's damaged but the labour is included.

This works well , only client with these contract gets helped after hours and if they really need us , they must pay us overtime rates.

But mostly they are willing to wait till the monday or tuesday

We have been doing this for the last 24 years , and its working very nicely

but still we can't charge a customer what we should.

[Nitty]

I recall a pensioner that brought his PII 266Mhz for me to repair: I walked out to his 1970'ish Datsun to fetch the computer & concluded that this man was definitely not in any financial situation to pay my going rate. Four hours later, I charged him R120.00 & even felt bad about that. He was smiling from ear to ear when he fetched his computer. Granted, he might have had a Benz parked in the garage at home - if people want to be devious, it's their problem. I do what my conscience dictates.

Looks can be deceiving Flatty. This just reminded me of an old man that lived in our community. He always looked dreadful - wearing the same old red sweater & living like a pauper. He even went to the shop to read the newspaper, because he was too stingy to buy it. We all thought that he was poor, until he passed away. He had left R7 million to his family (and that was more than 10 years ago) :mindblowing: