You can never trust any company you don't own to respect or reward you for work you do outside of the bounds of your contract.

They won't do it. Because companies are A-moral entities that are incapable of care by default.

A legal entity doesn't give a fuck about you.

I still vividly remember, during my first job out of university, being asked to work evenings and weekends to make a deadline to launch a then-nascent drop-shipping website.

1.5x pay! Only 4 weeks! Let's go!
I was earning £21k a year for this job.

So I said yes...

...and I have an extremely vivid memory of @[email protected] - who was my tech lead / architect type at the time - take me into a side room and tell me not to agree to it, because I needed that time to recover and it's time I would never get back.

Andy was right.

What happened?

After the first month without a break, we were still not finished. Features still creeped. The software I was writing was increasingly brittle and untested.

It was bad software. It barely worked.

4 weeks of overtime wasn't enough, and the ask was extended to 8 weeks. I agreed.

Once we finally got the software out of the door, I got paid my overtime bonus - 4 weeks worth of evening and weekend pay.

I was livid, believing that the implicit deadline stretch implicitly came with the agreement of continued pay.

The company was defiant because "we agreed".

I quit two weeks later. I learnt some valuable lesson early:

That contracts matter, companies will always behave in the best interests of their owners, that working outside of your hours should always be your own things.

That companies are not your friends.

I've seen these patterns repeat in others my entire career. It's the reason I've sent my teams home at 5, it's the reason I believe in mandatory zero overtime.

Glorification of hussle culture makes me feel ill - even as someone that works long hours.

Get paid for work.