I, also, work for a very large company which aggressively monitors employees' hours to ensure nobody burns out. Amazingly, this is the only such company from over a dozen for which I've worked in over 30 years. Most of those companies penalize employees for not working as much as project managers desire. Some of those companies even have lawyers dedicated to labor law disputes. One for which I worked even had a dedicated person in the WA State Dept. of Labor to handle labor disputes. What I've found is that many managers will fire employees for bogus reasons while staunchly stating that they're adhering to corporate guidelines. Gladly, my current company intensely promotes honesty, integrity, diversity, and safety above all else; I'm not exaggerating, either...we even have annual commitment sessions.

Everyone has the choice to work smarter or work harder: Smarter = proper analysis, design, and implementation; Harder = reactive implementation with little/no thought to design other than repeating what has been done before*. We all know that smarter designs lead to products with more longevity and less maintenance.

Like consumerism where people vote with their dollars, employees vote with their attendance. If employees give into the "HR marketing folks" and regularly work 24 hours/day (8 hrs per day in the office, being on-call the rest of the time, and routinely working extra hours), that is endorsing the mentality which resulted in every country's labor laws in the first place, and even unions in the US.

In the end, each person has to choose what is more important to them: their heart & mind, or their wallet.

Thought for the day:

"You can pay Uncle Sam with the overtime. Is that all you get for your money?"

-- Billy Joel

* I've embarrassed more than 1 person over the years whey someone says "I've been doing this for over _ years!", to which I reply "wow, you haven't learned to do better in all that time?!"