Doing your job per the specification is not putting in the bare
minimum. Working is a contract. You work, they pay. Staying back
regularly can imply any of the following to management:
-The worker is willing to effectively work for free or for less (which is bad for you)
-The worker can't manage its time effectively at work and thus has to stay back to make up for it.
When I was working professionally most of my work was project based
with about 1/3 my time going into maintenance. I was required to plan
my activities proportionally to the size and priority of tasks in my
work allocation. Like many professionals I was required to write
proposals and project timelines, justifications,etc on what I should be
working on at each time interval, and then had to account for it with
the usual timesheets and reports. I never stayed back unless there was
a problem which needed to be fixed that couldn't wait til the next
morning -that was my responsibility, my KPI's. When required I even
pulled several 36hr shifts for jobs which required minimal downtime.
However, I also made sure I got two days of leave in lieu.
My point Robert, is not to attack you or give you a hard time, but to
say that you're selling yourself short, and by extension, the rest of
us in the industry, because then your employer expects all its
employees to work crazy hours. Australian IT sector workers put in
crazy overtime because of this. And it sucks.
Old ref:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/05/1033538810318.html
-Andi.