Job stress software engineer compared to other jobs with equal payment.

[Marcel Wentink]

Reading a discussion in a Dutch magazine, the general opinion of software engineers is that they do more hours for equal payment, compared to employers in other occupations on simular education and salary level. Their main complaint is that software engineers often have to work overtime for free. The planning had a fixed date, some extra technical complication comes up, but the deadline still must be filled. And then you work for free, since it's your project. Is that your opinion too? Do we work harder and get less paid then say somebody in administation or sales who works at the same level? Besides that I would like to know if the job stress level in Europe, is equally high then the job stress in for example India or the US. Any experiences?

[Mohan Karthick]

prior to software I was in sales and marketing engineer, as per my expereince whenever you want to do some thing good, you need to put on some extra effort.

So if we are answerable for something we takes extra care to get it done.

[Marcel Wentink]

Yeah well. There are a lot of things in my life I want to put extra effort in apart from my job. For example being a good dad for my daughter. Doing sport and live healthy. So, if I can get a reasonably good ratio effort and time for salary, that is important to me, for the other goals. I am not going to work overtime 'just for the challange of it and because my teamlead is such a nice guy'.

[Thamizh Velan]

Originally posted by Marcel Wentink:
The planning had a fixed date, some extra technical complication comes up, but the deadline still must be filled. And then you work for free, since it's your project. Is that your opinion too?

May be yeah, being a permanent employee. Contractors who do the same job as me in my project get paid for the long extra hours, whereas I don't.
Only thing I can convince myself about this is job security, which I think it don't exist anymore.

Do we work harder and get less paid then say somebody in administation or sales who works at the same level? Besides that I would like to know if the job stress level in Europe, is equally high then the job stress in for example India or the US. Any experiences?

I think that the proportion of number of jobs in each sector matters too.
Usually, in India, the number of software jobs that pay 'X' is far more than the number of administration jobs that pay 'X'. Not sure of Europe or US.
From my personal experience, I would say the job stress level in Europe is lesser than that in India. I don't have any quantitative proof though.