I answer emails and slack whenever I can. On the flip side, I get work from home privileges, I show up when I want, I leave when I want, and I get put on exciting projects instead of boring ones. People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients. I typically don't bill time until my laptop comes out.
I'm two-minds about this. Companies really do abuse their employees and try to get all the work they can out of them. This is a problem that leads to abusive employers. But employees also look for ANY entitlement they can receive, whether or not it is useful to their professional development. This is also a problem that leads to lazy and useless employees. It's sort of a feedback loop. It's also probably very different outside of my field (and probably most people's field on this site), which is software development.
Why not? Requiring off-hour access is admitting project management failure. That’s what on-call is for, and on-call engineers and management should rotate and be paid for on-call duty. For them, it’s working hours. When I’m on call for a client, I bill _for being available_, so basically for keeping the phone on.
You are completely right.
Management lack of competence is pushed down and transforms in extra working hours for everyone else. In this kind of company, people are always putting down fires instead of working strategically. That causes more fires and more extra work at any time of the day.
The way I usually approach these discussions is “ok, you can have the feature built this weekend, this means people need to work their weekend, that costs 50% extra and means that the people working extra hours will be unavailable some time in the future.” Same thing with 24/7 support. It just costs money. Staff needs to be available. 90% of the people decide that Monday will be good enough.
The hard fact is that someone needs to pay for 24/7. It’s either the client, the employer or the employee. It’s just that a lot of employees don’t realize that they’re getting shortchanged here with talk about engagement and promise of better projects and I’m trying my best that this doesn’t happen in my company on my watch.
24-hour is harder, but when you have clients across different time zones, it is also a norm. Again, with big films scattering themselves across the globe, it is expected that someone in authority picks up 24/7 because your 3am is sometimes the client's 10am.
You can charge more for this, but the client doesn't want to hear complaints. You will be judged on service rendered for a given price. The firm down the street, the one who can provide people on a sunday without overtime, will win the next contract.
There's no 'on call' for the kind of projects that parent is talking about. There's a small handful of guys who get shit done and maybe a second ring development team around them.
For some people, the truly exciting work is the work where none of this stuff has been proceduralized. It's not feasible to train or do knowledge transfer between two shifts for these projects.
I know folks that sit on packed bags, ready to fly to Alaska and hike another 50 miles to fix failing cell infrastructure, but even they have a notion of “i’m on duty now and I’m off duty.” And on top, they get paid a shitload of money for being available just in case.
You make a deal with your #1s that they will get the fun projects, the paid vacations when the current crisis is over, the completely flexible hours and full autonomy. Anything they want within reason, as long as shit gets done.
It's not for everyone, but I can see where GP is coming from.
Flex hours is a thing that helps, but even there must be an agreement that when you’re off, you’re off. Companies can be stuck in perceived crisis mode for years at a time.
I had the employer pay for some of my vacations during downtime, I progressed along my career path much faster than normal employees, I was paid more than normal employees. It was a good gig.
And even startups need to get out of “we’ll wing it and cover with our lives for our management failures” mode as early as possible because it’s clearly not sustainable.
You don't have to pay for the vacation, if the crisis never ends.
This is true, but this is really question about compensation, not work time. Executives are basically always on call but they get executive pay.
If you are not well compensated for doing the work that can't be replaced, you are being exploited.
"Demanding clients" often respond positively to articulated, practiced boundaries. I'd be unimpressed with a project lead who simply allowed their client to set the rules. I expect the lead to know what's best for the project/team and to have the skills to communicate that to the client in a way they understand. We like the clients who "know the rules" implicitly, but that doesn't mean the others can't come to learn them.
The rare clients who really are so demanding that you can't even establish a boundary like this is probably dragging a whole fleet of problems behind them.
[And if you need to be available off-hours because that's what the project needs, that's different. Then it has nothing to do with how "demanding" the client is. It's the project that's setting the terms.]
If you own the business, you're always on, yeah.
If you're a worker, this is paid work.
Pinning career advancement to uncompensated work is bullshit.
Marx has been dead for 135 years, and people still parrot his confused ramblings without thinking. Amazing.
It is common to refer to this as unearned income because it is income received by virtue of ownership not work.
Investors and management are intertwinned and blurry. Smaller businesses usually have them the same and larger ones must compete with the alternative of starting ones own and thus pass down dividends. Even the most hands off "useless idiot heir" has an indirect management role via who they ultimately choose to support and what they do with it.
Investment has a role aside from funding that they engage in by driving efficiency, expansion and the dreaded counterpart of contraction to match with demand.
We have empirical evidence that while management and ownership often do in fact do useful work. Look at how farm appropriation has ended in reduced yields instead of increased as one would expect when farmhands gain the benefits of more ownership. Instead their production plunged and they started experiencing increased crop failure. Which brings to mind the related fallacy that farming is simple.
It is true that management and ownership and investors are often overcompensated and worryingly self perpetuating at the expense of others - but they do in fact have a legitimate claim to profits.
Because you are often busy with work? (Even though you're not actually working, your mind is with your work)
If you manage your project in any half-decent way then phine calls after work should be a rare exception.
Sadly, the effect of this is that there's less incentive to build resilient systems, since there's always someone available to fix things quickly. Trying to convince corporate to spend more time and money on building a system that looks/smells/feels the same, but is presumably more resilient, is very very difficult.
Yep. It's often double-bad end result, since if you do build a resilient system, no one sees you "fix" it, so it looks like you did no extra work.
But if you build something broken, and then swoop in and "fix" it, you get extra credit for pulling "more" work after hours / during an emergency.
I found this to be the opposite as long as the developer who wrote the system also owns the running of said system. It will not take many late night/weekend calls before the developer makes it more resilient.
Selling this to the business can be easy, because even if someone is there to fix it the system was presumably still down. This is why I push every developer to learn communication skills, and rudimentary business skills. If the developer (or their manager) cannot communicate to the business why a more resilient system is better for the business that's on them. This also requires developers to come off the "I only want to do it perfectly to 999999s", and again think about what can the business reasonably afford to do.
Of course this will fall apart once their manager catches on but in some monolithic organizations that could take years
It's so hard to predict which projects will succeed and fail. People will spend time setting up Jenkins pipelines and all kinds of unit tests, and their stuff still breaks. I argued for unit-testing on our current project to add resiliency, and I swear 70% of my energy is fucking unit tests now. Whoops!
Minds require rest to function optimally, so pushing yourself to an extreme comes at a cost that gets realized down the line instead. Identifying which means of functioning comes at the greatest cost is not easy to analyze or ascertain. So working together in addition to competing is important as well.
All principles of capitalism. Just, never before in history has there really been so much attention paid to the mind. Software, eesh, yep.
I guess I'm lucky enough that my managers have never hounded me about when I come in and leave, so if working an hour on the train means I get my work for the day done an hour early, it also means I leave the office an hour early. Yeah, maybe I could use that hour to read for fun instead, but I'd rather finish everything sooner and get on with my day sooner.
That's the fun part - companies didn't, people did it to themselves. Probably started as just some people answering emails they got overnight on their morning commute. Thanks to smartphones and always on connectivity, other colleagues get a ping that there's an email. And before long you've got your employees mailing each other.
I don't think there's ever been an actual company policy that codified the expectation that people should be answering company emails in their own time.
And the work has to get done at some point right? Most jobs that involve answering emails aren’t like factory jobs where you simply make as many widgets as possible during your shift and that’s is.
Every email I answer “on the train” means one less thing to do when actually at the office. Which means I can take a longer lunch or just relax a bit more or just have a slightly less frenetic pace.
I like my work and want to succeed at it too. Do not insinuate that someone who values their time outside of work doesn't. That is demeaning and insulting to the rest of us who have lives outside of work.
Work is work. Your employer pays you money to do work. If you do work outside of that, it doesn't mean anything other than you don't want/can't enforce a boundary between your work life and private life.
Also, yet another aspect is that even more of us like our work and want to succeed at it but have been around for longer than x years where the novelty of being "always on" has worn thin.
An employer taking advantage of one's lack of boundaries is bad form regardless of whether the employee can't/won't see how detrimental it can be.
Companies didn't persuade people, the tools (smart phones, laptops/home computers, fast residential network) just made it too easy and when all your peers do it it's hard for you not to.
Doing things which are part of work counts as work is hardly an innovative statement.
The question is, how did companies persuade people that they should work for free on the way into the office?