If workers want the right to disconnect, they need to exercise it without asking permission of management or the government.
I sure as hell don't ask permission to turn off my company-issued devices at 5pm and ignore them until 8am the next morning. Nor do I ask permission to ignore work-related comms outside of business hours, because I don't work for free. I already have the right to disconnect. I have always had it, because I am a human being and autonomy is a human right.
Remember: power yields nothing without a demand, and direct action gets the goods.
This is my attitude. Come 5pm, the phone goes into a focus mode ignoring work. I ignore any other desktop communications, frequently closing Slack and Superhuman. Disconnecting from work is the only way to stay sane. No one has yelled at me yet at this job. Previous jobs were awful though. We started work at 10am everyday and the CTO woke me up by calling twice at 7am to break through my do not disturb, just to tell me to push a feature asap. Nothing critical at all. Some bosses absolutely have zero respect for personal time and space.
Last place I worked, I was on call once every 4 weeks or so which entailed getting up in the middle of the night at least 3 days and often more then once. They also practiced dog-pile trouble shooting where everyone was expected to hop on "red alerts" and stay on the call until the issue was resolved.
I've seen it take 6hrs+, running past 5 o'clock or sometimes starting in the evening and running for hours.
During the pandemic, I unplugged around 3pm to grab some new shoes for a kid that had ripped theirs out, because other guys were around and after 5pm I'm on my own. Boss starts texting me, "where are you" and "you should do this stuff after hours"...
This really left a sour taste and I've since moved on.
We need some sort of ability to demand OT, hour for hour comp time, and after hours compensation. One person can fight back, but we are constantly undercut by management. I would often try to comp time and get hit up because it's a busy week, then later that comp time would evaporate and I'd get alot of flack trying to claw it back. My preference is not to comp my time in the morning, but I'd end up clocking in an hour later afew times a week just to try and get some of my time back.
Compensation or time off in lieu for overtime and callouts is the bare minimum we should expect. That shouldn't even be up for debate, and I'm glad to say, everywhere I've worked (in the UK) respects that.
Where I have problems is being expected to be available while "on call" but not being paid for it. In my opinion: if you can't get shit faced, you're working, and should be compensated accordingly with all working time regulations applying as normal.
Remember the hurricane that hit Virginia in 2012 or 2013? I wasn't even "on call" - i was just the only person with credentials. I told the DBA and the boss and the CTO that you can't just fix an outage at a cloud provider due to hurricane with telnet and a prayer candle.
Then i opened a bottle of whisky, and listened to them try to figure out how much data we lost, until about 5 AM. I don't remember if i was hourly contract or hourly employee at that point, but i did get ~8 hours of pay that evening for doing nothing but not unmuting my voice on the phone call!
I don't do Disaster Recovery anymore, no one really listens.
> Some bosses absolutely have zero respect for personal time and space.
Pecking order is everything.
In most organizations, exercising said disrespect for subordinates is a key method for management to demonstrate, enforce, and enjoy their higher social status.
Similarly, subordinates must exercise respect and deference to the time, space, and attention of management. This is a key method to help employees demonstrate, acknowledge, and internalize their lower social status.
Any threats to the status hierarchy threaten the structure of the organization and are usually dealt with harshly.
Same here, when my hours are up I'm done, work will be there for me in the morning. I'm surprised how many of my coworkers say they "feel" like they can't do that. I'm working in an engineering organization with major retention issues so at this point there's no way we will be punished for insisting on work-life balance.
I think at least 50% of the problem is on the employee side.
Hell, most of the time I don't even reply to things immediately during work hours.
Unless it requires absolute immediate attention, don't expect an immediate response. If you want sync comms for collaboration, organize a meeting and I'm all yours for two hours or as long as it takes. Otherwise, I'm putting myself on DND and checking my email and IMs every few hours so I have some space for deep focus.
This is the standard argument as to why no government regulation is necessary -- "because you can just walk away/change jobs!"
You are lucky because you have the privilege of being able to do this. Not everyone does. A lot of people need they job they have to continue, and their boss will fire them for not responding to an email at 9pm.
Those are the people that need government protection and regulation, or a union, or both. Because their employer won't do it unless forced to and they don't have to privilege to ignore it like you do.
> This is the standard argument as to why no government regulation is necessary -- "because you can just walk away/change jobs!"
I didn't say this because I think government regulation or unionization isn't necessary.
I said it because I don't believe government regulation will happen in the US in my lifetime. Nor do I expect to see the big 4 consulting firms unionized before Judgment Day. And, yes, I have lost jobs for not picking up the phone at 10pm on a Saturday night. Freedom isn't free.
I look for individual solutions to systemic issues because I don't trust the collective to have my back. I understand that collective action is necessary, but let's face it: the left in the US is too busy dicking around with the culture war to show up for the class war. They think that labels describing race, gender, sexuality, etc matter more than whether you're working-class or owning-class.
I'm looking out for myself because I've given up on anybody else looking out for me. I advise others to do the same.
Just because you’ve given up doesn’t mean you should advise others to do the same. Like an airplane, put the oxygen mask on yourself before helping others. You’ve then de-risked individually while supporting improvements for workers collectively.
Who says I'm giving up? I'm engaging in industrial action on my own since others in my workplace are unwilling to join me. I'm being the change I want to see in the world by engaging in work-to-rule.
Work to rule only works if everyone does it, so that they can't single anyone out. If only people who can afford it do it, then it doesn't do anything at all.
> And, yes, I have lost jobs for not picking up the phone at 10pm on a Saturday night. Freedom isn't free.
Luckily you had the safety net to survive that.
> I'm looking out for myself because I've given up on anybody else looking out for me. I advise others to do the same.
Why not both? Look out for yourself but also try to help others?
I honestly think tech workers for all the big companies will be unionized in the next decade. There is already a perfect model out there: The screen actors guild. That union sets minimum rules around pay, safety, overtime, residuals, and so on, but still allows for "superstars" to make far more.
That's the kind of union developers need. One that specifies some minimums that companies must follow (like protecting after hours disconnection and making sure all the workers get a piece of the success) but still allows people to make more and get better benefits.
The only safety net I had was two months' salary saved up. I didn't even get unemployment compensation; by the time the company got nailed for classifying me as a 1099 while treating me as a W-2 I had already found a different job.
> I honestly think tech workers for all the big companies will be unionized in the next decade. There is already a perfect model out there: The screen actors guild. That union sets minimum rules around pay, safety, overtime, residuals, and so on, but still allows for "superstars" to make far more.
I'd love to see that happen. I'm not counting on it. And I've given up on trying to persuade my coworkers to unionize. If I were at all charismatic or persuasive I wouldn't be working in tech to begin with.
> I honestly think tech workers for all the big companies will be unionized in the next decade.
0% to even lets say 50% instead of "all" in 10 years is just not possible. The "valuable" employees (engineers) for these companies don't even want to unionize. You'll have to convince them that somehow it would work out in there favor before you could even start the effort and that would take years alone.
> The "valuable" employees (engineers) for these companies don't even want to unionize.
I know many engineers that want to unionize. It's not that hard to convince people once they stop drinking all of the anti-union kool aid that has proliferated in the US over the last several decades.
Look at pro athletes that are contracted under a CBA. They get to negotiate profit-sharing, minimum salaries, guaranteed raises, etc. Roughly half of the revenue generated by the NBA is allocated to player wages.
Apple generates somewhere around $1.9M per employee[0], with a median salary just shy of $160k. One of the most common criticisms of unionization is that it would cap salaries and people would earn less. If Apple employees were compensated like basketball players, the average salary would be somewhere around $1M.
>"I honestly think tech workers for all the big companies will be unionized in the next decade."
I do respect unions in general and understand their vital role for protecting basic rights. But if I were a valuable software engineer for example there would be no way I would ever join union. Not my nature. Luckily I have my own company and aside of a business negotiations with my clients they can't really step on my rights.
In the early days of the labor movement when factory workers went on strike they had the problem of scabs -temporary workers brought in. These days any job done fully online can be outsourced, do you think we'll see instances of virtual scabs?
>A lot of people need they job they have to continue, and their boss will fire them for not responding to an email at 9pm.
If you have a boss like that, no amount of regulation or protection is going to help you. They will find a way to manipulate you and get around the rules. That isn't to say there shouldn't be any rules and regulations, but it is to say that this is the point of diminishing returns.
The way the regulations help is that it sets the expectation that the next person will probably also say no, or that someone might try to fight you on it because they have stronger ground to stand on.
Child labor laws work because company owners know that eventually they'll get caught. OSHA works the same -- because they know there are penalties for it. Sure, sometimes companies get away with stuff, but there is always the chance that they won't.
Well... It does, I work for an US based company but from Europe, they expected me to be available almost 24/7 and extra hours are "part of the salary" That's illegal in my country, as soon as I mentioned "Illegal" the discussion ended. Also If I accept to take any extra hours there are limits to that and I can't start working in the next 10 hours (we assume that ppl need rest and sleep).
I think is important to realize that ppl need to rest and have a life outside work and not to see workers as a disposable utility, and as a modern society we need to protect others from the power imbalances.
There are certainly situations where if you say "not it" the work just falls to other people (or worse, a single person) who is less comfortable or able to say no.
But there are also situations where a person has been said 'yes' to so many times that they just assume something is wrong with anyone who tells them 'no'. Enough people have to say 'no' that it becomes normalized. Either a more 'fair' process is made or they finally hire enough people to do the job right (haha, who am I kidding, they'll never do that, but you can at least get to 'less wrong').
It's really a tough matter of reading the room. Sometimes if you see someone asking for something that doesn't necessarily interest you, asking for it too makes it okay. Other times it causes the boss to catastrophize (well now everyone will want to do this so I'm not going to let anyone do it) and shut down.
Asking people to follow labor laws that are almost 100 years old is not that big of an ask. I know everyone is busy LARPing feudal England half the time but someone has to call bullshit, and it's mostly the people with just a little bit of power who can actually do anything about it.
IMO it's not about changing jobs, it's about setting expectations at jobs. That boss will only fire them for not responding at 9pm because they have the expectation that you will respond at 9pm. You need to set expectations early in the job when you aren't defying a standard behavior but setting that.
If you are already stuck you might need to have a sit down with your boss and try to work something out. Maybe they are actually usually OK with your not responding until morning but you just have no way to differentiate between normal and urgent. It is possible that you could work something out that doesn't require changing jobs to reset expectations.
> Maybe they are actually usually OK with your not responding until morning but you just have no way to differentiate between normal and urgent.
Yep, there are undoubtedly companies that really expect people to work unreasonable hours, but I think this is the common case. I very much don’t normally check work communications out of hours, but my boss has my phone number for emergency situations where I’m really needed (has been about 3 or 4 times over the 3 years I’ve been employed at the company).
I'm not sure how regulation can hope to really solve this when the problem isn't that an employer is forcing anything on you, but usually more one where your coworkers are independently making decisions about out-of-hours availability that create an unspoken culture, and usual and customary expectations that differ from the official written ones.
You're perfectly free to completely ignore work after 5pm! Nothing bad will happen! A company will swear up and down all day long that they support flex time and you're not expected to ever answer any queries outside of your own working hours!
But if a number of your coworkers decide of their own volition they're going to be in touch at all hours of the day and that becomes the default soft expectation, then you might look worse in comparison. Maybe not in the short term, maybe people will make a strong effort to un-bias themselves during performance reviews and not pay that any mind, but over time, you're sharing the bonus and raises pool with workers who valued their time less than you and perhaps ended up getting higher visibility for it.
Should regulation then mandate that your coworkers disconnect? Maybe. We do it for truckers, pilots, and flight attendants in safety-critical jobs: they're not allowed to work more than a certain set of hours regardless of whether they'd gladly do so.
It's just about pay isn't it? If you're fine working less hours for less pay, that's fine. That was always the choice. Of course there is a threshold below which you get no job at all but that isn't the case mostly. It's about pay vs. peers.
> You're perfectly free to completely ignore work after 5pm! Nothing bad will happen!
Maybe not in a big tech job. But I have worked at startups where ignoring work after 5pm was grounds for a negative performance review and being passed over for promotions. This was not the unspoken culture, it was the clear from-the-top direction. Deadlines existed and features needed to ship, and that required evening and weekend work.
If you in a role with even less power, ignoring work after hours can wind up with you being terminated.
> You are lucky because you have the privilege of being able to do this.
Plot twist: If everyone did like EddieDante, then the boss can't fire everyone and will accept the new status quo.
Both parties have bargaining power, abstractly speaking. The real power comes from the organization/leadership and not the work itself. Otherwise, there will be no CEO, manager, governments, etc... It'll be just workers exchanging goods between one/another.
>You are lucky because you have the privilege of being able to do this.
Maybe the person you replied to is skillful because they prepared for it? Not everything is just the result of life's crap shoot of luck and privilege. If you're finding your employer requires more of you than you wish to give, drawing boundaries and sticking with them makes sense to some people. Psychologists use the term agreeableness[1] to express this sort of sentiment, a person who would demand not to be bothered after work would be classified as less agreeable than a person who is willing to take calls in an "emergency" or just as a regular function of their job, you can see the differences in the continuum there. Many of the most highly paid people have lower agreeableness in tech.
Does it mean you work with focus from 8am to 5pm? And suppose that you're working in a competitive environment and you won't meet the expectation for your job if you don't work a few extra hours?
I entirely agree it's your right, but if you're ambitious and working more can help you to achieve certain goals, it's not unreasonable to work more than the bare minimum. As long as it's a personal choice, I think it's fine.
They make a case that there's a difference between men and women in how much overtime work is put upon them. In my household with my wife and I both working from home with lots of off-hour communications and demands, I see a clear difference. I'll put my phone into do not disturb or other modes and disconnect from work. I also turn off many/most notifications normally including email. She's entirely unable to detach from work, even refusing to put her phone on do not disturb, for fear of missing some critical Slack/Email/Text/Call/Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal. I'm comfortable in my role that I can turn off and not get yelled at while she isn't. I've noticed this pattern with previous partners as well. So it may be a difference between how willing women and men are to detach and risk missing something vs. employers treating them differently. Honestly, this article draws some conclusions about that without any supporting data.
Sorry this might be true, but certainly never been true for me. I work late, cook dinner, do house work, do garden work, do all the life admin, organise any repairs or do then myself. I am the main bread winner too. Yes my wife spends more time with our daughter but that's only because she works part time.
It's feels a bit unfair to be told that because I'm a man I don't do enough.
>>Women also pick up a huge amount of work in the form of chores, childcare, emotional labor, and general running of the house<<
It seems implicit in this statement. I'm also the cook (my wife doesn't know how), we split laundry, handle child care together when possible (with my mother coming over to help). My wife is in school and doesn't earn an income ATM and we aren't sure what happens when she graduates, but even with me working full time chores are split as I work from home. Different people have different strengths. We have a son and there are some things I like that he does that she doesn't.
Your first post in this thread wasn't a clear generalization, it was a vague statement about what 'women do'. This could be interpreted as saying 'all women do', 'many women do', 'more women than men do', 'some women do', or 'modal women do'.
Ok. Here's some data to let us know where things stand so we can at least know the lay of the land in this conversation. Talking generalizations without data doesn't do anyone much good... these were more disparate than I thought, though I'm willing to bet they aren't as far apart as you thought. As usual, the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle =)
This is about what I expected, thanks for the data. Many households share equally, a big chunk have the women doing more of the labor, and a small minority of household have men doing more.
They weren’t expressing an opinion that men don’t do work, but stating what research shows: that women tend to take on unpaid work disproportionately to men, including house work: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34465574/
As I mentioned above, my wife works longer hours than I do. I do the laundry, groceries, supply shopping, cook meals, clean, etc.. I have two full time jobs and I do all the housework.
Tech workers (and workers in general) can and should be forming unions to protect their time, their benefits, their IP, etc.
I constantly see developers say they are paid well but treated poorly by their employers (unpaid overtime, oncall rotations, receding benefits). A union fights for what people need, and we absolutely should be unionizing to advocate for all the workers.
Alternative is to start demanding startups form co-ops. Probably heretical on HN as it flies in the face of the whole tech start-up dream, which is for a couple tech bros to get massively rich at exit after overworking and under-rewarding a few employees. But a co-op would fairly represent the interests of all the workers without the adversarial nature of a union. You could represent your own interest and take votes on company direction.
> Probably heretical on HN as it flies in the face of the whole tech start-up dream, which is for a couple tech bros to get massively rich at exit after overworking and under-rewarding a few employees
I feel like a substantial portion of HN is basically College Republicans who majored in CS.
I think it's more likely that it's run by the Venture Capitalists and they help curate and drive the narrative more than not in an attempt to hopefully capture a small portion of people who can actually do software well and believe their stories.
Smartish people who wanted the possibility of getting really rich used to go to wall street (as bankers, funds managers, etc), but tech is all the rage these days.
See also The Glory Society, KO_OP, Lucid Tales, Triple Topping, Future Club, Soft Not Weak, Stray Bombay, Pixel Pushers Union 512, Hopoo, Chromatic Games, to name a few other coop games studios.
In my personal and limited experience of being present in Union meetings, tech startups (the kind of we see on HN) were consistently more cut-throat and stubborn than enterprise, consulting and other tech businesses, so I doubt we'll see that voluntarily. Lifestyle business are a better bet... are those startups?
But if I'm joining another startup I explicit don't want "But a co-op would fairly represent the interests of all the workers without the adversarial nature of a union. You could represent your own interest and take votes on company direction.". I know exactly what I'm signing up for and it's not to guarantee failure. The reason I joined is because someone else has the vision and the dream or I would have done it myself.
Why would you expect representing yourself to guarantee failure? And why do you think you need visions and dreams? It's just work that you get a say in.
I don't want a say in it for a startup.... Nothing slows a project or work down more then a big group making decisions. I want one or two lead people making nearly all the calls that's what I signed up. I would quit if they lost the vision and started taking huge amounts of employee input.
If I didn't want this I'd work at a big company.....
[Edit to preface] Well then maybe we're closer to unions than I thought.
I know a guy who mentions his therapist regularly, and I overheard a conversation with a mutual friend about how he needed therapy for years (none of us disagree) but he didn't go until he worked with someone who was also open about it. He said something like wanting to be that guy for other people. He's an odd duck. Occasionally wise, but often plays the fool.
One thing I've noticed about remote work is that I talk out loud to people so much less than I used to that when I do dive into a meaty conversation I tend to get a sore throat and afterward I feel like I dove on the conversation like a starving man on a sandwich. That's not strictly healthy.
I think for some of us even a scheduled hour talking to someone per week would be good, especially now. And frankly my understanding of the New York Movie Therapist trope is that they are often portrayed somewhere between life coach and lunch buddy. The joke there being that people have gone to therapy for years without any real progress being made. Clearly not real, but then again jokes often grow from a seed of truth.
> Software developers are top tier practitioners of Not Asking for Help When You Need It.
They also all seem to arrogantly believe themselves to be in the top 10% of their peer developers, in terms of compensation, ability to negotiate, bargaining power vs employer, and other workplace attributes; and are therefore hostile to any system that could fairly represent the interests of all the workers. "I'm a captain of my industry, and am already paid so much more than my peer developers," software developers imagine, "A union could only make things worse for me!"
Internalized ageism laced with a bit of 'temporarily embarrassed millionaire" is not a full explanation but certainly part of the recipe.
I've heard a few people claim that charity often comes down to realizing that as hard as you worked, things could have gone much worse for you if your luck had broken a different way, and so they feel fortunate for what they have and give some of it back when they can.
As much as some people try to deny it, equality always comes down to an alliance between people with privilege coming to the aid of those without. These underdog stories about a fringe group rising up and conquering the majority are good PR, but the uncomfortable truth is that some groups fail eternally and some groups succeed quickly and that usually comes down to collusion or overt collaboration with as many insiders as they can recruit. PETA is so obnoxious they've become a parody of themselves, and Greenpeace is not far behind, because nobody wants (only) a lecture.
In white-collar environments a lot of this shit is self-inflicted. Like if you let Slack send you notifications on your phone and check your email more than once a day when you don't really need to... stop doing that.
So true... also these people are obsessive compulsive, they really can't stop that easily and their management is all too happy to reap the benefits while their health deteriorates slowly.
Don't underestimate the power of peer pressure. If everyone but you is 24/7 responsive on Slack, you are at a disadvantage if you are not. Conversations might take place without you and come out in a way that you disagree with or your opportunities to contribute to important decisions is simply diminished. You might be seen as providing less value than others and be the one missing out on promotions.
On the flip side, we shouldn't underestimate the competitive edge of actually having life-work balance. Recovering properly when you're off work makes you smarter and more productive when you're at work. Being chronically exhausted, bordering on burn-out is not a recipe for getting shit done.
That's true, but it is a recipe for looking like you're getting shit done and claiming credit for the other people's work.
Side note, look how much is written about Musks crazy work schedule. Without going down that rabbit hole too far, you can see why he makes that information public.
Yeah it's pretty odd what most of the commenters in this post are saying. As if they've forgotten not everyone in a workplace, even at the same level, have identical goals. In fact in a big enough workplace, almost certainly there will be at least 2 very opposite goals.
Same for management as well. Some drive their subordinates hard but are willing to fight for big bonuses and fast promotions, others don't care as much and probably will also not be keen to investigate promotions, etc., either.
None of the responses are addressing the very strong point that not being available 24/7 when others are means you miss out on important decision-making opportunities. That's not necessarily about ambition, it's about enjoying your job and the things you work on and how you do them. It's about avoiding problems because you were there to voice your concerns. Without that input, you can end up feeling like a lackey.
If you're working at a company where important tech decisions which aren't at all time-critical are being made 24x7 by "whoever happens to respond on slack", I think you have some pretty serious issues all around.
> If you wanted that, you’d be playing the same game as your 24x7 colleagues.
I mostly agree, but come to a different conclusion. In my mind the situation is a repeated prisoner's dilemma where defection is equivalent to off-hours responses. With no defections, everyone lives a pleasant life with healthy boundaries, and regular career advancement. If one defects, they receive accelerated career advancement while the other does not. If they both defect, they live a miserable life with unhealthy boundaries and regular career advancement.
It has all the trappings of being able to make individual choices, but the system is best analyzed as a group. An global optimum exists and it doesn't involve playing 24x7.
If you want to become a manager and director of engineering or something then you probably need to sign up for checking your e-mail all the time.
If you're an IC and want to stay an IC you'd probably do better to make yourself indispensable by learning the codebase you're working on and becoming an expert. Which will be a lot easier if you're uninterrupted with mundane details.
Also if you're the firefighting person and the person that is easily interruptible then that's what you'll get, so you'll be constantly context switching and won't be able to become the indispensable expert.
And if you really want to climb the ladder, like someone else pointed out, you probably want to job hop.
You may be at a significant disadvantage by thinking that this is the way that you get rewarded.
My department is required to have Outlook/Teams on our phones. We get reimbursed for part of our cell bill, but it's a pittance. We're expected to be reachable in an "emergency."
It would prevent Outlook/Teams from bugging you with notifications at all hours. You could set up call forwarding or something like that. If someone's not willing to pick up a phone, it's not an emergency.
My work after hours will be commiserate with the proportion reimbursed. You want me 24/7 you pay 100% of any bills required to do that. It's like the brown m&ms rider.
If they're not willing to throw the (at this point) $200 a month at me for 24/7 access, what else are they gunna pull?
YMMV, but I do marketing and communications at a startup with a small team that's used to working asynchronously. We get a lot done on Discord, I admit. But I check in a couple of times a day, on my schedule, and I don't have any notifications unless I'm actively looking at Discord. Email, well, I rarely have incoming messages that I need to respond to immediately as opposed to within 24-hours-ish.
Even if you're able to disconnect physically from your work, it can be hard to disconnect mentally especially if you fear repercussion from your superiors.
The job market is a marketplace. Workers have a right to say no, employers have a right to hire someone else... so ask your employer in plain english what is expected from you and should they deviate from that, go somewhere else. If someone is willing to work under those conditions, that's their prerogative. This nation is at full employment, hiring good people is increasingly difficult, it's hard to make the case workers don't have options. They do and so do you. Salaries are increasing at an incredible rate, seems reasonable to me that expectations are changing along with them. Maybe the compromise is taking a lower salary or changing companies. Compromises have to be made...
I came here to say this: you are treated how you allow yourself to be treated.
If you're working too much, do something about it. You have power.
Very, very worst case scenario: you get fired. So what? It's a job. There are literally millions of them. Like OP said: you'd probably get a better job right now any way. Companies are tripping over themselves to acquire talent.
If you're allowing yourself to be overworked, that's your choice.
The amount of privilege in this comment is amazing. Not everyone has an in-demand IT career. Some people are new to the work force, some are old and exposed to ageism. Some are non-binary, some are women, some are minorities. Some are poor. Some can't work remote, some need special accommodations due to disability, some can't afford the costs of relocating.
Assuming everyone has the same privileges is how we end up with companies taking advantage of employees. Businesses know that the friction of job-hunting limits how many people will leave a company when they only get a 2% raise. They know that employees don't like to uproot their families to move across country for a new job. They know that if they continue to indoctrinate employees with the idea that discussing salary is bad, it helps keep wages down. They know that pushing for uncompensated overtime for salaried employees is rarely ever resisted. They know the power dynamic between employers and employees is almost always skewed dramatically in their favor. They know that promoting myths like Horatio Alger, and "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" reinforces the idea that the only thing holding people back is their lack of work ethic.
As George Carlin said, "It's a big club and you ain't in it!"
Wanted to also add: it’s crazy that we even need to have this discussion.
There’s way too much pressure on individuals, too little social and institutional support, and too much free rein given to companies … which they’ve proven they’ll abuse.
There must be more for individual employees to stand upon, and then the “you’re treated how you allow yourself to be treated” really means something to many …
I see this argument come up all the time. However, the job market in general and especially in America is terribly inefficient. The vast majority of Americans work paycheck-to-paycheck and are tied down to their geographic location (family, children, housing). There isn't really a social safety net (by design, I think) in America for employees who voluntarily quit their jobs. So lots of people are stuck in jobs they hate, getting paid less than they deserve, and are a poor match for their skills. There are still lots of jobs that don't have the luxury of entirely virtual interview processes. Over time, I do hope the job market gets more and more liquid for candidates.
I'm still waiting for proof it was anything more then people changing jobs or taking time off when they got stimulus checks. I really doubt anything is coming of it at this rate let alone "societal" changes.
Well COVID killed a bunch of people and disabled a bunch more, so those people dropped out of the workforce. There's also the fact that Baby Boomers are retiring. That means that economy right now wants more workers than are available which puts pricing power in the hands of employees.
And the idea that you should job hop to get higher wages and that employee loyalty to employers is for suckers has trickled all the way down and people are talking about it and there's a noticeable uptick in unionization drives.
The idea that everyone just up and quit is probably not correct at all, but I don't think its accurate to say that the environment isn't looking any different from the past ~30ish years.
I think the Fed is about to stomp the shit out of all of it though.
The problem is that expectations are vague, and usually lean towards benefitting the employer not then employee. Take "unlimited PTO." That sounds great, but it's a terrible deal for the employees.
It's called taking an hourly position. Many people prefer it. When you're on salary you're owned by the company, period. That's what getting a salary means, you're no longer getting compensated for individual slices of time because all your time is owned. It's only by the good graces of the company which purchased you a year at a time that you get time off. But that too is highly discouraged. Taking all your time off every year shows you might have priorities other than your employer, and by extension your career.
Don't they teach people what being on salary even means any more?
I've worked in Europe and USA and the attitudes to days off are very different. People in Europe always take 1 or 2 week vacations and dont stay in touch - no one expects them to. At the end of year they have to use or lose vacation time so natrually everyone takes time off. USA people will go to their lake house but stay on call all the time. Finish the year with unused vacation time - seems just quite common.
For me, the root cause of problems here, is not the “soft”, after work hours—some jobs need that kind of thing—but rather the escalation of expectations without another negotiating opportunity.
It’s a lot of work to enter into employment arrangements with a company. For both the employee and employer. What’s problematic is when either side is “surprised” by a change in expected behavior after the fact. It’s frustrating, because you have sunk cost in entering the employment agreement. So middle managers abuse their employees by springing these types of things after the job has gotten going. The employee has the freedom to walk, but not without paying a certain opportunity cost.
The job offer should make very clear up front in the listing what these “soft” expectations will be. And if they do, the employee/employer needs the recourse to renegotiate the situation.
I’ve seen this go the other way as well. Employee takes job, puts in a few months, and then springs untold issues on the employer. Like the abusive middle manager, if they make it minimal enough to just be annoying, it’s not worth firing them for it, it just becomes a drag on everyone else.
> It’s frustrating, because you have sunk cost in entering the employment agreement
It's even more precarious for US immigrants where many types of immigrant visa (H1B, L1, TN) are tied to continuing to hold a specific job.
Don't like that job anymore? Get laid off, or reclassified into a different position? Oops, you're in violation of your visa, you have a week to leave the country.
There's a huge power imbalance between the class of workers that have US permanent residency or citizenship, and those on work visas.
ya.. I'm in the boat. fortunately my employer is great, but i still feel like a hostage for 3 years and counting until my been card comes in.
then I'm a different kind of hostage because the US wants to tax me globally should i decide to leave again?
This is an especially American problem, at least in the developed world.
And what sets the US apart from the rest of the developed world? The almost complete lack of labor organization ie unions.
Your shitty life isn't because of [insert wedge issue here]. It's because of your material conditions. Poor white people have way more in common with poor black people than either do with rich people. But so many Americans believe they are simply temporarily embarrassed millionaires [1].
This propaganda is so successful that something like 30% of Americans believe in the Great Replacement [2]. It's pushed on mainstream media [3].
IMHO I stay connected because it saves boatloads of time if someone just needs a quick yes/no after hours which can then put us far ahead in productivity compared to if I hadn’t stayed connected. That typically results in less stress and less dense work for the team overall.
I like working at home, but I don't like living at work.
I would agree that being on call after hours requires compensation. Unfortunately many "full time" jobs do not pay overtime and provide no compensation for on call time.
Keynes was right about the increases in productivity and automation, but apparently absurdly naïve in predicting it would result in reduced work hours for the same pay rather than in increased profit and unemployment.
"Since our workers have become twice as productive, we've decided to double their pay and cut the work week in half" is not how most company managers think.
Yet it would seem to be better for society as a whole if our lives were not consumed by endless drudgery; reducing the standard "required" work hours would seem to be a good idea for human health and happiness.
I'm a dev. There's a certain amount of "being available" that comes with the job. I accept it... as long as it's rare.
At a previous job, we had a yearly trade show that we displayed at. I knew that the month before, I was going to be working more than 40 hours a week. The rest of the year was pretty much straight 40 hour weeks. I accepted that.
At my current job, my boss once called me in at 9 PM for an emergency. I was there until 1 AM (and he was there both before me and later than me). That happened once (in 13 years). I accept that.
If it's every week, that's a management problem, not a worker problem. I'm not management, and they don't pay me to fix management problems.
>The uncoupling of work from the office – something that long preceded the pandemic, but has been accelerated by it – has meant work could be done at any time and from any location.
oh look, yet another piece of propaganda pushing the idea of ending working from home in favor of returning to the office!
Low level workers should be able to count their work hours the same way celebrity CEOs do. Commuting, work socializing, even thinking about work count as hours worked.
The problem with 'disconnecting' is that you run the very real risk of being fired and replaced by someone who disconnects less than you. Don't want to pickup your phone after hours at 11pm on a Friday? OK, that's your choice, but it can come with consequences such as being reprimanded, being passed over for promotions or bonuses, being treated poorly, or outright being fired. Unless your skillset and value-adds are truly unique and both indispensable and irreplaceable (not true for 99.99% of us), disconnecting is not an option for those of us who can't afford to lose a job.
You're being downvoted, but the reality is for a lot of workers the time that's passed since the pandemic started hasn't felt like working from home, it's felt like living at work, and this is especially true for workers who live in towns that don't have a lot of tech companies. It's hard to stand your ground when there's only one tech company in town, or you're a young engineer who doesn't want their resume to show they left their first job out of college less than a year after they were hired.
Simply being dependable and competent makes you a pain to replace.
Don’t underestimate the slack the average worker has before being fired. Changes are you will be let go at some point based on stuff that has nothing to do with your personal competence at which point all that extra effort you put in being a stellar employee was largely pointless.
Getting a promotion sounds great, but jumping from company to company is generally the better option at which point you have again lost any befits from picking up the phone at 11pm on a Friday.
Being fired is the extreme end result. The immediate results I've faced are the other things I've outlined: not having as high a review score, not receiving a promotion, and just generally being treated poorly/less-friendly by managers. Basically 'disconnecting' leads to a hostile work environment. in my experience.
I don't follow, it seems like unless you luck into finding a job where everyone in your management chain adheres to the same 'disconnect' work ethic, this is a pattern that will instead repeat over and over.
Having a pattern repeat is only a problem if it has some inherent downside. Let’s assume every review over your career is acceptable vs outstanding, but you also get paid more money. Isn’t that a better situation?
If you and your boss have a slightly worse relationship but you’re personally happier then again that seems like a net positive.
As a retired programmer, the main part of my career was last century so if I could communicate this situation with my 20th century self he would be horrified by (among other things):
1) The lack of privacy
2) Being location tracked
3) The expectation that one should be available for work communications 24/7 for no extra pay
I'm sure he would say something like "Wow, it's too bad America is no longer a free country. We programmers are building the systems that enslave us. We're building our own cages, without asking if we should. In the future out employers will prioritize themselves over our families, partners, children and mental health. What do your kids have to say about this?"
We all dismissed the idea of unions because we were highly paid salaried professionals that employers bent over backwards for, but come to find out, unions are more than about money.
First, this is what America being a free country means. It means you have the absolute right and freedom to build your own cage if you choose to.
Second, although building on that idea, as a tech worker you have choice. You can choose to work somewhere that requires this kind of connectedness and monitoring, or you can choose not to. There are very highly paid engineers with no access to their email except on a laptop and during work hours. Ask around, ask this question during interviews.
Freedom means responsibility. If you want to make more choices you are agreeing to live with those choices consequences. We're learning very quickly that a ton of people are not ok with that deal.
> First, this is what America being a free country means. It means you have the absolute right and freedom to build your own cage if you choose to.
It also means we have the freedom to demand better treatment from our employers. I've never understood this attitude that we don't have a say in our workplaces and must always resort to leaving if we can't get what we want, even though companies bend over backwards trying to convince us that we do.
Clearly communicating to the business what our expectations are is important to getting what we want. We're seeing this play out in real-time during the pandemic.
If there's a competitive advantage to not allowing your employees much freedom, then it may be impossible to find alternatives that actually survive and thrive. A race to the bottom in everything but profit. I don't think just using the word 'freedom' here is terribly compelling for that reason if the market is converging on hostile-to-worker practices.
That particular strawman is looking pretty flimsy given the ample evidence that some companies (the ones I was referring to that have strong work/life balance) see a competitive advantage in providing freedom to their employees.
Work/life balance makes people happy, which makes them do more work in less time with fewer errors. Everyone is aligned incentive-wise here, as long as management bothers to continue to learn.
Not everything is a 'strawman' just because it doesn't agree with your experience. There is indeed an if in the start of my comment and it seems pretty remarkable to just leave it to chance and hope it all works out positively. It'll suck remarkably badly if it doesn't.
I dont get paid to answer my phone outside of work hours. I sure as hell dont feel obligated to answer it. Stop working for free. Its your time not your employers.
If I were being compensated for on-call time I would be answering the phone. That is a different arrangement.
What's up with all the negativity in this thread? This is a great time for people who want to have an impact. If you get fed up with corporate life you can create your own startup. The USA has the best VC ecosystem in the world. Alternatively you could bootstrap or join a startup. For a bootstrapped startup you could even decide to only work 1 or 2 days a week if that's what you prefer / and can keep the lights on that way.
In general that whole outlook of blaming things on external stuff that's outside of your control isn't healthy. It's such a great time to build
I guess the way I look at it is, I didn't disconnect much during my 20s or 30s while I was building my career. Any time I could be working it means I could have made one more discovery or published one more paper or written one more grant. Not doing so would mean giving up future freedoms- either having to take more restrictive jobs or not having a job at all.
In return, I now have far more free time and more money with which to enjoy it. That said, there are situations where my employer might need more of my time than usual, outside of normal work hours, and that's fine, so long as it's agreed upon in advance (I don't do on-calls, and I left academia, because fuck their work attitude).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadI sure as hell don't ask permission to turn off my company-issued devices at 5pm and ignore them until 8am the next morning. Nor do I ask permission to ignore work-related comms outside of business hours, because I don't work for free. I already have the right to disconnect. I have always had it, because I am a human being and autonomy is a human right.
Remember: power yields nothing without a demand, and direct action gets the goods.
I've seen it take 6hrs+, running past 5 o'clock or sometimes starting in the evening and running for hours.
During the pandemic, I unplugged around 3pm to grab some new shoes for a kid that had ripped theirs out, because other guys were around and after 5pm I'm on my own. Boss starts texting me, "where are you" and "you should do this stuff after hours"...
This really left a sour taste and I've since moved on.
We need some sort of ability to demand OT, hour for hour comp time, and after hours compensation. One person can fight back, but we are constantly undercut by management. I would often try to comp time and get hit up because it's a busy week, then later that comp time would evaporate and I'd get alot of flack trying to claw it back. My preference is not to comp my time in the morning, but I'd end up clocking in an hour later afew times a week just to try and get some of my time back.
Where I have problems is being expected to be available while "on call" but not being paid for it. In my opinion: if you can't get shit faced, you're working, and should be compensated accordingly with all working time regulations applying as normal.
Then i opened a bottle of whisky, and listened to them try to figure out how much data we lost, until about 5 AM. I don't remember if i was hourly contract or hourly employee at that point, but i did get ~8 hours of pay that evening for doing nothing but not unmuting my voice on the phone call!
I don't do Disaster Recovery anymore, no one really listens.
The word is "union". You want a union.
Pecking order is everything.
In most organizations, exercising said disrespect for subordinates is a key method for management to demonstrate, enforce, and enjoy their higher social status.
Similarly, subordinates must exercise respect and deference to the time, space, and attention of management. This is a key method to help employees demonstrate, acknowledge, and internalize their lower social status.
Any threats to the status hierarchy threaten the structure of the organization and are usually dealt with harshly.
I think at least 50% of the problem is on the employee side.
Unless it requires absolute immediate attention, don't expect an immediate response. If you want sync comms for collaboration, organize a meeting and I'm all yours for two hours or as long as it takes. Otherwise, I'm putting myself on DND and checking my email and IMs every few hours so I have some space for deep focus.
You are lucky because you have the privilege of being able to do this. Not everyone does. A lot of people need they job they have to continue, and their boss will fire them for not responding to an email at 9pm.
Those are the people that need government protection and regulation, or a union, or both. Because their employer won't do it unless forced to and they don't have to privilege to ignore it like you do.
I didn't say this because I think government regulation or unionization isn't necessary.
I said it because I don't believe government regulation will happen in the US in my lifetime. Nor do I expect to see the big 4 consulting firms unionized before Judgment Day. And, yes, I have lost jobs for not picking up the phone at 10pm on a Saturday night. Freedom isn't free.
I look for individual solutions to systemic issues because I don't trust the collective to have my back. I understand that collective action is necessary, but let's face it: the left in the US is too busy dicking around with the culture war to show up for the class war. They think that labels describing race, gender, sexuality, etc matter more than whether you're working-class or owning-class.
I'm looking out for myself because I've given up on anybody else looking out for me. I advise others to do the same.
Luckily you had the safety net to survive that.
> I'm looking out for myself because I've given up on anybody else looking out for me. I advise others to do the same.
Why not both? Look out for yourself but also try to help others?
I honestly think tech workers for all the big companies will be unionized in the next decade. There is already a perfect model out there: The screen actors guild. That union sets minimum rules around pay, safety, overtime, residuals, and so on, but still allows for "superstars" to make far more.
That's the kind of union developers need. One that specifies some minimums that companies must follow (like protecting after hours disconnection and making sure all the workers get a piece of the success) but still allows people to make more and get better benefits.
The only safety net I had was two months' salary saved up. I didn't even get unemployment compensation; by the time the company got nailed for classifying me as a 1099 while treating me as a W-2 I had already found a different job.
> I honestly think tech workers for all the big companies will be unionized in the next decade. There is already a perfect model out there: The screen actors guild. That union sets minimum rules around pay, safety, overtime, residuals, and so on, but still allows for "superstars" to make far more.
I'd love to see that happen. I'm not counting on it. And I've given up on trying to persuade my coworkers to unionize. If I were at all charismatic or persuasive I wouldn't be working in tech to begin with.
0% to even lets say 50% instead of "all" in 10 years is just not possible. The "valuable" employees (engineers) for these companies don't even want to unionize. You'll have to convince them that somehow it would work out in there favor before you could even start the effort and that would take years alone.
I know many engineers that want to unionize. It's not that hard to convince people once they stop drinking all of the anti-union kool aid that has proliferated in the US over the last several decades.
Look at pro athletes that are contracted under a CBA. They get to negotiate profit-sharing, minimum salaries, guaranteed raises, etc. Roughly half of the revenue generated by the NBA is allocated to player wages.
Apple generates somewhere around $1.9M per employee[0], with a median salary just shy of $160k. One of the most common criticisms of unionization is that it would cap salaries and people would earn less. If Apple employees were compensated like basketball players, the average salary would be somewhere around $1M.
0: https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2020/08/12/ranking-...
1: https://www.comparably.com/companies/apple/salaries
I do respect unions in general and understand their vital role for protecting basic rights. But if I were a valuable software engineer for example there would be no way I would ever join union. Not my nature. Luckily I have my own company and aside of a business negotiations with my clients they can't really step on my rights.
If you have a boss like that, no amount of regulation or protection is going to help you. They will find a way to manipulate you and get around the rules. That isn't to say there shouldn't be any rules and regulations, but it is to say that this is the point of diminishing returns.
Child labor laws work because company owners know that eventually they'll get caught. OSHA works the same -- because they know there are penalties for it. Sure, sometimes companies get away with stuff, but there is always the chance that they won't.
I think is important to realize that ppl need to rest and have a life outside work and not to see workers as a disposable utility, and as a modern society we need to protect others from the power imbalances.
But there are also situations where a person has been said 'yes' to so many times that they just assume something is wrong with anyone who tells them 'no'. Enough people have to say 'no' that it becomes normalized. Either a more 'fair' process is made or they finally hire enough people to do the job right (haha, who am I kidding, they'll never do that, but you can at least get to 'less wrong').
It's really a tough matter of reading the room. Sometimes if you see someone asking for something that doesn't necessarily interest you, asking for it too makes it okay. Other times it causes the boss to catastrophize (well now everyone will want to do this so I'm not going to let anyone do it) and shut down.
Asking people to follow labor laws that are almost 100 years old is not that big of an ask. I know everyone is busy LARPing feudal England half the time but someone has to call bullshit, and it's mostly the people with just a little bit of power who can actually do anything about it.
If you are already stuck you might need to have a sit down with your boss and try to work something out. Maybe they are actually usually OK with your not responding until morning but you just have no way to differentiate between normal and urgent. It is possible that you could work something out that doesn't require changing jobs to reset expectations.
Yep, there are undoubtedly companies that really expect people to work unreasonable hours, but I think this is the common case. I very much don’t normally check work communications out of hours, but my boss has my phone number for emergency situations where I’m really needed (has been about 3 or 4 times over the 3 years I’ve been employed at the company).
100% to this.
It's all about expectations.
You're perfectly free to completely ignore work after 5pm! Nothing bad will happen! A company will swear up and down all day long that they support flex time and you're not expected to ever answer any queries outside of your own working hours!
But if a number of your coworkers decide of their own volition they're going to be in touch at all hours of the day and that becomes the default soft expectation, then you might look worse in comparison. Maybe not in the short term, maybe people will make a strong effort to un-bias themselves during performance reviews and not pay that any mind, but over time, you're sharing the bonus and raises pool with workers who valued their time less than you and perhaps ended up getting higher visibility for it.
Should regulation then mandate that your coworkers disconnect? Maybe. We do it for truckers, pilots, and flight attendants in safety-critical jobs: they're not allowed to work more than a certain set of hours regardless of whether they'd gladly do so.
Maybe not in a big tech job. But I have worked at startups where ignoring work after 5pm was grounds for a negative performance review and being passed over for promotions. This was not the unspoken culture, it was the clear from-the-top direction. Deadlines existed and features needed to ship, and that required evening and weekend work.
If you in a role with even less power, ignoring work after hours can wind up with you being terminated.
Plot twist: If everyone did like EddieDante, then the boss can't fire everyone and will accept the new status quo.
Both parties have bargaining power, abstractly speaking. The real power comes from the organization/leadership and not the work itself. Otherwise, there will be no CEO, manager, governments, etc... It'll be just workers exchanging goods between one/another.
Maybe the person you replied to is skillful because they prepared for it? Not everything is just the result of life's crap shoot of luck and privilege. If you're finding your employer requires more of you than you wish to give, drawing boundaries and sticking with them makes sense to some people. Psychologists use the term agreeableness[1] to express this sort of sentiment, a person who would demand not to be bothered after work would be classified as less agreeable than a person who is willing to take calls in an "emergency" or just as a regular function of their job, you can see the differences in the continuum there. Many of the most highly paid people have lower agreeableness in tech.
[1]https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/agreeableness-conscientiousne...
I entirely agree it's your right, but if you're ambitious and working more can help you to achieve certain goals, it's not unreasonable to work more than the bare minimum. As long as it's a personal choice, I think it's fine.
This labor is typically unpaid and expected to be done on up of whatever other work the women do to pay the bills.
It's feels a bit unfair to be told that because I'm a man I don't do enough.
I think you might be reading things that no one is saying.
Saying, "this commonly happens" is not the same as saying, "you are doing this."
It seems implicit in this statement. I'm also the cook (my wife doesn't know how), we split laundry, handle child care together when possible (with my mother coming over to help). My wife is in school and doesn't earn an income ATM and we aren't sure what happens when she graduates, but even with me working full time chores are split as I work from home. Different people have different strengths. We have a son and there are some things I like that he does that she doesn't.
Saying a pattern exists in no way implies you, specifically, fit that pattern.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/11/04/raising...
They weren’t expressing an opinion that men don’t do work, but stating what research shows: that women tend to take on unpaid work disproportionately to men, including house work: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34465574/
I constantly see developers say they are paid well but treated poorly by their employers (unpaid overtime, oncall rotations, receding benefits). A union fights for what people need, and we absolutely should be unionizing to advocate for all the workers.
I feel like a substantial portion of HN is basically College Republicans who majored in CS.
If I didn't want this I'd work at a big company.....
We'll get unions about the same time it becomes normalized for developers to talk about seeing a therapist.
I know a guy who mentions his therapist regularly, and I overheard a conversation with a mutual friend about how he needed therapy for years (none of us disagree) but he didn't go until he worked with someone who was also open about it. He said something like wanting to be that guy for other people. He's an odd duck. Occasionally wise, but often plays the fool.
One thing I've noticed about remote work is that I talk out loud to people so much less than I used to that when I do dive into a meaty conversation I tend to get a sore throat and afterward I feel like I dove on the conversation like a starving man on a sandwich. That's not strictly healthy.
I think for some of us even a scheduled hour talking to someone per week would be good, especially now. And frankly my understanding of the New York Movie Therapist trope is that they are often portrayed somewhere between life coach and lunch buddy. The joke there being that people have gone to therapy for years without any real progress being made. Clearly not real, but then again jokes often grow from a seed of truth.
They also all seem to arrogantly believe themselves to be in the top 10% of their peer developers, in terms of compensation, ability to negotiate, bargaining power vs employer, and other workplace attributes; and are therefore hostile to any system that could fairly represent the interests of all the workers. "I'm a captain of my industry, and am already paid so much more than my peer developers," software developers imagine, "A union could only make things worse for me!"
I've heard a few people claim that charity often comes down to realizing that as hard as you worked, things could have gone much worse for you if your luck had broken a different way, and so they feel fortunate for what they have and give some of it back when they can.
As much as some people try to deny it, equality always comes down to an alliance between people with privilege coming to the aid of those without. These underdog stories about a fringe group rising up and conquering the majority are good PR, but the uncomfortable truth is that some groups fail eternally and some groups succeed quickly and that usually comes down to collusion or overt collaboration with as many insiders as they can recruit. PETA is so obnoxious they've become a parody of themselves, and Greenpeace is not far behind, because nobody wants (only) a lecture.
Side note, look how much is written about Musks crazy work schedule. Without going down that rabbit hole too far, you can see why he makes that information public.
If you wanted that, you’d be playing the same game as your 24x7 colleagues. That you aren’t means you (quite reasonably) have other priorities.
Neither you nor they are wrong; you’re just optimizing for different things.
Same for management as well. Some drive their subordinates hard but are willing to fight for big bonuses and fast promotions, others don't care as much and probably will also not be keen to investigate promotions, etc., either.
I mostly agree, but come to a different conclusion. In my mind the situation is a repeated prisoner's dilemma where defection is equivalent to off-hours responses. With no defections, everyone lives a pleasant life with healthy boundaries, and regular career advancement. If one defects, they receive accelerated career advancement while the other does not. If they both defect, they live a miserable life with unhealthy boundaries and regular career advancement.
It has all the trappings of being able to make individual choices, but the system is best analyzed as a group. An global optimum exists and it doesn't involve playing 24x7.
Are you?
If you want to become a manager and director of engineering or something then you probably need to sign up for checking your e-mail all the time.
If you're an IC and want to stay an IC you'd probably do better to make yourself indispensable by learning the codebase you're working on and becoming an expert. Which will be a lot easier if you're uninterrupted with mundane details.
Also if you're the firefighting person and the person that is easily interruptible then that's what you'll get, so you'll be constantly context switching and won't be able to become the indispensable expert.
And if you really want to climb the ladder, like someone else pointed out, you probably want to job hop.
You may be at a significant disadvantage by thinking that this is the way that you get rewarded.
If they're not willing to throw the (at this point) $200 a month at me for 24/7 access, what else are they gunna pull?
I'm genuinely curious, what sort of white-collar jobs exist where you can only check your email once a day?
they just make you tell them everything in meetings.
If you're working too much, do something about it. You have power.
Very, very worst case scenario: you get fired. So what? It's a job. There are literally millions of them. Like OP said: you'd probably get a better job right now any way. Companies are tripping over themselves to acquire talent.
If you're allowing yourself to be overworked, that's your choice.
Does anyone get anything without demanding it?
To my knowledge, nothing has ever happened without someone saying “enough is enough” and walking out the door.
Also, I never said anything about IT.
As George Carlin said, "It's a big club and you ain't in it!"
There’s way too much pressure on individuals, too little social and institutional support, and too much free rein given to companies … which they’ve proven they’ll abuse.
There must be more for individual employees to stand upon, and then the “you’re treated how you allow yourself to be treated” really means something to many …
And the idea that you should job hop to get higher wages and that employee loyalty to employers is for suckers has trickled all the way down and people are talking about it and there's a noticeable uptick in unionization drives.
The idea that everyone just up and quit is probably not correct at all, but I don't think its accurate to say that the environment isn't looking any different from the past ~30ish years.
I think the Fed is about to stomp the shit out of all of it though.
Don't they teach people what being on salary even means any more?
That’s why my product BenkoPhone is so important! Currently Australia only, coming to a virtual mobile number starved territory near you.
It's not just a matter of losing it; in many places, the employer faces legal penalties if employees don't use a minimum amount of leave.
It’s a lot of work to enter into employment arrangements with a company. For both the employee and employer. What’s problematic is when either side is “surprised” by a change in expected behavior after the fact. It’s frustrating, because you have sunk cost in entering the employment agreement. So middle managers abuse their employees by springing these types of things after the job has gotten going. The employee has the freedom to walk, but not without paying a certain opportunity cost.
The job offer should make very clear up front in the listing what these “soft” expectations will be. And if they do, the employee/employer needs the recourse to renegotiate the situation.
I’ve seen this go the other way as well. Employee takes job, puts in a few months, and then springs untold issues on the employer. Like the abusive middle manager, if they make it minimal enough to just be annoying, it’s not worth firing them for it, it just becomes a drag on everyone else.
It's even more precarious for US immigrants where many types of immigrant visa (H1B, L1, TN) are tied to continuing to hold a specific job.
Don't like that job anymore? Get laid off, or reclassified into a different position? Oops, you're in violation of your visa, you have a week to leave the country.
There's a huge power imbalance between the class of workers that have US permanent residency or citizenship, and those on work visas.
And what sets the US apart from the rest of the developed world? The almost complete lack of labor organization ie unions.
Your shitty life isn't because of [insert wedge issue here]. It's because of your material conditions. Poor white people have way more in common with poor black people than either do with rich people. But so many Americans believe they are simply temporarily embarrassed millionaires [1].
This propaganda is so successful that something like 30% of Americans believe in the Great Replacement [2]. It's pushed on mainstream media [3].
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/17/1099233034/the-great-replacem...
[3]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
I would agree that being on call after hours requires compensation. Unfortunately many "full time" jobs do not pay overtime and provide no compensation for on call time.
Keynes was right about the increases in productivity and automation, but apparently absurdly naïve in predicting it would result in reduced work hours for the same pay rather than in increased profit and unemployment.
"Since our workers have become twice as productive, we've decided to double their pay and cut the work week in half" is not how most company managers think.
Yet it would seem to be better for society as a whole if our lives were not consumed by endless drudgery; reducing the standard "required" work hours would seem to be a good idea for human health and happiness.
Disconnected enough imo
At a previous job, we had a yearly trade show that we displayed at. I knew that the month before, I was going to be working more than 40 hours a week. The rest of the year was pretty much straight 40 hour weeks. I accepted that.
At my current job, my boss once called me in at 9 PM for an emergency. I was there until 1 AM (and he was there both before me and later than me). That happened once (in 13 years). I accept that.
If it's every week, that's a management problem, not a worker problem. I'm not management, and they don't pay me to fix management problems.
oh look, yet another piece of propaganda pushing the idea of ending working from home in favor of returning to the office!
Don’t underestimate the slack the average worker has before being fired. Changes are you will be let go at some point based on stuff that has nothing to do with your personal competence at which point all that extra effort you put in being a stellar employee was largely pointless.
Getting a promotion sounds great, but jumping from company to company is generally the better option at which point you have again lost any befits from picking up the phone at 11pm on a Friday.
If you and your boss have a slightly worse relationship but you’re personally happier then again that seems like a net positive.
1) The lack of privacy
2) Being location tracked
3) The expectation that one should be available for work communications 24/7 for no extra pay
I'm sure he would say something like "Wow, it's too bad America is no longer a free country. We programmers are building the systems that enslave us. We're building our own cages, without asking if we should. In the future out employers will prioritize themselves over our families, partners, children and mental health. What do your kids have to say about this?"
We all dismissed the idea of unions because we were highly paid salaried professionals that employers bent over backwards for, but come to find out, unions are more than about money.
Second, although building on that idea, as a tech worker you have choice. You can choose to work somewhere that requires this kind of connectedness and monitoring, or you can choose not to. There are very highly paid engineers with no access to their email except on a laptop and during work hours. Ask around, ask this question during interviews.
Freedom means responsibility. If you want to make more choices you are agreeing to live with those choices consequences. We're learning very quickly that a ton of people are not ok with that deal.
It also means we have the freedom to demand better treatment from our employers. I've never understood this attitude that we don't have a say in our workplaces and must always resort to leaving if we can't get what we want, even though companies bend over backwards trying to convince us that we do.
Clearly communicating to the business what our expectations are is important to getting what we want. We're seeing this play out in real-time during the pandemic.
Work/life balance makes people happy, which makes them do more work in less time with fewer errors. Everyone is aligned incentive-wise here, as long as management bothers to continue to learn.
https://gizmodo.com/apple-return-to-work-policy-alphabet-mac...
Militaries never stop developing new weapons or upgrading existing one's, they test them on unsuspecting members of the public.
Suicide is psychological murder.
If I were being compensated for on-call time I would be answering the phone. That is a different arrangement.
In general that whole outlook of blaming things on external stuff that's outside of your control isn't healthy. It's such a great time to build
you're either so young that you still believe in the meritocracy or so rich that you need to believe in it to morally justify your existence.
In return, I now have far more free time and more money with which to enjoy it. That said, there are situations where my employer might need more of my time than usual, outside of normal work hours, and that's fine, so long as it's agreed upon in advance (I don't do on-calls, and I left academia, because fuck their work attitude).