If you reply to emails before 9 and after 6, you're telling your manager/client ... hey! I am at your disposal 24/7. By the way, if your boss gave you a "work laptop" you're already screwed.
Emails while commuting 'should count as work'
21–30 of 179 posts
Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'
#22Please don't read/send email while driving. Use your bus/train time to study things that will help your career, at this job and the next. Don't just give that time away to your current employer for free - unless your employer is a charity. Edit: Even if you work for a charity, giving away your time for free may not be a good idea. ;)
Use your bus/train time to study things that will help your career Or leave 45 minutes early and work those 45 minutes on the train.
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Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'
#23I absolutely consider time commuting as part of my work hours. I leave the office early and count the 45 minutes on the train as work time. Whether it's answering emails, writing some code, or working on documentation it's definitely work.
I don't log hours so it's kind of not relevant, but I mentally count lunch, especially if with coworkers. I can't quite bring myself to count the commute (also 30-45 min here). Counting both reduces 'real' working hours considerably.
Picking one or the other would be nearly equivalent anyway.
Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not good to simply look at the clock and say 'well that's a day' if you want more responsibility, leadership, respect, trust etc. 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 resil…
> 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. 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 some…
What they do is make it resilient to multi-hour fixes, while still keeping the light issues that look like emergencies but can be fixed by running a bat file to still go through, minimizing the work they have to do personally while still making them look like a hero.
Of course this will fall apart once their manager catches on but in some monolithic organizations that could take years
Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'
#25Well, obviously. 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?
Most people who have answering emails as part of their job are not working for an hourly wage. The other aspect is that some of us actually like our work and want to succeed at it: we don’t see work as slavery or some kind of adversarial relationship with the “boss.” Many people actually believe in what the company is trying to do and actually care about the job.
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.
Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'
#26Does this open the door for me billing my evening shower when the design finally clicks in my head?
Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's this black and white. First, I'm sure plenty of companies are basically stealing from their employees, but this is also situational. 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 lea…
> People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients. 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…
"Demanding client" doesnt mean unlimited funding. i find that the most demanding ones also look most closely at their bills.
Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'
#28Well, obviously. 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?
I don't think it's this black and white. First, I'm sure plenty of companies are basically stealing from their employees, but this is also situational. 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 lea…
"People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients."
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.
Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'
#29After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per family on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level it was at the end of the 19th century. While per person average 'working' hours are down in large parts of what we call the Western world, woman were brought en mass into salaried employment, raising the time on the company clock for a family significantly.
The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is now 'required' for many.
I personally feel that the relative recent introduction of 'work from anywhere' technology for the knowledge worker class, has indeed lead to yet another expansion of salaried-time, even when no 'salary' is provided for it.
We should also ask ourselves if the stance on 'working-from-home', which should be a normal evolution of the technology, hasn't been hampered by a standing tradition of externalizing the costs of commuting by companies to employees.
Commuting in itself is for many parts an anachronism that lost its grounding with the introduction of personal computers and the internet. It should be seriously questioned why this is allowed to stand, when it comes at great costs to both the employee's health as well as the environment.
(P.S. Before you go 'but even for knowledge workers nothing beats working together', you can be right, but do we need the 'gold-standard' of collaboration every working day now that the alternatives are for most business activities more than good enough and still getting better with each year?
As in many things it is a trade off. Yet often, we see that in those trade-offs were companies are left holding the bill instead of the employee (office furniture and architecture, IT equipment, ...), the balance goes in the direction of 'good-enough' rather than the 'best-of-the-best'.)
Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'
#30[deleted]