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Emails while commuting 'should count as work'

bbc.com

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Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'

#161

Post by mstade »

s-shellfish wrote: post #155
mstade wrote: post #5

Earlier 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…

Resilient systems will still break. They may break less, but it's impossible to anticipate every possible usage permutation of a system from here until eternity. There are tons of reliable methods to build resilient systems and they can still have their faults. What I'm talking about is resilient system or not - someone has to be there to fix it if it breaks. There is no silver bullet when it comes to software - some…

This is precisely why it’s difficult to sell upward – why spend time and money on something, yet still not be able to guarantee that things will work? Especially when you can roll the dice, have things work great until such time it doesn’t, and then just throw some man power on it till it’s fixed. When thinking about cost, it can be really hard to justify something you can’t really see the benefits of, until after the fact.

Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'

#163

Post by psychometry »

msiyer wrote: post #132
psychometry wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it takes a very special type of daftness to think for centuries men were "supporting" women by not allowing them to work.

This world is built upon the dead bodies of men. Men who fought wars to protect their kin, men who fell from the top of buildings they were constructing, men who suffocated to death deep in the tunnels, or drowned in the ocean... Let us not forget them. Let us not belittle their sacrifices.

Haha. You know it was men who started all of those wars, right?

Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'

#165

Post by naravara »

PeterStuer wrote: post #29

After 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-l…

>(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)

Probably not, but you also need to consider the second order effects. If it's not expected that you be in the office often, people more often choose to live far away from where they work. This makes it marginally harder to make people come into the office when you do need to pull together for "gold standard" collaboration.

If you wanted to mitigate against this, then you'd need to make part of your hiring requirements easy access to the office. But now you're needing to be prescriptive about where your employees should live, shrinking your potential talent pool and encroaching on their personal lives.

Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'

#166

Post by naravara »

iambateman wrote: post #15
stephengillie wrote: post #4

Please 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. ;)

As an employee of a charity, I don’t think working off the clock makes sense there either. ;) Charities pay for work just like anyone else. If you like, sure, make a donation. But make sure it’s formal. Otherwise you are robbing someone else of an opportunity to generously support the work AND if the “employee stretching to give” becomes organizational culture it can endanger the entire organization. Burn out is real…

>Charities pay for work just like anyone else.

Usually much less than anyone else, though the benefits packages tend to be more generous.

Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'

#167

Post by naravara »

outside1234 wrote: post #140
punnerud wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Norway you have to be paid when you ‘are available to the job’. If you are on standby the minimum pay is 1/3. If you have to work outside your normal workhours the pay is minimum 50% extra. If you are «forced» to drive, example as a consulatant normaly based in the city and have to comute longer than normaly, the comute is paid.

That works when you can pump oil to pay for everything and don't need to be competitive on cost. The rest of the world can't pay for overhead like that.

>That works when you can pump oil to pay for everything and don't need to be competitive on cost.

When you can offload the consequences of poor planning or lack of foresight onto your employees (in the form of making them stay late, come in early, be on call or have arbitrary schedules, etc.) at zero cost, that's going to discourage good management and honest project planning.

If I don't have to pay a price for underestimating how long it will take to do something, then am I not subtly incentivized to lowball estimates for everything knowing that it's really no skin off my back if it takes longer than expected? It's all coming out of my employees' hides. There may be fuzzy, unquantifiable effects on morale, psychological health, creativity, etc. on my staff that hurt the organization in the long run, but compared to the hard data on quarterly returns they don't weigh as heavily.

Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'

#168

Post by [deleted] »

mstade wrote: post #161
s-shellfish wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resilient systems will still break. They may break less, but it's impossible to anticipate every possible usage permutation of a system from here until eternity. There are tons of reliable methods to build resilient systems and they can still have their faults. What I'm talking about is resilient system or not - someone has to be there to fix it if it breaks. There is no silver bullet when it comes to software - some…

This is precisely why it’s difficult to sell upward – why spend time and money on something, yet still not be able to guarantee that things will work? Especially when you can roll the dice, have things work great until such time it doesn’t, and then just throw some man power on it till it’s fixed. When thinking about cost, it can be really hard to justify something you can’t really see the benefits of, until after th…

[deleted]

Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'

#169

Post by PeterStuer »

naravara wrote: post #165
PeterStuer wrote: post #29

After 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-l…

>(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) Probably not, but you also need to consider the second order effects. If it's not expected that you be in the office often,…

Thing is, if you ask your friends why they chose to settle down in the place they are living, it is very rarely 'because it was close to the office'. I think that is a direct consequence of the 'volatility' of work. Your grandparents might have expected the company they joined in their teens to employ them for the rest of their lives. This sounds alien today.

Not many people take it to the extreme of working with a laptop and a sat-link from a remote tropical beach, but plenty chose and environment they like, be it a hip bristling city or somewhere more rural for the peace and quiet, and then suffer the commutes that come with accepting a job.

Now you are right that there is the potential for abuse, certainly in employer side ruled sectors, an maybe we need some safeguards, but we need to try and stop this madness.

Turning some of the costs from employee to employer seems to work. I didn't run into many companies where the devs had 3x4K monitors and a quiet private office, because you know, at times 'you need that extra efficiency'.

Re: Emails while commuting 'should count as work'

#170

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

caymanjim wrote: post #124
mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible alternate definition: Anything that you wouldn't do if you weren't paid for it. This would include driving to the office.

It's not reasonable to expect your employer to pay for your commute time if you don't use that commute time to work. You can work for them on the train. You shouldn't work for them on the train if you're not getting paid for it, but you're generally also not expected to work on the train. You can't work for them while you're driving. You can think of that driving time as work, but you shouldn't expect your employer t…

I agree with you that there are strong arguments it is not reasonable to expect the employer to cover that cost but I don't think that implies that it isn't work!
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