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EU pushes for 'right to disconnect' from work at home

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Re: EU pushes for 'right to disconnect' from work at home

#421

Post by [deleted] »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #377
lotsofpulp wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a management issue of having no redundancy for someone performing something so crucial. If you're that crucial to operations, then you should be paid extremely lavishly, or be the owner, otherwise you're getting the short end of the stick.

Not really. If you formalise this kind of redundancy it leads to super annoying things like on-call rosters. Which are awful for a worker because it means you MUST be available immediately, can't drink or go out to the shop or whatever. I much rather just have them call me for that one critical issue that happens in a very long time, and appreciating me putting in the time after hours, than being forced to sit at hom…

[deleted]

Re: EU pushes for 'right to disconnect' from work at home

#422

Post by lotsofpulp »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #377
lotsofpulp wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a management issue of having no redundancy for someone performing something so crucial. If you're that crucial to operations, then you should be paid extremely lavishly, or be the owner, otherwise you're getting the short end of the stick.

Not really. If you formalise this kind of redundancy it leads to super annoying things like on-call rosters. Which are awful for a worker because it means you MUST be available immediately, can't drink or go out to the shop or whatever. I much rather just have them call me for that one critical issue that happens in a very long time, and appreciating me putting in the time after hours, than being forced to sit at hom…

I would demand to be paid if I was asked to be on call. On call to me means I’m working.

Re: EU pushes for 'right to disconnect' from work at home

#423

Post by jeromenerf »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #181
jeromenerf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father gets upset with this depiction. I don’t have children, so I can’t have a good feel of how much of a boomer rant it is. His point was that my sister and I were not difficult to manage, while he was working at home. He was just telling us to leave him alone and play outside. Or play legos in our rooms. The happy 80s. I hear from my friends that working from home with kids is not manageable in a flat. Possible…

You played with lego for your entire childhood, no education at all? Personally I love homeschooling (ie teaching my kids out of a school environment), but kids wither without educational input and intellectual nurturing. You can expect a kid to develop well without educational input shut in a room by themselves for weeks on end, even if their parents can afford lego.

Oh, no, of course. We went to school, 4 days a week until high school. Wednesdays were off back then.

I was not referring to home schooling but "managing kids" nowadays compared to the 80s. To my father, which was well involved in our education and housekeeping btw, it seems there wasn’t much anxiety about it. I feel that my friends are pretty anxious nowadays.

My dad was a general science teacher in a technical high school (woodworkers, mechanics, electrician ...), from an farmer family. We had this chance to learn a lot out of school, building stuff and caring for animals and crops. To the point actually where I haven’t learned a lot science wise until university.

Re: EU pushes for 'right to disconnect' from work at home

#424

Post by Viliam1234 »

aaaxyz wrote: post #355
colejohnson66 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(in America) There’s no such this as “overtime” in most salaried jobs though. You’re paid just for being an employee, not for hours worked. Whether you work 35 or 60 hours, it’s the same pay.[a] As a result, employers don’t have to worry about overtime pay, only burnt out employees (but entry and junior levels are disposable, right? /s) [a]: This also leads to the employer expecting one to be “on call” 24/7 regardles…

Why would you ever sign an employment contract that does not even mention overtime?

It's interesting how the same situation has completely opposite implications in different countries.

In my country, if the contract doesn't mention overtime, that's great, because it means the company must pay you nicely for overtime, and there is a limited amount of overtime per year. However, if it is explicitly a part of the contract, there may be more overtime per year (within some limits), and less compensation per extra hour (again, within some limits). So if you find overtime mentioned in your contract, that is a bad thing.

Re: EU pushes for 'right to disconnect' from work at home

#425

Post by GekkePrutser »

lallysingh wrote: post #417
GekkePrutser wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely get 3-4x less than US in the EU country where I live. But who cares.. I like the low-pressure life here. Rents are lower than the US too. We have socialised healthcare, safe gun-free cities. That's worth a lot more than a number on a bank statement. I hear that in the US people will lose their healthcare when they lose a job and it could cost $1000 a month (which is more than my monthly rent)! Here it's…

If you have a family, it's more like $2500/month for healthcare.

Wow, this is literally more than I make after tax :( And I have a senior IT job at a multinational.

But I suppose wages take this into account. High rent prices, healthcare etc. Otherwise people wouldn't be able to live off their wage.

Re: EU pushes for 'right to disconnect' from work at home

#426

Post by ericd »

aaaxyz wrote: post #358
ericd wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with the mythical man month? Hiring more people might not get the same amount done as a few working really hard. That said, burnout can make working harder worse than working a sane amount. But that doesn’t fall on the employer as much as the employee.

>Hiring more people might not get the same amount done as a few working really hard. That is highly dependent on when the new employee is added to the project. If it's done early (as a result of proper planning), it's most likely not gonna hurt.

One of the key points of the mythical man month is that communication overhead starts taking a larger and larger chunk of the total productivity as you scale the number of people involved, just to keep everyone synced up and rowing in the same direction. It's not really based on when the people are added.

Re: EU pushes for 'right to disconnect' from work at home

#427

Post by GekkePrutser »

throwaway45349 wrote: post #419
GekkePrutser wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. If you formalise this kind of redundancy it leads to super annoying things like on-call rosters. Which are awful for a worker because it means you MUST be available immediately, can't drink or go out to the shop or whatever. I much rather just have them call me for that one critical issue that happens in a very long time, and appreciating me putting in the time after hours, than being forced to sit at hom…

You can be on-call and still do other things -- it's not all or nothing. My workplace has tiered SLOs for on-call, some being as relaxed as O(30 minutes) for first response.

Yeah you can do other things but you're never really 'free'. You always have to be able to drop what you're doing at a moments notice. I really hate that feeling.

I'd rather just be there when it's really needed.

Re: EU pushes for 'right to disconnect' from work at home

#428

Post by baobabKoodaa »

mikem170 wrote: post #255
ghaff wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, when sick and vacation were more typically separate pools, the answer was definitely it depended. It's not hard to find studies showing that Mondays and Fridays saw a disproportionate number (i.e. not just 20%) of single day sick days. And, I'm sure, the pattern wasn't spread evenly across everyone. Personally, although I've fortunately had much need to take an appreciable number of sick days, I favor t…

At this point in the conversation I don't understand why any employee would want them to be separate. Doesn't that just work to the company's benefit? They want you to be there as many days as possible Why wouldn't you want all the sick+personal days to use as you see fit?

> I don't understand why any employee would want them to be separate. Doesn't that just work to the company's benefit? They want you to be there as many days as possible Why wouldn't you want all the sick+personal days to use as you see fit?

If you have a joined pool of 60 PTO days per year, that means more days off than separate pools of 30 vacation days + up to 30 sick days. All else being equal, of course an employee would prefer to have more days off. However, all else would not be equal. The PTO days are a cost to the employer, which means the employer can afford to shell out less in other forms of compensation. Think of the job market as a market where employers compete for employees (and vice versa, but that's tangential to the point here). Employers offer different forms of compensation to employees: salary, bonuses, paid vacation days, etc. If the government suddenly mandated that employers must give all employees more vacation days, then the employers could afford to pay out less in other forms of compensation. Sure, in the short run the employer would pay out more to employees and be less profitable, but over time they would balance out this cost by paying less in other benefits.

In other words, if you take the perspective of an employee with a 5+ year time horizon, the total amount of compensation received from the employer would not be expected to increase as a result of those government-mandated extra vacation days. What would change, however, is the incentive of people to go to work sick and infect others. If sick days cost you money, then you are incentivized to go to work sick. As a result, more people get sick. That would be bad. So from a risk/reward pespective, we have a reward of ~0, and a risk of more sickness.

Re: EU pushes for 'right to disconnect' from work at home

#429

Post by jfk13 »

efdee wrote: post #394
treis wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really work because the incentives become misaligned. It becomes a good thing for workers to have things go wrong and for them to be inefficient with their time. Organizations end up much less flexible because they then don't trust their workers not to milk them. Ultimately it changes from paying someone to get a job done to paying them for hours worked. Anyone that's hired a plumber knows that you get far…

If you pay someone to get a job done, that sounds like a contractor. If you pay someone for their hours worked, that's a salaried employee.

Actually, I think there are three categories, not two.

If you pay someone to get a job done, that's a contractor.

If you pay someone for their hours worked, that's an hourly-waged employee.

If you pay someone a salary, you're paying them to spend their working time, which will typically be around 35-40 hours a week but is not strictly defined or measured, attending to your business needs in whatever ways are agreed between you. It's a quite different relationship, based on a different level of expectations and trust.

To give a specific example: I'm a (European-based) salaried employee of a (US-based) company. Most weeks I spend rather more than 40 hours, one way or another, working on things for my employer, as I (mostly) enjoy my work and want to make the best contribution I can. Sometimes personal stuff comes up, and I may end up spending significantly less, but no-one's keeping track at that level on a day-to-day basis. I don't expect extra money if I work into the evening to finish something I'm involved in, nor do I expect to lose money if I spend the afternoon taking care of a family emergency.

I have in the past had a time-card that I punched when arriving at work, and again when leaving, and my employer paid me for the hours I worked; no more, no less. I'd call that "wages". My current employer pays me an agreed annual sum; it does not depend on the total number of hours I work during the year, but it comes with an expectation of how I will spend my time and expertise. That's a "salary".

Re: EU pushes for 'right to disconnect' from work at home

#430

Post by bonzini »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #354
geodel wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know specifics about you. But officially/legally fixed hours comes with list of measurable tasks that must be completed by certain time. Now in most places I worked things invariably get delayed due to vendors, other teams, servers, network issues and so on. When issues are finally resolved one is expected to complete allocated task in 'extra' time. Saying that my 35 hours are over is not gonna cut in my experi…

Granted, in USA you're paid 10 times more than in the rest of the world.

Not really. Italy has abysmal IT wages, a 30.000 euros wage in Italy is probably for roles that would get an 80.000$ salary in the US. That's not even 3x but then:

* there's 7% extra that is paid as a lump sum when you change employers, and 33% paid into a retirement account (vs. perhaps 20% for a 401k; employer/employee proportion of 25-75 vs. 50-50 for 401k matching)

* you don't enter work with any debt, because university is paid by the state if you're poor. I have seen directors from America (easily $200k salary) saying they can't afford a vacation in Europe because they have two sons/daughters in grad school.

* you don't have to pay for healthcare (and taxes are comparable for lower income tax brackets). If you have a child, pregnancy+delivery costs €0.00.

* nowhere in Italy are you going to have a real estate market as crazy as Silicon Valley

* childcare will cost 150-500 euros a month depending on age vs 1000-3000$ in the US

Putting everything together, maybe you're paid twice as much. Go to Germany or Finland and there's even less difference.

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