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When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

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Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#51

Post by spacemadness »

policepost wrote: post #30

Don't connect your phone to work. Close your laptop at 5. Walk away. Keep to a standard schedule.

Seeing the amount of people that answer late night chats from people in other timezones upsets me. What upsets me more are the people on vacation answering chats as soon as they’re pinged. That behavior changes work culture and expectations the more it happens. Bad managers love this sort of thing. I learned a long time ago that to keep my sanity I need a wall up between work hours and my personal life.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#52

Post by catboybotnet »

NoahECampbell wrote: post #10
mjmsmith wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people work hard in the hours that they're paid for, that is not "the bare minimum".

If something breaks and suddenly no customer can use the product and its 5pm and the engineers say "Welp sorry, my shift ended a few minutes ago so I'll fix it tomorrow!", that is in fact the bare minimum. If an engineer does that, they can be expected to not be earning any raises for actually doing what they're supposed to do, which is not to sit at a desk for a few hours a day, but to deliver a product

If you are not paid overtime, then you are not expected to work overtime. Simple as.

If the product is expected to be up 24/7, and there is nobody scheduled after you, it's on management and not you to solve that.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#53

Post by riffraff »

msla wrote: post #34

Medical people who take call had work follow them home a long time before Generation X.

It's a completely different thing.

My father had on-call in his job for decades in the last century, that did not mean he was constantly thinking about his job, it meant he could be reached to go if anything bad happened.

Being reachable via phone is not really the same as checking slack notifications every ten minutes.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#54

Post by lopis »

NoahECampbell wrote: post #16
lopis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, enough with this mentality. You don't need to work overtime or sacrifice your work-life balance to grow and earn raises or bonuses. For anyone reading that is working in a company that works like this, just know that there's a better world out there. Your brain can't focus for 12 hours a day no matter how much you try to convince yourself, and the more you push it the worse. It's ok to be paid to be on-call,…

I did say work-life balance is important, but also you are not being paid to sit at a desk for a few hours a day. If you work more then you should get paid more, I never said anything about working more for free, so please stick to what I was actually saying? Also try reading a book called Stolen Focus regarding the human brain's ability to focus, which is diminishing due to people actually not working on expanding t…

> If you work more then you should get paid more

Yes but the habit of working overtime in companies often leads to others feeling like their are "just doing the bare minimum" as you say. Working 8 hours and being productive throughout the week is not the "bare minimum". Companies that encourage people to work overtime are usually toxic places to work on that see jobs as a privilege instead of a partnership. In my workplace we strive to make sure that people don't over do it, regardless of being paid. You can't be on-call forever, and you can't work overtime forever. That's just not healthy and sets bad examples to juniors.

Thanks for the book recommendation, although that's missing the point.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#55

Post by donatj »

So as someone who has worked as a developer for 15+ years now, this is an honest question. What kind of things are you getting emails about after hours that can’t wait until tomorrow?

I have heard these horror stories for years but never experienced any of it.

Everyone who would be sending me email wants to be off work as much as I do. They’re not working after hours so neither am I. Even when I worked for an agency earlier in my career I can count on two hands the number of times I was contacted after hours, and it was usually an emergency like some clients database imploded.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#56

Post by wpietri »

freedomben wrote: post #46
tra3 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you disconnect and shutdown the problem solving part of your brain? I’ve found that writing a log or a daily summary, a core dump, if you will, helps me disengage. But not always.

Not OP but many years of working from home. The best thing I've found is Logseq. Any other note taking app would probably do, but the important thing is that it's a "daily journal" style where I brain dump relevant things into bullet points. This has come in really handy for many other reasons as well.

I've been using Logseq for the last few months and it's wildly better for me than using things like Evernote for this. I used to be big on having a lot of structure in terms of notebooks and notes, a lot of which contained project journals of one sort or another. But the way Logseq makes journaling a primary interface makes things much easier. I tag some things I want to be able to find later, or link them to pages. But I have a lot fewer dedicated pages now, and have to worry a lot less about maintaining consistency in some sort of broad ontology.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#57

Post by ghusto »

It's alright for us oldies who already have firm boundaries on this kind of thing, but the new batch could use our support here. Always-contactable is becoming (has become?) normalised, and it's just not on.

My practical advice:

- Do not put Slack / work e-mail / any comms to do with work on your personal phone. When they ask "why don't you have X on your phone", the answer is that you have a security policy to keep your personal accounts safe, but if they'd like to buy you a work phone, and pay for the contract, you'd consider carrying it. Which leads me to ...

- Establish whether you are being paid for on-call. If not, then you are not on-call

- "I sent you a message", isn't the same as "I spoke with you and made sure you understood the message I relayed outside of work hours"

I realise that these things are easier here in Europe than in the U.S.A. where labour laws are a little less fleshed out, but well, I can't help there :P

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#58

Post by arkey »

NoahECampbell wrote: post #10
mjmsmith wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people work hard in the hours that they're paid for, that is not "the bare minimum".

If something breaks and suddenly no customer can use the product and its 5pm and the engineers say "Welp sorry, my shift ended a few minutes ago so I'll fix it tomorrow!", that is in fact the bare minimum. If an engineer does that, they can be expected to not be earning any raises for actually doing what they're supposed to do, which is not to sit at a desk for a few hours a day, but to deliver a product

That's why OOH (Out Of Hour) On-call Rotas are a thing.

I work as a SWE and when I'm done, I'm done.

Except one week a month when I have my OOH shift, which is on a voluntary basis in the company I work for. If something breaks during time out of office hours, then it is my responsibility to take care of it. I do, however, get paid quite a nice extra sum just for being on-call.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#59

Post by jader201 »

stavros wrote: post #43
spacemadness wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I don’t find point 1 to be necessary at all. Points 2 and 3 are vital, however. As long as I cut work off at the end of the day, I’m fine.

I agree with you. I continue sitting in my home office after I stop work, and I don't feel tempted to check in at all. #2 and #3 are paramount to me, though.

I believe there's still a mental separation you get from having separate physical spaces for work life and personal life.

E.g. there are times that I do break the rule (very rarely) and get on my work computer (e.g. download work documents for tax prep), and part of me feels like I'm back at work.

If you've not tried it before, it may be hard to relate or recognize the difference.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#60

Post by lo_zamoyski »

Indeed. Work fills the time allotted to it. If you know (even subconsciously) that you can take work home with you, it becomes easier to give yourself permission to dilly-dally during work hours. And it becomes easier for everyone to dilly-dally at work during work hours and in such a way that they feel less guilty disrupting others because, hey, you can just work later just like I can, right?

This is especially true when you are young and single. Some people have families and they do not have the time to drag out their tasks until the late hours of the night because of the severe consequences of neglecting their other responsibilities. Young people are also often under the delusion that only the moment exists, and that they will live forever and stay young forever. Nope, you only ever get older and you will be old sooner than you realize. And then you'll be leaving annoying comments like this one in the comment section.

But even single people should be able to appreciate how stretching things out means you can do less with your time. It's not like you fill those in-between moments with valuable activity. You usually procrastinate doing worthless things. Besides, task switching isn't free. You have to build up context which allows sustained deep work to take place.

We've lost the culture of maturity and seriousness. FOMO is a symptom of that. Self-promotion and social media are a symptom of that. We prefer engaging in shallow put-ons instead of being adults.

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