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When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

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Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#81

Post by jtode »

jader201 wrote: post #6

I’ve been working from home 100% for going on 10 years. I’ve had a mix of experiences re: disconnecting from work, and three things that I believe are key: 1. Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door. Don’t go in that room except when you’re working. If you work from a laptop, (mostly) never take it out of that room. Obviously some don’t have this luxury, but if you do and you’re not doing this, I highly su…

The not having work on my personal phone was a big gamechanger for me as well, even before I worked from home. Not sure when or why I made the decision but very glad I did.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#83

Post by nobsthrow »

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…

You are a 2nd-year CS student.* You have never worked as an engineer. You do not understand what the real world is like. Please stop waxing about shit you don't know a la /r/cscareerquestions.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36344172

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#84

Post by bbbobbb »

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #48
lumost wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly surprised that more companies haven't invested in broader vacation policies. My experience has been that the constant "on" state wears you down. The only way to get to "off" is to be OOTO officially for a week+. Add in parental responsibilities and you really don't have any headspace for yourself. Would love to have 5-8 weeks per year, that would let me take at least 1 week's worth of time per quarter to…

>Add in parental responsibilities Out of curiosity, how many of your coworkers have kids? I have 3, and I've always found it a bit ominous that even when I'm on large teams (8+) I'm typically still the only person with kids. So far: 1. job 1, team of 8, only 1 other IC had kids 2. job 2, team of 10, nobody else had kids 3. current job, team of 8, nobody else has kids. If you expand it to the suborganization we're in,…

Fertility is definitely not below replacement rate. Maybe in western countries.

You find it hard to say it's unfair but you seem to hint to it. I don't think it is in the slightest. Also you sound like a software developer from the US so you likely can afford to work say 80% and "recoup" some of that free time.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#85

Post by commandlinefan »

ghaff wrote: post #18
ttul wrote: post #7

In the 1990s, even as a software developer, I never answered emails after working hours. Why? Because we didn’t have access to the office mail server outside the office. It was physically impossible to work from home. Add to this the fact that I didn’t have a cell phone or a pager, so when I left the office, nobody could get in touch with me even if they wanted to. On reflection, the separation of home and work was s…

There's a flip side to that though. It also meant that, when I was "in the office," I pretty much needed to be IN THE OFFICE. I couldn't really disappear during the workday on a regular workday by going for a walk or being available at home for this that or the other thing without making specific arrangements. I had the flexibility to do that from time to time but it wasn't a casual I'll be in my home office while th…

> when I was "in the office," I pretty much needed to be IN THE OFFICE

Well, we're getting back to that anyway... they're pretty much demanding that we all drive 45 minutes to sit at a hoteling spot that we reserved ahead of time in a noisy open office so that we can get on zoom calls with our remote coworkers all day (and be asked to "please mute because your background noise is very distracting") - and then drive home and still be available "after hours".

Glad I spent years of my life getting an advanced degree for this, I guess.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#86

Post by distcs »

nobsthrow wrote: post #83
NoahECampbell wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are a 2nd-year CS student.* You have never worked as an engineer. You do not understand what the real world is like. Please stop waxing about shit you don't know a la /r/cscareerquestions. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36344172

They may be 2nd year CS student but the world they experience is not any less real than ours who have been in the industry for 10-20 years.

You may disagree with them and that's fine. There is a sort of generation gap obviously and our opinions would differ from theirs. That's fine too.

But what is really unacceptable to me is how you dismiss their viewpoint because they are a 2nd-year CS student! What if they were not a 2nd-year CS student and still believed the same things?

Please be better than this. Comments like yours make these threads a terrible reading experience!

Also http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

> Saying that an author lacks the authority to write about a topic is a variant of ad hominem—and a particularly useless sort, because good ideas often come from outsiders. The question is whether the author is correct or not. If his lack of authority caused him to make mistakes, point those out. And if it didn't, it's not a problem.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#88

Post by doublerabbit »

donatj wrote: post #78
doublerabbit wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprise works different hours. If I need to relay something important and where email could cause broken communication, I need to work after hours. East Coast in five hours behind of me. West Coast is eight. If we have the regulators chasing us upon an urgent thing you need to be have the information ready for the next day. Unfortunately the whole "don't email after work" can only be applied to roles where staff a…

Huh, so the whole timezone thing might put me at a huge advantage working in the Midwest? We have people on the east and west coast but I'm at most 2 hours off from them.

Probably. I'm in the UK. The midwestern folk have always been the most pleasant to talk too.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#89

Post by swader999 »

jader201 wrote: post #6

I’ve been working from home 100% for going on 10 years. I’ve had a mix of experiences re: disconnecting from work, and three things that I believe are key: 1. Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door. Don’t go in that room except when you’re working. If you work from a laptop, (mostly) never take it out of that room. Obviously some don’t have this luxury, but if you do and you’re not doing this, I highly su…

If I didn't have to travel, I'd go for a desktop and it works better for the separation aspects too.

Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

#90

Post by pmontra »

> But what would you do when you had work emails?

This is probably unfair because I'm self employed but:

My customers are on Slack so I don't have much mails going on with them. I have Slack on my laptop and my tablet but I didn't install it on my phone. They know that if I'm offline on Slack they can whatsapp me or call me. That rarely happens, especially the phone call. Not every year.

I check my mail a few times per day. It's a very long time since I disabled push notifications of new mail message. Nearly all of them would be for automatic notifications of events.

This means that when I'm not easily reachable if I'm not working unless my customers really want to contact me. Apparently this doesn't bother them. I've been going on like this for at least 10 years. I wonder what we used before slack, maybe Skype: I remember many more Skype chats and calls. Meet and Slack replaced nearly all of them. Actually Skype screen sharing is better than theirs: it can be zoomed and gets closer to be full screen.

Finally, I don't have anybody to compete with inside my company, because my company it's me.

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