161–170 of 449 posts
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Some people work on weekends even in Germany. Saturday is normal workday according German law. It’s more or less personal preference. At least one has a choice.
some people work at night and on sunday ... i didn't know that means i'm not allowed to sleep. thanks for letting me know.
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> "the crud app you support fell over" is not an emergency. I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed to learn that situations impacting business-critical operations would be considered emergencies. The assumption that Australia just outlawed the concept of having an on-call rotation is not supported by the article. The article says requiring an employee to be on-call 24/7 for general purposes would indeed…
> But completely eliminating planned on-call rotations is not part of the goal. It certainly should be. You want your app supported 24x7 then pay for three shifts. If the government won’t make it a law then IT workers can make it a demand when they unionize.
I've dabbled in management a few times in my career. This meant attending manager-only meetings and trainings. I'll never forget one time when a manager in a focus group said something along the lines of, "The tech sector is going through a rough patch, so we can turn the screws on our employees and they'll have to take it because they will have a hard time trying to find a job somewhere else." This is at a company w…
I help people settle in Germany, and it's one of the main cultural aspects I cover. The other is how normal it is to take sick days.
I usually only have a couple of exceptions to this policy - I usually have my personal gmail logged in at work, and occasionally for very specific reasons, I might temporarily install "work" apps on my personal phone, for instance when I want to leave work early to catch a train, but need to be in a work meeting later in the day, or to stay in contact with colleagues when out at a conference, etc. These apps get removed again when I no longer need them.
When I leave work, the work devices get switched off. In most cases, I leave the work devices at work, including laptops and phones, assuming I have somewhere secure to leave them at work. Almost every company I've worked at, I've had a lockable chest of drawers, so I just put things in there. In the ones without, the laptop stays on the desk plugged in, and I might take the phone home even though it's switched off.
I've almost never been asked why I haven't seen or replied to an out-of-hours communication. On those few occasions, I've just said "All my work devices were switched off for the weekend" and there's been nothing further said. In the very few cases where I was expected to be on call, it was previously agreed and so I took the necessary devices home.
Obviously, things changed a lot with the shift to remote working during and after COVID, but I still maintained the same boundaries. Even now I have my own company, I have separate computer, desks and even chairs for work and personal use. Slack and work related e-mail is only on the work devices. If I want to do some work over the weekend (which feels acceptable now it's for my benefit), I physically sit in a different half of the office to do that.
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Like most things, there's a gaping chasm of variance between teachers that are phoning it in and teachers that want to engage their students in learning. I know a teacher who leaves for work at 6:30am, gets home after 5:30pm most nights, cooks dinner for the family, and spends the rest of her evening marking work and preparing lesson plans for the next few days. Then there's preparing reports, which is like a 6-week…
When you say preparing lesson plans, is that like printing out worksheets or is it literally planning out what the lesson is going to be? I'm not a teacher so am obviously missing context, but I don't understand how this part isn't standardised for every teacher following the same curriculum. It would be like asking each individual teacher to write a new textbook every year.
A teacher needs to respond to the dynamics in a large group of non adults, every day, every minute. You can’t plan that out in advance. Sure, experience helps to make the planning easier and to respond to situations you’ve seen before, but still, every day is different, and responding to the challenges in the last lesson requires a plan.
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some people work at night and on sunday ... i didn't know that means i'm not allowed to sleep. thanks for letting me know.
You’re welcome! You should read your work contract and/or Betriebsvereinbarung regarding work on weekends. It’s clearly defined.
I like the Swiss implementation of this. A manager _can_ contact an employee on a Sunday, but then the employee is immediately on weekend-rate overtime even if they just got an email with "deal with this next week". So, many companies have systems that hold back e-mail sent outside of working hours until the next working day unless specially authorised and costed. Never underestimate an economics-based solution to a…
I'd rather not work on the weekend, even for an overtime rate. Thanks.
I like the Swiss implementation of this. A manager _can_ contact an employee on a Sunday, but then the employee is immediately on weekend-rate overtime even if they just got an email with "deal with this next week". So, many companies have systems that hold back e-mail sent outside of working hours until the next working day unless specially authorised and costed. Never underestimate an economics-based solution to a…
I'd rather not work on the weekend, even for an overtime rate. Thanks.