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Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

reuters.com

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Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#181

Post by watwut »

silisili wrote: post #147
KoolKat23 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather not work on the weekend, even for an overtime rate. Thanks.

That's the benefit of working on a small team/startup. Whoever smelt it dealt it kind of situation. Basically, at first at least, whoever's application is erroring is getting a call when it breaks. It sounds bad, but it encourages everyone to write more fault tolerant code. Way moreso then a random bigcorp with an on call team.

Unless of course the "guilty" is not immediately apparent.

If it happens frequently, the guilty is the process, team lead or whoever runs the things.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#182

Post by aqme28 »

silisili wrote: post #147
KoolKat23 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather not work on the weekend, even for an overtime rate. Thanks.

That's the benefit of working on a small team/startup. Whoever smelt it dealt it kind of situation. Basically, at first at least, whoever's application is erroring is getting a call when it breaks. It sounds bad, but it encourages everyone to write more fault tolerant code. Way moreso then a random bigcorp with an on call team.

This is how you end up in situations where no one wants to work on the team that actually needs the most help

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#183

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

Propelloni wrote: post #171
red_admiral wrote: post #140

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…

Does the manager also get weekend-rate overtime if she sends out e-mails on the weekend? I mean, she _is_ working! Sounds like an incentive mismatch here. Or is this just a protection of workers on a tariff and does not cover "exempt" employees, ie. most IT people.

Weekend work etc. needs to be approved by a person's manager, so weekend-work without approval would in practice not be compensated (it's possible that technically they should compensate it then fire you for insubordination).

The hurdles for "exempt" are way higher than in the US.

I doubt it is actually done much in practice, although an employee who wants to be left alone on the weekend certainly could. I would also expect that guidance of "don't read your e-mail outside of working hours" would be sufficient to be able to send e-mail to employees at any day or hour without triggering overtime etc.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#184

Post by dullcrisp »

potamic wrote: post #176
majewsky wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, to be more specific, you don't like your company's implementation of their idea. We have the same setup in my org, but we get to define alerts ourselves. All our own alerts are built so that they don't go off if the underlying infra is borked, and only if there's something we can actually do on our level. We are being kept honest because there is a big kerfuffle when an incident is reported by customers first (in…

What metrics do you alert on? How do you distinguish between error due to faulty database client vs error due to database disk failure?

Define SLOs based on what can realistically be achieved with underlying infrastructure, only alert if those SLOs are breached?

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#185

Post by sokoloff »

dopylitty wrote: post #47
Aurornis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

> You want your app supported 24x7 then pay for three shifts.

24/7 is typically covered with 5 shifts (3 weekday and 2 weekend).

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#186

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

steelframe wrote: post #39

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…

He's right, and I think we're seeing this done across the industry (especially FAANG).

However, just because employees "have to take it" doesn't mean that it's better for the company to have employees that actively hate it and are just staying because of a lack of alternatives. Especially in a field where work output and especially quality is hard to measure, and the success of many companies hinged on motivated employees...

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#187

Post by potamic »

abhinai wrote: post #117
crossroadsguy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am from India and this is very common thing from Indian managers whether they are in India or working abroad (and I am sure this is not limited to India but since I am from there I am sharing this example). It's just a thing. I often am a pariah at workplace when it comes to views on work-life balance. So I have learnt to never get into discussions about it and just shut up and keep my head down while never giving…

I've had Indian managers and never experienced this. You're probably extrapolating from a small sample size which may all be from same company / industry.

Most people who have worked both in the west as well as in the country will say there is a stark difference in the superior-subordinate dynamic between these two places. Concepts of professional respect, upward feedback and personal boundaries are less evolved here. It's a byproduct of the region's culture which is inherently hierarchical. While there are places which actively eschew traditional ways, especially those that are part of global orgranizations, given the size of the industry there are many more where a strong hierarchy and subordination is unfortunately the norm.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#188

Post by KoolKat23 »

dukeyukey wrote: post #170
KoolKat23 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather not work on the weekend, even for an overtime rate. Thanks.

That's fine, but I'd be willing to. Always a chance I'm I'm far from a laptop or even signal, but if I'm having a quiet weekend and something comes up, some overtime sounds great.

I understand. Problem is this kind of thing is a race to the bottom.

Because of the silly ways humans work (mostly due to imperfect information), I'd feel obliged and will agree to it, despite not wanting to (concerns I will automatically be perceived as a lesser employee).

And then we're all working weekends.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#189

Post by Draiken »

ralferoo wrote: post #166

I feel bad for people in this situation, but at the same time I think it's kind of strange to allow yourself to be in this situation. Personally, I maintain a very strict separation between work devices and personal. Work email, slack, and whatever else I need for work lives on my work devices only. Personal email, whatsapp, etc live on my personal devices only. Most of the companies I've worked at add a remote wipe…

I don't think it's always an explicit choice. I joined a company and despite asking many questions to try and avoid weird policies that could affect work-life balance, after joining I discovered they had certain types of code that had to be shipped outside of their client's business hours. Due to timezone differences, that meant extremely early or late hours for me.

I like the company but absolutely hate this. However I can't just leave because of this. Even if I wanted to, finding a new job is not an easy task and it's exhausting.

This is why laws are important. You don't have to figure this out for every company you interview. If they do it, it's illegal. You can change your default to a reasonable expectation.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#190

Post by majewsky »

potamic wrote: post #176
majewsky wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, to be more specific, you don't like your company's implementation of their idea. We have the same setup in my org, but we get to define alerts ourselves. All our own alerts are built so that they don't go off if the underlying infra is borked, and only if there's something we can actually do on our level. We are being kept honest because there is a big kerfuffle when an incident is reported by customers first (in…

What metrics do you alert on? How do you distinguish between error due to faulty database client vs error due to database disk failure?

Taking my managed container image registry service as an example.

- The only critical alert that can actually page people is if the blackbox test fails. Every 30 seconds, it downloads a test image and if the contents don't match the expectation, an alert is raised (with some delay).

- Warning alerts are mostly for any errors being returned from background tasks, but these are only monitored during business hours.

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