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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

#201

Post by Obscurity4340 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #130
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…

This isn't some Indian specific thing. Private equity is destroying US infrastructure to make a quick buck. It's happening in almost every sector of the economy you can imagine. I'm not exaggerating when I say that PE firms are buying up nursing homes, transfering ownership of the land and building off into a separate entity, and have that entity charge the nursing home rent which keeps going up and up. This forces m…

I couldn't breathe reading this. I had no idea it was THIS bad, these private equity firms need to be reined the hell in if not eliminated and legislated against. Make them do something useful to society or tell them to get bent

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

#202

Post by hnlmorg »

euroderf wrote: post #156
KennyBlanken wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't some Indian specific thing. Private equity is destroying US infrastructure to make a quick buck. It's happening in almost every sector of the economy you can imagine. I'm not exaggerating when I say that PE firms are buying up nursing homes, transfering ownership of the land and building off into a separate entity, and have that entity charge the nursing home rent which keeps going up and up. This forces m…

[flagged]

No, this is just what happens when capitalism is treated like a religion and thus never questioned nor given safeguards against abuse.

This is also why Europe leans a lot more towards legislative oversight rather than the libertarian attitude that the market will somehow magically correct itself.

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

#203

Post by sgarland »

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?

If your endpoint is failing, it might be you. If everyone’s endpoint is failing, it’s almost certainly not you.

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

#204

Post by Aachen »

dan-robertson wrote: post #200
Aachen wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so confused that the manager felt the need to say this or that your country would need such a right for you to have that right (because unless it's in your work contract, you've not agreed to work when you're not working) Two questions: assuming you have fixed hours, does anyone (colleagues, direct supervisor, big boss) expect you to see messages or emails outside of your working hours? Second question: what cult…

The upside to not including such a thing seems pretty low. Maybe people save a few seconds not reading it? The downside seems quite high if you actually want people to understand your expectations about working hours. The signature may not mean much to someone who has been working for a long time but it could matter more for someone who is just starting their first job, or who has come from a quite different working…

I don't understand the first paragraph, what does "such a thing" refer to?

As for the second, yes that seems like a given. We send each other messages day and night because of that, but nobody expects a response outside of the recipient's working times

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

#205

Post by Xylakant »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #188
dukeyukey wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A sufficiently large overtime/weekend bonus will prevent that easily. I've had quite a few conversations both internally and with customers that started with "we need that by monday" and went via "we can do that, but it will cost X extra" to "well, i guess wednesday is fine, too." Mandatory weekend work is an extremely rare occurence here, I can count all occurences in the last five years on one hand and still have fingers to spare.

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

#206

Post by technothrasher »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #183
Propelloni wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

I sometimes want to send my employees emails over the weekend as I think of something and don't want to forget. But there are certain employees that I know will immediately act on the email, which I actually don't want. So I end up emailing myself and then forwarding them the email on Monday morning.

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

#207

Post by chgs »

sokoloff wrote: post #185
dopylitty wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

My first 24/7 role was

Mon Tue Fri Sat Sun Wed Thu on earlies

Then repeated on lates

Then a week of nights Monday through Sunday

Then a week off

I believe it’s changed now as they don’t like 7x12 hour night shifts in a row. Personally I preferred to deal with the “jet lag” once every 6 weeks and be done with it.

Those shifts tended to be fairly quiet with about 4-5 hours of breaks (unless something went really wrong)

You can staff a 24/7 shift with 5 people, but you really need 6 once you factor in holiday, illness, training etc.

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

#208

Post by chgs »

Ekaros wrote: post #162
dopylitty wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In Finland companies pay for on-call support time. That is you get extra pay to be available in 15 minutes or whatever timeframe agreed. And really that sort of commitment should not be free.

I used to have such an arrangement, but that was far more stressful.

I’m far happier with the “call me and If I’m able to I’ll answer” approach. I’ve had 2 call outs in 4 years, at a 4 hour cost a piece, both sorted with in 20 minutes.

By charging that 4 hour fee it means the person making the call has to justify it.

If I’m in an offical “on call” situation that limits me - can’t go to cinema, can’t go underground or on a plane, can’t got to the country, because I have a contractual agreement to be on call. Forget that.

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

#209

Post by chgs »

Yodel0914 wrote: post #135
yawaramin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily, employees in other parts of the world are in different time zones and their business hours can easily cover our off hours.

A lot of prod support can't be done remotely, for practical (need access to this physical environment) or security reasons.

In which case you need 24/7 shifts on site. If you can fix a problem remotely from your home then someone can do it in Sydney.

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

#210

Post by zmgsabst »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #186
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 empl…

I always like analogies, eg:

Skimping on feed because the penned milk cattle have to take it.

I would actually appreciate if our systems were coherently sociopathic rather than chaotic due to individual personality faults. At least then, conditions “on the farm” might make sense rather than look like an expression of mental illness and unchecked antipathy.

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