Are people here treating emails like IM's?
An email is inherently asynchronous. Why would I expect a response to an email before working hours? When did people start confusing them with synchronous communication?
Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
281–290 of 449 posts
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
i dont see how that is separated from the underlying infra. If the network/server/some dependency goes down, the blackbox test will fail and you'll get paged.
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#283> But the Australian Industry Group, an employer group, says ambiguity about how the rule applies will create confusion for bosses and workers. Jobs will become less flexible and in doing so slow the economy, it added.
Whenever I encounter someone professionally who can't deal with a little ambiguity about when it's appropriate to interrupt someone; I feel like I'm working with a child trapped in an adult's body.
"Children," who don't have the maturity to understand this ambiguity, shouldn't be managers.
I also find that rules like this come into play because some people (cough, children stuck in adult bodies, cough) just refuse to self-regulate. It takes maturity to think through if an out-of-hours contact is appropriate; these kinds of rules only come about because of widespread immaturity in management roles.
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Early on in my career when I was first put into the position of hiring both employees and contractors, a guy I was working with said "We can ask him for a better price and promise to give him a better deal on the next one", and I said "but we won't have any more work after this one" and he said "yeah I know but we can just tell him that to get a better price". It was one of the first times I realised that people are…
Being a jerk extends all around. As a manager I’ve had two employees tell HR that I was racist. The evidence? One I fired for performance, the other I had on a performance improvement plan. Mind you I had other minorities on my team in parallel that had no performance issues and strangely enough did not say I was a racist. Also one time the HR guy (who also doubled as office manager) ran a large scheme where he claim…
No idea why you're being down voted. I've had the very same experience once. Employee just sucked, after some nudges that went either ignored or just unnoticed I gave a very clear speech on where they're standing. Three months later I got him fired. He went to HR and claimed I was racist, and threatened with a lawyer. This really stressed me out for a good while, this was dragging along for weeks, with ugly mails and calls.
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
This does not stop an employer from potentially disciplining or firing you. Laws do, because they bind. Implicit contracts and hope are not a strategy, with regards to worker rights and protections.
Wait, can an employer fire you even if you didn't make a fault? What country are you in?
Probably the US - it's scary over there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#286Maybe we should think of these things as employment flags? There's no right-to-disconnect in my country, but sometime this year my boss started putting "I don’t expect a response to this email outside of your normal working hours." on the end of his email signature. I might not be earning FAANG money, but it's just another sign I'm working for a 'good' company.
Your boss is telling on themselves, admitting that they do expect you to work outside of normal working hours, even if to just read the email.
Sending that email out of office hours itself is a red flag.
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So, hiding true intentions and needs is better? No, it is illegal. Your proposed law would have the opposite effect of the law that passed: every company would include this in their employment contract and would have legal protections to make employees work overtime. In addition, there are exceptions: > To cater for emergencies and jobs with irregular hours, the rule still allows employers to contact their workers,…
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It never ceases to amaze me that people argue against things that are good for them.
You remain free to answer calls after hours. You simply cannot be fired or reprimanded for not being at your employers beck and call after hours *if you choose not to be*.
Even in situations where after hours calls require pay to immediately start, you remain free to negotiate with your employer how that works. If anything, creating such regulation *increases your freedoms*.
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is everything hourly there? Would this work with salaried employees that don't log hours? Or maybe everyone does? A running joke in my first company out of school was "can't wait to see that overtime check!" whenever we saw someone working after 5. The implication is no one ever gets overtime as a salaried employee.
I don't think true US-like "salaried contracts" exist at all in EU. Speaking as a Polish contractor. There might be fixed-price short-term project-based contracts but it has nothing to do with employment and definitely it's not a monthly/yearly thing without any hour limit. At best you have something like "minimum X hours per week" but there's always "up to Y" and while those hours are technically "preordered" upfron…
Heh. At a $SOME_PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER, they literally disabled the option to log overtime in the portal, because workers were "getting confused", and the official policy was "no overtime".
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
(replying to myself...) One might accept this crap as inevitable if we were talking about a consumer market, like for barbeque grills or dog food or some such. But railroads? We're talking key infra. So, which totalitarian dictatorships are behind this wrecking of America's railroads ? Russia? China? Norfolk Southern (et al.) ?
Why do you find it so hard to believe that this isn’t just a result of greed? It’s not like those who are bleeding that infra dry are consumers of the service itself. And couple that with a complete lack of regulation, it means they can continue to bleed the service with literally no consequences for their actions. This show covers the railroad problem pretty well: https://youtu.be/AJ2keSJzYyY?si=5k2vYnONHcWC6aeP …bu…
Oh, I believe that it's purely about greed. But if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
#290Interpreting that headline literally ...
If person A is working late (maybe they started their day late, or they work from a different timezone) and send a memo during off hours of Person B ... the memo can be "ignored" by Person B even when they come back to work next day?
Same for all off hours when person B is on leave - planned or otherwise?