361–370 of 449 posts
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Probably the US - it's scary over there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
Our work culture is a strong part of why the US is so economically dominant. Reap what you sow “I work to live not live to work” crowd. Your destiny is to be further economically colonized by the “I live to work” crowd.
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…
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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.
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.
Obviously if you do have a 50-70 workweek your job IS your life. Your co workers are your best friends and it doesn't matter if they call you up in the middle of the night. I have observed that in Workaholic cultures people spend a lot of time socialising with co-workers and less time on actually working.
I prefer the Dutch style of "working to live". Even if that means that you have to bring your own food and eat it behind a laptop. You can socialise at home.
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…
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> This law reduces the extent to which flexible employees can add (and extract, via hight salary!) value, and the extent to which customers receive timely service. Not at all. It means that if they want employees to be on call they have to pay for it.
This is nearly always a myth. On call has a huge precedent, it's not tech, it's the health sector. "Paid" on call is already defined as the active portion where you're responding to a page, not the passive portion where you're carrying the pager. Some countries have rules around time to respond within the definition of active vs passive, but most do not and the carrying the pager isn't compensated at all. Even with t…
This practice will only continue as long as people accept it.
dammit, i thought aussies were more freedom loving than even usians. i have met and interacted with some of them, and have read a good amount about them, too. did aussies not have this right, earlier? I don't know if it should even be called a right, because it seems obvious. to me, it sound more like an attack by employers on employees, to say they cannot do such a thing - before this so-called "right" was ”given".…
Employment contracts here usually state that you work X hours a week, likely 38 or less unless your union did a bad job, and can only work more if the hours are "reasonable" according to a bunch of criteria. This was previously enough to cut down on most of this kind of nonsense, but has not proven sufficient in the age of smartphones.
maybe the unions need to understand that and incorporate that understanding while negotiating.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our work culture is a strong part of why the US is so economically dominant. Reap what you sow “I work to live not live to work” crowd. Your destiny is to be further economically colonized by the “I live to work” crowd.
This strike me as a very naive view of the world.
Yeah it sucks to have a bad wlb work culture, but the alternative is losing what makes America so awesome.