Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 449 posts

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

#391

Post by seoulmetro »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #173
ludston wrote: post #60

My personal experience is that Australia doesn't have a huge problem with this generally. But mileage may vary. If it were a huge problem then vested interests would lobby fiercely against the law, and it seemed to pass without much challenge or comment from the public here. This law might seem like a big deal if you're working in a place without labour protection laws, and therefore you're used to constant abuse fro…

My personal experience differs quite significantly. I burnt out severely at two different companies. Both issues were directly attributable to management failing to acknowledge or deal with systemic issues, which resulted in huge amounts of overtime and callouts. All with zero compensation, because I was a salaried employee. One company had a problem with continuing to promise the world to clients, but not setting re…

Your entire comment just speaks about poor practices, not about abuse of outside hours.

There is never going to be a law that restricts wasted productivity or bad decisions.

Most workers in Australia don't even have ways to remote in. The fact that you do have that is probably reason to believe it's part of your role. It isn't quite rocket science to think that someone who controls releases can be on call, the same way someone who works in a hospital can be on call.

Your personal experience sucks but it sounds like part of the role, most of Australia doesn't have issues with this.

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

#392

Post by iforgotpassword »

mulmen wrote: post #299
iforgotpassword wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The details really matter here. I won’t assume you or GP were racially motivated but “just sucks” can easily be code for “wrong race/culture”. “Some nudges” is a red flag to me, regardless of race. You think you communicated a message but aren’t sure if it was understood. That’s your responsibility as the messenger, not theirs as the unknowing recipient.

> “Some nudges” is a red flag to me, regardless of race. You think you communicated a message but aren’t sure if it was understood.

Hence the "gave a very clear speech" part. If you don't get it at that point then I don't care if you're just stupid or it's cultural differences, at some point you have to adapt to the environment you work in. And no, there were no language barriers involved.

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

#393

Post by poincaredisk »

madeofpalk wrote: post #286
PlunderBunny wrote: post #24

Maybe 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.

What's wrong with sending an email out of office hours? I don't understand the sentiment, even though I've seen some people express it. Nobody's gonna read that email until Monday anyway - or at least shouldn't.

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

#394

Post by ecshafer »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #346
warbeforepeace wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for FAANG and have had one page outside of working hours over that last 12 months. I do not respond to emails on weekends or evenings. I do not turn my work laptop on during vacation at all. I leave at home in a safe.

I envy you. I've been on-call numerous times just this month and got paged almost daily, many of them between 10pm and 6am, 2am on average. Our on-call duty is basically house arrest for a week. The worst part is 90% of the pages are not real issues or I can't even do anything about them other than wait for them to self-resolve. It drives me insane and because it's FAANG, it's nearly impossible to get this changed. I…

My old company we had rotating on call shifts that was about one week a month. I got paged an average of 2 times a night because of some random thing breaking or some error. My current company, we get a week on call about every month and a half, either primary or secondary. But I have been paged I think 2 times in 3 years. Its a world of difference having a stable application and well done page rules.

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

#395

Post by poincaredisk »

billybuckwheat wrote: post #3

I don't live or work in any of those places, but I've been ignoring work emails and calls after hours for a long time. Helps that 1) I don't have a work phone, 2) apps that my company uses on my personal phone, and 3) never log into the company network or services on my own laptop. In the few instances when I was called out about it, I asked Could the message/call have waited until the following morning/Monday? The a…

I don't get it. How could they even expect you to read work emails outside of work hours? Especially since you don't have a company phone. Reading company emails on a private phone sounds like a huge security breach, and may not even be legal.

And if anyone from work (who is not also my friend asking to hang up) calls me on my private phone, I'm reporting them.

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

#397

Post by guywithahat »

nicbou wrote: post #165

This is already the case in Germany. It also applies to vacation and sick days. Above all, it's deeply ingrained in German culture, so that no one expects to reach you outside of your working hours. 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.

To be fair, I think it’s pretty well ingrained in most western cultures.

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

#398

Post by fragmede »

poincaredisk wrote: post #393
madeofpalk wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's wrong with sending an email out of office hours? I don't understand the sentiment, even though I've seen some people express it. Nobody's gonna read that email until Monday anyway - or at least shouldn't.

it's the "at least shouldn't" that's what's wrong. if your director sends an email late Friday night and your amalgamation of devices and nervous habits ends up seeing it before 9am Monday, it's going to sit in your brain, messing up your off-work hours. so "send at 9am" is just being courteous these days.

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

#399

Post by BLKNSLVR »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #316
IshKebab wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's also a lot more work for new teachers since they can't reuse lesson plans. I think it's probably quite possible after a few years to be a good teacher and also not spend all your free time marking and preparing lesson plans... but it's still hard work and underpaid. I'll stick with my overpaid and stress free programming job, thanks!

A lot of assignments can be partially machine graded, even if they think they can’t be. Teachers are usually luddites though…

Not necessarily luddites, but lack having a development team available for potential streamlining. Also the Government Department not setting the industry up to allow such streamlining (with a strong asterisk noting that such streamlining may actually be worse for learning outcomes, no matter how much better it would be for freeing up a teacher's time).

This person actually uses ChatGPT to generate report comments "around" the core themes that need to be pointed out in the report. She's said that it's saved a lot of time that would be spent on the "fluff" that wraps around the central message. I think this is one of the perfect use cases for an LLM; "fluff" generation, not the crucial message.

"Machine grading" would be something that the "machine" would have to be tuned for, which is Government Department level jurisdiction, and pretty well outside the skill set of teachers in general (I would think).

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

#400

Post by BLKNSLVR »

coldpie wrote: post #257
Yodel0914 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's amazing, but all-too rare. I think teachers have a very tough job, and many (most?) of them are not very good it at. My kids have had teachers who constantly shift assignment due dates because they're not ready, half-arse their lesson planning and tell the kids to do the rest at home, and are generally unable to manage a classroom.

> That's amazing, but all-too rare. No, it's abusive and indicative of a failing system. We should not be celebrating overwork. If a system needs its workers to be doing double- or triple-time to function at the desired level, then the system is not working well and is on its way to failure.

I actually think it's both.

She would spend that amount of time anyway, because "it's what she does".

It would be possible to achieve 90% of her results with maybe 70% of the time and effort that she puts in. But even at 70% it still would run into non-trivial "enforced overtime".

Post reply on HN