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 where most of the employees are on work visas, so losing their job can very rapidly escalate into having to leave the country in short order.
After I picked my jaw up off the floor I realized I simply lacked the scruples I'd need to be "one of them." I also started looking into every legal protection I had available to me in my jurisdiction.
I know not every manager is like that. I'd like to think I wasn't. But there are enough of them that think that way that legal protections often need to be there.
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 actively being jerks in business negotiations.
Another time was when I put my prices up to $160/hour from $80/hour after I realised I wasn't making any money (in fact by my calculations I was losing $3/hour for every hour my staff worked).
I didn't lose a single customer. They all just said "oh, right, well, okay when will you have it done?".
The same guys who had been crying poor a couple of months prior about how they "just didn't have the budget" were now paying double the rate and they could totally afford it.
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 claimed employees were expensing things, he did it on their behalf and got reimbursed. I found this out after the fact where I was asked if I ever asked him to order laptops or ran up huge Uber bills.
Context matters. When I walk into a high-end store and see a shirt on sale for $X, I assume that I need to pay $X to get the shirt. If I see a shirt at a flea-market priced at $Y, I assume I can get the shirt for some percentage off by just bargaining. The sellers are also aware of this context and, presumably, set their prices accordingly. The same thing regularly happens in business. For most services, people understand that pricing is not fixed and act accordingly. They are not (necessarily) jerks, they are just reacting to the context they are operating in.
you create such a great linkedin post on this story, you will get quite good traffic. But i think the guy who told you to lie is not wrong. hear me out.
He tried to save money. he didnt steal or do anything but. am not saying what he did was right, but it was not harmful or wrong. he should have framed the sentence better so it would make the contractor feel that he was not being promised anything.
he may have had his own reasons. its how life works.
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 in to any manager's pressure and still trying to maintain calm and composure avoiding direct conflict. It's like walking on egg shells.
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 management of the nursing home to find ways to cut expenses until there's nothing left to cut except stuff directly related to resident care, safety, etc. Families see the writing on the wall and move their relatives out which accelerates the demise of the nursing home and it has to shut down (or is shut down, by the county/state.) Then the PE firm bulldozes the building and sells the property (which is what they really wanted.)
The US suffered a massive toxic fire in Ohio that destroyed a big chunk of the town and left a huge area heavily poisoned because a private equity firm bought the railroad and was squeezing it for every penny, and despite plenty of warnings by union officials and experts, the FRA did nothing and then...boom. Wheel bearing seized, train derailed, town polluted by hundreds of thousands of pounds of incredibly toxic chemicals like vinyl chloride.
- insanely strict rules about when engineers can request time off even for family medical emergencies, and sick days (so you have train engineers and other staff working while sick as dogs. Totally safe! Really stressed out employees, too - and stress means mistakes.) RR unions tried to strike twice. First congress and then and Biden bitch-slapped them back to work with a "compromise" that was still oppressive as hell because the economic disruption from the trains not running was more important. All because the railroads want to cut the number of employees down as low as possible so there aren't available engineers to replace sick ones, and they don't want delays while replacement engineers head out to trains that had to be left somewhere because the engineer was sick.
- dramatically reducing the time rolling stock maintenance crews have to inspect a car for problems - from three minutes to a minute and a half. Not only does this save labor, it means those maintenance crews don't find as much stuff wrong which takes a car out of service and costs money for the repair...woo, saving more money!
- reducing the number of employees per train; I believe it's currently two, and they're trying to push the FRA into allowing them to run one employee per train.
- increasing train lengths to reduce labor costs by moving more cars per people they have to pay. This increases the chances of derailments, and also causes other problems, like slower brake response time (the longer the train, the longer it takes for a pressure reduction in the brake line to make it to the end of the train, though I believe some end-of-train devices can be set up to remotely release brake pressure.)
- reducing track crews and time allocated to track maintenance so the tracks are more available and maintenance costs are lowered.
Keep in mind locomotive engineers are paid a median wage of $35/hour with a 10/90th percentile spread of $28/$44. These aren't enormous sums of money they're saving by going to one person on the train, particularly since it will be a lower-paid employee who is removed.
The crash was caused by overheating bearings which caused a wheelset to seize and derail the train.
Hilariously, the EPA, the railway, and "independent scientists" all declared the area safe but EPA employees visiting the sites became sick in ways similar to how residents were being affected.
The railroad companies responded to public and congressional furor by saying they'd self-regulate (!) better, and join a program similar to the FAA's close-call incident reporting system. Only one railroad has joined that system, and all but one raiload saw an increase in derailments in the following year.
The PE firms know their maintenance and staffing cuts are causing increasing problems and will destroy the railroad companies. They don't care. They're milking the railroad companies for every dime they can squeeze, leaving them in tatters from all the deferred maintenance and repairs. These companies are responsible for moving massive amounts of cargo around the country, and when they fall apart, it will be a national crisis, and the federal government will have to step in and bail the companies out because they're 'Too Big To Fail.' And the PE firms that own trucking companies will see record profits...
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.
I had a similar experience with an HR manager in Australia, boasting about how they'd used a recent downturn to cut individuals' hourly rates by 10% (including many of my friends), while not reducing the charge-out rate to the client. Corporate management (as distinct from small business) selects for people like this.
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...
The thing is that it’s not that important if it hurts the company long term. If the company is big enough, any of those "managers" have plenty of time to make a great career there for several years if not more.
imo, that’s the issue when company’s ownership gets so diluted that nobody have personal interest anymore in the company’s long term viability.
Heck when your company is owned by private equity, even the company itself becomes a line in some excel spreadsheet. And you’d better not get that conditional formatting turn to red.
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.
Not annoying at all. I'm more annoyed by people just letting me keep making the same mistake without saying anything. In fact when I first wrote that something in my brain said maybe it wasn't right, so I looked up the word "scruples" and saw the definition "motivation deriving logically from ethical or moral principles that govern a person's thoughts and actions." I thought maybe that it might be a valid interpretation for the ethical or moral principles to be flawed in that context. What I should have done was look up examples of "lack of scruples" being used in sentences; that would have made it clear that I wasn't using it right.
Ex-manager here as well. I have always been surprised at how many managers will jump at the opportunity to put pressure on employees, even when there is no real benefit to the manager themselves or the organisation.
You pretty much summed up managers that have most of their employees on H1-B in the US. I know multiple managers that offload most of the work to the Asian immigrants on the H1-B visa, have them work 10+ hours a day and know that they can get them to do anything they want, because if they don't, they are scared that they can get fired and have to leave the country. I know multiple friends who silently work on weekends to potentially avoid being fired and leave the country!
Unfortunately the word "company" encompasses hundreds of millions of entities, of enormously different cultures, attitudes, ethics and so on.
Personally, I think behavior does (and likely has to) evolve with size. Unfortunately bigger tends to be worse.
Culture is also primarily a top-down flow. I'd the CEO is a screamer expect screamers all the way down and so on.
Of course there are companies, too many of them, that behave badly. There are too many people who treat other people as nameless, expendable and exploitable. There are also many others, the ones that don't make the juicy comments on reddit, which behave well, treat people as people, and so on.
Treating your work-place as a hostile environment can be emotionally and mentally draining. It can be counter-productive if the environment desires to support you.
Equally, if your environment is hostile then at least be looking elsewhere. Not all companies are created the same so there are likely better options elsewhere (although getting those posts is harder because people tend not to leave.)
Your advice rings true for many companies. But people stay in those places because they believe everywhere is the same. So a more nuanced advice might be to understand the culture and behavior where you work and decide if that's a culture you want to assimilate, and support, long term or not.
For the record, the place where I work has never expected anyone to do emails etc out-of-hours and you'd be laughed at if you suggested people should behave otherwise.
I had a manager relate to me overhearing almost that exact comment made in a manager meeting at a mid-size corp I worked for in 2008. He left in part because of that attitude, and I ultimately did too. It’s egregiously abusive.
Yeah i got a peek at how the sausage gets made at the higher levels and I decided I needed to keep my HH costs down and reach FI(maybe)RE asap. Until that happened I was ultimately a wage slave, and that's how they wanted it, with a gun to my head in the form of rent/mortgage/kids's schooling whatever keeping me desperate to perform for them.
This has nothing to do with being a manager or not, it's just that many people are jerks. I've seen non-managers do something similar when they consider themselves hard to replace. It's unfortunate this is where we have ended up as a society.
In a strong market the management and owners will have to pay more and improve conditions.
Maybe some managers will be faster to exploit things when supply/demand turns in their favour, but pretty quickly the invisible hand of the market would have readjusted anyway.
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 legal problem, a.k.a. "if you really want to ban it, tax it".
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.
Upper management does not need to log working hours and can work unpaid overtime. So, they can easily exchange emails on weekends. But when they involve a regular employee, who has to reach working hours, then it's overtime.
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" upfront, you are supposed to log them.
That being said lots of people still do unpaid overtime, but only because they're afraid about losing the job / care too much. Not because they actually legally have to. There are legal means to defend yourself from that.
Even 'salaried' in the UK means a contract that has a specified number of hours in it. In theory if you work more than that you should be getting either overtime or time in lieu, but in practice that might not always happen depending on your role in the company and the type of company.
I don't get overtime, but I do get time in lieu - I did about four hours extra the week before last doing set up for one of our busiest days of the year, and I'm taking Thursday afternoon off to make it up.
Things like 60 hour work weeks also aren't even legal without signing away your EU Working Time Directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003) rights (which isn't even an option in every EU country). I don't _think_ the post-brexit legislation did away with that, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Differs from country to country. In DE, salaried employees still have a number of hours/week in their contract (usually ~38) and are expected to log overtime and later take time in lieu. Max. permissible work hours per week is 48.
There are a bunch of exceptions for specific jobs.
The working hours, comp+ben etc. are usually determined by collective agreement with unions.
Pay for the same job can vary dramatically depending on which union your employer has a collective agreement with.
I know several people who got 25-30% pay rises just by moving to another part of the company that had an agreement with IG Metall instead of ver.di.
The economic solution again: you want your worker not to have to log hours because they have an important management job and work "as much as necessary"? Sure, pay them at least 125k a year. Anything under that, they must log hours.
>The implication is no one ever gets overtime as a salaried employee.
The flipside is that no one ever gets paid less as a salaried employee either, but most employees are too afraid of getting fired to remember that part. Any day that you work any portion, you get paid for the full day.
This is probably closer to the billing of on call staff than just "overtime".
For instance when getting an alert on PagerDuty in the middle of the night, you might get paid by 30 min increments while dealing with the emergency, even if your regular pay is by the day.
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.
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.
Law again takes care of that, because the right to rest also exist. So if you are asked to work 1h during the weekend, you usually gain 2.5 to 3 hours of rest in exchange.
Even that is not out-of-blue call to devs, rather just PROD support guys if some massive issue happens suddenly.
I live and work here 14 years, 2 companies, and never had to pick up phone I didn't want to pick up, or react anyhow. Even if for some reason they would expect to - 'sorry hiking in the mountains, 5h from computer' and they know it. But since everybody is in same mode, there is nobody to call me. Our Pune colleagues on the other hand, I see them working regularly long weekend hours on top of long week days during crunch time.
Yeah it is ridiculous to see all of the "employees" complain so heavily about one important work email that comes over the weekend, when the business patiently puts up with hundreds of personal phone calls, time spent scrolling on the phone, hacker News / Reddit posts and much more.
There needs to be a little bit more of a give and take. If employees are not expected to receive a single phone call or email outside of working hours. Would it be acceptable if the same restrictions were placed on personal calls and emails during working hours?
How many of the same people would be screaming murder, if their bosses came to them and complained about them taking personal email during work time.
> 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.
Some loners, cant be alone at home with themselves. After hours, they put the alpha dog away, in a little box, were nobody can be forced to play with that creature. So they call those they can torment.
If somebody calls after hours, for unimportant stuff, s/he needs to be marked up for therapy and re-socialisation.
I mean interrupting is one of the harder social actions in my opinion, especially in the workplace. So much of this comes from culture, family and your personality.
I say this as someone who interrupts, and loves to be interrupted. Am I a kid in an adult body, or are my norms different than yours?
Well that depends on your ability to self-regulate!
Do you constantly interrupt people and prevent them from doing work? If someone says they are busy and need a few minutes, do you ignore them and continue to interrupt what they do? Do you get angry if someone can't drop what they are doing to cater to your impulse?
Do your co-workers feel like working with you is like working with a child?
That is what my children do to me, and that is what "children in adult bodies" do in the workplace.
I once had a manager who, after working with for 6-8 months, gave me the impression of "working for a child."
He would interrupt me all day for very trivial matters, and insist that I drop what I'm working on to address some email that just came in. (And what I was working on was from email that came in yesterday, that I dropped what I was working on yesterday to start...)
Any time I started any task that required any significant concentration, I'd start to panic that I'd be interrupted before the task was complete. (And if you understand concentration, you realize that you just can't pick up an interrupted task where you left off.)
---
Where it came to a head was, late one Friday afternoon, I realized I needed to cherry-pick or revert something in Git. At the time, I was a bit of a novice to Git. I skimmed an article on how to do what I needed to do in Git, decided it would take me ~10 minutes, and that I'd leave when I was done.
No sooner did I make it through the first paragraph did my manager interrupt me with a question. I answered it, and tried to find where I was reading (in the article that explained what I was trying to do). Then the guy next to me interrupted me with a technical question. The two of them continued, ping-ponging each other, me being stuck trying to read a paragraph, until I was able to construct one single command.
Then my manager pulled me into his office. I saw that he was putting together a presentation, and I spent 10 minutes answering his questions.
I thought I was done and could complete my ~10 minute task, but no. After I constructed the 2nd Git command, my manager and the guy next to me resumed ping-ponging me with questions.
Finally there was a lull, and I started constructing the 3rd git command. My manager comes up behind me, and in a rather condescending tone, said to me: "What are you doing here? It's a long weekend, go home!"
I responded, "I'm just trying to complete a 10-minute task before I go home, but I keep getting interrupted!"
My manager didn't apologize. He grunted, and then ran out of the door, like a child caught making a mess, but not owning up to it.
---
This manager, BTW, is why laws in the linked article exist. He once "forgot" to tell me he wanted me to work on a Saturday. I had plans so I ignored his Saturday morning call. Thankfully he was fired (or quit, it was ambiguous) about a month or two later.
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So, are you like my old manager, constantly interrupting someone, and not having the emotional intelligence to apologize or to pace yourself? Or, do you think before you interrupt, give people a chance to pause what they are doing, and pace yourself so you aren't monopolizing others' time?
It gets worse when infantile bully managers treat other adults like children, such as adversarial treatment or imposing unnecessary inconveniences like RTO.
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.
I recently had a slack message on my Friday evening from my delayed-timezone manager starting his Friday.
There was no expectation to answer out of hours, but it was some small detail I could answer in a few seconds. And this was from a new and intense 24/7 workaholic ex-FAANG manager, whose high expectations I was still getting used to, and who would likely spend his whole weekend working on this project. So I gave a quick response.
He said thanks, told me to turn my phone off, and sent a group message to the team reminding us not to work outside hours, with a link to instructions on disabling slack notifications. And then he started scheduling his own overnight/weekend DMs to send at 9am Monday.
It was an awesome response, and those firm self-imposed boundaries helped allow the work to be rewarding, rather than an absolute nightmare.
A lot of companies here are pretty good. It's the ones that aren't that necessitate the law change.
My workplace, for instance, published the formal policy last week and the accompanying announcement was honestly bordering on anger about it. My team is pretty good, but other teams have been having to work out of hours. It's a good change.
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.
Totally different experience here working for FAANG, at least as it pertains to pages. For emails / slack etc I found it easy to ignore while working as an engineer, but much harder now in a management role. Even entirely disconnecting when going on vacation can be tough.
That said it is mostly self imposed. Over the past 2 years it was rarely the expectation to work outside regular hours (but did happen).
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. If I could find another job (and I'm trying!), I would bail in an instant.
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.
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 culture does your answer apply to?
For me the answer is a confident "no", having worked in the Dutch and German tech sector, mainly in small companies
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 environment, for example.
I guess one thing you might say is ‘why is this manager sending emails at such times’ but I think lots of people like the flexibility of working strange hours, eg maybe they tend to wake up very early, or want to fit their work-schedule around some childcare obligations like breakfast or a school run.
With getting no overtime, no time off in lieu, and managers perpetually confusing a 'problem' with an 'emergency', I'm glad to see this happen. If it will actually make a difference though, I'm yet to be convinced.
This isn't addressing unpaid hours, just the expectation than your boss or coworkers can communicate with you after hours. Unpaid hours is already illegal. How to enforce that in the education system without it collapsing is the open question.
The teacher situation is strange. One the one hand, they often do seem to work outside of school hours on lesson prep and marking. On the other hand, they generally don't work during school holidays (12 weeks/yr).
Also, given that most school days here are ~9am to ~3pm, I wonder how much of that "after hours" work actually falls within the standard 40hr work week.
> managers perpetually confusing a 'problem' with an 'emergency'
I'm working on a theory around "organisational ADHD". Based on 20 years of experience in, basically, "today's problem always overrules yesterday's priority" and how this negatively affects efficiency, quality, and throughput of an organisation.
And that this behaviour is generally created, encouraged, and facilitated by (bad / immature) management, who should be doing, essentially, the opposite.
I would like to see that happen, however, the current available guidance from FWC is worded very with a vast deal of of flexibility in it, and is highly open to interpretation. A manager may, in theory, decide any person responsible for any task may be contacted outside of hours. I've not seen anything truly restrictive.
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 from management and live in permanent anxiety of some petty retaliation. But here it really ought to just be a formalisation of normality unless you're working with particularly poor managers.
This hasn't been my experience in Australia. I don't believe this law will make a difference at all either. The reason is that if you refuse to do it, then this will come up during performance reviews as something else. "More responsive" or "available for your teammates" or "more of a team player" etc. Of course the manager won't be asking you in any direct way or in written form to be available outside working hours. The incentive system will just be changed to make it your choice to do so.
Conducting interviews over the last year or so had people telling me of their stories. The labor protection laws didn't seem effective except for clear cut cases and even then you'd probably just get a bit of money and you would've ruined your reputation of getting hired ever again because you're a trouble maker.
The law won't make a difference for us, but it will probably make a difference to the super-market employees being phoned at 6am and asked to take on an extra shift today.
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 realistic timelines.
When, inevitably, the goal posts were shifted, timelines were not updated to recognise the issue. There was never an explicit "You must work longer hours to finish this", it was "The client expects this to be done by this date.". There was also pressure that if I didn't work more to finish things, that it would fall upon some other member of the team who was also known to be burnt out.
Another company refused to require teams to conduct any form of peer reviews, testing or take on responsibility for monitoring or resolving issues.
Regularly people would commit code and push changes to production, and then walk out the door to go home. When that caught on fire, I'd be required to remote in and resolve whatever issue they had caused. Typically this happened right as I was getting home and trying to eat dinner.
I'm not certain if this law would've helped me in these cases. I like to think it would, but I'm usually not one to make waves until things start to get overwhelming. But it might give others some ammunition for dealing with management and HR.
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.
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.
The only people that I see working 24/7 are those who run their own business, which made sense to me because everyone else has a contract that stipulates the obligations of both sides. Unless that doc says that you're expected to work outside of work hours (which sounds self-contradictory), that's not part of the agreement. I'm surprised Australia needed a law for that
I don't think that's true. I'm in EU and I've allowed engineers to shift their working hours based on personal circumstances - like start remotely at 7am and finish at 3PM. I also encourage engineers to take the time they need for life stuff - kids school run, doctor, physio, sick aunt, whatever - because ultimately we measure the outcome of their work, and not the sum of hours worked.
For the office space - do you mean popping into the office at odd hours, like evenings or weekends? I'd probably be encouraging my engineers to talk to me about why they need to do it and not enjoy their non-working hours. If the work is too much, we solve for that. If they're going all in on something they love, I'll want to make sure they're not on a path to maybe burning-out.
Americans really do argue for the right to be treated like dirt don't they!
I can assure you old sport, not being contactable outside working hours has nothing whatsoever to do with requesting flexible working hours. And quite why an employee would like to "use the company office space" (be in work!) outside working hours I've no idea!
You have the right to, and can’t be punished for it. But you can still be punished if they just say it's unrelated to it, whether through missed opportunities, increased workload, undesirable assignments, or even termination with flimsy justifications.
It’s the age-old: “No one is pointing a gun at their head. They’re doing it because they want to.” -Manager XYZ
I can see two ways to prevent it:
1. Ban employers from doing so with potential fees, except in cases where it's a stipulation on the contract. Although this would eventually lead to employers adding it to every contract. Not a fan of this approach.
2. You make them pay you weekend-rate overtime, this would still allow your superiors to contact you, but they would think twice. I would definitely support this, although it might not apply to all circumstances.
3. I honestly don't know, there's probably better solutions from smarter people.
I don't know about Australia, but in my jurisdiction any illegal contractual clauses are unenforceable.
If the law says "X is forbidden" and the contract says "employee agrees to do X" then the employer has no legal recourse to force employee to do X.
Point 2. is the usual on-call, and it's still regulated (in my jurisdiction) by mandatory rest periods during which a person is legally mandated to not work.
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After I picked my jaw up off the floor I realized I simply lacked the scruples I'd need to be "one of them." I also started looking into every legal protection I had available to me in my jurisdiction.
I know not every manager is like that. I'd like to think I wasn't. But there are enough of them that think that way that legal protections often need to be there.
It was one of the first times I realised that people are actively being jerks in business negotiations.
Another time was when I put my prices up to $160/hour from $80/hour after I realised I wasn't making any money (in fact by my calculations I was losing $3/hour for every hour my staff worked).
I didn't lose a single customer. They all just said "oh, right, well, okay when will you have it done?".
The same guys who had been crying poor a couple of months prior about how they "just didn't have the budget" were now paying double the rate and they could totally afford it.
People be jerks yo.
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 claimed employees were expensing things, he did it on their behalf and got reimbursed. I found this out after the fact where I was asked if I ever asked him to order laptops or ran up huge Uber bills.
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 management of the nursing home to find ways to cut expenses until there's nothing left to cut except stuff directly related to resident care, safety, etc. Families see the writing on the wall and move their relatives out which accelerates the demise of the nursing home and it has to shut down (or is shut down, by the county/state.) Then the PE firm bulldozes the building and sells the property (which is what they really wanted.)
The US suffered a massive toxic fire in Ohio that destroyed a big chunk of the town and left a huge area heavily poisoned because a private equity firm bought the railroad and was squeezing it for every penny, and despite plenty of warnings by union officials and experts, the FRA did nothing and then...boom. Wheel bearing seized, train derailed, town polluted by hundreds of thousands of pounds of incredibly toxic chemicals like vinyl chloride.
https://www.tiktok.com/@moreperfectunion/video/7198354503823...
Precision railroad scheduling means:
- insanely strict rules about when engineers can request time off even for family medical emergencies, and sick days (so you have train engineers and other staff working while sick as dogs. Totally safe! Really stressed out employees, too - and stress means mistakes.) RR unions tried to strike twice. First congress and then and Biden bitch-slapped them back to work with a "compromise" that was still oppressive as hell because the economic disruption from the trains not running was more important. All because the railroads want to cut the number of employees down as low as possible so there aren't available engineers to replace sick ones, and they don't want delays while replacement engineers head out to trains that had to be left somewhere because the engineer was sick.
- dramatically reducing the time rolling stock maintenance crews have to inspect a car for problems - from three minutes to a minute and a half. Not only does this save labor, it means those maintenance crews don't find as much stuff wrong which takes a car out of service and costs money for the repair...woo, saving more money!
- reducing the number of employees per train; I believe it's currently two, and they're trying to push the FRA into allowing them to run one employee per train.
- increasing train lengths to reduce labor costs by moving more cars per people they have to pay. This increases the chances of derailments, and also causes other problems, like slower brake response time (the longer the train, the longer it takes for a pressure reduction in the brake line to make it to the end of the train, though I believe some end-of-train devices can be set up to remotely release brake pressure.)
- reducing track crews and time allocated to track maintenance so the tracks are more available and maintenance costs are lowered.
Keep in mind locomotive engineers are paid a median wage of $35/hour with a 10/90th percentile spread of $28/$44. These aren't enormous sums of money they're saving by going to one person on the train, particularly since it will be a lower-paid employee who is removed.
The crash was caused by overheating bearings which caused a wheelset to seize and derail the train.
It gets worse. The railroad pushed to have tanker cars intentionally burned, lied to the public, and turns out it was likely just because burning off the chemicals was cheaper and faster than a proper cleanup. Sources: https://www.tiktok.com/@moreperfectunion/video/7247656170347... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_de...
Hilariously, the EPA, the railway, and "independent scientists" all declared the area safe but EPA employees visiting the sites became sick in ways similar to how residents were being affected.
The railroad companies responded to public and congressional furor by saying they'd self-regulate (!) better, and join a program similar to the FAA's close-call incident reporting system. Only one railroad has joined that system, and all but one raiload saw an increase in derailments in the following year.
The PE firms know their maintenance and staffing cuts are causing increasing problems and will destroy the railroad companies. They don't care. They're milking the railroad companies for every dime they can squeeze, leaving them in tatters from all the deferred maintenance and repairs. These companies are responsible for moving massive amounts of cargo around the country, and when they fall apart, it will be a national crisis, and the federal government will have to step in and bail the companies out because they're 'Too Big To Fail.' And the PE firms that own trucking companies will see record profits...
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...
imo, that’s the issue when company’s ownership gets so diluted that nobody have personal interest anymore in the company’s long term viability.
Heck when your company is owned by private equity, even the company itself becomes a line in some excel spreadsheet. And you’d better not get that conditional formatting turn to red.
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.
This is the reason why I always tell young engineers to treat companies with utmost business-only mentality.
It's not that all managers are bad. It's that the company rewards psychopathic behaviors - that aren't easily apparent to humble people.
Companies are merely out there squeezing and exploring employees. Employees should feel free to return the favor.
In short, Fuck the corporations. They fired the first shot.
Personally, I think behavior does (and likely has to) evolve with size. Unfortunately bigger tends to be worse.
Culture is also primarily a top-down flow. I'd the CEO is a screamer expect screamers all the way down and so on.
Of course there are companies, too many of them, that behave badly. There are too many people who treat other people as nameless, expendable and exploitable. There are also many others, the ones that don't make the juicy comments on reddit, which behave well, treat people as people, and so on.
Treating your work-place as a hostile environment can be emotionally and mentally draining. It can be counter-productive if the environment desires to support you.
Equally, if your environment is hostile then at least be looking elsewhere. Not all companies are created the same so there are likely better options elsewhere (although getting those posts is harder because people tend not to leave.)
Your advice rings true for many companies. But people stay in those places because they believe everywhere is the same. So a more nuanced advice might be to understand the culture and behavior where you work and decide if that's a culture you want to assimilate, and support, long term or not.
For the record, the place where I work has never expected anyone to do emails etc out-of-hours and you'd be laughed at if you suggested people should behave otherwise.
This is indeed a major problem. The stereotypical engineers is such a humble personality. A kind of almost idiot-savant syndrome.
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This is gross..
> I also started looking into every legal protection I had available to me in my jurisdiction.
But so is this. I’d rather quit some crappy place than rely on legal protections.
Maybe some managers will be faster to exploit things when supply/demand turns in their favour, but pretty quickly the invisible hand of the market would have readjusted anyway.
Never underestimate an economics-based solution to a legal problem, a.k.a. "if you really want to ban it, tax it".
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.
That being said lots of people still do unpaid overtime, but only because they're afraid about losing the job / care too much. Not because they actually legally have to. There are legal means to defend yourself from that.
I don't get overtime, but I do get time in lieu - I did about four hours extra the week before last doing set up for one of our busiest days of the year, and I'm taking Thursday afternoon off to make it up.
Things like 60 hour work weeks also aren't even legal without signing away your EU Working Time Directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003) rights (which isn't even an option in every EU country). I don't _think_ the post-brexit legislation did away with that, but it wouldn't surprise me.
There are a bunch of exceptions for specific jobs.
The working hours, comp+ben etc. are usually determined by collective agreement with unions.
Pay for the same job can vary dramatically depending on which union your employer has a collective agreement with.
I know several people who got 25-30% pay rises just by moving to another part of the company that had an agreement with IG Metall instead of ver.di.
The flipside is that no one ever gets paid less as a salaried employee either, but most employees are too afraid of getting fired to remember that part. Any day that you work any portion, you get paid for the full day.
For instance when getting an alert on PagerDuty in the middle of the night, you might get paid by 30 min increments while dealing with the emergency, even if your regular pay is by the day.
It sounds bad, but it encourages everyone to write more fault tolerant code. Way moreso then a random bigcorp with an on call team.
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I live and work here 14 years, 2 companies, and never had to pick up phone I didn't want to pick up, or react anyhow. Even if for some reason they would expect to - 'sorry hiking in the mountains, 5h from computer' and they know it. But since everybody is in same mode, there is nobody to call me. Our Pune colleagues on the other hand, I see them working regularly long weekend hours on top of long week days during crunch time.
There needs to be a little bit more of a give and take. If employees are not expected to receive a single phone call or email outside of working hours. Would it be acceptable if the same restrictions were placed on personal calls and emails during working hours?
How many of the same people would be screaming murder, if their bosses came to them and complained about them taking personal email during work time.
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.
If somebody calls after hours, for unimportant stuff, s/he needs to be marked up for therapy and re-socialisation.
I say this as someone who interrupts, and loves to be interrupted. Am I a kid in an adult body, or are my norms different than yours?
Do you constantly interrupt people and prevent them from doing work? If someone says they are busy and need a few minutes, do you ignore them and continue to interrupt what they do? Do you get angry if someone can't drop what they are doing to cater to your impulse?
Do your co-workers feel like working with you is like working with a child?
That is what my children do to me, and that is what "children in adult bodies" do in the workplace.
Can you elaborate on this?
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I once had a manager who, after working with for 6-8 months, gave me the impression of "working for a child."
He would interrupt me all day for very trivial matters, and insist that I drop what I'm working on to address some email that just came in. (And what I was working on was from email that came in yesterday, that I dropped what I was working on yesterday to start...)
Any time I started any task that required any significant concentration, I'd start to panic that I'd be interrupted before the task was complete. (And if you understand concentration, you realize that you just can't pick up an interrupted task where you left off.)
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Where it came to a head was, late one Friday afternoon, I realized I needed to cherry-pick or revert something in Git. At the time, I was a bit of a novice to Git. I skimmed an article on how to do what I needed to do in Git, decided it would take me ~10 minutes, and that I'd leave when I was done.
No sooner did I make it through the first paragraph did my manager interrupt me with a question. I answered it, and tried to find where I was reading (in the article that explained what I was trying to do). Then the guy next to me interrupted me with a technical question. The two of them continued, ping-ponging each other, me being stuck trying to read a paragraph, until I was able to construct one single command.
Then my manager pulled me into his office. I saw that he was putting together a presentation, and I spent 10 minutes answering his questions.
I thought I was done and could complete my ~10 minute task, but no. After I constructed the 2nd Git command, my manager and the guy next to me resumed ping-ponging me with questions.
Finally there was a lull, and I started constructing the 3rd git command. My manager comes up behind me, and in a rather condescending tone, said to me: "What are you doing here? It's a long weekend, go home!"
I responded, "I'm just trying to complete a 10-minute task before I go home, but I keep getting interrupted!"
My manager didn't apologize. He grunted, and then ran out of the door, like a child caught making a mess, but not owning up to it.
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This manager, BTW, is why laws in the linked article exist. He once "forgot" to tell me he wanted me to work on a Saturday. I had plans so I ignored his Saturday morning call. Thankfully he was fired (or quit, it was ambiguous) about a month or two later.
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So, are you like my old manager, constantly interrupting someone, and not having the emotional intelligence to apologize or to pace yourself? Or, do you think before you interrupt, give people a chance to pause what they are doing, and pace yourself so you aren't monopolizing others' time?
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.
He said thanks, told me to turn my phone off, and sent a group message to the team reminding us not to work outside hours, with a link to instructions on disabling slack notifications. And then he started scheduling his own overnight/weekend DMs to send at 9am Monday.
It was an awesome response, and those firm self-imposed boundaries helped allow the work to be rewarding, rather than an absolute nightmare.
My workplace, for instance, published the formal policy last week and the accompanying announcement was honestly bordering on anger about it. My team is pretty good, but other teams have been having to work out of hours. It's a good change.
That said it is mostly self imposed. Over the past 2 years it was rarely the expectation to work outside regular hours (but did happen).
literally a page? with a pager?
Sending that email out of office hours itself is a red flag.
It’s not your job to make sure that others have boundaries.
The only exception being when I was paid extra to be on call.
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 culture does your answer apply to?
For me the answer is a confident "no", having worked in the Dutch and German tech sector, mainly in small companies
I guess one thing you might say is ‘why is this manager sending emails at such times’ but I think lots of people like the flexibility of working strange hours, eg maybe they tend to wake up very early, or want to fit their work-schedule around some childcare obligations like breakfast or a school run.
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Also, given that most school days here are ~9am to ~3pm, I wonder how much of that "after hours" work actually falls within the standard 40hr work week.
I'm working on a theory around "organisational ADHD". Based on 20 years of experience in, basically, "today's problem always overrules yesterday's priority" and how this negatively affects efficiency, quality, and throughput of an organisation.
And that this behaviour is generally created, encouraged, and facilitated by (bad / immature) management, who should be doing, essentially, the opposite.
That's not to say that there will never be exceptions against the laws.
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 from management and live in permanent anxiety of some petty retaliation. But here it really ought to just be a formalisation of normality unless you're working with particularly poor managers.
Conducting interviews over the last year or so had people telling me of their stories. The labor protection laws didn't seem effective except for clear cut cases and even then you'd probably just get a bit of money and you would've ruined your reputation of getting hired ever again because you're a trouble maker.
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 realistic timelines. When, inevitably, the goal posts were shifted, timelines were not updated to recognise the issue. There was never an explicit "You must work longer hours to finish this", it was "The client expects this to be done by this date.". There was also pressure that if I didn't work more to finish things, that it would fall upon some other member of the team who was also known to be burnt out.
Another company refused to require teams to conduct any form of peer reviews, testing or take on responsibility for monitoring or resolving issues.
Regularly people would commit code and push changes to production, and then walk out the door to go home. When that caught on fire, I'd be required to remote in and resolve whatever issue they had caused. Typically this happened right as I was getting home and trying to eat dinner.
I'm not certain if this law would've helped me in these cases. I like to think it would, but I'm usually not one to make waves until things start to get overwhelming. But it might give others some ammunition for dealing with management and HR.
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.
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.
The only people that I see working 24/7 are those who run their own business, which made sense to me because everyone else has a contract that stipulates the obligations of both sides. Unless that doc says that you're expected to work outside of work hours (which sounds self-contradictory), that's not part of the agreement. I'm surprised Australia needed a law for that
I've been in business for 7 years and fully self-employed for 4 years. Last week was my very first vacation without my laptop.
For the office space - do you mean popping into the office at odd hours, like evenings or weekends? I'd probably be encouraging my engineers to talk to me about why they need to do it and not enjoy their non-working hours. If the work is too much, we solve for that. If they're going all in on something they love, I'll want to make sure they're not on a path to maybe burning-out.
Everything in context.
I can assure you old sport, not being contactable outside working hours has nothing whatsoever to do with requesting flexible working hours. And quite why an employee would like to "use the company office space" (be in work!) outside working hours I've no idea!
It’s the age-old: “No one is pointing a gun at their head. They’re doing it because they want to.” -Manager XYZ
I can see two ways to prevent it:
1. Ban employers from doing so with potential fees, except in cases where it's a stipulation on the contract. Although this would eventually lead to employers adding it to every contract. Not a fan of this approach.
2. You make them pay you weekend-rate overtime, this would still allow your superiors to contact you, but they would think twice. I would definitely support this, although it might not apply to all circumstances.
3. I honestly don't know, there's probably better solutions from smarter people.
If the law says "X is forbidden" and the contract says "employee agrees to do X" then the employer has no legal recourse to force employee to do X.
Point 2. is the usual on-call, and it's still regulated (in my jurisdiction) by mandatory rest periods during which a person is legally mandated to not work.