Practically speaking, I already do: I told them not to contact me on my cell if they aren’t going to give me a work phone or reimburse me for the cost of a plan then I will not be using my personal phone for work purposes. They can reach me during business hours on my desktop phone, the work messaging system, or a ticket. If anything happens outside of those hours and they want me to do something about it, they better pony up for a plan, overtime hours, or flex hours.
Firing me seems highly unlikely because they agreed to these terms, I am very good at what I do, and they love me. Actual legal protections sound like something everyone should have though, if you’re on call you damn well better get paid for it or it’s wage theft pure and simple.
Hell I don’t even check my work phone outside work hours. I’ll answer when I’m being paid to
It blows my mind that more people aren’t like you and I. I’m sure there’s a reason (besides fear?) but I haven’t figured it out. I answer the phone after hours if I’m on call. Otherwise, talk to you in the morning folks!
When I worked Ina warehouse/yard we’d regularly need to text each other in our off hours for very simple “hey where did you put x” or similar because management couldn’t be fucked to help us organize efficiently
I’ll help out a fellow wage slave if me taking 15s to reply would save them a few minutes of hassle
But I’ve only ever done that at non-corporate places where I actually like the co-workers on my pay level, the corporate jobs provided communication software and that shit was programmed to be muted the minute I was off automatically
Oh for sure. I will always answer if it’s a co-worker because we’re a team and we help each other. Just not for the boss. Fortunately it’s rarely been an issue, I’ve been lucky to have mostly decent bosses in my career.
I guess I’m really lucky to have this right. Every day after my 8 hours are done, I have my slack notifications automatically muted and I fully shut down my work laptop. My boss knows if she really needs me, she’ll have to call my cell, and she has never once done that. There’s nothing quite like a little bit of mutual respect.
Australia’s ‘right-to-disconnect’ law actually comes into effect on Monday :)
In my case it kind of comes with the job. Anyone who works “in the cloud” and/or with web apps / servers and/or database servers knows what I mean. We do our best to minimize issues and keep things running smoothly during off hours. But of course, complex systems can and do break for myriad reasons. Sometimes we overlooked something. Or sometimes there’s an event beyond our control (ClownStrike, anyone? AWS outages, anyone?).
So, for emergencies / unforeseen problems I expect it to happen and don’t mind pitching in to help.
But my boss is also a workaholic who works almost every single weekend. He’s bad about texting or emailing us at weird hours and it’s annoying. Even if he doesn’t expect us to do anything right then, it still causes a mild panic when the phone lights up. And then you’re thinking about work shit when you shouldn’t have to.
One of the other managers where I work does a cool thing where he’ll put a “delay send” on his off-hours emails so you don’t get them until the next business day. A real act of kindness and consideration on his part. Unusual for an American manager.
We are a specialized firm so literally nobody else can do what we do and we have to get called in when there is a problem. That said, in other orgs I ran or was in prior to this current one we had “on-call” and “escalation” schedules that guaranteed time off to anyone not on the schedule. If you needed to be brought in off schedule you would be compensated a bonus at 3x hourly (calculated as yearly salary ÷ 640) and be removed from your next schedule rotation. If this was a recurring issue with a particular employee’s skill set, redundancy was added to that position. It wasn’t a perfect system but at least there was an effort made.
What a great idea. We’re spread too thin and have very little overlap in our knowledge / coverage, unfortunately. Typical ‘skeleton crew’ shop, unfortunately.
Yes. This is how most shops are now, but it didn’t use to be that way. The tech industry has gone from trying to hire and hoard all qualified personnel in order to beat out the competition to trying to see how thin they can run and what is the bottom set of qualifications they can get away with before things start breaking down.
Sounds like good management. I’ve never worked in an IT shop that was run like that. Best I’ve ever seen was ‘free comp time’ if you had to pull an all-nighter or work on a weekend.
I have always worked with critical production environments where things have to stay up. It is not sustainable with a skeleton crew. Eventually it leads to service degradation or instability which is far more expensive than adding redundancy. Something bites management in the ass once or twice and they get the message.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that what management ultimately did was outsource the liability to cloud services like Azure and AWS.
have always worked with critical production environments where things have to stay up.
Me too, they just expected us to work 100 hours a week when something broke.
I’m 25 years into my career now and know enough these days to say “no” when they ask for unreasonable things like that. It can sit broken for all I care.
I am sorry my man. I am pushing 30 years on my career so I feel your pain. That’s bad management and basically our bread and butter these days. They paint themselves into a corner and then pray they can summon an elder god to save their hide.
It’s all good. It was only really that bad at one job, a long time ago. Now I am the one counseling my teammates for work life balance and not to let themselves be taken advantage of by the company!
How are they contacting anybody in the first place, breaking into their homes? Check work messages when you go to work.
