Flexible working can make you ill, experts say
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I think it's very important to separate your work life from your home life so you have time to switch off and decompress. Never give your personal phone number(s) or email address to bosses at work - carry a separate work phone if you must, and turn it off or leave it at the office. Also don't check your work email from home, ever.
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) where work pay you a pittance to use your personal cell as a work phone is a joke. There is no universe where it's good for you.
If you set this expectation from the very beginning, it will be much easier than trying to change to this down the road.
I had a company try the same shit (on top of even more shit). Took a job, the pay was... not terrible. However they oddly took the time to stress that as a programmer I am exempt for overtime. After a while I was put as the "on-call" guy for deployments and crashes. I thought it was just during work hours, since we had dedicated sysadmins at the company, but it was in fact nights and weekends. The fact that they hid that during the interview and waited a couple months in when any other job offers I would have had dried up can only be a calculated move on their part. When they asked me if it was going to be a problem, I told them yes, I quit. If you're going to try to take whole weeks of my free-time for the company you sure as shit better compensate me for it. I'm not going to spend my weekends sitting around the house when I could be out hiking, kayaking, or fishing and spending time with my friends. Especially not when you go out of your way to stress you don't owe me anything additional, and especially not when it's done in such a conniving manner.
This was years ago, but I think we added $500 to anyone's paycheck if they spent the week during that period to be on call.
Once Finance decided they weren't too happy with how the IRS might view that, the payments were canceled. And since the devs weren't dumb enough to work for free, support was scaled back to office hours only.
that said, the IRS should cap bonuses to some level - such that the bonuses in the finance industry are eliminated.
I'll flip burgers before I do it, no one would pay me enough. Mine was going off 2-3 times a night, about 3-4 days/nights a week. I was then given no comp time either, and expected in the office at 8:30AM.
Karma seems to have come my way though, because now I have management that completely respects me and my time. It's just a shame it requires some windfall from a good manager to be treated with some sense of humanity.
My recommendation though to anyone is never accept a job with a pager involved. Doesn't matter about the details or how desperate you are to build a resume.
If they won't pay for a global "follow the sun" support model, they have no business running an operation that requires 24/7 support and you don't want to be there.
Much fun is had when you're at TheNextBigUnicornWePromise!.com and they only can afford a tiny ops team but need 100% uptime and 24/7 coverage with three people!
The problem with the Devops market is that good people get snatched up for north of 200k - so having a staff competent enough for larger scale is going to put a dent in any startups payroll budget with potential to lose the guys to apple fb etc easily.
I think we might see a re-fragmentation back toward outsourced ops services :-)
Thanks for pointing this out, it helps immensely as a devops to have a comparison point (to current compensation/benefits).
And the ability to have multiple numbers on the device.
I should have a phone in this era that allows me to have calls inbound on the employer number show up as work - and have any personal number calls be differentiated easily.
In the same manner as I have three email boxes in the damn mail app - which are easily deleted or locked once I leave a company, why can't I bolt additional phone numbers onto the phone during the time I'm employed there!?!?
I'm currently switching over carriers, and it's useful to be able to have my old SIM in for people and companies that haven't managed to get my new number.
So yes, the option does exist, just not in the American market. It seems to be somewhat unique to the Asian market from what I've seen.
It does mean that you're limited to the phones that have dual sim slots though, which tend to be less powerful than flagship phones.
I recommend a structure where you get paid for on-call -- even if it's just a token amount, it makes you feel less bad about having someone cover a week for you, and sometimes people are actually happy to do so.. rather than feeling like they're doing you a "favor".
While I've had plenty of sleepless nights over the past decade, everywhere I've worked has respected me and my time. Maybe I've just had good bosses, but "show up to work whenever you want" is doubly true when you're on-call and may have been fighting issues at night.
Similarly, my bosses have always had my personal cell phone number. It's paid for by work, and it's not a scam. I can count the number of times I've been called on vacation on one freaking hand. I volunteer to provide my international phone number when I'm overseas and pick up a local SIM, and in exchange, my boss NEVER CALLS ME.
I'm always wary of folks who are so guarded and defensive ("never hand out your home phone number", etc)
I treat my superiors and coworkers with respect, and they do the same for me. If I ever found myself taken advantage of, I'd put a stop to it, or I'd quit. It has never come to that, because I work for reasonable people.
Oh sure, but I was by no means sysadmin, and "on-call" wasn't anywhere near my job description or on any list of expected behavior.
> It's paid for by work, and it's not a scam. I can count the number of times I've been called on vacation on one freaking hand.
Your situation and mine are obviously polar opposites, so it makes sense you think it's find and I think it's BS. I would get called repeatedly between 11pm and 5am, often on Saturdays and Sundays. Our company WAS the cell phone carrier, and they'd only kick in $10/mo (taxable) to have you use your own cell phone for work, 24x7
Being officially on-call at the company meant you had to be no more than 30minutes from the office, carry a pager etc. etc. They expected me to take a "promotion" that was way more responsibility, way more accountability, and officially on-call for no pay raise or any adjustment to compensation.
After lots of discussions around the topic, I quit.
Of course, I know people who theoretically are on sane on-call schedules but as it turns out, because of irresponsible co-workers that shirk their on-call duties they ended up being called as a last resort...
This through crossed my mind because I had just finished two weeks of vacation where I literally did nothing related to work, and it was really relaxing.
Learn to say no to your boss. Work, computers and internet are only a small part of life.
Personally, it's not worth the stress. I was in the hospital for stress induced heart failure last year and work was a contributing factor along with urban life. Now I divide my time amongst other things. The market where I live is competitive and anyone who expects me to work a 60 hour week for them all the time and attack me for not doing so can politely fuck right off as it's not worth my life. Thankfully I don't have to deal with this; companies don't like paying overtime and I'm thankful to work for a company that respects my time.
I think loving ones work is the only way to really maintain good work/life balance while working from home.
My work/life balance is essentially balancing things between my hobbies and my family. So, it's a much nicer situation than if I was working on something I didn't love and I had to balance that with hobbies and family life.
Please man up and don't do it to yourselves and to other people.
That said, outside of paid work, I often work/read up on stuff which benefits ME, whether it is professional or personal development.
Actually, my salary is on par with the standard salaries for my area. No, it's not SV level, but salaries in Dallas are much lower than SV across the board.
Cost of living is so much cheaper, though, that I'd rather work at a defense contractor in Dallas than at a unicorn in SV. I can handily afford a 1500 sq. ft. townhouse on $65k/year, here... (I could afford it on less actually... I was making $42k when I first moved in). I don't think anybody in California can say that.
My company recently forced Vodafone Mobile device Management upon us, since that happened many people also stopped syncing their own smartphones (what a horrible app on Android). But I am in R&D where I guess deadlines are less strict...? Even during my PhD the lab would be mostly empty at 18:00 though I guess the people that were still working were the ones ending op at MIT.
I guess there is a reason we don't have a booming start-up culture here :)
Would the Netherlands (one of my favorite places in the world) have a booming startup culture with changes in laws and cultural norms? No, I don't think so. Anyone who wants to be involved with that stuff moves themselves over anyway.
It's odd because the Europeans were the first real entrepreneurs with colonialism, but it seems like that part of European culture (or maybe those particular minded Europeans) were exported and sent off as well.
I'm personally very interested in colonial era history and subsequent history of the Americas since that was the beginning of modern North/South America, and would love to run across a writeup someday attempting to breakdown the differences between new/old world thinking. Because even the Latin nations like Mexico are significantly different in how entrepreneurship is admired than from say, Spain or Italy.
If you own your business, no matter what, you are always thinking of your business. Especially when your business is small and will always be small enough that you're the only significant leadership in the entire company. You won't be doing too much delegation of responsibilities in a food truck.
Some production work is like that. You don't have a "real" production network unless the SCADA is air gap firewalled from the rest of the universe for safety reasons, and if its safety critical some of your coworkers will be onsite 24x7 so you can relax when you're offsite.
So the take away is that in order to avoid burnout you need to mindfully develop the skill of 'stopping work'. While that is easy when you work on a factory line and you can't bring the tools home, and its really really hard when your job consists mostly about thinking about how to solve a problem.
I found early on that since I really enjoy programming I couldn't "stop" instead I had to shift to one of my projects so that it would be more enjoyable for me. That works a bit but not as much as sitting on the deck of a mountain cabin with no Internet connectivity does :-).
But the bottom line is figure out a way to "not work", whether it is by reading, exercising, or doing some hobby, so that you don't let the stress of work overwhelm you.
As someone who often struggles to 'turn off' after work, this is my favorite way to disconnect. I try to make it out fairly regularly to camp deep in the backcountry–there's no better relief from work stress than sitting by a campfire in the forest, a full day's hike from the car, parked an hour's drive past the last trace of cell service.
The feeling of freedom is intoxicating–the feeling that there is literally no way that some work 'emergency' could crop up and demand my attention. It's something I used to get on airplanes, but with the increasing availability of in-flight wifi it's not quite so peaceful.
Sports in general are really effective against stress, it's hard to think of something else at all when engaged in the exercise. Make that a hobby and it's a long term recipe for a great career.
Given my typical new year's resolution I'll have to try the physical activity trick as well :-)
My chemical engineer friend gets called into the plant all the time on nights/weekends when things catch fire.
When I said factory I mean like someone who works on the line fixing the machines and works on a fixed schedule with a team of people who all do the same thing.
That sounds like work, why not do it at work?
One of the last things I was supposed to be piloting at my last S/W dev job was Predictive Maintenance scheduling and working with the service techs on what data they used to decide when something needed to be repaired.
At least that was my experience.
There's also a nagging bit that says "the wife and kids are asleep, there's nothing stopping you from sending those emails/working on the fixes you were looking at earlier". Then one email becomes four, a feature is completed/tested/checked in, and it's midnight.
It's not that my employer feels entitled to free labor, it's that my brain can't stop thinking about work. My job has somehow become my hobby.
A friend in Sweden is sometimes on call overnight, but is expected to sleep. If he's called, he gets the rest of the day off, because of Sweden's implementation of the EU law these rules implement.
I wasn't stressed, but not all that satisfied.
For the vast majority of human history, work has always been something that was interwoven into our lives. From hunting and gathering, to farming and ranching, to woodworking and blacksmithing, and so on, up until the industrial revolution, nearly everyone "worked from home" and I'm unaware of any documented ill health effects from this. Intuitively, I'd suppose that aggregate stress levels actually rose with the advent of commuting to dedicated factory/office workplaces, as factory quotas and office micromanagement are far more psychologically demanding than the farm or home workshop in which you ( or your remote, usually undemanding lord, in the case of feudal work relationships ) set your own schedule and degree of competitiveness.
The dangerous mindset is that if you're capable of working whenever and wherever you are, then why should you ever really disconnect? This problem is an epidemic with people who don't know how to create a mental separation between work life and everything else, and I would argue that although it's easier to fall in the trap if you work over a VPN, it can also happen for any worker that is permitted/encouraged to work at any time of the day regardless of the situation.
For quite a lot of human history, and still in some countries, farm animals were kept at home. The "done for the day" was enforced as much by the lack of electric lighting as anything else.
Software development is not a special occupational snowflake, and I'm going to guess that you've never been within the property boundaries of an actual farm, let alone actually done farm work. Your job is interwoven into your live so much because you choose to allow it, and don't know when to say "no" to your boss. Close your laptop. There, work's over. Farm work? Yeah, well, those fences aren't going to mend themselves.
You don't live at the office, do you? Not metaphorically, I mean literally sleep there. No? Guess where the farmer sleeps? At work. Every day. Extrapolate from there.
I do plenty of woodworking, including woodworking with CNC/Software. But, I do know when I'm done with a project because the abstractions are over, the plans are drawn and implemented, and the project is built. Then, its done.
I'm unsuccessfully trying to think of any examples. Fine arts painting, maybe?
Same line of thinking WRT military, farming, etc.
On a very small scale I'll never type that specific line of code again, probably.
There are very few ways to earn a living that don't terminate the procedure with "repeat from beginning of procedure"
If you were asking about a job where you do it once and it stays done permanently forever, that's silly, and it's not what the guy you replied to was referring to.
A society where the mean lifetime is 35 that works 20 hours per week gives people significantly less total leisure time than a society where the mean lifetime is 85 that works 50 hours per week.
Or in other words: all those dead infants got no leisure time at all.
Most posters below conflate or ignore two major aspects in their examples:
1. Physical vs. intellectual work. I had a few almost-sleepless nights over the length of my career, worrying whether my proposed (being implemented) architecture/solution would scale. Long-term mentall stress like this can lead to psychological issues, even depression. I am not saying physical work is a bed of roses, but when you stop working, you don' take your work to bed with you. And when you are physically tired, you actually sleep better.
2. Working for yourself vs. making someone else richer through your (unpaid) sacrifice. Working on a farm is never ending, yes, but you own the farm and all the extra work benefits YOU.
Enforce set hours as to when you are actually working as opposed to when you are doing something else, and let others in your household know what they are. Create a separate physical environment that you can mentally associate as being where you perform work, and work only, and take any other activities such as social life and games out of it -- preferably using a different computer altogether.
Setting virtual walls where work begins/ends can greatly reduce the cognitive overhead your brain has to endure when trying to separate what is work from the rest of your life, and thus lower overall stress.
It's really a problem with always being available, a 9-5 worker that checks there e-mail every night is going to have the same issues.
It's very easy to slip into 'flexible' hours when doing freelance, which can often mean working all day, any day of the week, not taking proper breaks, for weeks on end.
I've done that, felt awful for long periods, and needed time to recuperate afterwards. My body gave me a lot of signals to communicate that this wasn't good for me. I overheard another guy in one office who was doing similar hours to me, telling his Dad on the phone that he was sleeping really badly, a problem he hadn't suffered from before.
And of course that made perfect sense.
I've worked from home for years, and not as a freelancer. I just have my work hours like I would in any office.
It's worked out well for me, but it would be difficult for many people to hack it due to the extra discipline it requires. I can see why companies don't want people doing it but there's definitely big economic potential held back, and environmental/mental harm done from the daily travel into the office.
I grew up in rural Iowa and worked the typical farm boy jobs, went to school all the way through in Iowa then lived in Chicago, Nord Pas de Calais (France) and now Austin. The majority of the population that doesn't come from a similar diverse cultural background (talking true, meaningful rural cultural diversity here not skintone) and there's a lot to be said for having "grit" ingrained in who you are, it helps with handling remote work in my opinion.
Incidentally, I've also spent a portion of the last year on medical leave. The two have interacted pretty poorly so far, and I can definitely confirm part of the article's argument, at least in my case: When your work and personal lives are intertwined like it describes, the stress never goes away and you're constantly amped up. It's not good.
I am happy to note that nobody sent work emails over the holidays, so that's nice - at least then you get a chance to use that time to disconnect and get some distance from things and spend time with your family.
The calls were taken by junior folks who were overtime eligible, they rotated 1 week cycles and received 20% of their hourly rate, plus a 3 hour minimum for time worked. They handled all vendor dispatch, all telco callouts.
For the resolver groups, there was a severity-1 process, with an on-call manager & call tree to the higher skill people. People were on call for two-week cycles, but any call-out to these people was treated as a defect in the process.
The average was 2-3 escalated calls to senior staff on different teams per month, out of about 5-7000 calls total.
Being a startup founder now, I don't really find a good balance and my health is suffering. So I'm trying hard to follow my own rules this year. It's tough. There is so much work to do.
> "but If I wasn’t at home with my kids it costs me something."
> "To create free evenings, Veenendaal limited the working day"
Or is it more like:
> "evening events like a recent programme of talks on the food chain."
Is it:
> "Flexible working policies can also raise the risk of poor working conditions"
Or is it more like:
> "And past the table a dozen people work at long desks on chains."
Is it:
> "while the blurring of lines between work and home life is stressful for some people."
Or is it more like:
> "for staff lunches, yoga classes" (Seriously, I can't get away from work even to eat or sweat?)