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Comment by iagooar | Hacker News Reader

> For salaried employees, there are going to be times you need to work late, weekends, check email at home, whatever. It comes with the job.

Explain this to me. Nothing "comes with the job". Your job is your job and if you are working, say, 40 hours a week, it's more or less 8 hours a day. After 8 hours working, you go home and enjoy YOUR time. If companies want people to do company work while they are awake, they should basically double payrolls and pay for 16 hours, not just 8. Actually, not even in that case should it be OK.

People are people and need to have their life and leisure time. If they don't have it, they start to feel overworked, stressed, depressed. In the end, it's not a net positive for the company either.

THIS is precisely the attitude that leads some abusive bosses to believe that it's OK to expect people to sacrifice their free time. This should be a major offense, and should not be tolerated AT ALL in my opinion.

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Answering dnautics here, no idea why I can't reply directly to his post.

> The consequence of enforcing your attitude by law is that small companies will never be able to expand to compete with big businesses. Say your website goes down at an inopportune time for a market in another time zone. Sorry, there's no one that can fix it because you can't have someone handling emergencies that 'come with the job' off hours on a staff of five. Now you've lost a major market.

Emergencies are different beasts. In my opinion, being on call should be paid extra. Same as happens with emergency services. How is your service when the site goes down different than a medical urgency? (besides the obvious fact that most probably, nobody will die if your website goes down at night, but you get the idea).

I was talking regular work. I know (and have experienced this personally) that some companies make look every day as if it could be doomsday if you relax.

Of course, lines get blurry, as in life. But some situations are so obvious, it does not need to find edge cases.

The consequence of enforcing your attitude by law is that small companies will never be able to expand to compete with big businesses. Say your website goes down at an inopportune time for a market in another time zone. Sorry, there's no one that can fix it because you can't have someone handling emergencies that 'come with the job' off hours on a staff of five. Now you've lost a major market.

If you can't staff properly to service a market, maybe you shouldn't be in it. Having someone to answer level 1 support requests (and escalate with proper "on-call" pay when necessary) isn't that expensive.

Many times employees do not work 8 hours focused, sometimes they just do not come because of "sickness" just because they do not feel productive, or they come late-leave late occassionally because of a private need. Many employers understand that and tolerate that, as long as it is not impacting the general performance. So when company needs the employee occasionally out of office hours, the employee should do his/her best. If both parties are not abusing the situation everything is ok. Many times I am busy with a private issue at office hours but sometimes in a not-so-important private time my company needs me and I am happy to provide my support. With job contract I don't sell my 40 hours strictly, but I set up a continuous relationship with my employer to get the job done, which sometimes may require sacrifice of private time.

In fact, at least in the US, this is not the case, and it works both ways. If you're a salaried exempt employee --- as virtually all software developers are --- you don't get overtime pay and can be expected to work in off-hours. On the other hand, your pay can't easily be docked, and must be docked in full day increments.

Restated: salaried positions by definition include an expectation that your work won't always be confined to 9-5 hours.

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