If you're a software engineer, now is the time to start asking for things like that. If you don't think you'll ever get it at your current job, start looking elsewhere.
It's possible, albeit, unlikely.
The most common answer was click. They just hung up on me. I burned several recruiting firms. Telling me I was not passionate about this career choice. I was also told about several companies. How dare I think I was special, and that I didn't commit to the team culture. My explanation was that to fully exercise my mind I have a variety of hobbies that eat up time. I'm working on a novel, acting, etc. They're not competing, but they provide benefit to the company. Nope. I approach this one with real caution now.
They're misunderstanding the meaning of the phrase.
Real //coverage// requires shifts of multiple people for the same job. "Being reachable", used to involve special extra pay just for the option of being called in (actual pay).
I keep trying to push the boundaries outwards in negotiations though, trying to find their breaking points. Often, it surprises me how much I'm able to get away with.
The samizdat of our times might just be about _actually_ working while wading through seas full of these creatures.
I'm not sure how the job market is in Philly, but one of the reasons this worked in SF (I imagine), has to due with the leverage the employee has over their prospective employer.
In SF/bay salaries are quite high, and talent is hard to find.
It doesn't hurt that the engineer who I know that did this, was an incredible engineer.
That said, I still recognize it's probably not something that's going to work all the time. For every 10 companies you ask, 1 will agree.
That's because they are high in absolute terms, but not high in relative terms.
In other words, if the pay was actually high, talent wouldn't be hard to find.
Eventually, you'd attract talent from other regions and related industries (I can make 3 times more in computer science instead of meteorology, you say?).
You'd also see more incentive to improve the productivity of the highly specialized, highly skilled talent. This would look like less patience for things that waste developers' time, like substandard tooling, unacceptable levels of technical debt, etc.
There are jobs where you have to be present X hours. But a knowledge worker, someone who's creating. The end goal should be what's delivered. Not how long I'm present. It's not just the 8 hours 5 days butt in seat. It's that my cell phone is plastered all over. I get lambasted for not responding to an email late at night. Work doesn't end at a cut off. I miss contracting because they would think twice about contacting me after hours.
Shouldn't the company want to get the best possible work out of me. Ensure that their employee has an ideal work/life balance. So that they come to work with energy and able to work properly. Or are we just supposed to be a cog, churning out code.
Again there are checks and balances. The alternative schedule is not concrete. Stuff breaks, you have a meeting week. You'll be working regular hours and then some. That's fine. Just give a balance to not have to cram everything I want to do into two days.
Now I pitched it that writing helps with documentation, the other pieces helped with sales work, etc. So each piece I provided reasoning why it would be better. But that didn't matter.
So why not go back to contracting? I've been thinking a little about doing this, but it seems like it would drag you around to a lot of different locations. And the pay doesn't seem that great either, given the lack of stability and the short-term nature (3, 6, 12-month contracts are the norm from what I see).
I stayed in one general location for about three years. Working 3 to 6 month contracts. Get to know a few firms you're generally good. They'll come calling. Regarding pay, health insurance was the biggest cost. Saving smartly I was able to take one to two months off a year and focus on my own thing. Contracting generally paid well. Then there were the 100+ hour work weeks with time and a half. Essentially do it smartly it's not bad.
With salary it's similar except the hours do not come into play.
It went somewhat well, but reality and inexperience of course hit and we ended up selling 5-6 years later in what amounts to an acquihire.
My new life goal is to get back into that, as it was definitely the happiest time of my life. Just finding solid people who can get work done on projects, without having to kill yourself for no reason. If people were killing themselves for a couple weeks, it was for a damn good reason we all shared the benefits from - e.g. an informed decision by everyone to pitch in for a better outcome at the end. Conversely if we had a slow month we'd work half days on backlog pet projects to help improve tooling. Everyone understood work life had an ebb and flow just like personal life.
That is truly what is working in the American workforce imo. Just the camaraderie of being in something together and believing your co-workers/managers/whatever have your back, just like you have theirs when they go through stuff.
It's taken a few years to make me realize why "owning" my own labor is so important, but it's basically this. I want to have a long-term lifestyle business with people who work hard and passionately, but realize it's simply one aspect of life.
I type this mostly for the simple reason that my initial response was "man I want to hire this guy" but realized how I no longer have the freedom to make such unilateral "crazy" decisions. How many others are in my position? Somewhat depressing to think about :)
I'm curious what do you mean by reality/inexperience?
I've had a few roles very similar to that. It was here's work, get it done by date Y. That was it. A year back during one of my breaks between roles. I spent two months trying to bootstrap a consulting firm. Ran into the no prior clients to get clients problem. But near best damn time of my life. Spending the morning networking talking to people. Then the afternoon, attending tech meetups, and working on projects.
I agree a good team is a corner stone to a good work environment. My favorite places to work also had a strong team to go with it. Also there own little culture traits.
I want to own my own consulting firm/labor. For the variety of projects, work schedule, etc. It's just getting back to that point. Alot of the best tech workers I know. Want to own/work in a consulting firm .For several reasons. They want their own hours/locale to work in. To not be artificially held back on a project, and alternate between tech stacks, to keep their skills sharp.
What we lacked was all the rest - sales, marketing, business development, someone ensuring that the market verticals we were in were strong and who knew when to start looking into new lines of business. While I had some of the latter, the marketing and sales side was always difficult for me.
Lessons definitely learned, and I'm very excited for try #2!
And yep, the team matters the most. People forget what that word means, but when you're in a functional team you'll simply know it. I describe it as that feeling of being stuck on some tedious work you're hacking away at feeling burned out on, leaving for the day, then coming in the next morning to find your co-worker who works late pushed that project forward for you while you were sleeping.
Sounds silly right? But that is severely lacking in most corporations today - that idea of team spirit and team members having each other backs like that. You certainly see it in startups, but that seems to almost be it save very small pockets with competent managers in large corporations almost by accident rather than design.
Reading your other posts in this thread you would have fit right in to our ops team back then. Basically our job was to make sure that phone never rang at 2am, and if it did we had fucked up somewhere so we didn't mind it as much as the only person you typically had to blame was staring back at you in the mirror. Everyone was empowered to keep those calls from coming in though. If your company requires heroics to operate, you're doing it wrong.
Wow. I can't even believe it would require that much of a cut (and clearly even that still wasn't enough for those people). Damn.
The short answer is you can't. Your boss is always within his or her right to tell you that you have to stay.
You're 100% within your right to say "no" and walk out of the door.
Wait, what?! I'm on the younger side, even for a forum like this, and I've had an employment contract for every job I've ever had... even as an intern, short term contractor, or just summer jobs in high school.
I'd immediately walk away from any offer that didn't include an employment contract. Not putting your terms of employment in writing can only result in you, the employee, getting exploited. There are no positives.
I've worked a job with a real contract once in my career. I'm not sure I would do it again. Not being able to quit is a strange feeling, even though there is quite a lot of consideration in return. In the end I opted to not renew and go back to a simple at-will agreement, since I kind of resented the lack of freedom it gave me.
A real contract actually means they must pay the full length regardless of if they fire you, save of course for specific "for cause" reasons outlined in the agreement.
Through unions and collective bargaining.
However if your boss offers you a 5% raise and you counter with a 5% pay cut and you're out the door at noon every on the last work day of every week, you'd be surprised how willing they would be do to that.
My current job is a compressed work shedule: 9hr days but every other friday off. The friday I do work is 8hrs. And no on-call. I can actually do errands and appointments and spend time with family without taking a vacation day. I love it.