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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

There is no downtime anymore. You can never truly get away from work in an age of 4g connectivity everywhere.

I'm doing a bit of consulting with a startup at the moment, and one of our team members recently disappeared off on vacation. Good for him, I thought. Two days later, he popped back up on the company slack, working away from his tropical beach.

To be clear, this is not a case of digital nomadding. This is 10 days of vacation time that they somehow guilted him into throwing away after he had actually flown halfway around the world.

20 years ago, there was an expectation that when you left the office, you were unreachable except in an emergency. I don't see any hint of that expectation anymore. It's a combination of employers with serious boundary issues, and empoloyees fearing the ramifications of pushing back.

You really need to stand up for yourself these days. But at least I've found that if you do so, it generally works.

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I had to cancel my honeymoon and my brother's honeymoon because of work.

I am an H1B from India working for the American subsidiary of an India company. For a short period of time, I was put on a project that was created by some other team and finally abandoned by the customer. Then, 1-2 years later, new customer management decided to bring the project back to life. Only thing was the new management didn't know it was still in prototype stage. They tried to go to market with it, only to find issues.

Unfortunately for me, when this customer approached my company, I was free and I got assigned to this project. I did what they asked to. It was only for a month of so. Then, I heard nothing from this customer for a couple of months. Then they showed up again asking me to make some changes, that lasted for 1-2 weeks. It repeated once or twice again. Then I never heard from them.

2 years passed by after I worked on this project for the first time. I must have worked on and off for 2 months total in this so far. I went to India on a 40 day vacation for my brother's and my marriage. I get an email from the manager who handles this customer that this customer has come back again and they want me to work. I tried to work from India as much as I could. But this manager insisted on me cancelling my vacation. Finally, he escalated to my actual manager's boss's boss, saying that I have to cancel my honeymoon. I was scared of loosing my visa, so I ended my cancelling my honeymoon. Since my brother and I got married within the same month, we had our honeymoon's planned together. So he also had to cancel.

The day I got the email from the manager asking me to cancel my honeymoon, I stayed in room for the whole day. I was incredibly stressed and miserable.

I was never the same person after this. I lost all my interest in work and my company. I will resign within 1 or 2 months and leave US altogether. There is a good chance I will regret it later, but it has become too much for me to handle.

I want to start off by saying that it was wrong of them to ask you to cancel your vacation, but in the end you threw away your vacation on the hypothetical that they would fire you, only to leave the company voluntarily. It seems like you ended up with the worst of both worlds. If you would have said no, then you'd be no worse off than you are now.

The guy is obviously going through an awful time, is it really necessary to point that out?

He's a human, not a robot. I'm sure he agonized over BOTH decisions. I'm glad it was fully rational and clear cut for you, though.

Look, I've had an awful day. Nothing to compare with your story, but bad enough to start shooting cvs like a machine gun. After coming home and a nice cold beer, I feel fine.

My reasoning is that in a couple of months max I'll have another job. A better paid job, with a sensible schedule (not this ridiculous 2 hour lunch stop), with a sensible dress code and standard ways to do things. While the people that made me feel bad today will be, no doubt, in exactly the same trouble that they're today because they don't know any better and they don't listen.

Don't leave the US for that bad experience. Do leave if you feel that you'll be better off in your country for other reasons, but not because of an awful person. Do you want to feel all your life that a single idiot ruined your life plans?

How much time do you need to stay in that company to keep your visa? From your story it seems that you've been there for four years. If it isn't much more than a year more, resist. Pretend indifference or, even better, feel it. Make plans for what you'll do when you can change jobs. Get support from your wife and family. And trust yourself.

> There is no downtime anymore. You can never truly get away from work in an age of 4g connectivity everywhere.

You can. Get rid of your phone. Most of us don't have a job that actually requires a phone, and it's really as matter of your work willing to take advantage of the fact that most of you won't push back when pressed. You can take advantage of the fact that they won't pay for you to carry a phone.

I finally got rid of my phone about a month ago. Started off deleting all the apps, stopped carrying it. Finally, took a roofing hammer and smashed it to bits. I may purchase a pay-as-you-go "brick" and leave it in the trunk of my car for emergencies, but otherwise I will never have an internet connected device that I carry on me at all times. It's needless for most of us.

You can talk about how convenient it is to have things like Maps at all times, and to be sure that is convenient. Just requires a little forethought and planning. Don't give into the FOMO, smash your phone.

Well done.

Perhaps a middle ground is having a dedicated work phone, and then turning that off when you are not on the clock and not rostered to be on call.

Android Work Profile can help with this. You can turn off the work profile, which completely disables your work account, apps, and notifications.

https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/7029561?hl=en

A bit less extreme, but I put my phone silent mode about 6 months ago and never set it back.

I was probably checking it more for the first month to be honest, but after breaking my own and others expectations of a swift reply I find it much easier to respond at my leisure.

Edit: communication at work is expected over internal IM and email, and my previous solution was to not give out my number. I feel this works better.

After all, if I'm 3 hours late responding and it was dire I would have been contacted via other means.

No phone? We need team players at this company. /s

You joke, but I've never worked in a place I didn't hear this literal sentence.

I've never configured Outlook on my phone. If they absolutely -have- to reach me, they can text or call me.

The beautiful thing about that is it makes it difficult, but not impossible, to reach me. No one on my project has my number. They know who does. That person knows to respect my time. They also know I don't always pick up.

So there's multiple levels of filtering that means that if it arrives, it arrives as a voicemail, and is something so important it requires attention ASAP, -and- is something that can't be addressed by someone else (since if it is, it'll be faster to find someone who can figure it out than to reach me). So it's a very small class of problems that actually get through, and they're usually the ones I -do- care about.

Sole developer, devops, and all the other I/T hats for a startup. Amazingly when I dipped out for a 2 week vacation in Thailand I wasn't bugged once. I informed them I would only have chromebook so I could only SSH into a server, very limited as to what I could do. I also ensured that nothing was released for 2 weeks prior to me leaving. The only exceptions were critical bugs.

I was amazed that I wasn't bothered once. The no release thing leading up to the vacation was a huge saver I think. Thats not to say I haven't been fucked by this company. I worked all day December 30th (Saturday I think) and a half day on NYE this year. But in general things I've put in like only doing releases on Tuesday to keep them far away from the weekend and only doing system patches once per month outside of super critical things (Meltdown and Spectre) have saved me. Again though I still get fucked on occasion.

But I mostly fuck myself into working either because I feel pressured by the sheer weight of ever building tasks and bugs or because there is something fun I want to try in our application, generally performance optimizations make me happy and give me a sense of accomplishment. I can be found doing those some early Saturday mornings before getting on with my day.

> I don't see any hint of that expectation anymore

From what I've seen, in a sample size of three commercial workplaces with software projects, I think it varies from person to person and company to company.

At my current enterprisey gig, my perception is that some of my colleagues are very poor at setting boundaries with work, especially in terms of signing out of the team's slack after hours. This isn't forced by the environment, it's people choosing to remain plugged in. Some of my other colleagues are much better at setting boundaries. I managed to last about 1.5 years in my role before checking my work email or work slack outside of business hours.

In previous gigs at a small company I've seen far worse culture in terms of crunch time to hit project milestones or close deals, but also fairly positive leadership at times from the CEO telling people to go home.

You want to work for a company where people signing in to company slack/Skype when they are meant to be on leave are kindly but firmly hounded by colleagues and management to disconnect and go actually have their holiday.

> 20 years ago, there was an expectation that when you left the office, you were unreachable except in an emergency.

Maybe I am sort of fresh in the workforce (3 yrs) but I just don't allow this - if I am not in the office I don't work. I don't have slack on my phone or whatever and I have strict boundaries working 9-5. Does it become worse when I have more exp?

This is the correct attitude. My comment comes from observing the 20-something crowd at this current gig. As near as I can tell, I'm the only one there who leaves work completely behind at any point during the week.

It's painful to watch. Glad to hear you're not falling for it.

I think it's mostly a combination of the work culture at any given employer or even within a team, and the habits/expectations of the people doing the work.

I keep weird hours due to working remotely and across time zones, and I do encourage people to contact me by phone for anything time-sensitive when I'm offline. But that almost never happens, people are usually OK with waiting until I get back online to answer their queries.

Some form of this is more the rule than the exception on my team, because the people who don't work remotely still have lives (pick up the kids, avoid the rush-hour traffic, whatever) -- and also have to be flexible about their hours due to the multiple time zones.

This includes people with 1 to 25+ years experience FWIW. So I wouldn't worry about it, if you want to have a strict 9-5 boundary you can find good places to work (just not on anything mission-critical). If you prefer to work 40 hours a week on some other reasonable schedule, you can also find good places to work.

I once had a colleague who worked a very strict 9-5 and could have been called in an emergency but we all understood it would have to be a REAL emergency before we bothered that guy. He did a great job and everyone respected him, despite his being probably the only guy in the building keeping such a rigid schedule.

No. A few companies may have toxic expectations from management (and some of the stories here do show people who work for such places); avoid them (quit if you mistakenly end up at one).

But most of this is self-inflicted via tacitly accepting and reinforcing cultural norms that don't actually need to be followed. I've yet to work at a place that attempted to abuse my boundaries once I made it clear I respected them. I.e., "Didn't you see that email I sent last night?" "I did when I got in today", they now know I don't check email after hours. No one wants to 'officially' say "You should have no work life balance; we expect you to be on call 24/7", so just making it clear that you won't voluntarily do it, and will presume that you are always truly off the clock when not at work, means they tacitly accept it.

>20 years ago, there was an expectation that when you left the office, you were unreachable except in an emergency. I don't see any hint of that expectation anymore.

This is commonplace in Europe. Vacation is vacation, and largely this is respected.

Yup, can confirm. As far as I can tell, only some managers do some work during their vacation, but I'm sure it's because they want to (i.e. they feel that the world would fall apart without them).

Not all Europeans. I work with a number of Swiss folks from my company and I remember thinking "jesus! I thought they had better work/life balance in Europe!".

Getting on calls at 8pm (due to time zone different), emails on the weekend, work travel on bank holidays, etc.

Ehh. I used to think that too. In the UK the culture (at least in London) is pretty damn close to NYC or Silicon Valley in terms of evening and weekend work in tech. At least in better paying jobs.

For full time roles, they DO have 23 to 25 days vacation minimum, unlike that evil PTO of 15 days (or worse, unlimited vacation) where you have to cancel your honeymoon if you get the flu that year.

I had a colleague that interrupted the honeymoon because of a vague "we are swamped with work" remark from an asshat manager.

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