Emails while commuting 'should count as work'
bbc.com
bbc.com
The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is now 'required' for many.
I personally feel that the relative recent introduction of 'work from anywhere' technology for the knowledge worker class, has indeed lead to yet another expansion of salaried-time, even when no 'salary' is provided for it.
We should also ask ourselves if the stance on 'working-from-home', which should be a normal evolution of the technology, hasn't been hampered by a standing tradition of externalizing the costs of commuting by companies to employees.
Commuting in itself is for many parts an anachronism that lost its grounding with the introduction of personal computers and the internet. It should be seriously questioned why this is allowed to stand, when it comes at great costs to both the employee's health as well as the environment.
(P.S. Before you go 'but even for knowledge workers nothing beats working together', you can be right, but do we need the 'gold-standard' of collaboration every working day now that the alternatives are for most business activities more than good enough and still getting better with each year?
As in many things it is a trade off. Yet often, we see that in those trade-offs were companies are left holding the bill instead of the employee (office furniture and architecture, IT equipment, ...), the balance goes in the direction of 'good-enough' rather than the 'best-of-the-best'.)
>The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is now 'required' for many.
These two facts often make me ponder whether we are regressing as a society but simply blind to this fact because various quality of life things have become cheaper (e.g. going on holiday and electronics).
Meanwhile, we are mostly collectively losing at the wealth game and I am quite convinced we are losing at the wealth game globally - despite many people's attempts to illustrate that global poverty is decreasing (I lack data and drive to prove this point sadly). As such, social mobility also seems to regressing as who your parents are seems to be more important now than it might have been 50-60 years ago - I need only to look to my parent's achievements (and their peers) to be reminded of this fact.
So what is it that has convinced you that we're losing, in the face of evidence to the contrary?
For me, my anecdata leads me to believe it is very hard to get on the wealth ladder. I have built this perspective from associating with people ranging from backgrounds of very working class to ultra high net worth people. We live in a world where (thanks to things like QE) it's easy to make money if you have money - equity markets have gone through a sustained bull period and housing prices have seen a sustained period of growth which has only in the past few years cooled down.
An easy thing for many people to relate to is house prices (which is often most people's entry into wealth). If you live in a major city like London, good luck buying a house without parental help. The past decade has seen growth which has basically been faster than most people can save at. What's even more crazy is that the gap is small enough to see within (half) a generation - I have an older brother and people in their mid 30s face a very different situation to people in their mid 20s now. If you got on the housing ladder around or before 08 you'd have made widened the gap between those who didn't in a stepwise fashion.
Meanwhile, my father was able to buy a house and have a kid when he was 27 after arriving in the UK with nothing on his back - he didn't even have a university degree. Contrast that with today, people who work in classically "elite" jobs live paycheck to paycheck in the city. Do you know any junior doctors in London? Most of them are amongst the most miserable people I know - they work all kinds of crazy shifts (night oncall) then have 1-2 hour commutes home.
So if you're in a situation where most people are struggling to move out of home, let alone get on the ladder, while it is known that the rich are getting richer can we say that we live in more equal times?
This smells like selection bias. The people who aren't struggling that badly aren't complaining about it!
32% of americans 18-35 live at home [0], but that isn't an all-time high -- in 1940, for instance, approximately 35 percent of people in that age range lived at home.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/24/479327382...
* with the exception of the Black demographic
So, is the comparison point Roman London? During the Blitz? When Pea Soup was a common pollution issue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog)? Or is it a period post war until about 1980 when assets hadn't caught up to a booming economy?
Some parts of life are more expensive in a few world cities that are more than their local population, places like London, SF, NYC, Paris. In such places, housing is likely prohibitively expensive for almost everyone, as the market size (aka demand) is every person in the world worth north of $USD 10 million in the entire world. That market is a LOT larger than even ten years ago, and has a motivated population (the Chinese) who prefer foreign assets over local ones. On the flipside, supply has not kept up, as most world cities have housing approval procedures that are glacially slow, and held back by NIMBYs.
But even then, the London of 1950 wasn't the place it is now, and lots of things like air quality have improved vastly, as has what is available to do - from eating to drinking and general entertainment.
Ironically, I think what you parents did is the same way everyone today could make great wealth - move to a city in another country with opportunity. My ex moved to Beijing and made 1st world money while spending like a local - so > $100K with expenses under $1K a month.
I guess my parent's generation i.e. post-WW2. Your insight about assets not catching up is valid, although social mobility was very high for the times.
>In such places, housing is likely prohibitively expensive for almost everyone, as the market size (aka demand) is every person in the world worth north of $USD 10 million in the entire world. That market is a LOT larger than even ten years ago, and has a motivated population (the Chinese) who prefer foreign assets over local ones.
This is presentation of facts I've previously struggled to articulate so thank you for framing it much more lucidly than I ever could have. This particular insight unfortunately somewhat agrees with my viewpoint that "global inequality has gone down but local inequality has gone up globally". Like I said, I haven't got any data to prove it, but I would willingly put money on betting that there is some Simpson's paradox schenanigans going on here. China, if anything, is a great example of this - the Beijing middle classes are doing "o.k." and there are tonnes of billionaires in China, but equally, there are plenty of people still living on 100USD a month (or less).
>Ironically, I think what you parents did is the same way everyone today could make great wealth - move to a city in another country with opportunity. My ex moved to Beijing and made 1st world money while spending like a local - so > $100K with expenses under $1K a month.
I think that is a fair point, the only difference I'd argue, is that my parents came to the UK and did well for themselves by playing the same game as most the people around them. Sure, I could move to China on an expat salary (I have recollections of 200k PA USD for "english teachers" in South Korea being passed around a while back, or teachers at Harrow Beijing getting paid 100k+ PA) but is that really something any of the locals can do there? That's almost soft colonisation in my eyes. I recently had a chance to discuss local software engineer salaries with a local mainlander and he quoted salaries of 20-30k USD for fresh CS grads in ShenZhen. And he scoffed as if that was a big number. Really puts things into perspective when you compare that to Ivy CS fresh-grads in SV (120-200k when I last checked)...
Probably not, but you also need to consider the second order effects. If it's not expected that you be in the office often, people more often choose to live far away from where they work. This makes it marginally harder to make people come into the office when you do need to pull together for "gold standard" collaboration.
If you wanted to mitigate against this, then you'd need to make part of your hiring requirements easy access to the office. But now you're needing to be prescriptive about where your employees should live, shrinking your potential talent pool and encroaching on their personal lives.
Not many people take it to the extreme of working with a laptop and a sat-link from a remote tropical beach, but plenty chose and environment they like, be it a hip bristling city or somewhere more rural for the peace and quiet, and then suffer the commutes that come with accepting a job.
Now you are right that there is the potential for abuse, certainly in employer side ruled sectors, an maybe we need some safeguards, but we need to try and stop this madness.
Turning some of the costs from employee to employer seems to work. I didn't run into many companies where the devs had 3x4K monitors and a quiet private office, because you know, at times 'you need that extra efficiency'.
Use your bus/train time to study things that will help your career, at this job and the next. Don't just give that time away to your current employer for free - unless your employer is a charity.
Edit: Even if you work for a charity, giving away your time for free may not be a good idea. ;)
Charities pay for work just like anyone else. If you like, sure, make a donation. But make sure it’s formal. Otherwise you are robbing someone else of an opportunity to generously support the work AND if the “employee stretching to give” becomes organizational culture it can endanger the entire organization. Burn out is real.
Working for an NPO can be existentially rewarding, but I hear a lot of myths about how NPOs provide better work life balance, etc, and I don't think that's true at all.
I have a theory that a lot of people do things in certain ways in order to keep up appearances. For instance, a lot of startups waste a lot of money on things that are 'business-y' to legitimize themselves as a 'real business'.
To that extent, I find that a lot of NPOs waste a lot of resources appearing 'thrifty' (read: cheap). I've worked with a lot of NPOs that waste tons of employee time and money because they don't want to spend money because of the 'optics'. What this means is that getting anything done takes more time and energy at an NPO.
My specialty is database marketing, and I've literally done thousands of experiments across millions of mailed letters. I've found that for most donors, anything that can make a letter appear 'cheaper' improves response rate and the average donation. Most people interpret similar data as people preferring more 'personalized' letters, but I think that's because there is a lot of overlap between 'low-budget' and 'human touch'.
The irony is that at once place we spent more than three times as much per letter to make them appear cheaper.
This mindset also applies to people who work at non-profit orgs. People would spend 3 days doing stuff by hand rather than paying $100 to have it automated. On a similar note, I was stuck with an ancient Pentium 4 for a long time because the IT department bought them used. They were eventually replaced with Core 2 Duos. They were slow as hell, which was bad enough, but if you did the math the lifetime cost was much higher than buying a new computer due in large part to how much power Pentium 4's used. Not to mention it took them forever to upgrade from CRTs, which use so much more electricity than LCDs.
Probably for many in the targeted audience the feel of 'authenticity' is important, even when it is manufactured.
Usually much less than anyone else, though the benefits packages tend to be more generous.
Or leave 45 minutes early and work those 45 minutes on the train.
Nice deal for everyone: they get access to a larger pool of potential employees. I get to live where I want.
And I make sure I only write the hours I actually work while commuting. (Right now I'm reading HN instead.)
It's important to have a good work/life balance.
Please do what you want with your time. Use your bus/train time for what you want to do, which includes voluntarily giving away that time at whatever cost you want.
If my current job is programming engine control units, they'll pay me to train in things relevant to that, like MISRA standards - but if I think my next job will involve blockchains, the ECU manufacturer ain't going to pay me to study those.
"There's a real challenge in deciding what constitutes work," said Dr Jain, from the university's Centre for Transport and Society.
"Work" is anything I would be doing while sitting at my desk in your office building. So if I'm doing that on a train or in your office they are both "work." And if my train ride takes 1.5 hours to the office and 1.5 hours home, I'll get on the train around 8AM and leave the office at 3:30 to arrive at the other end by 5PM and count that as an 8 hour work day.
On the other hand, if I am in my car driving, I don't think of it as work until I can actually concentrate on doing work.
This would include driving to the office.
Where you choose to live and work are up to you, and need to be factored in to the burden. Commuting is only "work" if you're expected to do something during the commute.
If you are «forced» to drive, example as a consulatant normaly based in the city and have to comute longer than normaly, the comute is paid.
The problem is America has become beholden to shareholders, and the narrative is you're unpatriotic or naive if you want to disrupt the status quo. The resources exist to appropriately compensate workers for their time.
When you can offload the consequences of poor planning or lack of foresight onto your employees (in the form of making them stay late, come in early, be on call or have arbitrary schedules, etc.) at zero cost, that's going to discourage good management and honest project planning.
If I don't have to pay a price for underestimating how long it will take to do something, then am I not subtly incentivized to lowball estimates for everything knowing that it's really no skin off my back if it takes longer than expected? It's all coming out of my employees' hides. There may be fuzzy, unquantifiable effects on morale, psychological health, creativity, etc. on my staff that hurt the organization in the long run, but compared to the hard data on quarterly returns they don't weigh as heavily.
But most of the times one could take advantage of it by living closer to the job and reducing commute time
I always wonder why people decide to leave faraway from work which isn't in any way cheaper if you include commute cost and time, for a room more
A room you don't use because you don't have time to use it
Best thing my parents taught me is living at walking distance from work
Doing things which are part of work counts as work is hardly an innovative statement.
The question is, how did companies persuade people that they should work for free on the way into the office?
Sadly, the effect of this is that there's less incentive to build resilient systems, since there's always someone available to fix things quickly. Trying to convince corporate to spend more time and money on building a system that looks/smells/feels the same, but is presumably more resilient, is very very difficult.
It's so hard to predict which projects will succeed and fail. People will spend time setting up Jenkins pipelines and all kinds of unit tests, and their stuff still breaks. I argued for unit-testing on our current project to add resiliency, and I swear 70% of my energy is fucking unit tests now. Whoops!
Yep. It's often double-bad end result, since if you do build a resilient system, no one sees you "fix" it, so it looks like you did no extra work.
But if you build something broken, and then swoop in and "fix" it, you get extra credit for pulling "more" work after hours / during an emergency.
I found this to be the opposite as long as the developer who wrote the system also owns the running of said system. It will not take many late night/weekend calls before the developer makes it more resilient.
Selling this to the business can be easy, because even if someone is there to fix it the system was presumably still down. This is why I push every developer to learn communication skills, and rudimentary business skills. If the developer (or their manager) cannot communicate to the business why a more resilient system is better for the business that's on them. This also requires developers to come off the "I only want to do it perfectly to 999999s", and again think about what can the business reasonably afford to do.
Of course this will fall apart once their manager catches on but in some monolithic organizations that could take years
Minds require rest to function optimally, so pushing yourself to an extreme comes at a cost that gets realized down the line instead. Identifying which means of functioning comes at the greatest cost is not easy to analyze or ascertain. So working together in addition to competing is important as well.
All principles of capitalism. Just, never before in history has there really been so much attention paid to the mind. Software, eesh, yep.
I guess I'm lucky enough that my managers have never hounded me about when I come in and leave, so if working an hour on the train means I get my work for the day done an hour early, it also means I leave the office an hour early. Yeah, maybe I could use that hour to read for fun instead, but I'd rather finish everything sooner and get on with my day sooner.
I answer emails and slack whenever I can. On the flip side, I get work from home privileges, I show up when I want, I leave when I want, and I get put on exciting projects instead of boring ones. People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients. I typically don't bill time until my laptop comes out.
I'm two-minds about this. Companies really do abuse their employees and try to get all the work they can out of them. This is a problem that leads to abusive employers. But employees also look for ANY entitlement they can receive, whether or not it is useful to their professional development. This is also a problem that leads to lazy and useless employees. It's sort of a feedback loop. It's also probably very different outside of my field (and probably most people's field on this site), which is software development.
Why not? Requiring off-hour access is admitting project management failure. That’s what on-call is for, and on-call engineers and management should rotate and be paid for on-call duty. For them, it’s working hours. When I’m on call for a client, I bill _for being available_, so basically for keeping the phone on.
The way I usually approach these discussions is “ok, you can have the feature built this weekend, this means people need to work their weekend, that costs 50% extra and means that the people working extra hours will be unavailable some time in the future.” Same thing with 24/7 support. It just costs money. Staff needs to be available. 90% of the people decide that Monday will be good enough.
The hard fact is that someone needs to pay for 24/7. It’s either the client, the employer or the employee. It’s just that a lot of employees don’t realize that they’re getting shortchanged here with talk about engagement and promise of better projects and I’m trying my best that this doesn’t happen in my company on my watch.
24-hour is harder, but when you have clients across different time zones, it is also a norm. Again, with big films scattering themselves across the globe, it is expected that someone in authority picks up 24/7 because your 3am is sometimes the client's 10am.
You can charge more for this, but the client doesn't want to hear complaints. You will be judged on service rendered for a given price. The firm down the street, the one who can provide people on a sunday without overtime, will win the next contract.
There's no 'on call' for the kind of projects that parent is talking about. There's a small handful of guys who get shit done and maybe a second ring development team around them.
For some people, the truly exciting work is the work where none of this stuff has been proceduralized. It's not feasible to train or do knowledge transfer between two shifts for these projects.
I know folks that sit on packed bags, ready to fly to Alaska and hike another 50 miles to fix failing cell infrastructure, but even they have a notion of “i’m on duty now and I’m off duty.” And on top, they get paid a shitload of money for being available just in case.
You make a deal with your #1s that they will get the fun projects, the paid vacations when the current crisis is over, the completely flexible hours and full autonomy. Anything they want within reason, as long as shit gets done.
It's not for everyone, but I can see where GP is coming from.
Flex hours is a thing that helps, but even there must be an agreement that when you’re off, you’re off. Companies can be stuck in perceived crisis mode for years at a time.
I had the employer pay for some of my vacations during downtime, I progressed along my career path much faster than normal employees, I was paid more than normal employees. It was a good gig.
And even startups need to get out of “we’ll wing it and cover with our lives for our management failures” mode as early as possible because it’s clearly not sustainable.
You don't have to pay for the vacation, if the crisis never ends.
This is true, but this is really question about compensation, not work time. Executives are basically always on call but they get executive pay.
If you are not well compensated for doing the work that can't be replaced, you are being exploited.
You are completely right.
Management lack of competence is pushed down and transforms in extra working hours for everyone else. In this kind of company, people are always putting down fires instead of working strategically. That causes more fires and more extra work at any time of the day.
Because you are often busy with work? (Even though you're not actually working, your mind is with your work)
If you own the business, you're always on, yeah.
If you're a worker, this is paid work.
Pinning career advancement to uncompensated work is bullshit.
"Demanding clients" often respond positively to articulated, practiced boundaries. I'd be unimpressed with a project lead who simply allowed their client to set the rules. I expect the lead to know what's best for the project/team and to have the skills to communicate that to the client in a way they understand. We like the clients who "know the rules" implicitly, but that doesn't mean the others can't come to learn them.
The rare clients who really are so demanding that you can't even establish a boundary like this is probably dragging a whole fleet of problems behind them.
[And if you need to be available off-hours because that's what the project needs, that's different. Then it has nothing to do with how "demanding" the client is. It's the project that's setting the terms.]
Marx has been dead for 135 years, and people still parrot his confused ramblings without thinking. Amazing.
It is common to refer to this as unearned income because it is income received by virtue of ownership not work.
Investors and management are intertwinned and blurry. Smaller businesses usually have them the same and larger ones must compete with the alternative of starting ones own and thus pass down dividends. Even the most hands off "useless idiot heir" has an indirect management role via who they ultimately choose to support and what they do with it.
Investment has a role aside from funding that they engage in by driving efficiency, expansion and the dreaded counterpart of contraction to match with demand.
We have empirical evidence that while management and ownership often do in fact do useful work. Look at how farm appropriation has ended in reduced yields instead of increased as one would expect when farmhands gain the benefits of more ownership. Instead their production plunged and they started experiencing increased crop failure. Which brings to mind the related fallacy that farming is simple.
It is true that management and ownership and investors are often overcompensated and worryingly self perpetuating at the expense of others - but they do in fact have a legitimate claim to profits.
If you manage your project in any half-decent way then phine calls after work should be a rare exception.
And the work has to get done at some point right? Most jobs that involve answering emails aren’t like factory jobs where you simply make as many widgets as possible during your shift and that’s is.
Every email I answer “on the train” means one less thing to do when actually at the office. Which means I can take a longer lunch or just relax a bit more or just have a slightly less frenetic pace.
Work is work. Your employer pays you money to do work. If you do work outside of that, it doesn't mean anything other than you don't want/can't enforce a boundary between your work life and private life.
Also, yet another aspect is that even more of us like our work and want to succeed at it but have been around for longer than x years where the novelty of being "always on" has worn thin.
An employer taking advantage of one's lack of boundaries is bad form regardless of whether the employee can't/won't see how detrimental it can be.
I like my work and want to succeed at it too. Do not insinuate that someone who values their time outside of work doesn't. That is demeaning and insulting to the rest of us who have lives outside of work.
That's the fun part - companies didn't, people did it to themselves. Probably started as just some people answering emails they got overnight on their morning commute. Thanks to smartphones and always on connectivity, other colleagues get a ping that there's an email. And before long you've got your employees mailing each other.
I don't think there's ever been an actual company policy that codified the expectation that people should be answering company emails in their own time.
Companies didn't persuade people, the tools (smart phones, laptops/home computers, fast residential network) just made it too easy and when all your peers do it it's hard for you not to.
Why employers (in the knowledge business at least) track people by the hour is beyond my understanding.
At least in Germany, working unions are fighting against not counting working hours, because it is better for the employees and is also a saftey net against related health issues. Without counting, legal rules are not enforceable and people may even work on weekends without any compensation. This also leads to the fact that managers start to expect those extra hours from everyone, and consequently see it as an lack of motivation or dedication not doing them.
Attorneys do the same thing. It’s no big deal.
Because in some countries it is a legal requirement. Where I work, in Austria, there is currently a legal limit of 10 working hours per day and a total of 50 hours per week, except in exceptional circumstances. Therefore, all employees must log their working hours.
I found the process odd when I first moved here. However, over time I have come to appreciate the advantages. I have absolutely no pressure from my employer to work excessive overtime and there is no default culture of long working hours. After 14:00 on Fridays, every week, the office is 90% empty.
I hope this small example helps you to understand why employers in some locations have to track people by the hour.
Yes while the employer may not be able to legally force you to handle emails outside of official work hours and doing so counts as working...
Depending on your job, if you don't check and reply to some time sensitive emails outside of work hours, you might a) become a roadblock on someone else's project that's due soon b) be late to respond to "emergencies" and this can affect how people perceive your overall effectiveness and performance.
Of course, company culture can minimize last minute requests, unrealistic deadlines, etc. to minimize these "emergencies" that need quick replies but many don't.
Of course, but for the vast majority of cases the right mental model is "too bad". Whoever needs you to be available after hours needs to learn how to plan and execute his work. Emergencies happen, but those should be rare; if not, wean them off or look for another employer. Being on call all the time is not healthy long term. Today's job market is very friendly to engineers; if your company does not minimize those emergencies, consider working elsewhere.
Yes I know that's an ideal world etc. But how did people handle that before there was email? That's right, they didn't, and it had to wait until tomorrow.
This is not a new phenomenon.
Edit: Just wanted to add that I'm not trying to justify this behaviour. It was wrong to intrude into people's personal lives and expect unpaid work then and it's wrong now.
I was on HN, not doing much work worth paying for.
Of course lawyers bill for research, phone calls, and emails. So do consultants. Why would considering work emails during commuting counting as work be at all a controversial? What's the contrary argument?
Maybe it's different in the UK, but I don't understand the big deal.
Looking at the types of emails we send/recieve, a trend seems to emerge, some people ask a lot more question using email, and some emails require us to do a lot more answering.
Today's email habits are still rooted in the blackberry culture that created it - there was no structure and framework around email use.
I still believe mobile emails are more beneficial for the people asking the questions, and not so good for people who have to answer answering the questions, often on their own time to keep up.
How does poor planning on someone else's part require you to reply instantly, or within the same business day? Very little should be that critical if the organization is truly-proactive.
Processing several hundred emails a day used to be a norm on a few recent projects. A few trends emerged to manage sanity:
- Poor emailing habits exist. Triaging is incredibly important, on top of GTD. Those 2 minute email replies can really add up, scheduling replies is important.
- The more we try to get ahead and email in our off time, the more replies we recieve in a vicious cycle. The more we send emails. Our time will never scale to meet the available time of all the people we simultaneously communicate with.
- I try to use mobile email only to read emails and to write as little as possible.
- Where I do have to write mobile emails, especially after hours, I consider if I want to be at the top of the person's inbox or not, and that's probably best achieved by scheduling an email to go out at 7 or 8 AM instead of the night before.
- The email scheduling feature in Aquamail is invaluable. I wouldn't be able to switch back to iOS without a comparable email client. Boomerang is handy too for automatic follow ups that can be scheduled at the time of sending.
- Try to centralize communication as much as possible and check email 1-3 times a day. Email can be followed up on, it isn't always the case with Slack. Slack/Chats are extremely valuable for realtime input.
I'd love to hear any other tips or strategies folks are using to manage their email flow.
IT is one classic example with the lazy sysadmin is a good sysadmin. If everything is secure and operational and all desired expansions are either met or properly analysed as not worth it then their slacking off doesn't matter.
No one seems to have mentioned my perspective: Its not that I feel compelled to do this (far from it), its more that the commute is BORING AS HELL.
At least for London, the wifi and network is only available during the 30 seconds you are in a station (i.e. not in the tunnels), so more productive things that need a persistent network connection wont work very well (e.g. Duolingo, netflix etc). You cant even look out of the window since its in a tunnel the whole way! :-)
The other alternative to doing emails is reading cached news articles (I actually do this a lot - load up a series of 10-15 articles before getting on the train), or desperately trying to connect to the wifi then load a webpage in the 30 second window you have before you are back in a tunnel.
Or you can get paid-for Duolingo or download netflix shows the night before etc. Its all a bit of a faff though really, while your inbox is sitting there full of juicy unread emails from your colleagues in another hemisphere that you'll need to read at some point anyway .... too tempting to jump in and start triaging when your alternative is staring at the floor or the blackness outside the windows :)
[1] http://www.offlineimap.org
(Wink)
Picking one or the other would be nearly equivalent anyway.
But on the other hand, I recall being shocked (this was some years ago) when a seriously enterprise-level customer service rep emailed me at midnight. Because, you know, I was billing for reading her message, in 15-minute blocks, but she was paid on a salary basis.
I feel like companies use Slack exactly for this reason...it tethers your employees to a very intimate possession-your smartphone and it's far more invasive than a phone call or email and your are expected to respond immediately.
It has all the dynamics of any email or regular office conversation. Somebody has a grudge in the office and want to make you look bad for remote working? Call them and immediately hang up and tell managers 'so and so isn't responding in real time' or take a convo out of context where emoticons play a far more conflicting messages to the receiver. For example, somebody using a animated flashing parrot and mistaking it as a slight.
I feel like Slack has been more times counter-productive than advertised.
Where you live is not a simple choice for many of us. History of previous jobs, family commitments, schools, house prices, etc., etc... Like lots of things, it's a compromise.
On the flip side, having a long commute gets me preferential treatment re. remote working, so it's swings and roundabouts.
Perhaps the people inclined to down vote think I'm advocating for banning women from work? Please realize I'm saying no such thing, I'm simply pointing out an obvious consequence for long term labor supply that simple reasoning can deduce and the data bears out.
[1]http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/18/is-u-s-ferti...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/figures/m4838a2f1....
My wife haven't worked out a single day in life, and haven't ever taken a single anticonceptional pill, either. The only thing we agreed without discussion in our marriage was having a single kid. I went to vasectomy the month after my son was born.
Tell that to generations of men that have used violence to stay on top. Hard not to consider it a war when it looks, talks, and walks like a duck.
My point is: I'm not sure "supported" is quite the right word.
Let us not forget them. Let us not belittle their sacrifices.