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> People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients.

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.

"Demanding client" doesnt mean unlimited funding. i find that the most demanding ones also look most closely at their bills.

“Demanding client” is usually code for “behaves like a spoiled child because nobody dared to tell them no.” The most demanding clients I’ve witnessed were mid-level managers from MTV and Universal Music. Called for work being done on a weekend just because they felt like.

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.

Then they may go elsewhere, to someone not on a 9-5 monday-friday culture. Many now space people out (ie some on a w-th weekend) so the company can provide 7-day service at normal rates. I used to work in film/tv. 7-day service is a norm.

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.

You may have misread what I wrote. I’m not at all opposed to flex time, work schedules that include the weekend, people preferring off work hours. If someone prefers to work weekends and have weekdays off, fine. If someone prefers 6x6.66 hours instead of 5x8, good with me. People that work on drilling platforms or on ships have even more extreme schedules. Still, this is all fundamentally different from constant availability for a single person.

Good for them. If they demand that you're available 24/7, then they can pay for it.

You two are talking about completely different things.

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.

What if that single person, the hero that bears the world of this project on his sole shoulders stumbles and falls, falls ill, or simply wants to go on holidays and sit in the desert without cell reception? Stop the world?

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.

At least in a startup environment, the bus factor risk isn't even on the same order of magnitude as much more tangible stuff like the client walking away. Doubling your labor costs to mitigate a risk that doesn't make the top 3 is just bad business. Sometimes it's not even an option.

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.

So you’d rather like that the employees foot the bill? Someone needs to pay for that prized 24/7. Note that you can scrounge up an on-call schedule with three people, two if you squeeze it.

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.

Having been one of those #1 employees in the past, I didn't feel short changed. It was an arrangement that was beneficial for both myself and the employer. I don't know how many of us there are. But there are people who will take being on call 24/7 in exchange for full autonomy and not having to justify coming and leaving at random hours or taking leave without notice when the opportunity is there.

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.

There’s a huge leap between “I’m founder or employee #1 and if this flies, it’ll be great.” and the sweeping statement that people that don’t pick up their phone after business hours cannot be entrusted with important projects - which is exactly the statement I took offense with.

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.

"the paid vacations when the current crisis is over"

You don't have to pay for the vacation, if the crisis never ends.

>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.

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.

Executives also usually have someone filter their calls, their phone numbers are rarely available to random clients.

> Requiring off-hour access is admitting project management failure.

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.

> People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients.

"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.]

"People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients."

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.

Yet so common.

Nearly all companies "steal" from their employees. If the company makes any profit whatsoever, that is surplus value which has not been paid to the employees who generated it.

Then maybe those poor exploited employees should go and generate surplus value for themselves without the company.

They may not have the capital to do so. That doesn't mean they're not aggrieved. It just suggests they do not have the means to do anything about it.

In other words, the employees can't generate the same surplus value without the company. So the company did in fact generate some of it, so the profit isn't stolen at all, it's earned.

Marx has been dead for 135 years, and people still parrot his confused ramblings without thinking. Amazing.

> So the company did in fact generate some of it, so the profit isn't stolen at all, it's earned.

It is common to refer to this as unearned income because it is income received by virtue of ownership not work.

Doesn't matter, it still isn't stolen. Redefining the meaning of words doesn't magically turn confused ramblings into wisdom.

it's called business not socialism. if the company you work for treats you poorly then leave for another that won't. that or, as already recommended, go off on your own and create all the value for yourself that you can. either way, it's capitalism at work.

That is a naive assumption - dating back to Marx who failed to see that not all value came from work of means of production and that the means themselves are not fixed. Intellectual work can provide continuous dividends for one. While factory workers may toil day in and day out the engineer who designed it do 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.

> I get put on exciting projects instead of boring ones

Because you are often busy with work? (Even though you're not actually working, your mind is with your work)

If people call you after work a lot then it's probably not because it's necessary, but because they know you don't mind.

If you manage your project in any half-decent way then phine calls after work should be a rare exception.