We ALL need to be against 24/7/365 “on call”. I did it for 10 years. It not only sucks, but I’m confident hurt my overall productivity. If it’s not important enough to hire a backup or two, it’s simply not important.
I worked somewhere that "specialized" in hiring younger newish grads from the midwest. They'd bring them out to the Bay Area, pay them way under market. The people would put in a year to two years at $75k working 70 hour weeks before they realized it was an intolerable and nonsustainable situation. The younger people were more excited over the free lunch and pingpong tables to care about comp, let alone making rent.
Indeed unsustainable, but getting that experience and Bay Area connections might quite likely be a rational career choice for these grads
Doing this has facilitated a healthy work life balance and I believe leads to better productivity.
The best thing that ever happened to me was company implementing a lockdown policy so that email/chat/... are only allowed from company assets so I am totally cutoff from work via my phone except through that list and the best part is it by the companies own policy. I only get true emergency calls now.
My favorite move in tabletop strategy when doing disaster recovery is finding the most important person at the table and going 'Bang, you died driving to work, you can stay but you cannot help anyone'
You only get this line if you're a US citizen as justification as to why H1B visa quotas need to be increased. If you're here on an H1B visa, you get reminded daily that your replacement is waiting back in your home country, you can be replaced with a single phone call, and you better have a plan to get all of your things and family back to your home country quickly when you get bounced.
No offense, but that doesn't make any sense. Right now, there's a lot of paperwork and the H1B lottery that means it's non-trivial to get a new H1B worker into the country. Increasing the quota would make it easier for the employer to act like H1B would be replaced on a whim, and actually create the scenario you're complaining about.
> ...and you better have a plan to get all of your things and family back to your home country quickly when you get bounced.
Knowing a lot of H1Bs, this is the real reason H1Bs can be exploited and bullied. Their visa is tied to the employer, which gives that employer way more leverage over the employee than over a citizen or permanent resident.
The real way to fix these problem is to keep the quota, but remove the control the employer has over work visas (by making them easily portable). That way, the employer can get the talent they need if there's really a shortage, but they'll have to pay market salaries and provide reasonable working conditions to the immigrants.
If I had to guess based on my friends/family, first jobs are horribly abusive for 100% of med school graduates, 90% of law graduates, and 20% of software engineers. That 20% is common enough that we hear about it all the time, but it's still much less frequent than other high-paying jobs.
When product managers and CIOs don’t have anything to show, we get tossed under the bus. I’ve never been a fan of the dev unionization movement, but I’m becoming more of a fan it by the day. I think of how I feel after having given my all to my career, and I can’t imagine how young H1B professionals feel when the abuse they put up with is far worse than what I’ve dealt with.
We're expensive, sure. Difficult to replace, absolutely. But you know that sooner or later you will be, and in the meantime you only get limited privileges.
Nobody checking their email or phone after work... Ridiculous.
EDIT: I should say, from the U.S. anyway.
Interestingly, none of them have ever taken me up on that, but it's often lead into productive discussions about how you need at least five people to properly cover a 24x7x365 roster - and that the cost of that is quite reasonable - if you genuinely need 24x7x365 coverage.
I would be giving up time with family, excercise (my health), and my other goals, so I don’t see how a simple 2x would even begin to cover the loss of those.
My numbers are based around super-hard-to-argue-against standard employment law for other professions where I live. If you work as a waiter or a shop assistant that's the sort of overtime deal you get automatically.
When you push that minimum legally required remuneration to its obvious extension if your boss is asking you to be on duty 24x7, it's difficult for them to argue a reasonable case _down_ from having to pay you 8 times as much money.
The primary aim of that line of reasoning is to point out "if you need my job covered 24x7, employing and paying another four people with my skills to make sure it's covered for the 130 hours a week I'm not in the office is a more reasonable and less expensive way of doing it than trying to make it all my problem."
Quite often, in my experience, it's because the boss suddenly has their first customer ever suddenly demanding it, and they've not done the maths already and been immediately able to tell the customer "Sure. That'll cost you about ten times as much as a weekday business hours only support. When would you like us to start billing that? I'll need that in writing, of course."