If there's an emergency, they can always call, but I don't like being "always on".
When I got a new phone, I simply didn't install the email or slack clients. It's led to occasional text messages, when I really needed to communicate with a team member, but all in all has been a fantastic experience. Highly recommended.
If you want me after hours you call. Thats the only option you have.
[1] https://newatlas.com/right-to-disconnect-after-hours-work-em...
[2] https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3...
That said, other than a handful of coworkers who I'm friends with outside of work, only my manager & HR have my personal number. This adds an extra step where the coworker should determine if getting in touch with me immediately is actually worth the effort.
So far, I've received one such phone call in 3 years. It was an actual emergency, and easily resolved by me at that time because they called me. If they had waited until the next working day, the issue would have blown up and taken much more effort for me to resolve.
This might alternatively be an argument for working with people who respect your time.
If I were to ever receive so many phone calls it becomes a problem I'll solve that problem. Right now I've had all of zero calls this year so I think I'll be right for the moment.
Furthermore, I don't find it particularly bright to host sensitive data by such a vague company. Bonus negative points for the infosec community using such.
Yes, a thousand times. People often write on company instant messaging just to ask things that can figure on their own.
People don't phone you for stuff that could have easily waited till tomorrow morning.
Also, if the employee has very marketable skills, they may be happy to leave a job whose hourly rate has suddenly dropped.
If you are highly skilled, you are highly in demand. Therefore, demand good treatment.
Tech industry compensation has never been higher: http://levels.fyi/comp.html
Google pays for on-call hours. You are credited with 33.3% time for each hour on call if you have a 30 minute response requirement, and 66.6% time for each hour on call if you have a 5 minute response requirement. These can be taken as extra holiday, or cashed out. [0]
[0] Among other public sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/41v0ol/i...
The problem is companies where default on-call becomes part of the culture. They also have little incentive to fix terrible ops. I hear AWS can be like this, depending on the service.
Personally, I choose the opposite: you need to email me to tell me you want to call me (so that I’ll turn on my softphone app), otherwise you’ll just automatically go to voicemail (which will also go to my email.)
I notice that with Gmail’s inbox categories, you only get push-notified when something lands in Primary or Updates; so as long as you’ve trained the system to push the irrelevant/lifecycle stuff into the other categories, your phone won’t ding all that often. (Mine doesn’t, and I get a good amount of raw email.)
I have hundreds of rules for email filtering. With most mailing lists never hitting my inbox. But it's still way too much for individual email push notifications.
My solution so far has been to just use the outlook web app. Sure it's not as nice as the app but it lets me get to the info I need while also preventing me from having to install any sort of profiles on my device, as an added bonus I do not allow the site to send me notifications so I do not have to worry about being bothered off-hours.
Personally I need to be able to put everything to the side when I'm out of office.
How do you even lose days off to some work emergency? If I was scheduled to be on vacation but I have to come in for some emergency, I don't lose those days, and you shouldn't either, since you never actually took those days off.
If you're salaried then they are paying you for it based on the job requirements, it's part of the job and one of the things that separates hourly employees from salaried ones.
Unless you're talking about the cost of your cell plan or device? But even then, a lot of companies will pay for your plan and subsidize part/all of your device if they have a legitimate work reason to need to contact you and expect a fairly quick response outside the office.
EDIT: To be clear I'm referring to US law/practices. The entire point of salaried as opposed to hourly work is that it is based on performance rather than hours, and it's up to you and your employer to come to agreement on what performance means. At some companies salary might be for 40 hours, at others it's for 60 or 80 regularly. It's your own responsibility to find out before taking the job, and decide for yourself what you're willing to provide or not.
Salary is not 40 hours working + 128 hours on call per week.
Salary is a payment schedule, that's it. Anything else requires contractual agreement.
The fact that you think it gives companies the right to demand irregular hours is more about your mindset than reality.
Wish we had those laws here. Fortunately I work at a company where I am compensated extra for my oncall shifts that take place outside of normal work hours -- it ends up being a few extra tens of thousands of dollars per year. That should be the mandated standard though, not just for those who are lucky.
I'm not saying that's unreasonable, but I've heard of employees getting caught leaking by communicating through cell plans paid for by the employer.