Sustainable work-life balance with Personal SLA (2019)
evgenii.info
evgenii.info
1. It can only be demanded for exceptional circumstances, with justification. "Poor planning or lack of staff are insufficient." [1]
2. It must be compensated with 25% extra salary, or extra holiday (if the employee agrees). An employee cannot waive their right to this.
3. Even then, there is a limit by law on the number of extra hours you can do in a year, [2] says 170 hours per calendar year. Got a big crisis in January? Employer had better start planning ahead so everyone's time budget isn't exhausted by December.
4. Like many countries, Switzerland has an exception for "management". So you don't call your cleaner a "facility manager", the Swiss law specifies this as "management AND earning at least CHF 120'000 a year". [3] For context, according to expatica [4] the OECD calculated the Swiss average wage in 2017 as 62.3K.
I personally think the principle that you cannot be expected to work "all hours that are necessary" unless you're paid around twice the average salary is brilliant and gets rid of a lot of potential abuse of this rule.
[1] https://www.legalexpatgeneva.com/employment-law/contractual-... [2] https://www.ch.ch/en/overtime-and-extra-hours/ [3] https://www.kmu.admin.ch/kmu/en/home/concrete-know-how/perso... [4] https://www.expatica.com/ch/working/employment-law/switzerla...
Seems to be working here, the Norwegian economy is quite good and unemployment is low. It helps that people here 'work to live' rather than 'live to work' and that the work ethic (in most people) is fairly strong, people get on with working rather than spending a lot of time chatting round the coffee machine.
You'd need to tweak the multiplier in different countries dependent on inequality.
The median salary in the UK is around 29K GBP. I wouldn't say that 58K (70K CHF) is a "should be expected to exist at all times" salary.
No, but if someone on £58k is expected to work unreasonable amounts of overtime without sufficient compensation they probably won't suffer too much if they decide to switch jobs.
Or at least, no-one tells you that you have to officially, but when you inverview for moving up to a permanent contract you don't want to be the person with the weakest publication profile.
However, that compensation limit was so low that lots of companies started abusing this and extended this type of contract to all employees not just the ones with high pay/responsibilities to the point where in job ads you now see the lack of these all-in contracts listed as a perk.
In some scummy companies they forced all existing employees to change to these new all-in contracts and if you refused(which you were of course legally allowed to) you'd slowly be pushed out of the company via bad performance reviews and then dismissed.
It's tired and lame.
Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
> It's tired and lame.
It's an incredibly common term we use at my workplace, and I expect many other engineering orgs use it as well.
We use it not only for services ("five nines"), but also for tasks and human initiated things.
It's a simple and useful stand-in for a complicated and abstract concept. I don't expect to have to explain SLAs every time they are discussed.
> In IT we have a popular concept which is closely related to these two principles – Service-level agreement (SLA).
It's never become the norm where I've worked. So I don't really have advice for that.
Maybe I screen out those jobs in my searches. Or they screen me out :)
My bigger point is that there are many different SW engineering worlds even in SV. You, and everyone you know, may be in the one you describe.
But there are other and better ones out here. One caveat: You may have to "level up" to join some of them.
It's not magic, it's good leadership and management.
It's pretty simple.
Separate but related, an engineering team that is able to coordinate aggressive cycles on a regular basis, with built-in time to recover, is probably more productive over the long term than one that can't.
Come on. This is tiresome.
(Running two long running tasks in the background so it's not high focus stuff)