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throwarayes

Here’s what I do:

- never install slack or email on your phone

- use a separate laptop for personal stuff. I don’t/can’t log in to work stuff here.

- put your work laptop away and out of sight when done work

- (optionally) give a few trusted people your phone number if they absolutely must reach you

The last point help alleviate the stress of “I absolutely must always check slack to deal with the latest crisis”

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Ive been working remote long before the pandemic and cant stress these points enough. They might seem silly at first but they really work. At the bare minimum, no slack or work email on your phone.

I've also learned to over communicate. Usually when I step away I leave a pretty detailed overview of where things are and the feeling of "leaving the team high and dry" diminishes.

> give a few trusted people your phone number if they absolutely must reach you

My last team sent me a desktop IP phone they could call me whenever. I should have realized then it wasn't a great fit. heh.

> (optionally) give a few trusted people your phone number if they absolutely must reach you

But HR has your number, for obvious reasons, and, as I've learned the hard way, cannot be trusted to not publicize it internally, even if you request that they not.

Good point. Phone numbers are cheap and it's worth thinking about having additional ones you can change. This also comes up for the problem of SMS 2FA, a coworker got tired of a headhunter (?) trying to reach me and finally gave him my cell phone. Very dangerous if it was a social engineer out to get enough data to break in.

This!

I'm doing exactly this since 2021 and it helped _immensely_

That's fine it works for you but it just shifts the burden off yourself by putting it on your coworkers. Unless it's specifically discussed and agreed upon for your role, that's rather unfair to the rest of the team.

How?

Keeping work and private life sperate is normal.

The coworkers should all be doing the same thing. Only the oncall and their official escalation paths should be expected to be available off-hours.

I would say that it shifts the burden off of yourself by putting it onto management. Management then has the option to hire more people, to offset schedules to maintain better coverage, to establish more accurate goals and timelines, etc. These are things that are inherent to the role of a manager. There's no sense in me burning myself out to poorly work around a problem that exists at a different level.

The default assumption is that time outside of work hours is my time, and is not to be interrupted. Unless it's specifically discussed and agreed upon for my role, having anything else is extremely unfair and manipulative.

Hiring more people means less money at the end of the year for that annual bonus. So you’re kinda making that choice, even if you shift the problem to management.

Great I’ll take the work life balance over an imaginary bonus then. And if you can’t keep up in compensation then I’ll look for another job

Bonuses aren’t imaginary. In some industries like finance they are like 90% of your comp.

Less money for the manager's bonus. For line workers, the bonus is more or less fixed.

That's just not true in many cases.

Not true in finance.

Wow, so the solution is for workers to do as much work as possible to "help" management hiring less employees? Do you think that when they save money, they set it aside for employees bonus? Or may be employee compensation is driven by supply and demand and has nothing to do with you working overtime all year long...

A lot of finance firms have a “you eat what you kill” model where the compensation pool is a direct function of how much money the desk makes. So if you hire more people to do the same amount of work then yeah, the bonus pool gets divided more ways and each person makes less money.

Sure, but finance is the exact last place we want to look for sustainable, value-producing business models.

To be fair legal shops often have the same policy. (Bonus = your billed hours/total billed hours * surplus)

Incompetent management are even worse for the bottom line of the company.

There is no such thing as a default assumption. Every role has different expectations and none of them are canonical.

Without having the insight into another's mind that we have with our own, how could anyone make the claim that their coworker's burdens are as important to address than those of self?

I think the opposite is true: unless it’s agreed upon I work outside work hours, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to stop everything at a vacation with my kids to solve a bug. And I would not work anyplace that wanted that.

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