Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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If your company was “good about work life balance”, it wouldn’t support weekend and 2 am logins/commits/code reviews. The optics and what is communicated to the team are the opposite of what you’re stating. Very similar to “unlimited PTO” where everyone competes to take the least amount possible (explicitly or implicitly).

Culture matters.

https://www.good.is/money/france-lets-you-disconnect

> In France, if you’re a company of 50 employees or more, you cannot email an employee after typical work hours. The labor law amendment has come about because studies show that in the digital age, it’s increasingly difficult for people to distance themselves from the workplace during their off hours. This new provision allows people to get the full advantage of their time off.

> “All the studies show there is far more work-related stress today than there used to be, and that the stress is constant,” Benoit Hamon of the French National Assembly told the BBC. “Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”

> In France, if you’re a company of 50 employees or more, you cannot email an employee after typical work hours.

That's ridiculous. The protection should be to protect the employee who sets their phone/computer not to check email during off hours, not a prohibition on the sender uploading a message to their mail server's queue.

I email my staff at 2am constantly. I don't expect replies until they're "at work" (wherever and whenever that may be).

You can always have the mail system queue the mail from a sender, but not deliver to the recipient until business hours. That meets your requirements while regulation still protects workers from those not operating in good faith.

You may not expect a reply but there are a great many people who would feel pressure to reply to a senior staff member outside of work hours.

The things we do are within our control; the ways others respond are not.

If someone wishes to volunteer to work 24/7, it isn't my job to stop them. It's insane of them, though, and I might contemplate firing someone who felt pressured to act/respond at 2am (for being dumb and unreasonable).

Consider the power dynamics and that subordinate's need to earn money.

Good thing we have laws to prevent this then. Same with minimum wage, minimum wage, work place safety and so on.

Just because you think there is no pressure to reply, doesn't mean there isn't a societal/workplace culture that pushes people to do so when their superiors ask for something. Same reason you can tell a co-work something is dumb, but you would say 'lets look it from another angle' to a manager or ceo.

> The protection should be to protect the employee who sets their phone/computer not to check email during off hours, not a prohibition on the sender uploading a message to their mail server's queue.

That's usually the case, the above source didn't explain it correctly.

The law actually only obligates the company to agree a set of rules with the staff elected representatives (usually from a union). In almost all cases, those rules are simply that employees cannot be obligated to connect outside their paid work hours, and not suffer any consequence for not connecting.

Right, but your e-mail timestamps are still at 2am right? Your team can’t help but notice. IMHO you lead by example, and you set the example here that it’s normal to work at 2am. This is bound to increase the stress for your team. There might also be less impressionable team members, but here you run another risk—they’ll judge your time management skills. If you can’t help but write e-mails at 2:00, I’d be compassionate with your team and send them the next morning (or use some kind of ‘send later’ widget)…

I’d expect team members to handle the truth. Pretending isn’t going to do anyone any favors.

Gaslighting your team could backfire in any number of ways.

> IMHO you lead by example, and you set the example here that it’s normal to work at 2am.

It is normal to work at 2am if you work the way I and most of my associates work.

I think it's fairly common for hackers and other deep-thinking types to work very intensely for 2-5 minutes at a bunch of different times all throughout the day.

We have the unlimited PTO as well, so maybe it is that kind of company.

I admit that it might just work well for me as I don't actually need work life balance or really use the time off. What I mean is that I have never experienced any pressure to work beyond regular hours. I am not sure that the weekend/2AM logins/commits are supported. I have never heard much comment on them at all really.

My goal is not to rain on your parade, nor to take from your passion, but to communicate to be mindful of the signals work behavior emits to those you collaborate with.

I agree. Your comment is quite valuable in that respect.

I do not agree with all of your points but I certainly agree with this one.

Setting the example for the rest of the team when you are explicitly/implicitly recognized as the leader is very important. I had to learn this lesson recently.

For example, I signaled to the team last Friday that I was not going to be working at all this weekend. Checked my email just now and neither did anyone else. If I put something up for code review on Saturday afternoon, someone else on the team is likely to pop in for review and then likely do some work tasks themselves. Its not that this is bad, but you have to be aware that it is happening and moderate it accordingly.

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