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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

> When something critical comes up

The problem: everything looks 'critical' to folks with a greedy and selfish streak who rise high in management and have their pay tied to the quarterly stock price. That's how we ended up with 24/7 support and "five nines" availability. I'm old enough to remember that banks opened late and closed early, didn't operate on weekends or holidays, and if you didn't get your paycheck cashed by 4pm Friday you were out of luck until Monday at 10am. Grocery stores, malls, and tons of other places opened in the morning and closed at night, and most places didn't open on Sunday at all. Those that did opened later "after church".

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There's nothing wrong with 24/7 support and high availability; just pay people to do evening and night shifts and compensate anyone who gets called to help with an incident outside normal working hours.

Night shifts can be pretty rough, but back when I still did shifts I sacrificed a couple nights around new year once and added a good chunk of money to my usual income that month over a few days due to getting holiday compensation (double pay) plus night shift compensation and that got doubled again for being an emergency substitute for another person who'd gotten sick.

You only get problems when social manipulation is used to pressure workers into providing that level of support without appropriate compensation.

I think GP's point is precisely that once you normalize something that used to be a special case requiring extra compensation, it's hard to make the case that you need to get paid extra for your extra work, since it's, well, no longer extra?

It depends how the labor supply and demand curves are moving. The case for extra compensation is that you will stop working there if you do not get extra compensation.

People are still working the same retail jobs they did in the days before 24/7 expectations and, after taking into account inflation, making about the same amount of money. https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/the-free-market-fairy/

And? Evidently, there was a huge increase in labor supply relative to demand for that type of labor in the decades since the 1970s. Hence the workers could not negotiate higher wages.

If the workers had better options, they would have chosen to go elsewhere.

Around me, I now see restaurants and stores closing earlier, which must mean they are no longer able to find labor willing to work at the low wages they were expecting them to.

>The problem: everything looks 'critical' to folks with a greedy and selfish streak who rise high in management and have their pay tied to the quarterly stock price. That's how we ended up with 24/7 support and "five nines" availability.

I think it was because customers preferred to patronize banks and stores that were open longer hours, and so they won business by selling something customers wanted. Similarly, I thought customers liked 24/7 support and five nines availability (especially for internet and electricity).

If labor prices go up, then maybe those perks will be scaled back because customers will not be able to afford them. I already see fast food restaurants around me no longer open before 11AM and after 7PM.

> customers preferred to patronize banks and stores that were open longer hours

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-tyranny-of-ch...

How is that related to what we are talking about?

That article is about choosing between 10 different comparable items. It is not about giving money to a store that happens to be open when you want to give it money, versus a store that is closed.

I think lots of people needed to bank when they weren't working so banking hours needed to get extended. The banks that filled that need saw increases in customers and most other banks had to do the same or lose customers.

Or.... maybe people shouldn't have to work jobs where they can't even get away to go to the bank to do business. Oh, but wait, companies can't let anyone go run errands, who is going to keep the 24/7 machine going?

The greed and selfishness of my managers are significant factors in determining who I want to work for/with. And why I'm so grateful I can work with people I am friends with outside of work.

But I understand this is difficult, even impossible, to know during the interview process.

> during the interview process

I think assuming management is greedy and selfish until proven otherwise is a good way to approach interviewing. Negotiating compensation will give lots of clues. Ask for more money, or a different TC structure and see what happens. For comparison, ask for something that doesn't cost anything.

What if the interviewer is looking for a true teammate and is put off by your attitude, and thinks you are greedy and selfish, a mercenary? You lose that good job with a test that lumps together the best and the worst actors.

'a true teammate and is put off by your attitude, and thinks you are greedy'

True teammates are cool, but is he prepared to feed my family and adopt my children in case I get killed by a bus?

What is the extent of mutual sacrafice 'true teammates' are gonna do for each other? Or is it a manipulative boss getting you to sacrafice family for the sake of the business? Or is is a naive idiot getting both of you to sacrafice for the business?

Yoy responsibility is to family and yourself first. Jobs come and go.

Most of us are here at our jobs because we need to earn a living, and not because we just love scrum so much that we'd do it even if we had to do it for free.

Of course you'd want to maximize your pay. Any coworker who drinks the Koolaid and doesn't understand that isn't a coworker I'd want to be with.

Sure. I was thinking about large enough companies where you may not be negotiating directly with your day-to-day workmates.

It's true this is a problem. It's actually a problem I ran into at another job and one of the reasons I left that job. It goes hand in hand with letting a bunch of a team attrit and then ignoring that fact. I find it often happens when a direct manager doesn't know how to handle their manager or their managers manager. I have also found that in most cases the person requesting the 'critical' item never actually wanted it immediately but after it filtered down from two managers who are desperately trying to look good it became a 'critical' item.

It's definitely a problem and while there are some ways to just work around your boss it's often just easier to find another job.

It's a really good thing for banks and grocery stores to be open more, though. There's a big difference between trying to squeeze more hours out of a salaried worker vs. hiring more people to cover more shifts.

For support, it depends on whether you're hiring more people (good), offering optional on-call time for extra money or reduced hours (probably fine), or forcing people to be on-call on top of a normal work week (bad).

> It's a really good thing for banks and grocery stores to be open more, though

Is it? Why? What has the average person gained from being able to shop and bank 24/7? Are you sure they aren't just being given more incentive to spend money and support greedy management and investors?

Well, the average person does gain something from being able to shop and bank at all.

If you are required to be in the office from 9 am - 5 pm Monday-Friday and grocery stores and banks are only open from 9 am - 5 pm Monday-Friday (or even 8 am - 6 pm if you live in an area where long commutes are normal) you're effectively excluded from banking and shopping entirely.

This seems to be a systematic means of excluding people in some places in Europe. Stores and banks in some places were only open from 8 am to 5 or 6 pm Monday - Saturday. Orthodox Judaism forbids work (including house work) on Saturday, so Jewish people working 9-5 jobs had very limited access to services.

> If you are required to be in the office from 9 am - 5 pm Monday-Friday

But.. why should companies require that? No time to go out for an errand?

If it's going to be a weekly or biweekly thing like groceries or banking, and just about everyone needs it, why have every full-time employee work it out ad-hoc? It seems simpler to have those places open a few more hours a day.

(And if you want to reduce how much people work then it's better to just shorten the standard work week than to add in a weekly grocery exception.)

It’s messed up, but that’s how it works for jobs where the employees have no power and are easily replaceable but very dependent on the income.

So no good reason at all.

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