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Comment by yabones | Hacker News Reader

I’m sure there will be a cutout for “critical infrastructure” that includes IT, so they can continue working network and server guys like rented mules.

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These cutouts can be made to keep everyone happy. Say, in Switzerland for every hour you worked outside business hours, you get an hour of paid time off. Two hours if you work in the night or on a weekend.

I have a standing policy in every team I run: if you have to work outside of hours, double the amount of time that you worked and round up to the nearest day. Take that many days off as soon as is practical.

The traditional “flex time” is nothing more than a zero-interest temporal loan, encouraging endless borrowing from the back of Sometime After Never.

I deliberately impose a stiff interest rate on that sort of borrowing within any organization I run, because while I recognize that we do need to field emergencies, we also want to penalize the “every day is an emergency” pattern so prevalent in the industry.

Wish I had VP or directors like you. This is a great way to improve the team morale as well as product quality.

Isn't that always going to be 1 day? Or do you mean a nominal 8h (or whatever) work day rather than 24h?

I don’t double the time but I’m on top of OT and always make sure folks take time off. I normally round up but nothing official

Spent months dealing with almost nightly emergencies. Manager would give days off on a whim to be nice.

Destroyed moral of every-one.

A policy would have been better, and would have forced company to stop ignoring problems a lot sooner.

+1, but it takes a good employer to actually adhere to these rules. Enforcement is very lacking.

I don't get why (in any country) it should take more than a phone call to have employee rights enforced.

Some of it comes down to how much compliance there is to the laws in the first place. In an environment where no one is complying, and no one is reporting for fear of losing their job (particularly in environments where you can be laid off without cause fairly easily), standing up for your rights can lead to being dismissed for "unrelated reasons", and future reference calls talking about how you weren't a "team player".

Just having the laws on the books, or even an enforcement mechanism that works is sometimes not enough to get them widely adopted.

It's very easy to get help in Ontario with labour issues, they act swiftly and they have teeth. I've used them and know many others who have and have had great successes. That being said, because enforcement is strong, I don't see a lot of Ontario employers screwing the pooch and I don't suspect it's rampant. Also, only 13 million people live in Ontario,

Why not straight up overtime. That on employer request can be exchanged to time off.

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