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Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

Unintended consequences in 3... 2... 1...

In general, legislation is a terrible solution where simple personal responsibility, team culture, and "voting with your feet" work best.

In before Ontario has a net outflow of devs to places that don't micromanage what kinds of messages I can send to my employees and at what hour. Some of the closest bonds I've built with other engineers happened at 5AM on a Monday morning because we need to debug a server failure live in prod. All hands on deck! Raise the hacker flag and pass out the RedBull! Tallyho!

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> Some of the closest bonds I've built with other engineers happened at 5AM on a Monday morning because we need to debug a server failure live in prod. All hands on deck! Raise the hacker flag and pass out the RedBull!

See, this is exactly the toxic work culture this is preventing. I don't want to be working at 5AM on a monday morning, and I don't want coworkers to do so either, creating cultural pressure I do.

There shouldn't be "personal responsibility" when it comes to workers rights and (self-)exploitation.

What in the world is "self-exploitation"? More woke college student hooey?

Self-exploitation is an ideological control mechanism of the bourgeoisie in modern capitalism, where, instead of outright coercion, more insidious mechanisms are used to extract surplus value from labor.

By activating the worker's will to generate value and "empowering" them to partake in "hustle culture", they create a system in which they can seize surplus value while the subject isn't even aware of their own exploitation. (your comments are a prime example :))

See also the Gramscian notion of cultural hegemony for more details on the mechanisms at play here.

Your explanation lost me at "Gramscian."

Sorry to hear that - it's not that hard to understand if you put your mind to it! Glad to hear you made it pretty far though!

If you can't avoid hiding behind a po-mo smoke screen of gurus like Gramsci/Deleuze/Guattari/Adorno/whoever, maybe you don't have a very clear or even meaningful claim.

Not everything that goes above your head is a smoke screen :-)

We aren't against social justice here.

If you need engineers to respond to server issues at 5am you can and should be paying them to be on call, and then paying them on top of that when an incident occurs. I don't think anything in this law (which doesn't seem to even resemble the headline of this article tbh) would prevent that.

100 % agree

Should be extra pay just for the stress of being on call and not allowed to go make plan for your weekend (movie, camping …)

And some extra cash for each call you received

Legislation here is great and I welcome it.

> In general, legislation is a terrible solution where simple personal responsibility, team culture, and "voting with your feet" work best.

The entirety of the labor rights movements was won by over by unionization, strikes, threats of violence and legal activism. If "voting with your feet" was the solution we'd still be working 12-hour days. For a more current example, we'd have on-calls being paid at least time-and-a-half for every hour you're available.

That's great bro. That's how I had my first outbreak of an autoimmune disease and years of insomnia and PTSD whenever my phone vibrated from years of being on-call from completely preventable causes.

Wishful thinking every employer would let employees "vote with your feet".

Not everyone wants to build relationships with colleagues especially as your son/daughter awaits you to finish work standing by your desk with their coloring pencils or if your a single mom weaning your child. I'll take the legislation for sure.

Did you mean wean or nurse? Children naturally wean themselves around two or three years old.

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