Workers deserve the right to disconnect (2021)
novaramedia.com
novaramedia.com
I sure as hell don't ask permission to turn off my company-issued devices at 5pm and ignore them until 8am the next morning. Nor do I ask permission to ignore work-related comms outside of business hours, because I don't work for free. I already have the right to disconnect. I have always had it, because I am a human being and autonomy is a human right.
Remember: power yields nothing without a demand, and direct action gets the goods.
You are lucky because you have the privilege of being able to do this. Not everyone does. A lot of people need they job they have to continue, and their boss will fire them for not responding to an email at 9pm.
Those are the people that need government protection and regulation, or a union, or both. Because their employer won't do it unless forced to and they don't have to privilege to ignore it like you do.
I didn't say this because I think government regulation or unionization isn't necessary.
I said it because I don't believe government regulation will happen in the US in my lifetime. Nor do I expect to see the big 4 consulting firms unionized before Judgment Day. And, yes, I have lost jobs for not picking up the phone at 10pm on a Saturday night. Freedom isn't free.
I look for individual solutions to systemic issues because I don't trust the collective to have my back. I understand that collective action is necessary, but let's face it: the left in the US is too busy dicking around with the culture war to show up for the class war. They think that labels describing race, gender, sexuality, etc matter more than whether you're working-class or owning-class.
I'm looking out for myself because I've given up on anybody else looking out for me. I advise others to do the same.
Luckily you had the safety net to survive that.
> I'm looking out for myself because I've given up on anybody else looking out for me. I advise others to do the same.
Why not both? Look out for yourself but also try to help others?
I honestly think tech workers for all the big companies will be unionized in the next decade. There is already a perfect model out there: The screen actors guild. That union sets minimum rules around pay, safety, overtime, residuals, and so on, but still allows for "superstars" to make far more.
That's the kind of union developers need. One that specifies some minimums that companies must follow (like protecting after hours disconnection and making sure all the workers get a piece of the success) but still allows people to make more and get better benefits.
The only safety net I had was two months' salary saved up. I didn't even get unemployment compensation; by the time the company got nailed for classifying me as a 1099 while treating me as a W-2 I had already found a different job.
> I honestly think tech workers for all the big companies will be unionized in the next decade. There is already a perfect model out there: The screen actors guild. That union sets minimum rules around pay, safety, overtime, residuals, and so on, but still allows for "superstars" to make far more.
I'd love to see that happen. I'm not counting on it. And I've given up on trying to persuade my coworkers to unionize. If I were at all charismatic or persuasive I wouldn't be working in tech to begin with.
0% to even lets say 50% instead of "all" in 10 years is just not possible. The "valuable" employees (engineers) for these companies don't even want to unionize. You'll have to convince them that somehow it would work out in there favor before you could even start the effort and that would take years alone.
I know many engineers that want to unionize. It's not that hard to convince people once they stop drinking all of the anti-union kool aid that has proliferated in the US over the last several decades.
Look at pro athletes that are contracted under a CBA. They get to negotiate profit-sharing, minimum salaries, guaranteed raises, etc. Roughly half of the revenue generated by the NBA is allocated to player wages.
Apple generates somewhere around $1.9M per employee[0], with a median salary just shy of $160k. One of the most common criticisms of unionization is that it would cap salaries and people would earn less. If Apple employees were compensated like basketball players, the average salary would be somewhere around $1M.
0: https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2020/08/12/ranking-...
I do respect unions in general and understand their vital role for protecting basic rights. But if I were a valuable software engineer for example there would be no way I would ever join union. Not my nature. Luckily I have my own company and aside of a business negotiations with my clients they can't really step on my rights.
You're perfectly free to completely ignore work after 5pm! Nothing bad will happen! A company will swear up and down all day long that they support flex time and you're not expected to ever answer any queries outside of your own working hours!
But if a number of your coworkers decide of their own volition they're going to be in touch at all hours of the day and that becomes the default soft expectation, then you might look worse in comparison. Maybe not in the short term, maybe people will make a strong effort to un-bias themselves during performance reviews and not pay that any mind, but over time, you're sharing the bonus and raises pool with workers who valued their time less than you and perhaps ended up getting higher visibility for it.
Should regulation then mandate that your coworkers disconnect? Maybe. We do it for truckers, pilots, and flight attendants in safety-critical jobs: they're not allowed to work more than a certain set of hours regardless of whether they'd gladly do so.
Maybe not in a big tech job. But I have worked at startups where ignoring work after 5pm was grounds for a negative performance review and being passed over for promotions. This was not the unspoken culture, it was the clear from-the-top direction. Deadlines existed and features needed to ship, and that required evening and weekend work.
If you in a role with even less power, ignoring work after hours can wind up with you being terminated.
But there are also situations where a person has been said 'yes' to so many times that they just assume something is wrong with anyone who tells them 'no'. Enough people have to say 'no' that it becomes normalized. Either a more 'fair' process is made or they finally hire enough people to do the job right (haha, who am I kidding, they'll never do that, but you can at least get to 'less wrong').
It's really a tough matter of reading the room. Sometimes if you see someone asking for something that doesn't necessarily interest you, asking for it too makes it okay. Other times it causes the boss to catastrophize (well now everyone will want to do this so I'm not going to let anyone do it) and shut down.
Asking people to follow labor laws that are almost 100 years old is not that big of an ask. I know everyone is busy LARPing feudal England half the time but someone has to call bullshit, and it's mostly the people with just a little bit of power who can actually do anything about it.
Maybe the person you replied to is skillful because they prepared for it? Not everything is just the result of life's crap shoot of luck and privilege. If you're finding your employer requires more of you than you wish to give, drawing boundaries and sticking with them makes sense to some people. Psychologists use the term agreeableness[1] to express this sort of sentiment, a person who would demand not to be bothered after work would be classified as less agreeable than a person who is willing to take calls in an "emergency" or just as a regular function of their job, you can see the differences in the continuum there. Many of the most highly paid people have lower agreeableness in tech.
[1]https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/agreeableness-conscientiousne...
If you are already stuck you might need to have a sit down with your boss and try to work something out. Maybe they are actually usually OK with your not responding until morning but you just have no way to differentiate between normal and urgent. It is possible that you could work something out that doesn't require changing jobs to reset expectations.
Yep, there are undoubtedly companies that really expect people to work unreasonable hours, but I think this is the common case. I very much don’t normally check work communications out of hours, but my boss has my phone number for emergency situations where I’m really needed (has been about 3 or 4 times over the 3 years I’ve been employed at the company).
100% to this.
It's all about expectations.
Plot twist: If everyone did like EddieDante, then the boss can't fire everyone and will accept the new status quo.
Both parties have bargaining power, abstractly speaking. The real power comes from the organization/leadership and not the work itself. Otherwise, there will be no CEO, manager, governments, etc... It'll be just workers exchanging goods between one/another.
If you have a boss like that, no amount of regulation or protection is going to help you. They will find a way to manipulate you and get around the rules. That isn't to say there shouldn't be any rules and regulations, but it is to say that this is the point of diminishing returns.
Child labor laws work because company owners know that eventually they'll get caught. OSHA works the same -- because they know there are penalties for it. Sure, sometimes companies get away with stuff, but there is always the chance that they won't.
I think is important to realize that ppl need to rest and have a life outside work and not to see workers as a disposable utility, and as a modern society we need to protect others from the power imbalances.
Pecking order is everything.
In most organizations, exercising said disrespect for subordinates is a key method for management to demonstrate, enforce, and enjoy their higher social status.
Similarly, subordinates must exercise respect and deference to the time, space, and attention of management. This is a key method to help employees demonstrate, acknowledge, and internalize their lower social status.
Any threats to the status hierarchy threaten the structure of the organization and are usually dealt with harshly.
I've seen it take 6hrs+, running past 5 o'clock or sometimes starting in the evening and running for hours.
During the pandemic, I unplugged around 3pm to grab some new shoes for a kid that had ripped theirs out, because other guys were around and after 5pm I'm on my own. Boss starts texting me, "where are you" and "you should do this stuff after hours"...
This really left a sour taste and I've since moved on.
We need some sort of ability to demand OT, hour for hour comp time, and after hours compensation. One person can fight back, but we are constantly undercut by management. I would often try to comp time and get hit up because it's a busy week, then later that comp time would evaporate and I'd get alot of flack trying to claw it back. My preference is not to comp my time in the morning, but I'd end up clocking in an hour later afew times a week just to try and get some of my time back.
Where I have problems is being expected to be available while "on call" but not being paid for it. In my opinion: if you can't get shit faced, you're working, and should be compensated accordingly with all working time regulations applying as normal.
Then i opened a bottle of whisky, and listened to them try to figure out how much data we lost, until about 5 AM. I don't remember if i was hourly contract or hourly employee at that point, but i did get ~8 hours of pay that evening for doing nothing but not unmuting my voice on the phone call!
I don't do Disaster Recovery anymore, no one really listens.
The word is "union". You want a union.
I entirely agree it's your right, but if you're ambitious and working more can help you to achieve certain goals, it's not unreasonable to work more than the bare minimum. As long as it's a personal choice, I think it's fine.
I think at least 50% of the problem is on the employee side.
Unless it requires absolute immediate attention, don't expect an immediate response. If you want sync comms for collaboration, organize a meeting and I'm all yours for two hours or as long as it takes. Otherwise, I'm putting myself on DND and checking my email and IMs every few hours so I have some space for deep focus.
It’s a lot of work to enter into employment arrangements with a company. For both the employee and employer. What’s problematic is when either side is “surprised” by a change in expected behavior after the fact. It’s frustrating, because you have sunk cost in entering the employment agreement. So middle managers abuse their employees by springing these types of things after the job has gotten going. The employee has the freedom to walk, but not without paying a certain opportunity cost.
The job offer should make very clear up front in the listing what these “soft” expectations will be. And if they do, the employee/employer needs the recourse to renegotiate the situation.
I’ve seen this go the other way as well. Employee takes job, puts in a few months, and then springs untold issues on the employer. Like the abusive middle manager, if they make it minimal enough to just be annoying, it’s not worth firing them for it, it just becomes a drag on everyone else.
It's even more precarious for US immigrants where many types of immigrant visa (H1B, L1, TN) are tied to continuing to hold a specific job.
Don't like that job anymore? Get laid off, or reclassified into a different position? Oops, you're in violation of your visa, you have a week to leave the country.
There's a huge power imbalance between the class of workers that have US permanent residency or citizenship, and those on work visas.
1) The lack of privacy
2) Being location tracked
3) The expectation that one should be available for work communications 24/7 for no extra pay
I'm sure he would say something like "Wow, it's too bad America is no longer a free country. We programmers are building the systems that enslave us. We're building our own cages, without asking if we should. In the future out employers will prioritize themselves over our families, partners, children and mental health. What do your kids have to say about this?"
We all dismissed the idea of unions because we were highly paid salaried professionals that employers bent over backwards for, but come to find out, unions are more than about money.
Militaries never stop developing new weapons or upgrading existing one's, they test them on unsuspecting members of the public.
Suicide is psychological murder.
Second, although building on that idea, as a tech worker you have choice. You can choose to work somewhere that requires this kind of connectedness and monitoring, or you can choose not to. There are very highly paid engineers with no access to their email except on a laptop and during work hours. Ask around, ask this question during interviews.
Freedom means responsibility. If you want to make more choices you are agreeing to live with those choices consequences. We're learning very quickly that a ton of people are not ok with that deal.
Work/life balance makes people happy, which makes them do more work in less time with fewer errors. Everyone is aligned incentive-wise here, as long as management bothers to continue to learn.
It also means we have the freedom to demand better treatment from our employers. I've never understood this attitude that we don't have a say in our workplaces and must always resort to leaving if we can't get what we want, even though companies bend over backwards trying to convince us that we do.
Clearly communicating to the business what our expectations are is important to getting what we want. We're seeing this play out in real-time during the pandemic.
This labor is typically unpaid and expected to be done on up of whatever other work the women do to pay the bills.
It's feels a bit unfair to be told that because I'm a man I don't do enough.
I think you might be reading things that no one is saying.
Saying, "this commonly happens" is not the same as saying, "you are doing this."
It seems implicit in this statement. I'm also the cook (my wife doesn't know how), we split laundry, handle child care together when possible (with my mother coming over to help). My wife is in school and doesn't earn an income ATM and we aren't sure what happens when she graduates, but even with me working full time chores are split as I work from home. Different people have different strengths. We have a son and there are some things I like that he does that she doesn't.
They weren’t expressing an opinion that men don’t do work, but stating what research shows: that women tend to take on unpaid work disproportionately to men, including house work: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34465574/
Saying a pattern exists in no way implies you, specifically, fit that pattern.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/11/04/raising...
I would agree that being on call after hours requires compensation. Unfortunately many "full time" jobs do not pay overtime and provide no compensation for on call time.
Keynes was right about the increases in productivity and automation, but apparently absurdly naïve in predicting it would result in reduced work hours for the same pay rather than in increased profit and unemployment.
"Since our workers have become twice as productive, we've decided to double their pay and cut the work week in half" is not how most company managers think.
Yet it would seem to be better for society as a whole if our lives were not consumed by endless drudgery; reducing the standard "required" work hours would seem to be a good idea for human health and happiness.
It's not just a matter of losing it; in many places, the employer faces legal penalties if employees don't use a minimum amount of leave.
I constantly see developers say they are paid well but treated poorly by their employers (unpaid overtime, oncall rotations, receding benefits). A union fights for what people need, and we absolutely should be unionizing to advocate for all the workers.
I feel like a substantial portion of HN is basically College Republicans who majored in CS.
If I didn't want this I'd work at a big company.....
We'll get unions about the same time it becomes normalized for developers to talk about seeing a therapist.
They also all seem to arrogantly believe themselves to be in the top 10% of their peer developers, in terms of compensation, ability to negotiate, bargaining power vs employer, and other workplace attributes; and are therefore hostile to any system that could fairly represent the interests of all the workers. "I'm a captain of my industry, and am already paid so much more than my peer developers," software developers imagine, "A union could only make things worse for me!"
I've heard a few people claim that charity often comes down to realizing that as hard as you worked, things could have gone much worse for you if your luck had broken a different way, and so they feel fortunate for what they have and give some of it back when they can.
As much as some people try to deny it, equality always comes down to an alliance between people with privilege coming to the aid of those without. These underdog stories about a fringe group rising up and conquering the majority are good PR, but the uncomfortable truth is that some groups fail eternally and some groups succeed quickly and that usually comes down to collusion or overt collaboration with as many insiders as they can recruit. PETA is so obnoxious they've become a parody of themselves, and Greenpeace is not far behind, because nobody wants (only) a lecture.
I know a guy who mentions his therapist regularly, and I overheard a conversation with a mutual friend about how he needed therapy for years (none of us disagree) but he didn't go until he worked with someone who was also open about it. He said something like wanting to be that guy for other people. He's an odd duck. Occasionally wise, but often plays the fool.
One thing I've noticed about remote work is that I talk out loud to people so much less than I used to that when I do dive into a meaty conversation I tend to get a sore throat and afterward I feel like I dove on the conversation like a starving man on a sandwich. That's not strictly healthy.
I think for some of us even a scheduled hour talking to someone per week would be good, especially now. And frankly my understanding of the New York Movie Therapist trope is that they are often portrayed somewhere between life coach and lunch buddy. The joke there being that people have gone to therapy for years without any real progress being made. Clearly not real, but then again jokes often grow from a seed of truth.
If you wanted that, you’d be playing the same game as your 24x7 colleagues. That you aren’t means you (quite reasonably) have other priorities.
Neither you nor they are wrong; you’re just optimizing for different things.
I mostly agree, but come to a different conclusion. In my mind the situation is a repeated prisoner's dilemma where defection is equivalent to off-hours responses. With no defections, everyone lives a pleasant life with healthy boundaries, and regular career advancement. If one defects, they receive accelerated career advancement while the other does not. If they both defect, they live a miserable life with unhealthy boundaries and regular career advancement.
It has all the trappings of being able to make individual choices, but the system is best analyzed as a group. An global optimum exists and it doesn't involve playing 24x7.
Same for management as well. Some drive their subordinates hard but are willing to fight for big bonuses and fast promotions, others don't care as much and probably will also not be keen to investigate promotions, etc., either.
Side note, look how much is written about Musks crazy work schedule. Without going down that rabbit hole too far, you can see why he makes that information public.
Are you?
If you want to become a manager and director of engineering or something then you probably need to sign up for checking your e-mail all the time.
If you're an IC and want to stay an IC you'd probably do better to make yourself indispensable by learning the codebase you're working on and becoming an expert. Which will be a lot easier if you're uninterrupted with mundane details.
Also if you're the firefighting person and the person that is easily interruptible then that's what you'll get, so you'll be constantly context switching and won't be able to become the indispensable expert.
And if you really want to climb the ladder, like someone else pointed out, you probably want to job hop.
You may be at a significant disadvantage by thinking that this is the way that you get rewarded.
If they're not willing to throw the (at this point) $200 a month at me for 24/7 access, what else are they gunna pull?
I'm genuinely curious, what sort of white-collar jobs exist where you can only check your email once a day?
they just make you tell them everything in meetings.
In return, I now have far more free time and more money with which to enjoy it. That said, there are situations where my employer might need more of my time than usual, outside of normal work hours, and that's fine, so long as it's agreed upon in advance (I don't do on-calls, and I left academia, because fuck their work attitude).
In general that whole outlook of blaming things on external stuff that's outside of your control isn't healthy. It's such a great time to build
you're either so young that you still believe in the meritocracy or so rich that you need to believe in it to morally justify your existence.
If I were being compensated for on-call time I would be answering the phone. That is a different arrangement.
At a previous job, we had a yearly trade show that we displayed at. I knew that the month before, I was going to be working more than 40 hours a week. The rest of the year was pretty much straight 40 hour weeks. I accepted that.
At my current job, my boss once called me in at 9 PM for an emergency. I was there until 1 AM (and he was there both before me and later than me). That happened once (in 13 years). I accept that.
If it's every week, that's a management problem, not a worker problem. I'm not management, and they don't pay me to fix management problems.
I know it's en vogue to pretend that everyone is a helpless idiot being taken advantage of, and that they need to be rescued by the state.. and that is partially responsible for the lack of accountability people have for their situation.
No one must connect to anything if they don't choose to. Take responsibility for your agreements, and meet them.
Disconnected enough imo
Don’t underestimate the slack the average worker has before being fired. Changes are you will be let go at some point based on stuff that has nothing to do with your personal competence at which point all that extra effort you put in being a stellar employee was largely pointless.
Getting a promotion sounds great, but jumping from company to company is generally the better option at which point you have again lost any befits from picking up the phone at 11pm on a Friday.
If you and your boss have a slightly worse relationship but you’re personally happier then again that seems like a net positive.
oh look, yet another piece of propaganda pushing the idea of ending working from home in favor of returning to the office!
That’s why my product BenkoPhone is so important! Currently Australia only, coming to a virtual mobile number starved territory near you.
And the idea that you should job hop to get higher wages and that employee loyalty to employers is for suckers has trickled all the way down and people are talking about it and there's a noticeable uptick in unionization drives.
The idea that everyone just up and quit is probably not correct at all, but I don't think its accurate to say that the environment isn't looking any different from the past ~30ish years.
I think the Fed is about to stomp the shit out of all of it though.
If you're working too much, do something about it. You have power.
Very, very worst case scenario: you get fired. So what? It's a job. There are literally millions of them. Like OP said: you'd probably get a better job right now any way. Companies are tripping over themselves to acquire talent.
If you're allowing yourself to be overworked, that's your choice.
There’s way too much pressure on individuals, too little social and institutional support, and too much free rein given to companies … which they’ve proven they’ll abuse.
There must be more for individual employees to stand upon, and then the “you’re treated how you allow yourself to be treated” really means something to many …
Does anyone get anything without demanding it?
To my knowledge, nothing has ever happened without someone saying “enough is enough” and walking out the door.
Also, I never said anything about IT.
As George Carlin said, "It's a big club and you ain't in it!"
And what sets the US apart from the rest of the developed world? The almost complete lack of labor organization ie unions.
Your shitty life isn't because of [insert wedge issue here]. It's because of your material conditions. Poor white people have way more in common with poor black people than either do with rich people. But so many Americans believe they are simply temporarily embarrassed millionaires [1].
This propaganda is so successful that something like 30% of Americans believe in the Great Replacement [2]. It's pushed on mainstream media [3].
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/17/1099233034/the-great-replacem...
[3]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Don't they teach people what being on salary even means any more?