Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours | Hacker News Reader

Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

reuters.com

527 pointstestrun431 comments

I've dabbled in management a few times in my career. This meant attending manager-only meetings and trainings. I'll never forget one time when a manager in a focus group said something along the lines of, "The tech sector is going through a rough patch, so we can turn the screws on our employees and they'll have to take it because they will have a hard time trying to find a job somewhere else." This is at a company where most of the employees are on work visas, so losing their job can very rapidly escalate into having to leave the country in short order.

After I picked my jaw up off the floor I realized I simply lacked the scruples I'd need to be "one of them." I also started looking into every legal protection I had available to me in my jurisdiction.

I know not every manager is like that. I'd like to think I wasn't. But there are enough of them that think that way that legal protections often need to be there.

> After I picked my jaw up off the floor I realized I simply lacked the scruples I'd need to be "one of them."

This is the reason why I always tell young engineers to treat companies with utmost business-only mentality.

It's not that all managers are bad. It's that the company rewards psychopathic behaviors - that aren't easily apparent to humble people.

Companies are merely out there squeezing and exploring employees. Employees should feel free to return the favor.

In short, Fuck the corporations. They fired the first shot.

Corporations are a form of “slow” AI - this is literally a war against the machines

Unfortunately the word "company" encompasses hundreds of millions of entities, of enormously different cultures, attitudes, ethics and so on.

Personally, I think behavior does (and likely has to) evolve with size. Unfortunately bigger tends to be worse.

Culture is also primarily a top-down flow. I'd the CEO is a screamer expect screamers all the way down and so on.

Of course there are companies, too many of them, that behave badly. There are too many people who treat other people as nameless, expendable and exploitable. There are also many others, the ones that don't make the juicy comments on reddit, which behave well, treat people as people, and so on.

Treating your work-place as a hostile environment can be emotionally and mentally draining. It can be counter-productive if the environment desires to support you.

Equally, if your environment is hostile then at least be looking elsewhere. Not all companies are created the same so there are likely better options elsewhere (although getting those posts is harder because people tend not to leave.)

Your advice rings true for many companies. But people stay in those places because they believe everywhere is the same. So a more nuanced advice might be to understand the culture and behavior where you work and decide if that's a culture you want to assimilate, and support, long term or not.

For the record, the place where I work has never expected anyone to do emails etc out-of-hours and you'd be laughed at if you suggested people should behave otherwise.

I wonder how much of a thing "long-term culture" really is in the tech industry. The culture at Google in the year 2024 looks very different from the culture at Google in 2010. In many ways the culture at Microsoft in 2024 is radically different from the culture at Microsoft in 2001.

I do agree with the notion that company culture trickles down from the CEO over time. So that suggests that company culture can shift as CEOs come and go. Another factor that can impact culture include market pressure. I can say with some confidence that the relentless squeeze that shareholders put on operating costs undeniably has a direct impact on practices and policies that govern the quality of the average employee's experience at work.

I disagree. The fundamental idea of a company causes this behavior. They, the company, actually doesn't have a choice.

You have to turn a profit and the only way to achieve that is exploitation. You have to take labor and pay less than it's worth and pocket the difference. There's no way around it.

You might say "well you can be less exploitative" - but not really. Because you ALSO have to thrive in your market. Even if you are an angel sent from God to save corporate America, your competition isn't. They lie, they cheat, they steal. If you don't you're a sucker, and it's only a matter of time until your company goes under.

Because consumers will choose the cheaper option almost every time. And they don't actually know much about the company, they only know advertising. And they don't know much about the product either, because products are complex. Even domain-specific products, like, say, medical equipment - the buyers don't know shit. They know what the product should do, but do they know the materials are reliable? Do they know the power system is reliable? Do they know the software is written in a memory-safe manor? No, they don't.

So you lie (advertise). And you steal (pay your employees a low wage). And you cheat (use capital to undercut competitors, sometimes selling at a loss in new markets). And if you say no, then you will be replaced by someone who does. Nobody has any choice in this system.

> Because consumers will choose the cheaper option almost every time.

Largely true - but the key word is "almost".

> You have to turn a profit and the only way to achieve that is exploitation. You have to take labor and pay less than it's worth and pocket the difference. There's no way around it.

But this is NOT the only way to achieve lower prices. Lower prices can be achieved by simple things like keeping your employee turnover at a minimum, not going through rounds and rounds of layoff+hiring cycles, not wasting time on "performance reviews" and other BS management activities - and generally treating employees and customers as an asset. This is automatic cost savings that can be passed down to the customers.

Do you know why customers are willing to pay higher prices at Trader Joes? It is because the store is always staffed, clean, and full of inventory with happy employees.

There is clearly a higher quality way of winning. The factory-style squeeze and replace seems rather naive and stupid from a branding and long term return perspective.

As I've said, you can be less exploitative. You can't be not exploitative.

> happy employees

Trader joes employees are not actually paid very well. They're paid okay. Also trader joes is not very successful. They're a small niche, only profitable in the whitest and richest parts of the country.

> seems rather naive and stupid from a branding and long term return perspective

Yes, to an extent. But branding, as I've alluded to, is mostly advertising. The reality of your product is a tiny tiny part of your brand. How your brand is advertised is a much bigger part.

Luxury goods are often not actually higher quality. They just advertise to rich people and have big "no poors allowed" signs on the front door. They create an artificial scarcity in people's minds, and monkey brain says "ooo ooo rare = valuable!!"

Trader joes is cleaner, sure, and the experience is nicer. But from a food quality perspective, how much better is it than Walmart or Target? ... not much. I can find produce and whole-foods at both locations and I can live an equally healthy life with a diet consisting of only foods from Walmart.

But Walmart doesn't have the prices written on cute little chalk boards, so...

> You can't be not exploitative.

This is not true. Specifically because you are pointing out that exploitative companies will retain more money than non-exploitative ones and thus not be beaten in competition.

However, it is paradoxically also true that the same competition is beaten merely by high quality - leading to higher margins. Cost cutting is not the only way to squeeze margins.

> Trader joes employees are not actually paid very well. They're paid okay. Also trader joes is not very successful. They're a small niche, only profitable in the whitest and richest parts of the country.

And yet, they are nowhere close to running out of money and have a firm loyalty against cheaper competition. Exploitative cheap is not the only way and you are proving that same point.

> Yes, to an extent. But branding, as I've alluded to, is mostly advertising. The reality of your product is a tiny tiny part of your brand. How your brand is advertised is a much bigger part.

> Trader joes is cleaner, sure, and the experience is nicer. But from a food quality perspective, how much better is it than Walmart or Target? ... not much. I can find produce and whole-foods at both locations and I can live an equally healthy life with a diet consisting of only foods from Walmart.

Yes you can find the same produce at whole-foods or walmart or target. And yet, trader joes survives and is expanding. Once again, you are proving the same point - cheap exploitation is NOT the only way to win.

No, because if you're not exploitative that would mean you're producing exactly as much money as you're paying out to your labor, or less. This is impossible in a capitalist system, because you go under.

It can be done and sometimes is, but we call that charity. I've seen some businesses that take 100% of their profit and just redistribute it to their employees. But they can never expand, only float, and the company exists on borrowed time.

The difference here is made up with capital - as in, we're told the myth that capital is the reason why businesses pay less for labor than it produces. Because they provide the capital.

In reality, capital can be democratically owned and capital is also not the cornerstone of our economy. People, labor, is.

> No, because if you're not exploitative that would mean you're producing exactly as much money as you're paying out to your labor, or less.

This is an incorrect understanding of exploitation. Even in the most ethical corporation to have ever lived, 100% of the money earned will not go to labor. The money earned by a corporation is always paid out to

1. Employees/suppliers

2. Government

3. Shareholders

4. Company's own balance sheet

The exploitation part happens when companies cut on 1 to boost 2, 3, and 4. They do so to boost margins.

But strictly speaking, they could cut 2 via tax deduction maneuvers, cut 3 via shareholder return cuts, and cut 4 via plain old not saving more.

Cutting 1 is the most visible cut there is. Within 1, they could cut labor, quality, suppliers, advertising, what have you. Everything is shortchanging the company.

There are so many levers at play here. Exploitation only starts at stripping your company's assets (labor, loyalty, real estate, supplies, customer goodwill) in order to boost other aspects - usually 3 and 4.

There are economic systems in which 100% of the value produced is paid out to laborers. We're just not in one.

> Exploitation only starts at stripping your company's assets (labor, loyalty, real estate, supplies, customer goodwill) in order to boost other aspects - usually 3 and 4.

First, this is merely an opinion. It's not a matter of me "misunderstanding" exploitation. It's an opinion that this is when exploitation starts.

Also, this is UNAVOIDABLE. You MUST, necessarily, take some money away from labor to give it to 3 and 4.

Your entire thought process rests on this word here - "stripping". What is that? When does that begin?

Is one dollar stripping? To me, yes, to you, no. What is that magic number? And, if you can find that magic number, why is it correct? And who decides?

> There are economic systems in which 100% of the value produced is paid out to laborers. We're just not in one.

You will need to give examples.

> Also, this is UNAVOIDABLE. You MUST, necessarily, take some money away from labor to give it to 3 and 4.

Absolutely. Can you point at where this was not implied?

> Your entire thought process rests on this word here - "stripping". What is that? When does that begin?

This where your understanding is completely off. It seems that you are missing the forest for the trees. Instead of focusing on "stripping", try to ask the question, "What steps can the company take when they are stagnating in revenue or margins?"

Peace!

The problem is you're not able to quantify where the problem begins. I am, the problem starts at 0.

Apparently there's a point where siphoning money from labor becomes bad. When is that point, according to you? You have no idea. What's that number? I dunno. Apparently nobody on Earth knows.

But you're telling me you understand exploitation? Yeah, fat chance. It's obvious you've gave a very minimal amount of mental effort into your views and outlook on economy and just ran with it. If you're not actually able to quantify what the problems are, reliably, you don't have an opinion. You have a delusion that makes you feel good. Which, granted, is easier and simpler to sell to voters. But it's also nothing - it's fluff.

> that aren't easily apparent to humble people.

This is indeed a major problem. The stereotypical engineers is such a humble personality. A kind of almost idiot-savant syndrome.

In a strong market the management and owners will have to pay more and improve conditions.

Maybe some managers will be faster to exploit things when supply/demand turns in their favour, but pretty quickly the invisible hand of the market would have readjusted anyway.

The invisible hand of the market does not make shitty people with power become less shitty people with power.

I had a similar experience with an HR manager in Australia, boasting about how they'd used a recent downturn to cut individuals' hourly rates by 10% (including many of my friends), while not reducing the charge-out rate to the client. Corporate management (as distinct from small business) selects for people like this.

I am from India and this is very common thing from Indian managers whether they are in India or working abroad (and I am sure this is not limited to India but since I am from there I am sharing this example). It's just a thing. I often am a pariah at workplace when it comes to views on work-life balance. So I have learnt to never get into discussions about it and just shut up and keep my head down while never giving in to any manager's pressure and still trying to maintain calm and composure avoiding direct conflict. It's like walking on egg shells.

I've had Indian managers and never experienced this. You're probably extrapolating from a small sample size which may all be from same company / industry.

I have had 7 managers from India at big US companies over a 30 year span and 6 of them where like this. It is an interesting phenomenon, in another timeline I'd like to be a tech ethnographer.

Most people who have worked both in the west as well as in the country will say there is a stark difference in the superior-subordinate dynamic between these two places. Concepts of professional respect, upward feedback and personal boundaries are less evolved here. It's a byproduct of the region's culture which is inherently hierarchical. While there are places which actively eschew traditional ways, especially those that are part of global orgranizations, given the size of the industry there are many more where a strong hierarchy and subordination is unfortunately the norm.

Basing the claim, "you're probably extrapolating from a small sample size" on only your experience, is extrapolating from a small sample size.

This isn't some Indian specific thing.

Private equity is destroying US infrastructure to make a quick buck. It's happening in almost every sector of the economy you can imagine. I'm not exaggerating when I say that PE firms are buying up nursing homes, transfering ownership of the land and building off into a separate entity, and have that entity charge the nursing home rent which keeps going up and up. This forces management of the nursing home to find ways to cut expenses until there's nothing left to cut except stuff directly related to resident care, safety, etc. Families see the writing on the wall and move their relatives out which accelerates the demise of the nursing home and it has to shut down (or is shut down, by the county/state.) Then the PE firm bulldozes the building and sells the property (which is what they really wanted.)

The US suffered a massive toxic fire in Ohio that destroyed a big chunk of the town and left a huge area heavily poisoned because a private equity firm bought the railroad and was squeezing it for every penny, and despite plenty of warnings by union officials and experts, the FRA did nothing and then...boom. Wheel bearing seized, train derailed, town polluted by hundreds of thousands of pounds of incredibly toxic chemicals like vinyl chloride.

https://www.tiktok.com/@moreperfectunion/video/7198354503823...

Precision railroad scheduling means:

- insanely strict rules about when engineers can request time off even for family medical emergencies, and sick days (so you have train engineers and other staff working while sick as dogs. Totally safe! Really stressed out employees, too - and stress means mistakes.) RR unions tried to strike twice. First congress and then and Biden bitch-slapped them back to work with a "compromise" that was still oppressive as hell because the economic disruption from the trains not running was more important. All because the railroads want to cut the number of employees down as low as possible so there aren't available engineers to replace sick ones, and they don't want delays while replacement engineers head out to trains that had to be left somewhere because the engineer was sick.

- dramatically reducing the time rolling stock maintenance crews have to inspect a car for problems - from three minutes to a minute and a half. Not only does this save labor, it means those maintenance crews don't find as much stuff wrong which takes a car out of service and costs money for the repair...woo, saving more money!

- reducing the number of employees per train; I believe it's currently two, and they're trying to push the FRA into allowing them to run one employee per train.

- increasing train lengths to reduce labor costs by moving more cars per people they have to pay. This increases the chances of derailments, and also causes other problems, like slower brake response time (the longer the train, the longer it takes for a pressure reduction in the brake line to make it to the end of the train, though I believe some end-of-train devices can be set up to remotely release brake pressure.)

- reducing track crews and time allocated to track maintenance so the tracks are more available and maintenance costs are lowered.

Keep in mind locomotive engineers are paid a median wage of $35/hour with a 10/90th percentile spread of $28/$44. These aren't enormous sums of money they're saving by going to one person on the train, particularly since it will be a lower-paid employee who is removed.

The crash was caused by overheating bearings which caused a wheelset to seize and derail the train.

It gets worse. The railroad pushed to have tanker cars intentionally burned, lied to the public, and turns out it was likely just because burning off the chemicals was cheaper and faster than a proper cleanup. Sources: https://www.tiktok.com/@moreperfectunion/video/7247656170347... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_de...

Hilariously, the EPA, the railway, and "independent scientists" all declared the area safe but EPA employees visiting the sites became sick in ways similar to how residents were being affected.

The railroad companies responded to public and congressional furor by saying they'd self-regulate (!) better, and join a program similar to the FAA's close-call incident reporting system. Only one railroad has joined that system, and all but one raiload saw an increase in derailments in the following year.

The PE firms know their maintenance and staffing cuts are causing increasing problems and will destroy the railroad companies. They don't care. They're milking the railroad companies for every dime they can squeeze, leaving them in tatters from all the deferred maintenance and repairs. These companies are responsible for moving massive amounts of cargo around the country, and when they fall apart, it will be a national crisis, and the federal government will have to step in and bail the companies out because they're 'Too Big To Fail.' And the PE firms that own trucking companies will see record profits...

I couldn't breathe reading this. I had no idea it was THIS bad, these private equity firms need to be reined the hell in if not eliminated and legislated against. Make them do something useful to society or tell them to get bent

I am sure you heard of red lobster going bankrupt because of endless shrimp.

Well, that wasnt actually the case but once again private equity.

They forced red lobster to sell off their land/buildings to a PE controlled entity. Which rented it back to them. Also forced them to go to a specific, PE controlled, fish seller.

In fact, they got forced into starting the endless shrimp stuff because that seller had too much shrimp.

And for the privilege to be managed by them, the bought companies get forced to take on the debt that PE took on to buy them in the first place, along with paying an outrageous amount of money every month.

And lets not even get into what they do to elderly homes..

Darden group sold Red Lobster to GGC because it was massively underperforming in it's portfolio due to mismanagement through the 90s. GGC wasn't able to make much headway with it, and so it sold 25% to a vendor on the supply chain as part of debt restructuring and forgiveness, that allowed them to get some unit economics back into reality and the owner of the supply chain company took the rest of the position to continue the work of re-building the supply chain. Should the PE firm have involved the vendors in that way, maybe not, however it seems it was a decent enough strategy in terms of thoughtfulness.

Red Lobster had a death rattle long before PE got involved, PE is just a convenient story.

McDonald's, a non-failing firm, not owned by PE, was once described by a former CFO thusly: "We are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business." They realised that owning the land upon which their restaurants, allowed them to succeed.

Red Lobster's PE firm, on the other hand, did the exact opposite: sold the most valuable asset out from under their restaraunts, to another PE firm, which then squeezed the restaraunts on rent and ruined their store economics (along with the aforementioned supplier further ruining their unit economics) until they went out of business.

They're in Chapter 11, they're not out of business yet.

Why do you think that is what happened? It doesn't seem to be in line with what GGC told their LPs, so I'm curious where you get your interpretation of the events from? Do you have any links or reading you could provide me with?

>Why do you think that is what happened?

The reason I think that is what happened is because that is what happened. Here are some links, as requested:

How a bad real estate deal sunk Red Lobster [0]

When a private-equity firm bought the iconic seafood chain in 2014, it sold the real estate under the restaurants for $1.5 billion. Then the restaurants struggled to pay the rents [1]

It Was A Bad Real Estate Deal, Not A Bad Meal Deal That Killed Red Lobster [2]

Ultimate Endless Real Estate Costs at Red Lobster [3]

Golden Gate crippled Red Lobster by selling off one of its most valuable assets, the real estate it owned [4]

To help fund the deal, Red Lobster spun off its real estate assets in a transaction known as a sale leaseback agreement. Red Lobster had long owned its own real estate but would now be paying rent to lease its restaurants. Sale leasebacks are very common in the restaurant industry, but the arrangement wound up hurting Red Lobster because it became stuck with leases it no longer could afford to pay. [5]

But again, it wasn’t because of the shrimp. Following the sale of Red Lobster to Golden Gate, the chain’s real estate assets were also sold off, which meant that the restaurants now had to pay rent on these locations to their parent company. As such, the company was stuck in leases for underperforming restaurants that it couldn’t afford [6]

0: https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/bad-real-estate-deal-sun...

1: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/private-equity-rol...

2: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bad-real-estate-deal-not-1730...

3: https://artofprocurement.com/supply/ultimate-endless-real-es...

4: https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/

5: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/03/food/red-lobster-seafood-rest...

6: https://www.eater.com/24160929/red-lobster-bankruptcy-endles...

The vendor wouldn't have been able to afford the price of the business with the land in the deal, it would have massively complicated chapter 11 if they needed to enter it (they did), given were the company was, reducing tax burden was important (sale was done at near breakeven). Sale+Rent back is a very traditional move in clearing up a business that has very little value and is leaning heavily on a real estate portfolio (not it's core business). You can read all the court filings and disclosures over the years, it paints a different story.

I understand the media told a story, but the story isn't the whole story, in fact it's just that: a story.

The 6 reliable sources provided, which I trust you read in the 30 minutes between their posting and your reply, speak for themselves.

If you can convince all 6 reliable sources I linked, to correct their story, such that it reflects your own personal narrative of what happened, I will believe you.

Alternatively, you could provide 6+ equally-reliable sources which explicitly point out that the 6 reliable sources I cited are wrong (rather than just reframing the issue, or attempting to predict what would have happened had reality been different than what it was).

While I respect you as a person, and as a valuable contributor to this forum, your personal narrative simply isn't as reliable as the 6 reliable sources I provided.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/940944/0000940944140...

https://goldengatecap.com/vereit-announces-sale-of-204-milli...

https://fortune.com/2014/06/30/why-private-equity-investors-...

Darden had a very interesting pitch to GGC, going so far as to secure covenants from franchisees holders in advance to sale+leaseback - GGC in spite of S+LB, obligations, the in fact bought millions more in real estate to try and shore up the stability in locations.

Then here, you'll see it play out: https://bankruptcy-proxy-api.dowjones.ai/cases/Florida_Middl...

Story is considerably more complicated than PE is evil.

It seems we're in violent agreement: The sources you provided don't actually dispute the ones I did: indeed, they confirm that the real estate was sold out from under the restaurants. To further cement this point, your last link flat out says what we're all already saying: Private Equity can't/didn't save Red Lobster.

This action further distressed individual restaurants, rather than helping them out.

Instead, the sources you provided instead simply say that it was advantageous for Private Equity and the Private Equity deal, which is the point here: it was good for PE, bad for the individual restaurants.

Which makes sense, it's not a complicated concept: how does jacking up rent on an individual restaurants help it? It doesn't, as the sources I provided pointed out. If you were paying X today, and now you have to pay >X, that doesn't help you.

Why was it worse for the restaurants than the alternative?

Why was the rent increased, by how much, and by who?? What was the difference between the payments and how much did it diff from market over time or at whatever time you're talking about.

I'm an LP in GGC so I have lots of thoughts, happy to hear yours in detail!

Was the rent increased? Yes.

By how much? By enough to hurt the restaraunts. I'd be happy to hear from you the specifics of how much it was increased, per-restaurant, if that's what you're referring to.

Was it worse for the individual restaraunts than not jacking up the rent? Yes, paying more is worse than paying less.

Was it worse than not being bought out by PE? Probably, but that's the sort of prophesizing about what would have happened had reality been different, in which I'm not interested in participating. What we do know is that a lot of value was extracted from Red Lobster into the pockets of PE, leaving the company a withered husk of its former self, a common PE playbook.

It's not prophesying given we have additional facts we could include to play out the alternative (socioeconomics)- if you wanted to engage from a place of intellectual honesty, that is.

"Playing out an alternative future" is "prophesizing" with more words, and prophets always claim to have some basis to predict the future, but nobody can. That's why I'm not interested in prophesizing about what might have happened had reality been different.

You mentioned rent costs, though: I'm happy to hear the rent costs before vs. after private equity sold the land out from under the restaraunts – it sounded like you were saying you're in a position to access those numbers? Given your excellent posting history, I trust that you want to engage from a place of intellectual honesty in that regard.

As it stands now, all we know is that, post private equity, they were jacked up so much that the stores struggled to pay. So how much was it exactly?

A lot of the time, private equity (like MBAs etc.) is a convenient bogeyman for why crappy underperforming companies are crappy and underperforming. But private equity often gets involved because they are crappy and underperforming (or are just in a line of business that doesn't have good prospects any longer).

A small fraction of the time, private equity is brought in to make an ailing, breakeven business profitable.

Much more often, it's to bite off limbs until it dies, feasting on cashflow and assets.

And then the third portion of the time, the business is generating reliable, modest long-term returns, a "blue-chip" company. Private equity doubles down on future growth that is not projected, gets the company into debt to the owners, makes it worthless, compensate themselves in stock with bank leverage, issues themselves further priority stock, files bankruptcy to get rid of the pensions, and on, and on, and on with various tricks to sack whatever assets the have on their books and whatever cashflow was generating a reliable 5% return before private equity got involved.

> Much more often, it's to bite off limbs until it dies, feasting on cashflow and assets

This can be a legitimate strategy. I know someone who made millions buying yellow pages companies and managing them for de-growth.

Eastman Kodak is a good example. Fujifilm arguably sort of came out the other side but much smaller company in much different country.

B&M retail, especially in the traditional department store sense, is much reduced. Could Sears have become Amazon (presumably including AWS)? I guess. Would anyone to a first approximation who was employed at Sears still be there? Probably not. Would Sears as it existed have brought any particular assets or expertise to the table? Probably not.

At some point, reinvention is sort of pointless because it means bringing along a lot of baggage that has net negative value.

That's a fair bit of revisionist history trying to make PE look like it's not the bad guy.

Red Lobster was flourishing in the 1990s; it was one of the most popular sit-down chains back then. There were lines around the block at most locations.

In 2013, Darden Restaurants decided to spin-off Red Lobster and Olive Garden by selling them to a PE firm which coveted the ability to exploit these profitable chains. (Average EPS was approximately $0.77/share, and Red Lobster remained the countries' most popular seafood chain until COVID.)

The sale to the PE firm GGC included a sale-leaseback of all of Red Lobster's real estate. The purpose of this was to fund the acquisition, since PE never puts its own money down; it funds acquisitions with the assets of the acquired company. Red Lobster's operating expenses jumped more than 50% overnight, as it now had to pay rent on locations it used to own.

Within 2 years, this PE-driven cash grab had Red Lobster on the verge of bankruptcy. Selling Red Lobster to its biggest supplier didn't fix things because the problem was that PE had the bright idea to ruin the company through the sale-leaseback arrangement.

PE was not just a convenient story, they are the cause for Red Lobster's demise.

It's all bullshit. Buffet bought BNSF but the rest of the major railroads are publicly traded companies. And Berkshire Hathaway isn't private equity either.

What PE firm are you referring to when you talk about the railroads and the Ohio incident?

I know a number of nursing homes had >50% mortality from COVID, as there was not even a real attempt at isolation. While visiting hours may have been restricted, we pretended that nurses and staff (already scarce) were simply unable to transmit COVID, taking them on and off premises on regular shifts, and the result is hundreds of thousands of people killed.

Murdered.

A lot of old people in red states straight up voted for the day of the pillow and gleefully accepted it.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/texas-lt-governor-thinks-old...

These comments from the lt governor and trump were extremely popular with their base and with the population of Texas.

What do you do when the people being murdered vote for their own murder?

Don't worry, this happens everywhere that caves to free market ideologies. In the UK local government (tax payers) get ripped off exactly the same for social care. Private equity firms know the local government has a legal duty to provide care for the elderly and those with chronic conditions. So they can charge whatever they want.

Obviously the global investors have no problem morally with this, they are more than arms reach away. It's an executive in one of the companies they own that takes the heat for a couple of weeks, and then it goes away (and the executive gets their bonus for being the face of immorality).

If anyone wonders why public services are crippled, this is the main reason.

Sorry for the annoying language comment: your issue was not lack of scruples but presence of scruples.

Not annoying at all. I'm more annoyed by people just letting me keep making the same mistake without saying anything. In fact when I first wrote that something in my brain said maybe it wasn't right, so I looked up the word "scruples" and saw the definition "motivation deriving logically from ethical or moral principles that govern a person's thoughts and actions." I thought maybe that it might be a valid interpretation for the ethical or moral principles to be flawed in that context. What I should have done was look up examples of "lack of scruples" being used in sentences; that would have made it clear that I wasn't using it right.

He's right, and I think we're seeing this done across the industry (especially FAANG).

However, just because employees "have to take it" doesn't mean that it's better for the company to have employees that actively hate it and are just staying because of a lack of alternatives. Especially in a field where work output and especially quality is hard to measure, and the success of many companies hinged on motivated employees...

I always like analogies, eg:

Skimping on feed because the penned milk cattle have to take it.

I would actually appreciate if our systems were coherently sociopathic rather than chaotic due to individual personality faults. At least then, conditions “on the farm” might make sense rather than look like an expression of mental illness and unchecked antipathy.

The thing is that it’s not that important if it hurts the company long term. If the company is big enough, any of those "managers" have plenty of time to make a great career there for several years if not more.

imo, that’s the issue when company’s ownership gets so diluted that nobody have personal interest anymore in the company’s long term viability.

Heck when your company is owned by private equity, even the company itself becomes a line in some excel spreadsheet. And you’d better not get that conditional formatting turn to red.

This has nothing to do with being a manager or not, it's just that many people are jerks. I've seen non-managers do something similar when they consider themselves hard to replace. It's unfortunate this is where we have ended up as a society.

Ex-manager here as well. I have always been surprised at how many managers will jump at the opportunity to put pressure on employees, even when there is no real benefit to the manager themselves or the organisation.

Normalize it now; take advantage of it later when there is some sort of benefit, however short-term/sighted it may be.

Early on in my career when I was first put into the position of hiring both employees and contractors, a guy I was working with said "We can ask him for a better price and promise to give him a better deal on the next one", and I said "but we won't have any more work after this one" and he said "yeah I know but we can just tell him that to get a better price".

It was one of the first times I realised that people are actively being jerks in business negotiations.

Another time was when I put my prices up to $160/hour from $80/hour after I realised I wasn't making any money (in fact by my calculations I was losing $3/hour for every hour my staff worked).

I didn't lose a single customer. They all just said "oh, right, well, okay when will you have it done?".

The same guys who had been crying poor a couple of months prior about how they "just didn't have the budget" were now paying double the rate and they could totally afford it.

People be jerks yo.

Being a jerk extends all around.

As a manager I’ve had two employees tell HR that I was racist. The evidence? One I fired for performance, the other I had on a performance improvement plan. Mind you I had other minorities on my team in parallel that had no performance issues and strangely enough did not say I was a racist.

Also one time the HR guy (who also doubled as office manager) ran a large scheme where he claimed employees were expensing things, he did it on their behalf and got reimbursed. I found this out after the fact where I was asked if I ever asked him to order laptops or ran up huge Uber bills.

No idea why you're being down voted. I've had the very same experience once. Employee just sucked, after some nudges that went either ignored or just unnoticed I gave a very clear speech on where they're standing. Three months later I got him fired. He went to HR and claimed I was racist, and threatened with a lawyer. This really stressed me out for a good while, this was dragging along for weeks, with ugly mails and calls.

The details really matter here.

I won’t assume you or GP were racially motivated but “just sucks” can easily be code for “wrong race/culture”.

“Some nudges” is a red flag to me, regardless of race. You think you communicated a message but aren’t sure if it was understood. That’s your responsibility as the messenger, not theirs as the unknowing recipient.

> “Some nudges” is a red flag to me, regardless of race. You think you communicated a message but aren’t sure if it was understood.

Hence the "gave a very clear speech" part. If you don't get it at that point then I don't care if you're just stupid or it's cultural differences, at some point you have to adapt to the environment you work in. And no, there were no language barriers involved.

Yeah but the “very clear speech” came later, after the decision was made. After redemption was possible. At that point you’re just reinforcing your perceptions. Your job as a manager is to manage that expectation. If you fire someone for it that’s your failure.

> Yeah but the “very clear speech” came later, after the decision was made.

Huh? I clearly stated they had another three months at that point. Nothing changed, so they got the boot three months later. What the heck do you expect? Another two years? At this point I have to assume malice from your side. I guess you're just one of these people yourself. Blame everyone and everything but yourself.

> I clearly stated they had another three months at that point. Nothing changed, so they got the boot three months later.

Yes, and I clearly stated your mind was already made up so that didn’t matter. It was impossible for them to change your mind.

> What the heck do you expect? Another two years?

Your job as a manager is to address these issues before they become fireable. You know, to manage.

> At this point I have to assume malice from your side.

This is an internet forum, relax. What does it even mean to be malicious in an internet comment? I’m not taking away your livelihood.

> I guess you're just one of these people yourself.

“These people”? Is this still a thread about you not being racist?

> Blame everyone and everything but yourself.

Go look in a mirror.

Much like a blameless root cause analysis I believe a firing is a failure of the organization. How did this person get hired in the first place? How did you fail to coach them? What did the organization learn to avoid a repeat?

In my experience “performance” is code for “I don’t like you”. I have never seen a performance metric that isn’t arbitrary and inconsistent. Not just between peers but day to day for an individual.

PIPs are just CYA for HR.

I can’t speak to these specific situations because I wasn’t there but when managers speak about “performance” they’re using a euphemism for their perception. This can easily feel like racism because it comes from a place of discrimination.

“I have friends who are x” is a common refrain of racists so isn’t a defense, especially in an asymmetric power structure. Maybe you aren’t, or maybe your employees feel you are but they tolerate it to keep their jobs.

In your experience what are legitimate grounds to fire someone?

Theft and fraud.

If you’re bad enough at your job to get fired you basically are a fraud.

Is it your assertion that power asymmetry, discrimination, and retaliation do not exist?

> If you’re bad enough at your job to get fired you basically are a fraud.

Depends on who thinks you are bad enough and how they came to the conclusion.

If your boss thinks you are bad enough - the question is why do they think so? Is it laziness, incompetence, or merely small nonsense that the boss couldn't accept retroactively? Is this all via stack rank or fake BS quotas? What is it?

Even without stack ranking, if you lead a team large enough, you get people who are struggling more than others. Sometimes it’s clearly situational: they are more junior and are still learning the ropes, the project is going through a rough patch and it’s hard to deliver, they are going through a rough patch and it’s hard to deliver and sometimes it’s just that their skillset is mismatched with what they have to do. In this case, you have to decide if it’s a case where training will solve the issue or if having someone else there would be better for everyone. And yes, not constantly being in conflict with everyone is also a professional skill.

It does indeed extend all around, and I'm sorry you had to go though that. But you have to keep in mind that there is an extreme power imbalance between an employee and a manager who can have them fired, which means the jerk-factor is very much slanted heavily in one direction. For regular employees having those above you abuse their power over you in various ways is often a daily occurrence.

Context matters. When I walk into a high-end store and see a shirt on sale for $X, I assume that I need to pay $X to get the shirt. If I see a shirt at a flea-market priced at $Y, I assume I can get the shirt for some percentage off by just bargaining. The sellers are also aware of this context and, presumably, set their prices accordingly. The same thing regularly happens in business. For most services, people understand that pricing is not fixed and act accordingly. They are not (necessarily) jerks, they are just reacting to the context they are operating in.

>They are not (necessarily) jerks, they are just reacting to the context they are operating in.

That's a good point and honestly is often caused by the seller in the first place. A lot of tools used by businesses are intentionally not priced or priced on a floating scale so that the sales team has an opportunity to introduce fake discounts to make the sale, but ultimately this signals to the buyer that negotiation is part of the transaction. Almost all enterprise software and hardware sales work like that. Often the buyer would rather have a set price upfront than how to deal with the haggling process but it's the sellers that are creating this problem.

Doing business in the Middle East, we ran into the mistake of not intentionally pricing 20% higher than what we were actually aiming for. Even if you’re not actually looking to negotiate, you still need to keep a buffer for the negotiator to claim he’s done his job effectively — and some room for his boss too.

Doing contract work, I usually find that eventually extra work gets identified during the project; no one wants to do the paperwork around a change order (or more importantly, explain to their boss[es] why a change order is needed), so the easiest solution is to pad the initial pricing to account for it, and then when it comes up do it pro-bono. The larger the company, the more you buffer, as the paperwork gets worse and the misidentified scope becomes more likely.

And then of course a lot of companies end up with “yearly budgets”, and are price-insensitive as long as you stay in their remaining budget. Not pricing as much as the budget allows is just leaving money on the table.

That is, the floating price isn’t just some sales fuckery to trick buyers into bad deals (although it probably often does happen) — there’s some legitimacy to the madness. And buyers love haggling; IME it starts with haggling on direct price/effort, and then with haggling on scope. They want the project price to be fixed after haggling, not before.

you create such a great linkedin post on this story, you will get quite good traffic. But i think the guy who told you to lie is not wrong. hear me out. He tried to save money. he didnt steal or do anything but. am not saying what he did was right, but it was not harmful or wrong. he should have framed the sentence better so it would make the contractor feel that he was not being promised anything. he may have had his own reasons. its how life works.

Yeah i got a peek at how the sausage gets made at the higher levels and I decided I needed to keep my HH costs down and reach FI(maybe)RE asap. Until that happened I was ultimately a wage slave, and that's how they wanted it, with a gun to my head in the form of rent/mortgage/kids's schooling whatever keeping me desperate to perform for them.

> turn the screws on our employees

This is gross..

> I also started looking into every legal protection I had available to me in my jurisdiction.

But so is this. I’d rather quit some crappy place than rely on legal protections.

I had a manager relate to me overhearing almost that exact comment made in a manager meeting at a mid-size corp I worked for in 2008. He left in part because of that attitude, and I ultimately did too. It’s egregiously abusive.

You pretty much summed up managers that have most of their employees on H1-B in the US. I know multiple managers that offload most of the work to the Asian immigrants on the H1-B visa, have them work 10+ hours a day and know that they can get them to do anything they want, because if they don't, they are scared that they can get fired and have to leave the country. I know multiple friends who silently work on weekends to potentially avoid being fired and leave the country!

I like the Swiss implementation of this. A manager _can_ contact an employee on a Sunday, but then the employee is immediately on weekend-rate overtime even if they just got an email with "deal with this next week". So, many companies have systems that hold back e-mail sent outside of working hours until the next working day unless specially authorised and costed.

Never underestimate an economics-based solution to a legal problem, a.k.a. "if you really want to ban it, tax it".

I'd rather not work on the weekend, even for an overtime rate. Thanks.

That's the benefit of working on a small team/startup. Whoever smelt it dealt it kind of situation. Basically, at first at least, whoever's application is erroring is getting a call when it breaks.

It sounds bad, but it encourages everyone to write more fault tolerant code. Way moreso then a random bigcorp with an on call team.

I used to get called all the time because our in house infrastructure would fall over, and my apps would crash. It didn’t matter how many times I explained my apps couldn’t run without good infra, and that I wasn’t on that team, and that I had no access or authority to do anything… when my apps when down I got called.

So actually, I really don’t like your idea.

Or, to be more specific, you don't like your company's implementation of their idea.

We have the same setup in my org, but we get to define alerts ourselves. All our own alerts are built so that they don't go off if the underlying infra is borked, and only if there's something we can actually do on our level. We are being kept honest because there is a big kerfuffle when an incident is reported by customers first (instead of alerting).

What metrics do you alert on? How do you distinguish between error due to faulty database client vs error due to database disk failure?

Define SLOs based on what can realistically be achieved with underlying infrastructure, only alert if those SLOs are breached?

Taking my managed container image registry service as an example.

- The only critical alert that can actually page people is if the blackbox test fails. Every 30 seconds, it downloads a test image and if the contents don't match the expectation, an alert is raised (with some delay).

- Warning alerts are mostly for any errors being returned from background tasks, but these are only monitored during business hours.

i dont see how that is separated from the underlying infra. If the network/server/some dependency goes down, the blackbox test will fail and you'll get paged.

You can test for this. For example, we had routines that were called on repeated HTTP failures that would then get 5 or so of the top US websites. If those fail too, it moves from an application error to an infra one.

If your endpoint is failing, it might be you. If everyone’s endpoint is failing, it’s almost certainly not you.

Pretty sure your parent poster meant a small overall team. As in, the company is small enough that everyone knows who everyone else is and there’s little to no bureaucracy to reach the right person.

Doesn’t seem like your case at all.

Unless of course the "guilty" is not immediately apparent.

If it happens frequently, the guilty is the process, team lead or whoever runs the things.

This is how you end up in situations where no one wants to work on the team that actually needs the most help

> Whoever smelt it dealt it

Until whoever dealt it just leaves the team. Then it’s everyone’s problem.

I joined a startup a couple years ago, and got handed a poisoned chalice.

It was a project that was critical to the company, but that was not very reliable, and broke overnight very often, sometimes 3-4 days per week.

I was the 4th dev on it. Everyone else who worked on it before had burned out and quit. The dev before me couldn’t tough it out another 2 weeks and quit before i joined.

Eventually I burned out after a year and quit too. All this to say, that’s great when it works, but when it goes bad it’s real bad hahaha.

There's also the call you get when the founder breaks something and blames the person who touched it before them.

That's fine, but I'd be willing to. Always a chance I'm I'm far from a laptop or even signal, but if I'm having a quiet weekend and something comes up, some overtime sounds great.

I understand. Problem is this kind of thing is a race to the bottom.

Because of the silly ways humans work (mostly due to imperfect information), I'd feel obliged and will agree to it, despite not wanting to (concerns I will automatically be perceived as a lesser employee).

And then we're all working weekends.

This is one of those things that I can see happening, but also has never happened anywhere I've worked.

A sufficiently large overtime/weekend bonus will prevent that easily. I've had quite a few conversations both internally and with customers that started with "we need that by monday" and went via "we can do that, but it will cost X extra" to "well, i guess wednesday is fine, too." Mandatory weekend work is an extremely rare occurence here, I can count all occurences in the last five years on one hand and still have fingers to spare.

It tends to be an issue with more "vulnerable" workers, ones with less leverage. Shift work, nurses and hospitality. Margins are ample to cover low wages.

That's true, but that's always true - people with less bargaining power will always have a harder time. Nurses (and other care workers) also suffer from the effect that the people that suffer most from a hard stance on work time are their wards and not their bosses.

There’s a relevant quote attributed to Bob Carter:

> Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine

Instead of going into an immediate frenzied panic when someone says they need something now, stop and ponder for a minute how it will impact you and them. Only then make a decision.

I remember a friend who was asked for something urgent from a client. They rushed to do it to their own personal detriment and uploaded the result. About a week later, they could see the file had never been downloaded. Turns out the matter wasn’t that urgent and the client had other priorities. My friend was understandably upset, but it was a valuable lesson.

I'll steal that quote :)

The advantage of framing it in monetary terms is that clients are very used to thinking in monetary terms. It's not a "no, we won't do that", but a "yes with a cost" that they'll very likely reject on their own terms. And it clearly leaves the door open for something that is really really urgent - be it a genuine emergency or just the result of poor planning.

Law again takes care of that, because the right to rest also exist. So if you are asked to work 1h during the weekend, you usually gain 2.5 to 3 hours of rest in exchange.

Does the manager also get weekend-rate overtime if she sends out e-mails on the weekend? I mean, she _is_ working! Sounds like an incentive mismatch here. Or is this just a protection of workers on a tariff and does not cover "exempt" employees, ie. most IT people.

Weekend work etc. needs to be approved by a person's manager, so weekend-work without approval would in practice not be compensated (it's possible that technically they should compensate it then fire you for insubordination).

The hurdles for "exempt" are way higher than in the US.

I doubt it is actually done much in practice, although an employee who wants to be left alone on the weekend certainly could. I would also expect that guidance of "don't read your e-mail outside of working hours" would be sufficient to be able to send e-mail to employees at any day or hour without triggering overtime etc.

> I would also expect that guidance of "don't read your e-mail outside of working hours" would be sufficient to be able to send e-mail to employees at any day or hour

I sometimes want to send my employees emails over the weekend as I think of something and don't want to forget. But there are certain employees that I know will immediately act on the email, which I actually don't want. So I end up emailing myself and then forwarding them the email on Monday morning.

Does your client not support delaying emails? Gmail has schedule send for example.

> So I end up emailing myself and then forwarding them the email on Monday morning.

Certain clients (like Apple’s email app) allow you to schedule emails to be automatically sent at a later date.

> I think of something and don't want to forget.

This is a you problem. Fix the forgetting part, you are management that's literally your job. Leave a post it somewhere, start keeping a checklist, whatever.

Stop making it your employees' problem.

It's the employee's fault for reading work email during weekends, not the managers.

He did fix the forgetting part, that's what sending an email to himself was for

Upper management does not need to log working hours and can work unpaid overtime. So, they can easily exchange emails on weekends. But when they involve a regular employee, who has to reach working hours, then it's overtime.

You are only exempt if you make at least 125k a year. Below that, you MUST log all your hours, IT or not.

Even that is not out-of-blue call to devs, rather just PROD support guys if some massive issue happens suddenly.

I live and work here 14 years, 2 companies, and never had to pick up phone I didn't want to pick up, or react anyhow. Even if for some reason they would expect to - 'sorry hiking in the mountains, 5h from computer' and they know it. But since everybody is in same mode, there is nobody to call me. Our Pune colleagues on the other hand, I see them working regularly long weekend hours on top of long week days during crunch time.

But employers will strike back with a law: if you read HN during work hours, your rate will be halved.

Surveillance of employees is obviously banned anyway.

No need to speculate, we can check if such situation indeed takes place in Switzerland.

Yeah it is ridiculous to see all of the "employees" complain so heavily about one important work email that comes over the weekend, when the business patiently puts up with hundreds of personal phone calls, time spent scrolling on the phone, hacker News / Reddit posts and much more.

There needs to be a little bit more of a give and take. If employees are not expected to receive a single phone call or email outside of working hours. Would it be acceptable if the same restrictions were placed on personal calls and emails during working hours?

How many of the same people would be screaming murder, if their bosses came to them and complained about them taking personal email during work time.

Effectively pointless apples to oranges whataboutism.

If employees at work are not completing tasks then by all means carpet them, warn them and fire them.

During working hours.

You don't get to follow them home physically or digitally and take them to task outside of contract and labour laws.

Is everything hourly there? Would this work with salaried employees that don't log hours? Or maybe everyone does? A running joke in my first company out of school was "can't wait to see that overtime check!" whenever we saw someone working after 5. The implication is no one ever gets overtime as a salaried employee.

I don't think true US-like "salaried contracts" exist at all in EU. Speaking as a Polish contractor. There might be fixed-price short-term project-based contracts but it has nothing to do with employment and definitely it's not a monthly/yearly thing without any hour limit. At best you have something like "minimum X hours per week" but there's always "up to Y" and while those hours are technically "preordered" upfront, you are supposed to log them.

That being said lots of people still do unpaid overtime, but only because they're afraid about losing the job / care too much. Not because they actually legally have to. There are legal means to defend yourself from that.

Heh. At a $SOME_PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER, they literally disabled the option to log overtime in the portal, because workers were "getting confused", and the official policy was "no overtime".

Even 'salaried' in the UK means a contract that has a specified number of hours in it. In theory if you work more than that you should be getting either overtime or time in lieu, but in practice that might not always happen depending on your role in the company and the type of company.

I don't get overtime, but I do get time in lieu - I did about four hours extra the week before last doing set up for one of our busiest days of the year, and I'm taking Thursday afternoon off to make it up.

Things like 60 hour work weeks also aren't even legal without signing away your EU Working Time Directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003) rights (which isn't even an option in every EU country). I don't _think_ the post-brexit legislation did away with that, but it wouldn't surprise me.

This is probably closer to the billing of on call staff than just "overtime".

For instance when getting an alert on PagerDuty in the middle of the night, you might get paid by 30 min increments while dealing with the emergency, even if your regular pay is by the day.

>The implication is no one ever gets overtime as a salaried employee.

The flipside is that no one ever gets paid less as a salaried employee either, but most employees are too afraid of getting fired to remember that part. Any day that you work any portion, you get paid for the full day.

Differs from country to country. In DE, salaried employees still have a number of hours/week in their contract (usually ~38) and are expected to log overtime and later take time in lieu. Max. permissible work hours per week is 48.

There are a bunch of exceptions for specific jobs.

The working hours, comp+ben etc. are usually determined by collective agreement with unions.

Pay for the same job can vary dramatically depending on which union your employer has a collective agreement with.

I know several people who got 25-30% pay rises just by moving to another part of the company that had an agreement with IG Metall instead of ver.di.

The economic solution again: you want your worker not to have to log hours because they have an important management job and work "as much as necessary"? Sure, pay them at least 125k a year. Anything under that, they must log hours.

Overtime rates are not worth being interrupted during time off. I’d rather lose out on money and have my precious time.

> But the Australian Industry Group, an employer group, says ambiguity about how the rule applies will create confusion for bosses and workers. Jobs will become less flexible and in doing so slow the economy, it added.

Whenever I encounter someone professionally who can't deal with a little ambiguity about when it's appropriate to interrupt someone; I feel like I'm working with a child trapped in an adult's body.

"Children," who don't have the maturity to understand this ambiguity, shouldn't be managers.

I also find that rules like this come into play because some people (cough, children stuck in adult bodies, cough) just refuse to self-regulate. It takes maturity to think through if an out-of-hours contact is appropriate; these kinds of rules only come about because of widespread immaturity in management roles.

Some loners, cant be alone at home with themselves. After hours, they put the alpha dog away, in a little box, were nobody can be forced to play with that creature. So they call those they can torment.

If somebody calls after hours, for unimportant stuff, s/he needs to be marked up for therapy and re-socialisation.

I mean interrupting is one of the harder social actions in my opinion, especially in the workplace. So much of this comes from culture, family and your personality.

I say this as someone who interrupts, and loves to be interrupted. Am I a kid in an adult body, or are my norms different than yours?

That depends entirely on if you ask permission before you interrupt another person.

I really don't mean to be pedantic, but that would already be interrupting someone right?

Eh I mean it would depend on how your doing it really, Im thinking its the difference between "hey sorry to interrupt, I have a question do you have a minute?" vs "hey {question}"

What became of "don't ask to ask" (https://dontasktoask.com/)? Although it may take some getting used to, I find it convincing that one shouldn't need to ask about whether it'd be OK to ask for short questions because the question for permissing is interrupting just as much as the actual question except that with the former it may be impossible to estimate how complex it is whereas it may be much easier to decide if the question is known.

For longer issues, could it make more sense to schedule an (online) meeting?

And on the receiving side of interruptions: Ocasionally it has helped me to just keep the "chat app" closed when I want to concentrate on something. If anyone has something urgent, they could always elevate to performing an old-style synchronous phone call, but interestingly this rarely happens with "text-chat" people :)

that's similar to the no hello movement. if you're going to ask a question over chat, just ask it, we don't need the pretend conversation around it, and by saying hello you've already interrupted me.

Not to worry, I usually just say "hi" and wait for them to respond before asking the question.

> “I … love to be interrupted”

Can you elaborate on this?

The imagined exchange is something like this

"To get you up to speed on foo I'll explain some important ways it differs from bar. First, of all—"

"Wait, I'm not familiar with bar, can you use a different frame of reference or briefly explain bar to me first?"

"Oh, I'm so glad I didn't waste your time and mine trying to give you information you don't have context to make sense of."

Well that depends on your ability to self-regulate!

Do you constantly interrupt people and prevent them from doing work? If someone says they are busy and need a few minutes, do you ignore them and continue to interrupt what they do? Do you get angry if someone can't drop what they are doing to cater to your impulse?

Do your co-workers feel like working with you is like working with a child?

That is what my children do to me, and that is what "children in adult bodies" do in the workplace.

On behalf of humanity I ask you to please stop interrupting us.

I'll try to explain it a different way:

I once had a manager who, after working with for 6-8 months, gave me the impression of "working for a child."

He would interrupt me all day for very trivial matters, and insist that I drop what I'm working on to address some email that just came in. (And what I was working on was from email that came in yesterday, that I dropped what I was working on yesterday to start...)

Any time I started any task that required any significant concentration, I'd start to panic that I'd be interrupted before the task was complete. (And if you understand concentration, you realize that you just can't pick up an interrupted task where you left off.)

---

Where it came to a head was, late one Friday afternoon, I realized I needed to cherry-pick or revert something in Git. At the time, I was a bit of a novice to Git. I skimmed an article on how to do what I needed to do in Git, decided it would take me ~10 minutes, and that I'd leave when I was done.

No sooner did I make it through the first paragraph did my manager interrupt me with a question. I answered it, and tried to find where I was reading (in the article that explained what I was trying to do). Then the guy next to me interrupted me with a technical question. The two of them continued, ping-ponging each other, me being stuck trying to read a paragraph, until I was able to construct one single command.

Then my manager pulled me into his office. I saw that he was putting together a presentation, and I spent 10 minutes answering his questions.

I thought I was done and could complete my ~10 minute task, but no. After I constructed the 2nd Git command, my manager and the guy next to me resumed ping-ponging me with questions.

Finally there was a lull, and I started constructing the 3rd git command. My manager comes up behind me, and in a rather condescending tone, said to me: "What are you doing here? It's a long weekend, go home!"

I responded, "I'm just trying to complete a 10-minute task before I go home, but I keep getting interrupted!"

My manager didn't apologize. He grunted, and then ran out of the door, like a child caught making a mess, but not owning up to it.

---

This manager, BTW, is why laws in the linked article exist. He once "forgot" to tell me he wanted me to work on a Saturday. I had plans so I ignored his Saturday morning call. Thankfully he was fired (or quit, it was ambiguous) about a month or two later.

---

So, are you like my old manager, constantly interrupting someone, and not having the emotional intelligence to apologize or to pace yourself? Or, do you think before you interrupt, give people a chance to pause what they are doing, and pace yourself so you aren't monopolizing others' time?

It gets worse when infantile bully managers treat other adults like children, such as adversarial treatment or imposing unnecessary inconveniences like RTO.

Maybe we should think of these things as employment flags?

There's no right-to-disconnect in my country, but sometime this year my boss started putting "I don’t expect a response to this email outside of your normal working hours." on the end of his email signature.

I might not be earning FAANG money, but it's just another sign I'm working for a 'good' company.

A lot of companies here are pretty good. It's the ones that aren't that necessitate the law change.

My workplace, for instance, published the formal policy last week and the accompanying announcement was honestly bordering on anger about it. My team is pretty good, but other teams have been having to work out of hours. It's a good change.

I work for FAANG and have had one page outside of working hours over that last 12 months. I do not respond to emails on weekends or evenings. I do not turn my work laptop on during vacation at all. I leave at home in a safe.

Totally different experience here working for FAANG, at least as it pertains to pages. For emails / slack etc I found it easy to ignore while working as an engineer, but much harder now in a management role. Even entirely disconnecting when going on vacation can be tough.

That said it is mostly self imposed. Over the past 2 years it was rarely the expectation to work outside regular hours (but did happen).

> it is mostly self impose

This is the key. Of course companies don’t object to you working extra hours. You shouldn’t do it - it sets a bad precedent for those who you manage.

The hard part of disconnecting as a manager is feeling like the team is blocked on you when you're not there. If you're a good manager then you enable the team to function without you. It's just tough to get that level of confidence in your management abilities.

>I work for FAANG and have had one page

literally a page? with a pager?

Usually via a Pager app these days, not a physical device.

I have a literal pager because my company wants to take over my phone with their software and have the ability to wipe it out any time they wish. No thanks, kiss my ass. They will not provide a work phone either. An actual pager was the only alternative.

I envy you. I've been on-call numerous times just this month and got paged almost daily, many of them between 10pm and 6am, 2am on average. Our on-call duty is basically house arrest for a week. The worst part is 90% of the pages are not real issues or I can't even do anything about them other than wait for them to self-resolve. It drives me insane and because it's FAANG, it's nearly impossible to get this changed. If I could find another job (and I'm trying!), I would bail in an instant.

That on-call doesn't sound healthy at all. Have you tried improving it? You have a strong case for it - such a noisy on-call will miss real issues.

My old company we had rotating on call shifts that was about one week a month. I got paged an average of 2 times a night because of some random thing breaking or some error. My current company, we get a week on call about every month and a half, either primary or secondary. But I have been paged I think 2 times in 3 years. Its a world of difference having a stable application and well done page rules.

Average of twice a night is freaking insane. I was burning out doing 1-week-in-3 with pages 3 nights out of 7. These were all actionable issues (DDoS, packet loss etc.) so I had to actually wake up and work.

I recently had a slack message on my Friday evening from my delayed-timezone manager starting his Friday. There was no expectation to answer out of hours, but it was some small detail I could answer in a few seconds. And this was from a new and intense 24/7 workaholic ex-FAANG manager, whose high expectations I was still getting used to, and who would likely spend his whole weekend working on this project. So I gave a quick response.

He said thanks, told me to turn my phone off, and sent a group message to the team reminding us not to work outside hours, with a link to instructions on disabling slack notifications. And then he started scheduling his own overnight/weekend DMs to send at 9am Monday.

It was an awesome response, and those firm self-imposed boundaries helped allow the work to be rewarding, rather than an absolute nightmare.

I'm so confused that the manager felt the need to say this or that your country would need such a right for you to have that right (because unless it's in your work contract, you've not agreed to work when you're not working)

Two questions: assuming you have fixed hours, does anyone (colleagues, direct supervisor, big boss) expect you to see messages or emails outside of your working hours? Second question: what culture does your answer apply to?

For me the answer is a confident "no", having worked in the Dutch and German tech sector, mainly in small companies

The upside to not including such a thing seems pretty low. Maybe people save a few seconds not reading it? The downside seems quite high if you actually want people to understand your expectations about working hours. The signature may not mean much to someone who has been working for a long time but it could matter more for someone who is just starting their first job, or who has come from a quite different working environment, for example.

I guess one thing you might say is ‘why is this manager sending emails at such times’ but I think lots of people like the flexibility of working strange hours, eg maybe they tend to wake up very early, or want to fit their work-schedule around some childcare obligations like breakfast or a school run.

I don't understand the first paragraph, what does "such a thing" refer to?

As for the second, yes that seems like a given. We send each other messages day and night because of that, but nobody expects a response outside of the recipient's working times

> I don't understand the first paragraph, what does "such a thing" refer to?

The signature in the email.

Ooh I get it now, that makes sense, thanks

That’s been the policy at every company I worked at.

The only exception being when I was paid extra to be on call.

Yes, it is! You are the lucky one

Your boss is telling on themselves, admitting that they do expect you to work outside of normal working hours, even if to just read the email.

Sending that email out of office hours itself is a red flag.

What's wrong with sending an email out of office hours? I don't understand the sentiment, even though I've seen some people express it. Nobody's gonna read that email until Monday anyway - or at least shouldn't.

it's the "at least shouldn't" that's what's wrong. if your director sends an email late Friday night and your amalgamation of devices and nervous habits ends up seeing it before 9am Monday, it's going to sit in your brain, messing up your off-work hours. so "send at 9am" is just being courteous these days.

If your own nervous habits lead you to checking work emails outside of work, it sounds like you were preoccupied with thoughts about work regardless of whether or not you received an email. No, the correct solution if you can't ignore a notification is to either block notifications from work apps entirely, or to create a notification schedule that blocks work apps outside of given hours. That schedule should be made during work hours, of course.

If the employee is a nervous person, and that nervousness is impacting their work, and you need them to relax, and they can't, you need to figure out a way to help them relax.

The concept of office hours is obsolete when there is no office.

It’s not your job to make sure that others have boundaries.

Mining operations run 24/7/365 days a year and workers have shifts.

Being contacted out of hours (notice the absence of the word office) is a no-no unless there's an on call agreement .. and even that has a roster.

There's an unspoken exception for serious accidents that require hands on deck to save lives | recover bodies.

I don't regard sending an email as an issue, it's much like posting a letter - but there's no obligation to read or respond to a work email out of hours (in countries such as Australia).

With getting no overtime, no time off in lieu, and managers perpetually confusing a 'problem' with an 'emergency', I'm glad to see this happen. If it will actually make a difference though, I'm yet to be convinced.

I mean the FWC can straight up fine the company, and in general our commissions & ombudsmans are pretty decently run. It'll have an effect, I'm sure.

I would like to see that happen, however, the current available guidance from FWC is worded very with a vast deal of of flexibility in it, and is highly open to interpretation. A manager may, in theory, decide any person responsible for any task may be contacted outside of hours. I've not seen anything truly restrictive.

It will be most interesting how this applies to teachers, who often have to prepare lessons and mark work outside of hours.

The teacher situation is strange. One the one hand, they often do seem to work outside of school hours on lesson prep and marking. On the other hand, they generally don't work during school holidays (12 weeks/yr).

Also, given that most school days here are ~9am to ~3pm, I wonder how much of that "after hours" work actually falls within the standard 40hr work week.

Like most things, there's a gaping chasm of variance between teachers that are phoning it in and teachers that want to engage their students in learning.

I know a teacher who leaves for work at 6:30am, gets home after 5:30pm most nights, cooks dinner for the family, and spends the rest of her evening marking work and preparing lesson plans for the next few days. Then there's preparing reports, which is like a 6-week lead-time task in addition.

During holidays she's definitely more relaxed, but still spends an absolute sh*tload of time preparing lessons for next term.

She's specifically on one end of the spectrum, but that's also what it takes to get a class of up to 30 students to actually pay attention and make some worthwhile progress at their schooling. She chooses it though, she loves it, she lives for it.

I couldn't do it to that degree without going insane.

That's amazing, but all-too rare. I think teachers have a very tough job, and many (most?) of them are not very good it at. My kids have had teachers who constantly shift assignment due dates because they're not ready, half-arse their lesson planning and tell the kids to do the rest at home, and are generally unable to manage a classroom.

> That's amazing, but all-too rare.

No, it's abusive and indicative of a failing system. We should not be celebrating overwork. If a system needs its workers to be doing double- or triple-time to function at the desired level, then the system is not working well and is on its way to failure.

I actually think it's both.

She would spend that amount of time anyway, because "it's what she does".

It would be possible to achieve 90% of her results with maybe 70% of the time and effort that she puts in. But even at 70% it still would run into non-trivial "enforced overtime".

I think it's also a lot more work for new teachers since they can't reuse lesson plans.

I think it's probably quite possible after a few years to be a good teacher and also not spend all your free time marking and preparing lesson plans... but it's still hard work and underpaid. I'll stick with my overpaid and stress free programming job, thanks!

A lot of assignments can be partially machine graded, even if they think they can’t be.

Teachers are usually luddites though…

Not necessarily luddites, but lack having a development team available for potential streamlining. Also the Government Department not setting the industry up to allow such streamlining (with a strong asterisk noting that such streamlining may actually be worse for learning outcomes, no matter how much better it would be for freeing up a teacher's time).

This person actually uses ChatGPT to generate report comments "around" the core themes that need to be pointed out in the report. She's said that it's saved a lot of time that would be spent on the "fluff" that wraps around the central message. I think this is one of the perfect use cases for an LLM; "fluff" generation, not the crucial message.

"Machine grading" would be something that the "machine" would have to be tuned for, which is Government Department level jurisdiction, and pretty well outside the skill set of teachers in general (I would think).

When you say preparing lesson plans, is that like printing out worksheets or is it literally planning out what the lesson is going to be?

I'm not a teacher so am obviously missing context, but I don't understand how this part isn't standardised for every teacher following the same curriculum.

It would be like asking each individual teacher to write a new textbook every year.

Experienced teachers likely have it down. Or can just use whatever was done in previous years. But you have set standards changed every 10-20 years at least. And maybe new textbook that has things in bit different order. Or there is some topical thing. Lesson planning is really looking at book and items there thinking how much time going over it with current group takes and then considering what items or things are needed in addition to reach those goals for this lesson.

If you had to make a 1/2 hour presentation/workshop, there is some planning involved even if you can just copy paste the slides and training material.

Okay, I get it now. Lesson plans are something that can only be done on the fly and are more about adapting to things outside the control of the teacher e.g. one lesson took longer due to a disruption in the classroom.

I was wondering why the people who set the curriculum couldn't just make a year's worth of lesson plans and email them to each teacher. Thanks for the explainer (to everyone who replied).

Lesson plans are inherently individual to a teacher. So even if a year’s worth of lesson plans was created and shared, and even if I thought they were good, it would still take non-negligible time for me to absorb them and mentally plan how I was going to use them.

That’s the tip of the iceberg in my attempt to explain the complexity of teaching.

It probably depends on the country, but in my country (Germany), the government only defines outlines of what knowledge and skills the students are expected to acquire. The teachers are expected to design a specific curriculum to convey these skills (though obviously constrained by outside factors, most prominently the available set of textbooks).

Planning out what the lesson is going to be.

You have 20-30 kids with varying backgrounds, skill levels and learning habits. Some require challenges to figure out things on their own, others explicitly explanations. Some work well in a group, others need individual attention. Some go through a rough patch at home or with friends and are distracted. Some days are hot and you make no progress.

A teacher needs to respond to the dynamics in a large group of non adults, every day, every minute. You can’t plan that out in advance. Sure, experience helps to make the planning easier and to respond to situations you’ve seen before, but still, every day is different, and responding to the challenges in the last lesson requires a plan.

You’re going to get meme responses about why this is the case from Americans who have never been to countries with centralized education systems, but the only reason that America doesn’t do this is our strong federalism and decentralized, local, education system.

> It would be like asking each individual teacher to write a new textbook every year.

This is quite an appropriate way of putting it. It is like that, but there's no real specification as to the quality and length of said text book.

Some teachers create a textbook of stick figure drawings. Others create a textbook of coherent progressive storylines that build on each other using a logical set of figures and well-labelled diagrams that explain the concepts and outcomes that cater to different learning styles.

Now I'm getting out of my depth a bit, as I don't pay a huge amount of attention to the detail of her work, but I believe there is (much?) more opportunity for re-use of materials from one year to the next, thus minimising custom work. But I also believe that she prefers to do it all "custom" for her own (perfectionist? obsessive?) reasons.

As a math teacher in the states some years back, I worked 6:30 am to 4pm in the building and from and a couple hours most evenings and usually 3-6 hours both days of the weekend. 70+ hours a week. Any holiday was spent catching up on grading. I often recruited my wife to help grade it was so overwhelming. And summer meant trainings and summer school otherwise the summer was unpaid and as a teacher we desperately needed the money.

All in, I averaged three separate weeks (one at Christmas, and one week on either side of summer) a year of stay-cation since we could barely afford food let alone travel.

When I transitioned to software, I nearly cut my hours in half and doubled my pay, nearly 4x-ing my effective hourly wage and had my first real vacation; heck, my first time on a plane even.

a 9-3 school day for students means an 8-4 work day for teachers, minimum. that eats up the 40hr week right there, even for a teacher working the bare minimum.

This isn't addressing unpaid hours, just the expectation than your boss or coworkers can communicate with you after hours. Unpaid hours is already illegal. How to enforce that in the education system without it collapsing is the open question.

Australia doesn't have a problem with people doing work outside work hours... not even close. That's why this was so easy to pass.

That's not to say that there will never be exceptions against the laws.

> managers perpetually confusing a 'problem' with an 'emergency'

I'm working on a theory around "organisational ADHD". Based on 20 years of experience in, basically, "today's problem always overrules yesterday's priority" and how this negatively affects efficiency, quality, and throughput of an organisation.

And that this behaviour is generally created, encouraged, and facilitated by (bad / immature) management, who should be doing, essentially, the opposite.

My personal experience is that Australia doesn't have a huge problem with this generally. But mileage may vary. If it were a huge problem then vested interests would lobby fiercely against the law, and it seemed to pass without much challenge or comment from the public here.

This law might seem like a big deal if you're working in a place without labour protection laws, and therefore you're used to constant abuse from management and live in permanent anxiety of some petty retaliation. But here it really ought to just be a formalisation of normality unless you're working with particularly poor managers.

I also personally haven't had issues with this in Australia, but have seen it happen to friends who work in legal (many times).

This hasn't been my experience in Australia. I don't believe this law will make a difference at all either. The reason is that if you refuse to do it, then this will come up during performance reviews as something else. "More responsive" or "available for your teammates" or "more of a team player" etc. Of course the manager won't be asking you in any direct way or in written form to be available outside working hours. The incentive system will just be changed to make it your choice to do so.

Conducting interviews over the last year or so had people telling me of their stories. The labor protection laws didn't seem effective except for clear cut cases and even then you'd probably just get a bit of money and you would've ruined your reputation of getting hired ever again because you're a trouble maker.

The law won't make a difference for us, but it will probably make a difference to the super-market employees being phoned at 6am and asked to take on an extra shift today.

Being called to change/schedule shifts is one of the things that I saw in news reports that it's explicitly permitted.

> To cater for emergencies and jobs with irregular hours, the rule still allows employers to contact their workers

Doesn't seems it will make a difference for them either unfortunately

My personal experience differs quite significantly.

I burnt out severely at two different companies.

Both issues were directly attributable to management failing to acknowledge or deal with systemic issues, which resulted in huge amounts of overtime and callouts. All with zero compensation, because I was a salaried employee.

One company had a problem with continuing to promise the world to clients, but not setting realistic timelines. When, inevitably, the goal posts were shifted, timelines were not updated to recognise the issue. There was never an explicit "You must work longer hours to finish this", it was "The client expects this to be done by this date.". There was also pressure that if I didn't work more to finish things, that it would fall upon some other member of the team who was also known to be burnt out.

Another company refused to require teams to conduct any form of peer reviews, testing or take on responsibility for monitoring or resolving issues.

Regularly people would commit code and push changes to production, and then walk out the door to go home. When that caught on fire, I'd be required to remote in and resolve whatever issue they had caused. Typically this happened right as I was getting home and trying to eat dinner.

I'm not certain if this law would've helped me in these cases. I like to think it would, but I'm usually not one to make waves until things start to get overwhelming. But it might give others some ammunition for dealing with management and HR.

Your entire comment just speaks about poor practices, not about abuse of outside hours.

There is never going to be a law that restricts wasted productivity or bad decisions.

Most workers in Australia don't even have ways to remote in. The fact that you do have that is probably reason to believe it's part of your role. It isn't quite rocket science to think that someone who controls releases can be on call, the same way someone who works in a hospital can be on call.

Your personal experience sucks but it sounds like part of the role, most of Australia doesn't have issues with this.

This is already the case in Germany. It also applies to vacation and sick days. Above all, it's deeply ingrained in German culture, so that no one expects to reach you outside of your working hours.

I help people settle in Germany, and it's one of the main cultural aspects I cover. The other is how normal it is to take sick days.

Netherlands also

The only people that I see working 24/7 are those who run their own business, which made sense to me because everyone else has a contract that stipulates the obligations of both sides. Unless that doc says that you're expected to work outside of work hours (which sounds self-contradictory), that's not part of the agreement. I'm surprised Australia needed a law for that

The culture extends to self-employed people to an extent, but it can be hard to set boundaries for yourself when you are building your own thing.

I've been in business for 7 years and fully self-employed for 4 years. Last week was my very first vacation without my laptop.

Result: complete loss of freedom to have flexible working hours and use the company office space

I don't think that's true. I'm in EU and I've allowed engineers to shift their working hours based on personal circumstances - like start remotely at 7am and finish at 3PM. I also encourage engineers to take the time they need for life stuff - kids school run, doctor, physio, sick aunt, whatever - because ultimately we measure the outcome of their work, and not the sum of hours worked.

For the office space - do you mean popping into the office at odd hours, like evenings or weekends? I'd probably be encouraging my engineers to talk to me about why they need to do it and not enjoy their non-working hours. If the work is too much, we solve for that. If they're going all in on something they love, I'll want to make sure they're not on a path to maybe burning-out.

Everything in context.

Americans really do argue for the right to be treated like dirt don't they!

I can assure you old sport, not being contactable outside working hours has nothing whatsoever to do with requesting flexible working hours. And quite why an employee would like to "use the company office space" (be in work!) outside working hours I've no idea!

To be fair, I think it’s pretty well ingrained in most western cultures.

Not in the US or Canada, in my experience.

I live in the US, I’ve never heard of someone being called after work unless it was part of their job or some once in a decade emergency

You have the right to, and can’t be punished for it. But you can still be punished if they just say it's unrelated to it, whether through missed opportunities, increased workload, undesirable assignments, or even termination with flimsy justifications.

It’s the age-old: “No one is pointing a gun at their head. They’re doing it because they want to.” -Manager XYZ

I can see two ways to prevent it:

1. Ban employers from doing so with potential fees, except in cases where it's a stipulation on the contract. Although this would eventually lead to employers adding it to every contract. Not a fan of this approach.

2. You make them pay you weekend-rate overtime, this would still allow your superiors to contact you, but they would think twice. I would definitely support this, although it might not apply to all circumstances.

3. I honestly don't know, there's probably better solutions from smarter people.

I don't know about Australia, but in my jurisdiction any illegal contractual clauses are unenforceable.

If the law says "X is forbidden" and the contract says "employee agrees to do X" then the employer has no legal recourse to force employee to do X.

Point 2. is the usual on-call, and it's still regulated (in my jurisdiction) by mandatory rest periods during which a person is legally mandated to not work.

I don't live or work in any of those places, but I've been ignoring work emails and calls after hours for a long time. Helps that 1) I don't have a work phone, 2) apps that my company uses on my personal phone, and 3) never log into the company network or services on my own laptop.

In the few instances when I was called out about it, I asked Could the message/call have waited until the following morning/Monday? The answer was almost always Yes.

This does not stop an employer from potentially disciplining or firing you. Laws do, because they bind. Implicit contracts and hope are not a strategy, with regards to worker rights and protections.

That's unrealistic. Managers who are unhappy with workers ignoring emails will find a reason to fire them, not promote them, or give them a smaller bonus.

With that logic you could throw out any labor protection law. Let's keep it constructive.

It sets the rules, workers will have to fight for it to be followed still. But sociopathic management now knows workers have a foot to stand on in court, enterprises will be inclined to make it policy. Less sociopathic management might realise they were being assholes and dial it back a bit. Some managers genuinely don't realise that the current "norm" is not fair, since they are deep in the zeitgeist.

Countless exceptions sure but there's no denying this is a good attempt at change.

What stops my employer from potentially disciplining or firing me is first of all, that I am good at what I do, and second that I negotiate from a position of strength.

If my employer wants me to work off hours, I mean maybe I will, if I don't have anything going on, and I'll take some time the next day where I won't work as compensation for doing that, I won't ask permission.

If I do have something going on, I'll say, "Can't do that. Have something going on". They're fine with it. They're reasonable people. Why would I work for unreasonable people? I would work for someone else.

If they actually did fire me? OK, maybe I look for another job, but probably I'm retired. I saved my money. I negotiate from a position of strength.

Sounds like you live in a world of incredible privilege. Not everyone is so lucky.

Nope - A large portion of the world works like this. If you work for a place which demands you work all of the time, you either work for an abusive employer, or you get paid a lot of money to be at their beck and call.

If the employer is abusive, find another job. If you are paid a large salary to be a slave to company, consider finding a job with a better work/life balance.

I think you have a poor understanding of what most of the world looks like. Most people on the planet exist in tenuous circumstances which do not allow them to simply go find another job, let alone an employer that isn't abusive, etc. The luxury of being able to worry about these things and take meaningful action to achieve them is truly a recent phenomenon that is not widely distributed.

> Nope - A large portion of the world works like this. If you work for a place which demands you work all of the time, you either work for an abusive employer, or you get paid a lot of money to be at their beck and call.

If you mean that most employers are abusive then yes. That’s why there are laws like this one. Non-abusive employers can ignore it because they were already doing the right thing.

> find another job

See the problem is that if labour laws didn't protect people, then everyone would be constantly under the stress of having one foot out the door and having to look for another job at the drop of a hat. Workplace productivity would plummet and the economy be quickly be tanked

There were no weekends before labor movement fought and got it..

You may do well because you’re lucky; luck does not scale.

> What stops my employer from potentially disciplining or firing me is first of all, that I am good at what I do, and second that I negotiate from a position of strength.

In other words, you are at the tender mercies of your employer, and you rely on them to uphold the implicit contract that they will not cross those unspoken boundaries. I'm glad this strategy works for you, but you are literally placing your livelihood, a roof over your head, and the food on your table at risk to keep it this way. If that's an acceptable risk for you, then sure.

>> In other words, you are at the tender mercies of your employer

There are no tender mercies involved.

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest" -- Adam Smith

Mr. Smith is talking about the sell side rather than the buy side in that passage, but the same principle applies.

Obviously employers would prefer not to employ employees if there are more profitable alternatives. If my employer decides not to employ me any longer (which is expected, my team was 50 people this time last year, it is 10 people now), neither the roof over my head nor the food on my table is at risk. My life, financially, will go on exactly as it does now.

You can get the same type of thing, but you have to give something up in order to get it. Most people won't and that's their choice and that's fine.

> My life, financially, will go on exactly as it does now.

Then your situation has zero relevance to almost every human being on earth

I'm no lawyer, but I am an Australian and know the hoops you need to jump through in order to fire a full time employee.

An employer who is prepared to put in writing that you will be fired for not working unpaid overtime (responding to email) is in for bad time.

Wait, can an employer fire you even if you didn't make a fault? What country are you in?

Probably the US - it's scary over there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Our work culture is a strong part of why the US is so economically dominant.

Reap what you sow “I work to live not live to work” crowd. Your destiny is to be further economically colonized by the “I live to work” crowd.

Or maybe it was all the military interventions that punished anybody who ever dared to question that domination

This strike me as a very naive view of the world.

Look at how dominant the USA is compared to the europeans who love to make fun of us for working so hard. The USA is about to be flung into another golden century due to its dominance in GenAI. Frogs/the EU will be too busy eating caiver served by rude waiters to realize that huggingface and mistral are all they have to compete with us. Eventually they won't be able to afford the caiver anymore. You laugh, but look at how the UK economy is doing. That's the future of Europe.

Yeah it sucks to have a bad wlb work culture, but the alternative is losing what makes America so awesome.

And that's the confirmation. But given how emotional your response is I guess there is something personal to it so I won't push it.

I'm just curious as to why did you make a distinction between France and Europe.

I’m not disagreeing with you but are you directly benefiting from the US’s “dominance”?

The way I see it, unless you’re in the top say 5-10% of tech workers you probably aren’t seeing great benefit from the US’s leads in anything. And anyone outside of that is seeing their general QoL being slowly degraded by ever higher prices and an ever weaker government (due to monopolization).

> Yeah it sucks to have a bad wlb work culture, but the alternative is losing what makes America so awesome.

You're not reaping the benefits of that “hard work”, executives do.

Same here. The fact is no one can be on call 24/7. People need downtime. I have never worked with a manager who demanded people be contactable at any time. I have been on call but that makes sense. Note that on a good team, being on call is easy because the service rarely goes down.

I have paging app installed my on phone, and that's it. If it is really, truly urgent they will page me. I have never been paged. Nobody has ever complained.

> Helps that 1) I don't have a work phone,

I have a work phone, but that's for making calls and doing other mobile stuff during work hours. Nobody expects me to use it outside of those hours, that's not really related to having one. Do your colleagues only get one when they're expected to be online 24/7?

You've set some healthy boundaries when it comes to work-life balance, which is great!

This is important, right here; healthy boundaries. The best time to set them up is right at the start, too. I've had 3 employers that privided me with a phone and laptop because the jobs involved travel, but I made very clear that work hours are work hours, so when I am off the clock, so are those devices. The respected that each time because the expectations were negotiated upfront, instead of waiting for one party to get ticked off and trying to pivot from that.

I don't get it. How could they even expect you to read work emails outside of work hours? Especially since you don't have a company phone. Reading company emails on a private phone sounds like a huge security breach, and may not even be legal.

And if anyone from work (who is not also my friend asking to hang up) calls me on my private phone, I'm reporting them.

> To cater for emergencies and jobs with irregular hours, the rule still allows employers to contact their workers, who can only refuse to respond where it is reasonable to do so.

This clause pretty much invalidates the rest of the rule. Why should an employee need to justify their inability (or unwillingness) to respond? I can understand the "jobs with irregular hours", but otherwise shouldn't it be a best effort thing, without any obligation?

And what constitutes an emergency. If nobody's wellbeing is at risk then imo it's not an emergency, but I doubt that how a company will interpret it.

The CEO might argue their wellbeing is at risk if they don't receive the bonus for reaching their quarterly targets.

This only makes sense if emergencies are strictly defined. For instance "don't come to the office there's a bear inside" is an emergency. "the crud app you support fell over" is not an emergency. If the latter is an emergency to the company they should staff for 24/7 support, not rely on exploiting people during their off hours to provide free support.

> "the crud app you support fell over" is not an emergency.

I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed to learn that situations impacting business-critical operations would be considered emergencies.

The assumption that Australia just outlawed the concept of having an on-call rotation is not supported by the article.

The article says requiring an employee to be on-call 24/7 for general purposes would indeed be illegal.

There was another example that someone could not be required to come in for a surprise shift with only a few hours of notice overnight.

But completely eliminating planned on-call rotations is not part of the goal.

> But completely eliminating planned on-call rotations is not part of the goal.

It certainly should be. You want your app supported 24x7 then pay for three shifts.

If the government won’t make it a law then IT workers can make it a demand when they unionize.

Sounds like a great deal for the lucky 1/3 of developers who get assigned the day shift, but isn't it pretty rough for the majority? I'd much rather keep a normal schedule and get woken up every once in a while than work 5pm-1am or 1am-9am.

> I'd much rather keep a normal schedule and get woken up every once in a while than work 5pm-1am or 1am-9am.

It would be in the contract you'd sign when you accept the job. It's not like your current workplace will suddenly change the policy and force you to work at night. The world is already full of places with night shift jobs, and you are not currently working at one of those places.

Why isn't it like that? If my company decided to follow a new rule that nobody can be oncall after hours, wouldn't they have to force at least 2 engineers from each oncall rotation into the new shifts? Even if I escape being one of those 2, shouldn't I expect to have 66% fewer day shift opportunities in the future?

Once again the lack of worker rights come into play here. Companies should never be able to change an employee's working hours like that. I'm guessing in the US they can, because they have almost no worker's rights. Where I live this would be illegal.

As for new opportunities, well, maybe? The theory would say these weird hour shifts would cost more and companies would have to think harder about their operations and decide if the extra cost really makes sense. Employees would also ask for more money to work under these hours.

I believe it would simply remove the inherent expectation that every tech product is guaranteed to be online 24/7 without any extra cost to the companies, only to the employees lives. That's a great outcome in my view.

Sure, but this is one of the things people are talking about when they worry a regulation might make companies less competitive. Online 24/7 is table stakes for any company that aspires to have a global presence - nobody in Europe or the US would buy Atlassian products if they were only guaranteed to be available during business hours in Sydney. If Australia successfully shifted the culture on this, Australian software would struggle heavily to find success on the global markets.

So what? If only companies could have slaves again to make them more competitive!

I'm absolutely fine if companies "become less competitive" because they can't exploit their employees as much.

Following this train thought would paint China's 996 policy as a great idea.

I'd actually be good with (and prefer) 5pm-1am. :)

Luckily, employees in other parts of the world are in different time zones and their business hours can easily cover our off hours.

A lot of prod support can't be done remotely, for practical (need access to this physical environment) or security reasons.

In which case you need 24/7 shifts on site. If you can fix a problem remotely from your home then someone can do it in Sydney.

24/7 on-site is costly and counterproductive when issues are rare but high impact.

Someone in another country providing remote support doesn't work for a whole range of industries, particularly where security clearance is in play.

Even then, feels like.its easier and better for everyone if if instead of everyone needing multi-continental teams, you have one team, and if they get woken up and stupid o'clock to fix something, they get extra holiday or pay or something.

I know I like it like that. And I get that not everyone does! But IME, the out-of-hours rota is usually voluntary, so you can choose.

Tripling the cost of running a tech company in Australia is effectively outlawing startups.

If you can't afford to pay people to work for you, you do not have a viable business.

That’s right, we should continue to exploit workers instead because of vague contract terms that they “must work extra hours when required”. Workers should remember that the business is more important than their non contracted time.

The capitalism dream right?

the document starts with framing it applies to "non small business", so an early start up can still function with a small team of motivated volunteers outside hours, but beyond a certain size i agree with the sibling comments: if a late startup still relies on that to survive/grow, then its business model isn't working.

This seems like a bit of an over-reaction. I do rostered 24/7 on-call 1 week a month. I get compensated for both being on-call, and if I get called.

To run 3 shifts would mean splitting our already smallish team into 3 cells that never worked at the same time. It would actually be cheaper for the org, assuming they could convince the current staff to do it. But it would be a terrible for the team, and for the individuals on the late shift (shift work is notoriously unhealthy).

In Finland companies pay for on-call support time. That is you get extra pay to be available in 15 minutes or whatever timeframe agreed. And really that sort of commitment should not be free.

I used to have such an arrangement, but that was far more stressful.

I’m far happier with the “call me and If I’m able to I’ll answer” approach. I’ve had 2 call outs in 4 years, at a 4 hour cost a piece, both sorted with in 20 minutes.

By charging that 4 hour fee it means the person making the call has to justify it.

If I’m in an offical “on call” situation that limits me - can’t go to cinema, can’t go underground or on a plane, can’t got to the country, because I have a contractual agreement to be on call. Forget that.

> You want your app supported 24x7 then pay for three shifts.

24/7 is typically covered with 5 shifts (3 weekday and 2 weekend).

My first 24/7 role was

Mon Tue Fri Sat Sun Wed Thu on earlies

Then repeated on lates

Then a week of nights Monday through Sunday

Then a week off

I believe it’s changed now as they don’t like 7x12 hour night shifts in a row. Personally I preferred to deal with the “jet lag” once every 6 weeks and be done with it.

Those shifts tended to be fairly quiet with about 4-5 hours of breaks (unless something went really wrong)

You can staff a 24/7 shift with 5 people, but you really need 6 once you factor in holiday, illness, training etc.

It's just a very narrow rule. The government has an explainer on it (https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/hours-of-w...), and their example of after-hours contact which might be legitimate involves 3 hours of document preparation due the next morning.

> who can only refuse to respond where it is reasonable to do so

What does this even mean? I didn't think employees had an obligation to respond at all? Presumably it's actually "whose right to refuse contact is only protected by law where it is reasonable for it to be so."

Something which would materially affect the businesses ability to continue as a going concern?

For emails, I generally feel these are a 24hr thing. I turn off email alerts so I can focus on my tasks then check a few times a day only.

I used to filter CC emails into their own folder for reading maybe once a day which worked mostly well but occasionally people can't seem to use to/CC as they are supposed to.

Calls I always try to pickup or callback asap but my job calls usually means urgent.

Chat like Teams I'm mixed. Often it's urgent but too many people use Teams in my current company like email and it's really disruptive to work flow getting 50 unimportant messages a day + long "just one more thing' task requests. Ive considered putting an auto-reply of "if it's not on JIRA it's not a task" but that would not come across well.

But generally I feel a better law change would be right to work your contracted hours. Put the onus on the company that they have to get your workload to the contracted hours or pay overtime. Some exceptions for execs on top end pay, but generally this would be a better win for employees, and then you can get that after work call but your being paid extra, which in itself will make people think twice about calling etc when they know there is a cost.

Isn't what you're describing the difference between exempt and non-exempt employees? In the US, the protections you're describing exist if you make less than ~$60k. Above that amount and you're exempt from being entitled to overtime.

> if you make less than ~$60k. Above that amount and you're exempt from being entitled to overtime.

This is incorrect. Entitlement to overtime pay varies from state to state. In California, for example, there are complex rules but for most employees, the analysis ultimately boils down to whether you spend more than 50% of your working hours performing exempt duties. If you don’t meet this threshold — even if you are highly compensated and have an executive title — you are not exempt and you must be paid overtime. It also does not matter if the company is paying you on a salary or hourly basis.

Lots of people missing nuance or seeing this rule change say what they want it to say, rather than what it actually says.

Employers are still allowed to contact employees anytime.

Previously you could theoretically be terminated for not reading or replying to messages from your employer outside hours. Now there are restrictions on that. That’s all that’s changed.

"Previously you could theoretically be terminated for not reading or replying to messages from your employer outside hours. Now there are restrictions on that. "

Now you will be terminated for "some other" reason.

Previously, when you show to a tribunal or whatever institution that they fired you for not working out of hours despite insisting it was some vague "job performance" reason, the tribunal says well, that's technically legal anyway, it's just rude, so too bad.

Now, it's illegal. So "some other reason" has to be watertight. If in the process of concocting a "some other reason" you trip another law, you don't get a Do Over because you were trying to break a different law, instead you have more trouble.

Yes, but 'Employers should be able to justify contacting professionals after hours based on common contract clauses that say a worker’s high salary includes reasonable overtime'.

See: https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/the-right-to-...

Indeed, but that doesn't effect most people since most people are not on high salaries.

It should help for people like my mother, who get paid sweet fuck all but are expected to work 10-12 hour days, where 1-3 of it is homework and they are effectively on call 24/7 without compensation.

There will be countless exceptions but it's a good thing to have in law, so it can be taken to the ombudsman or used in court.

Go to college and get an education so you ~~can make a good living~~ have the opportunity to work more hours.

I understand this should hopefully help low wage earners that are taken advantage of. That’s great. The US, my country, could really take some inspiration here. But why are we rolling back the achievements of the standardized 40 hour work week for a certain group of people?

It feels like this is pitting the poor against the middle class. All the while the wealthiest of wealthiest are relaxing in yachts complaining that their grocery baggers can’t be called in to work overtime.

For me, the interesting thing about Japanese work culture is that they pay white collar jobs overtime.

Paid overtime seems to be a blue-collar only thing in most English-speaking countries.

Paid overtime is covered in my contract (with rates detailed etc.), as is leave entitlements (and even how long I can be expected to work without a break). I suspect my contract is not unusual in Australia.

So, before this "right" they were physically attached to their devices unable to freely decide to ignore emails? Or there was some kind of timer and expect SLA for answers that needed to be met?

Or maybe because not replying under a given SLA led you to be fired? In which case my question is: is your only option to work for companies that have this culture? And you have to force all companies to behave in the same way?

I'm guessing it is something like, you can't be fired specifically for not answering outside of working hours. Nothing stopping companies from firing you for not fitting company culture (the unspoken part being company culture is we all answer calls outside of work hours). Still a step forward because there will be some careless/incompetent companies that leave a paper trail indicating they fired you for this so you can sue and get paid.

So, hiding true intentions and needs is better? Why is regulation not to force companies to be clear that you may be expected to be flexible with your corp comunication before signing the contract?

> So, hiding true intentions and needs is better?

No, it is illegal. Your proposed law would have the opposite effect of the law that passed: every company would include this in their employment contract and would have legal protections to make employees work overtime.

In addition, there are exceptions:

> To cater for emergencies and jobs with irregular hours, the rule still allows employers to contact their workers, who can only refuse to respond where it is reasonable to do so. Determining whether a refusal is reasonable will be up to Australia's industrial umpire, the Fair Work Commission (FWC), which must take into account an employee's role, personal circumstances and how and why the contact was made.

UK is up next:

https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/08/20/the-right-to-discon...

By jurisdiction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_disconnect

Are people here treating emails like IM's?

An email is inherently asynchronous. Why would I expect a response to an email before working hours? When did people start confusing them with synchronous communication?

Sometimes I get a random thought on a Saturday and send an email so I don’t forget. I have people on my team who view that as a “drop everything, cancel the wedding, pull the car over” level emergency. The issue is they ALL do this to themselves. They put work email on their phones, they have notifications enabled. Nobody asked them to do this, nobody asked them to read email all weekend. Even if I tell them “please ignore all weekend email”, it’s like they physically cannot do it. It’s almost an addiction.

Help them out by scheduling the email to be sent during business hours?

When did this shift happen? People shouldn’t check email when they don’t want to read it.

Often others don't behave in the same way we would or even the way we would expect. My suggestion is in the spirit of trying to offer a little help to your fellow teammates with a few extra clicks, in what seems like a very low effort compromise.

I suppose it depends on your team dynamics, size, structure, etc. I work with a small, tight knit team and if I already knew someone was going to act a little neurotic with regards to a low priority weekend email, I would do the extra few clicks to make their life slightly better. In a large corporate setting maybe I would be less sympathetic, who knows.

Large corporate setting for sure and yes I ended up doing scheduled emails specifically for this person. But im not sure the original cause of why they couldn’t stop checking. I couldn’t control everyone’s emails in the whole group either.

I suspect it was when smart phones started defaulting to notifications for every email. A scourge.

But why the heck do people get work emails to their private phones in the first place?

I just don't understand America. And, since this law was apparently necessary in Australia, not that either. They're both just weird.

In Australia the email thing being discussed is largely a sideshow to the law that was recently passed.

The behaviour of concern relates to the kind of bosses | managers that make a point of contacting employees out of hours and pressuring them to attend the office | answer questions at length, etc.

It's the direct phone calls and obsessive DM's @ 2 minute intervals that being targetted - most people handle auto generated work related emails well enough, they learn to disable notifications and have muscle memory for "Dismiss".

I completely agree. But it's not just America, this was definitely common when I was working in Ireland for Irish companies too.

I was the weird one for not having Slack on my phone. So far I haven't been fired for it. But maybe I haven't been promoted either.

That's what paper is for. Not email.

Are you really suggesting people use snail mail simply for async?

LMAO! No... How did you even get that?

> Sometimes I get a random thought on a Saturday

I'm suggesting when you have that random thought, you write it the fuck down -- even if you have to add a reminder to call or email someone at an appropriate time. I'm kind of shocked that this is some new development to people.

That adds one more opportunity to forget though. There’s no need to be condescending.

Yes, there is a need to be condescending. Outsourcing your personal notepad by emailing people off-hours is silly, rude, and abusive. That kind of behavior warrants direct confrontation and aggressive ridicule.

No, it doesn’t.

I live nine time zones away from some colleagues. I’m not going to schedule every email. They can read it in their working hours.

E-mail should not have notifications

like oncall or incident alerts for example.

(^say management unilaterally decided you have work offwork hours and it is "urgent" or else look for a new job)

I'm an Australian and I'm really surprised this law is needed. I would be very surprised to hear somebody was fired for ignoring email after hours.

I’m in Australia too. I’ve never been at a company that dysfunctional either.

But there’s always some manager that’s not reasonable. This is just a formality that puts what most reasonable people already do into writing.

I thought that's normal? I switch off my work phone and laptop and then I do not even know if I get any mails ... is this only a thing in Germany?

Some people work on weekends even in Germany. Saturday is normal workday according German law. It’s more or less personal preference. At least one has a choice.

some people work at night and on sunday ... i didn't know that means i'm not allowed to sleep. thanks for letting me know.

You’re welcome! You should read your work contract and/or Betriebsvereinbarung regarding work on weekends. It’s clearly defined.

I have a Betriebsvereinbarung with your [insert female family member of your choice] for this weekend.

Sei kein Arschloch.

I feel bad for people in this situation, but at the same time I think it's kind of strange to allow yourself to be in this situation. Personally, I maintain a very strict separation between work devices and personal. Work email, slack, and whatever else I need for work lives on my work devices only. Personal email, whatsapp, etc live on my personal devices only. Most of the companies I've worked at add a remote wipe functionality to the phone, and even though I understand the business case for this and I've never heard of it being misused, that's not something I want on my personal devices.

I usually only have a couple of exceptions to this policy - I usually have my personal gmail logged in at work, and occasionally for very specific reasons, I might temporarily install "work" apps on my personal phone, for instance when I want to leave work early to catch a train, but need to be in a work meeting later in the day, or to stay in contact with colleagues when out at a conference, etc. These apps get removed again when I no longer need them.

When I leave work, the work devices get switched off. In most cases, I leave the work devices at work, including laptops and phones, assuming I have somewhere secure to leave them at work. Almost every company I've worked at, I've had a lockable chest of drawers, so I just put things in there. In the ones without, the laptop stays on the desk plugged in, and I might take the phone home even though it's switched off.

I've almost never been asked why I haven't seen or replied to an out-of-hours communication. On those few occasions, I've just said "All my work devices were switched off for the weekend" and there's been nothing further said. In the very few cases where I was expected to be on call, it was previously agreed and so I took the necessary devices home.

Obviously, things changed a lot with the shift to remote working during and after COVID, but I still maintained the same boundaries. Even now I have my own company, I have separate computer, desks and even chairs for work and personal use. Slack and work related e-mail is only on the work devices. If I want to do some work over the weekend (which feels acceptable now it's for my benefit), I physically sit in a different half of the office to do that.

I don't think it's always an explicit choice. I joined a company and despite asking many questions to try and avoid weird policies that could affect work-life balance, after joining I discovered they had certain types of code that had to be shipped outside of their client's business hours. Due to timezone differences, that meant extremely early or late hours for me.

I like the company but absolutely hate this. However I can't just leave because of this. Even if I wanted to, finding a new job is not an easy task and it's exhausting.

This is why laws are important. You don't have to figure this out for every company you interview. If they do it, it's illegal. You can change your default to a reasonable expectation.

> that meant extremely early or late hours for me.

Especially if you had asked deliberate questions to establish work-life-balance and they'd withheld this, I personally wouldn't have just agreed to doing it without discussion of extra remuneration. Despite it clearly being a big deal for you, if you don't provide at least some pushback, it won't even be on their radar as an issue that's causing you pain.

Maybe if it's very occasional, say once a month, it's not too bad to do it. If it's every week, it'll significantly impact your life. If it's every day, or worse several times per week but unpredictable, then your life is being severely disrupted without compensation of that fact.

I remember once, a company ordered us all to work a month of 12-hour days (which itself is a symptom of bad project management, but that's a different discussion). At the meeting when we were told this, lots of people who were worried about losing their jobs just looked unhappy but said nothing. I knew I could find another job easily enough, so I brought up overtime pay. The company really didn't like it - and in fact threatened me later, but there was nothing they could really do, as they weren't in a position to let people go. The manager's reply was that they didn't want to pay overtime because they were worried that people would game it for extra money. I very firmly told them in this meeting (this was still the same meeting) that people didn't actually want to be there any longer than necessary - they wanted to go home to their wives and kids, and fortunately a few of the previously silent people added things like "my wife always complains whenever I have to do overtime". The outcome was that we had another meeting the next day where we were told that the overtime was voluntary and we'd be paid our normal salary. Nobody volunteered. The day after, the offer was increased to 1.5x salary. A couple of people volunteered. Even at the final overtime rate of 2x salary, there were still a few people who said that their personal time with the family was more important than the extra money. The company finally understood that people's time is precious.

In your case, I would simply start a discussion about sharing the responsibility for the out of hours work. Say you can provide detailed instructions, and be available by phone for the first couple of times to provide verbal help if they have any difficulties. At first, they might try to unload it onto someone else who doesn't complain, but you should still push for it to be shared across the wider team, maybe on a rota if it's really essential and with a bonus each time. You might find you have someone who needs the money and volunteers to do extra. And if the managers themselves ever find themselves having to do the process, you can be sure they will hate it, and very quickly find a way of getting the work done at another time in the week instead.

Sometimes, you can rationalise it as part of the nature of the job. My last two jobs have been UK based but working with US teams, but even just working a time-shifted day of 10am-6:30pm still causes me to have to turn down lots of evening events with friends because I simply cannot get there in time for a 7pm start. I really hate this aspect of the job, but in this case I knew the situation coming into it, and my daily rate is high enough that I consider it to be worth it.

> Even if I wanted to, finding a new job is not an easy task and it's exhausting.

I know it's always easy to say, but you don't have to do anything you think is unreasonable. There may be repercussions to that, and I can understand the fear many people have for losing their job, but silently putting up with things that cause you stress or pain just means that the situation never gets addressed.

For most people, I'd suggest the single best thing you can possibly do in your life is to save enough money for a 3-6 month emergency buffer, so if you were to lose your job it's not such a big deal, as long as you can find another job in that timeframe. While this advice is typically given for unexpected layoffs, or dealing with house or car emergencies (all of which are great reasons in their own right), it has the side benefit that you can start to loosen the hold that your job has over your life - you can start to push back on the work-life balance, because the consequences of losing your job are so much less important.

I pretty much agree with everything you said, but I still feel like your take is a bit too absolutist. If you're not afraid of losing your job, all of these are 100% accurate. But if you are, some of this advice can get you fired.

In my personal situation I did pretty much what you said. I brought it up and I'm hoping it will be resolved at some point. The reality is that these kinds of problems can almost always be solved, it just costs resources so companies de-prioritize it constantly.

I definitely agree that some push-back is necessary and a lot of companies have this culture of suffering silently that is very hard to change. It takes a lot of social capital and a fair amount of risk, depending on the type of people in charge. I know that I wouldn't have brought it up if I didn't have a safety net of savings in case I lost my job.

People also forget that they are not alone. Our individualistic society promotes this kind of thinking that sometimes prevents solutions from being reached. As in your example, many folks were unhappy, but nobody wants to be the one that brings it up.

Overall I only really want to emphasize that it's really not always a choice. There's a very big power imbalance in employment relationships that can't be solved by individuals.

This new-ish problem speaks to a major reason I personally prefer hybrid/on-site work cultures - there is usually a clear barrier between work/free-time, at least IME. When I'm not in the office there is very little expectation that I am working. I personally prefer this separation - when I worked a fully remote job it felt like I was being pinged at any given hour and expected to respond.

This law would never happen in the united states. 0%.

This is fine for big companies and government but startups is going to die because of this.

Startups, and anyone else can still roster support.

Keep in mind all the low-income employees who are harassed after work for trivial reasons that can absolutely wait by power-trip managers who will now feel a tiny bit more empowered to say no than they did yesterday. I think it's a great thing even though it doesn't benefit me directly.

~300 hours unpaid overtime per year and having to respond after work to emails and calls? That’s crazy.

And they worry now that the economy will slow down. I think people will start to work normally now, in the previous conditions I would work much slower as a compensation.

In my country it is not unusual for people to work 36 hours. You'd imagine that a nation like Korea or Japan would be twice as rich because they work 70 hours yet it doesn't seem to go that way...

Obviously if you do have a 50-70 workweek your job IS your life. Your co workers are your best friends and it doesn't matter if they call you up in the middle of the night. I have observed that in Workaholic cultures people spend a lot of time socialising with co-workers and less time on actually working.

I prefer the Dutch style of "working to live". Even if that means that you have to bring your own food and eat it behind a laptop. You can socialise at home.

At individual contributor level, such schemes may work -- anyways, people are paid by the hour so anything outside hours is already dubbed 'overtime', and companies are bound to care.

At management level (i.e. top management talking either between them or with the management levels just below), where hours don't get counted (in some countries such as France, it's just 'days'), it really boils down to the top management's culture. Workaholic top management = every manager is expected to be workaholic... and Darwin does the rest: soon enough, only workaholics remain.

Generally I'll only answer for actual production emergencies and I'll expect that I'll get time in lieu or overtime payments. I'll probably still keep doing that.

I wonder what this will mean for the various forms of on-call. I've seen several policies, I'm sure there are more:

- "Ad-hoc" on-call with no process and you just get a phone call after hours from the boss

- "Voluntary" on-call with a stipend, rotation based among a particular team

- "Mandated" on-call with full over-time pay / penalty rates

Are all of these now up for review? Presumably anything written in a contract takes precedence I suppose.

How on earth would one even begin to enforce reverting the dismissal of an employee "because they didn't answer their phone after hours"?

"Employee was dismissed due to poor performance." "Employee was dismissed because they were not delivering enough value compared to their peers..."

These ideas and protections are great in theory, but very hard to manage in practice, and I'd imagine it gets tested on the first serious appeal.

The same way any other labour protection laws are enforced?

As an unambitious fellow happy to grind away at the bottom of the ladder, this is how I've conducted myself most of my career. My brief forays into management have generally impacted my work-life balance too far the wrong way, and correcting said balance ran into incompatibilities with expectations (not in performance mind you, just in the ambiguous and subjective 'that which is required of leadership').

Y'all can have it.

As an Aussie I’m glad this is has been codified in law but I’ve personally not had any issues with people expecting me to reply outside of work hours.

Then again I’ve always acted like I had this right anyway, if I were contacted outside of working hours I would just ignore it within reason. I always thought there hadn’t been much consequences but perhaps the consequence were respected boundaries…

dammit, i thought aussies were more freedom loving than even usians. i have met and interacted with some of them, and have read a good amount about them, too.

did aussies not have this right, earlier?

I don't know if it should even be called a right, because it seems obvious.

to me, it sound more like an attack by employers on employees, to say they cannot do such a thing - before this so-called "right" was ”given".

thoughts?

Employment contracts here usually state that you work X hours a week, likely 38 or less unless your union did a bad job, and can only work more if the hours are "reasonable" according to a bunch of criteria. This was previously enough to cut down on most of this kind of nonsense, but has not proven sufficient in the age of smartphones.

wow. just the existence of smartphones seems to be not enough of a reason to drop these contracts or criteria. in fact one would think it should be the opposite, because smartphones are so disruptive and distracting.

maybe the unions need to understand that and incorporate that understanding while negotiating.

>This was previously enough to cut down on most of this kind of nonsense, but has not proven sufficient in the age of smartphones.

the kind of technology that is available in the world should have nothing to do with the laws regarding freedom of the people.

depending upon fuzzily worded employment contracts and the non-deterministic enforcement of them, and depending upon whether your union did a good job or not, are not the characteristics of freedom.

Almost every message I send after hours saves me double the time during the workday. Otherwise, I would just save it for the workday.

Like in the UK where this already exists. In most contracts you get to sign a waiver. Show me the law and I’ll show you the loophole

You may be confusing the right to ignore out of hours comms with the Working Time Directive that the UK got with EU membership?

The UK doesn't have the former (yet). On the latter you are correct, I have signed away my right in every white collar job I've had. I couldn't sign the contract without signing that right away.

Between this and the New Zealand government's ruling on Uber, seems like ANZAC countries still maintain worker's rights.

When I first started working, I would respond outside of working hours, work overtime, and try to please everyone. As I got older, I developed a rule: as soon as I finish work, I just ignore all work chats, calls, and emails. Did it affect my well-being? Yes, I highly recommend it to everyone!

Seriously, just don’t install (or log in to) Slack on your phone. Started doing this myself a few years ago and it has been great. I have a pager, page me if you need me. It’s just… normal to not be obsessed with work.

And/or: Have separate work and personal devices and never cross the streams. When I'm done working on Friday, I put my work laptop and work phone in a soundproof drawer and don't open the drawer until Monday morning.

At the very least don't install work Slack on your personal phone!!

I can't believe they didn't have this right previously. I have almost always (except when I was paid specifically for being available anytime) had a habit of turning my phone off/airplane as soon as the business hours end.

If an employee doesn't respond outside working hours can't he be penalised in a different way or miss out in promotions if other employees do? Clearly this law is a good thing but i find it hard to see how it can be enforced.

Another 'good in theory' idea. Trying to run a business in Australia is 'death by a thousand paper cuts'. Far too many rules. Letting individuals interact freely creates good outcomes 90+% of the time. Most of these rules are cost-benefit negative because the administrative burden of adherence exceeds the benefit of the new rule. Politicians and govt departments like them though; they get to put a dot-point on their list of achievements.

Unfortunately Australia has become a business-backwater (the upper bound of our capabilities is to dig stuff out of the ground and ship it overseas).

Sorry if this sounds negative, but every rule - however well-intentioned - steals attention and creativity away from entrepreneurs, slows the economy, drives up prices, reduces customer service, and benefits large incumbents who can withstand the burden.

If you rely on exploiting the fact that your employee does not have the right to ignore your call outside of hours, your business shouldn't exist. What kind of take is this? It says it gives them the right to ignore, not to sue the business if they do call.

Employees benefit from calls out of hours. How? The employer is able to offer better service to customers, and make more money, and the employee can negotiate a higher salary from the more profitable business. Employees who are inflexible cannot offer the same level of service to their employer and its customers; they'll on-average be paid less and measures like this increase production costs, making goods and services slightly more expensive.

This law reduces the extent to which flexible employees can add (and extract, via hight salary!) value, and the extent to which customers receive timely service.

If overnight service is that critical and profitable, hire a night shift.

But who really pays? The employer? Yes, at first, but the cost is passed straight on to consumers. Prices are sky high in Australia for this reason, businesses have many laws that each increase prices by a fraction of a percent - almost imperceptible - but cumulatively very noticeable.

Typical whinging Aussie business owner. You lot won't be happy until you turn us into another America, with at-will employment and healthcare tied to employment like a yoke around an ox.

You are neglecting to mention the power imbalance that exists between employees and employers. Like economists who view all actors as fully informed and rational market participants, your viewpoint is fantastic on paper, but in real life there are centuries of examples of ordinary workers getting exploited if regulations like these are not in place.

And hey, you might be one of the good bosses who will shrug and say "sure, no problem" if an employee wants to prioritise their life over their job. There are plenty who won't, and this law will help reign them in.

So your argument is that instead of consumers paying, employees should pay?

But you know what helps ?

More money in wages ! Instead of business owners getting more money? If that went instead to workers (aka consumers) then everyone would have more to spend!

Then you know who would have more money ?

Good business owners !!

——-

Demand side / supply side economics rhetoric is fun, but it’s rhetorical.

Success depends entirely on what is appropriate for the market at that given moment.

So, paying for a night shift will increase the cost to customers, but higher salaries negotiated by on-call employees won't?

Or did you leave out the part where those employees discover how little negotiating power they really have

This is preposterous and basically kills startups completely.

You genuinely think a seed stage startup should hire a complete "night shift" to ensure no engineers ever get paged "after hours?" This simply kills startups completely.

I’m sorry, this insults quite a few startups and firms that don’t believe in wage theft.

Getting equity is not wage theft.

If the principle behind your equity pay out scheme is wage theft with extra steps, you’ve got a huge problem, and an unsustainable business.

Asking employees to participate in a reasonable on-call rotation is not "wage theft." Your antagonistic/adversarial relationship is exactly what destroys cultures.

If you attitude to an outage on a weekend is to ignore it and say that's the company's problem you should simply never join a small startup. You don't deserve equity if you refuse to share in responsibility.

If you do offer equity then that's a slightly different thing. That can be considered payment by those who are willing to take the risk. However, a lot of "startups" in EU do not offer such thing. They do standard employment with unpaid on-call. And those can f right off.

Yeah I agree those so-called startups deserve your scorn.

Those are NOT the same things. It seems we will have to get into the weeds to be clear.

Firstly - the conversation here is about startups - however its not specified if its what stage of maturity the startup is at.

Assuming it’s an early stage startup, which is typically what “startup” evokes; the risk and return profile is different, and should be captured in the contract. The equity payout early stage employees get is different from what a regular work contract entails.

This is how risk and reward are priced - (and risk and reward is the heart of pricing, which is what this conversation is really about.)

If you want regular employees to do startup hours, or be on call for those times - then the pricing for that time must be commensurate.

That’s it.

Nothing more, nothing less. Frankly, I think you would vehemently agree with this.

Suppose, Shit happens. You have some emergency, you need staff to respond. Guess what though? The wording of the regulation seem to cover this scenario!

However, you are in a bad spot, you need to make numbers, so you decide to make people work hours they aren’t paid for?

Well come on. That’s crap, and I REALLY doubt you are advocating for this, because that’s a corrosive attitude that only shields bad management and managers.

That is why these laws exist. Not because of the golden situations where you can have a justifiable ask.

It’s because there’s more people willing to use power over fairness. To cover up their deficiencies by saying “work harder”, instead of fixing issues to actually be sustainable.

Yes, we know increased profits always go to the worker. Particularly when the business needs to rely on exploiting them to make those increased profits.

Let me try your logic here...

Employees benefit from no paid annual leave! How you ask? The employer is able to offer better service to customers, and make more money, and the employee can negotiate a higher salary from the more profitable business.

Am I doing this right? Workers give up more rights but in theory they can negotiate higher pay because the business is more profitable?

Start with a theoretical employee who offers no value and gets paid zero. Dial up their usefulness and consider what happens. The greater the value an employee offers, the stronger their negotiation power in pay discussions. It's not more complicated than that.

Start with a theoretical employee who offers excellent usefulness and is paid accordingly. Dial down the legal protections and security and consider what happens. The weaker the security of the employee, the stronger the negotiating power of the employer in pay discussions. It's not more complicated than that.

this comment is a good example of why modern economics is seen as out of touch. you start with a theoretical model then try and apply it to the world vs starting with the lived expenses of workers and building off of that

You forgot the part where individual workers are great at negotiating against a large entity.

> This law reduces the extent to which flexible employees can add (and extract, via hight salary!) value, and the extent to which customers receive timely service.

If you're paying someone to be on-call, this is not an issue.

This is about unpaid out-of-hours work.

> Employees benefit from calls out of hours. How? The employer is able to offer better service to customers, and make more money, and the employee can negotiate a higher salary from the more profitable business. Employees who are inflexible cannot offer the same level of service to their employer and its customers; they'll on-average be paid less and measures like this increase production costs, making goods and services slightly more expensive.

The business can put that into their contract so that a prospective employee can make a conscious decision:

For example, I have two offers, one for x% higher salary but the contract stipulates a requirement for me to be available after-hours between Xpm-Ypm on x days of the week, I can then make the decision whether the x% more money is worth the stress and the free time I have to give up.

That's how our business introduced on-call: it's opt-in and there is specific remuneration for being on call and for responding to an issue.

Nice in theory, but I've generated a tremendous amount of value for some of the places I've worked at, and it's rare to see any of it flow back the other way. Secondly, this is a right. An employee can waive that right if they choose, but they have the power. They can't be punished for exercising it, which is the important part.

> This law reduces the extent to which flexible employees can add (and extract, via hight salary!) value, and the extent to which customers receive timely service.

Not at all. It means that if they want employees to be on call they have to pay for it.

This is nearly always a myth.

On call has a huge precedent, it's not tech, it's the health sector.

"Paid" on call is already defined as the active portion where you're responding to a page, not the passive portion where you're carrying the pager.

Some countries have rules around time to respond within the definition of active vs passive, but most do not and the carrying the pager isn't compensated at all.

Even with the active part, time-in-lieu can be the definition of paid... still 40h per week (or whatever), but if you only responded to 1h of active on call in a week, finish work an hour earlier one day the next week.

People in tech like to imagine that their salary rises by some significant %, but it seldom does... nurses and A&E staff aren't paid far more for being on-call and carrying a pager, and that precedent travels far, countries aren't legislating in a way that makes their health services untenable.

Some countries do legislate hard in this area, i.e. France, but then... they have a much smaller tech sector as a lot of companies will avoid hiring there or setting up an office there (especially when neighbouring countries do not have such legislation).

To be clear I don't know what the exact text of the Australian law is, but I'm just clarifying that on call does not have to be paid, and as soon as one thinks about the health service and the impact of such legislation it's clear why. Sure one can also view this as wage theft in every industry, but in that case workers need to go make that case. Most large companies will likely continue to avoid such legislation by treating their workforce as fluid, and just withdrawing from some countries and only hiring in others.

Note: None of the above is reflective of where I currently work, but are things I've learned from prior places of employment.

Payment buys time that people can't be doing what they want to. If what they want is to be drinking 10 beers, then the options are either paying them not to (i.e. paying for passive on-call time), or accepting that if there is a call they might not be able to handle it since they could be half in the bag.

This practice will only continue as long as people accept it.

Surely you are joking

What you are describing is called wage theft.

But, but, if the employer doesn't steal wages from employees, where will they get the money to pay them higher salaries?

Employees != customers.

Absolute nonsense - if you need on-call support from your engineers, put it in the contract and pay them the extra for the time when they're on-call, you're literally complaining that you can't rely on unpaid overtime for something you should be paying for!

> your business shouldn't exist. What kind of take is this?

Your take was worse

I have to respectfully disagree here. You place far too much stead in "individuals freely interacting" and none in "micromanaging bosses constantly hassling you at ridiculous hours for pissant assignments that can wait until the morning".

My experience in working at Australian businesses, especially as an IC, is that there is far too much of the latter, and far to little of the former. This is especially true the younger the reporting staff member is.

While I support his new law, more rules do act as a barrier to entry / competition for new / smaller businesses. Larger companies can more easily adhere to increasingly complex employment rules than smaller ones.

The new law protects people from being bothered by micromanagers during off hours, but reduced market competition keeps people stuck with a shitty boss, and reduces their chances to get a raise.

Yep. Rules and enforcement create compliance costs.

So do contracts.

We aren’t removing contracts though.

If we are discussing market forces, an abundance of roles doesn’t equal an abundance of good managers.

It does increases search costs for workers.

It's indeed a very negative take on a pro-labour policy. Entrepreneurship doesn't equate to exploitation of workers. If your business depends on that then it's not a death by thousand paper cuts, rather a death by poor management. Germany has similar laws and it hasn't exactly become a 'business-backwater'.

>> but every rule - however well-intentioned - steals attention and creativity away from entrepreneurs

Really? Every rule? How about safety in the workplace? Hardhats for construction workers? No more asbestos in the walls? I think the rules setting standards for cars/trucks have prevented vast numbers of accidents. Lord knows what insurance rates would be like without limits on how much a truck can carry, how fast it may drive. The innumerable rules that create and protect intellectual property rights have served entrepreneurs well too. And there was that ozone hole thing.

Here is an idea: Lets remove the rules about embezzlement. When an employee takes from an employer that employer can fire them and sue to get property back. No need to involve the police. Let the hand of the free market separate the trustworthy employees from the bad.

I own a tech consulting company in Australia. What rules are you talking about? The only change that's come in recently that's affected us is the changes to fixed-term contracts, and that's an entirely fair change to stop employees from getting dicked over by bad employers. Likewise, moving super through one-touch payroll is a great change that literally only affects dodgy employers.

The reason we're a country that digs shit out of the ground in lieu of doing anything else is the same reason why virtually all investment in the country is in real estate: it's not taxed highly enough to encourage people to diversify, and it's a sector that's too big to fail. Why would you invest in your mate's new tech company and potentially lose it all when you can throw it into a property with almost literally zero risk and far better returns?

In Tech consulting, you can pass of all your regulations and cost to your client.

In fact consulting thrives exactly because of government overreach.

Startups are complete opposite of Consulting

Huh? If you're a startup you still have to absorb regulatory costs somehow.

If they're not getting passed on to the customer, they are getting picked up by the VCs. This is pretty normal.

Dunno about you guys, but we're not charging doing payroll, management or regulatory compliance to our clients unless it's specifically requested/required by the client.

You could say "oh but that cost is bundled into your rates", but that cost is also bundled into your product fees for a product start-up, so..?

We don't have to do r&d documentation but we also don't get r&d reimbursements. Not a lot else different from a back-office perspective.

Right. Let the exploiters and the exploited, with that glaring power gap, settle it among themselves and keep it in the house. Couldn't agree more.

Sometimes governments attempt to make rules to promote a value other than the economy. Yes, those rules can (usually do) have negative economic impacts. More wealth is good, but lets not pretend that there are no tradeoffs.

The last 10 years (and especially the last 3) have seen a massive shift in work culture and the once-precious work/life balance has essentially disappeared. Many people in white collar jobs are hooked into work every waking hour. That sucks, and a lot people don't want to live like that. Many people (myself included) are in a position to set clear boundaries, but many others aren't.

I'm not a huge fan of government as a guardian of culture, but sometimes it is. In this instance, the law is essentially mandating a return to the cultural norms of ~10 years ago. If your startup fails because of that, well, that's OK - perhaps you can come up with something more pro-social.

I already do this in the US.

I am suprised they didn't have that right to begin with.

Interesting to see the US perspective on this.

http://archive.today/jv4nz

do they have the right to employment??

Please define 'right to employment', I think that has a special meaning in the US that isn't really a thing elsewhere?

I think a much favorable law should be that employers must automatically log after hours overtime and pay for such overtime for ALL employees besides the C-Suite.

Aka, any communication sent to employees MUST be billed to the company. The company can figure out if they want to pay ALL employees overtime pay or shut down their communication systems after 5 pm.

Interpreting that headline literally ...

If person A is working late (maybe they started their day late, or they work from a different timezone) and send a memo during off hours of Person B ... the memo can be "ignored" by Person B even when they come back to work next day?

Same for all off hours when person B is on leave - planned or otherwise?

What an utterly weird reading; I have a hard time seeing it as literal at all. Maybe you have your own definition of "literal"?

It says they have the right to ignore them after hours. After hours is when they do the ignoring. When they're back on the clock, they stop ignoring and start reading their emails again. Including the ones sent while they were off; the headline doesn't say they have the right to ignore anything during working hours.

I need this my boss is a total bitch!

I mean... this is a nice thought and all, but all this means is that Australian employees now have the right to be the part of the "difficult decision to reduce our workforce in order to better align with our long term strategic objectives".

This doesn't end up being totally true right? Americans have MASSIVELY more labor protections than Vietnamese people but we're more productive. I don't like the assumption we can't ever improve anything for anyone because it reduces competitiveness. It's unproductive and also appears to be ahistorical when we look at other changes to labor practices over time

Eric Schmidt : hold my beer

In 2024 it hurts really bad to read all such great news from other nations while sitting in India where industry leaders, startup founders, and politicians are actively trying to impose things like 70 hour work week or so and take away whatever labour protections (which is very little and mostly ineffective and practically none if you are in "corporate") we have and even encroach upon the Sundays and Saturdays (the latter being working for most of the Indian workers anyway).

Oh you're same guy from another thread. You seem like you're on some kind of a mission here. My experience was 100% different than you. You seem to be generalizing from a small sample and paint an entire country with that baseless generalization.

Why would you go this length and do this witch hunting? Do you have some issue in reading other people's views? I have commented this same view twice in different context and you consider that a "mission"? This is a behaviour I have seen so widespread here that it seems like a trend. In fact it's a thing! Go asking on r/india and see how that is. Now that would also be a very small set for you, isn't it? Well, that is definitely orders of magnitude higher than hn when it comes to this particular country. So get a feel there maybe?

Well, what is your mission? Since I mentioned my country's name (which I guess could be yours as well but I am not sure) is this somehow become a "prestige" issue for you?

I don't know whether a tag works here, but @dang is this kind of witch-hunting or attack acceptable here? Or is it rather kosher?

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