Hacker News Reader

Comment by ludston | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

> 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

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

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com