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Comment by eldavido | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how ISPs, colo providers, transit operators, power plants, and other 24x7 infrastructure providers can function in environments like this.

Unplanned incidents shouldn't happen regularly, but on the off chance they do, I can't imagine being caught between screwing my customers vs. breaking the law. Talk about a rock and a hard place...

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As often the truth got a bit distorted through translation and re-reporting. Unfortunately it's getting a bit late for me to explain in details but hopefully if you can read this article it should clear things up:

http://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2014/04/11/la-le...

In short, not all workers are concerned. For instance I work as a developer for a french company but I'm not bound by the "Syntec", so it does not concern me.

Sounds like an orthogonal problem. Even in France, the law doesn't say you can't work at midnight, just that you can't (usually) work more than N hours/week. You can hire people for non-standard shifts, just not "overwork" them (as defined under the law).

Just like how in blue law states, you can work on Sunday for jobs that need 24/7 support: hospitals, police, infrastructure.

You schedule someone (or hire a service) to provide 24/7 coverage.

If someone is required to respond outside of normal business hours, compensating PTO is provided.

Actually, I'd be strongly partial to that time off being granted at a multiple scale, much as overtime and double-overtime are rated. If I'm called on to respond outside of core hours (and am not normally scheduled for those hours), I get 1.5x time compensation. If it's between midnight and 8am, weekends, or holidays, it's 2x.

From Frank Herbert's Dune, there's the Fremen desert water compensation principle of 10x price -- the idea being that if you create an obligation of others to share their very limited water through loss, stillsuit damage, etc., you must pay them back 10 times what they provided you.

See generally: http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Stillsuit

I'm also very much increasingly a fan of having engineering, not just ops, included on pager rotation:

• It increases pager coverage, and reduces any one person's pager obligations. Simply having pager anticipation is a mental burden after a while.

• It creates a stronger incentive for response procedures: what are the expected obligations of response staff, what's considered sufficient effort, what's the escalation policy, who is expected to participate, what are consequences of failure to respond?

• It makes engineering more aware of the consequences of their actions: is insufficient defensive engineering causing outages (say, unlimited remote access to expensive operations), are alerts, notification mails, and/or monitoring/logging obscuring rather than revealing anomalous conditions? Are mechanisms for adjusting, repairing, updating, and/or restarting systems complex and/or failure prone themselves?

My experience at one site, where I was a recent staff member (and hence unfamiliar with policies, procedures, and capabilities), systems went down starting at 2am, I was unable to raise engineering or my manager, and the response the next staff meeting to my observation of this was pretty much "so what" did not endear me to the organization (I left it shortly afterward).

I think in France, it would be probably just acceptable to relax and not worry about having no internet or email access if an ISP or data center goes out. It's a different culture - and they value very different things.

The first thing, this is not a law. It is some agreement between unions or something like that and employers. The agreement itself is not about employees, it is about contractors. Contractors in France do not have 35 hours a week work time limit, they can work as much hours as they want.

Also, the agreement does not says they can not check mails after some hour, the employer must give them possibility to disconnect for 12 consecutive hours. You can expect them to be available for remaining 12 hours.

So, all you need is either employee on call or two contractor to switch turn-offable times.

You mean to say you don't understand how those lazy socialists surrender monkeys could have the common sense to make exceptions?

I mean seriously, you really think they haven't thought of that?

Maybe in a country with better work/life balance, customers are more understanding and willing to wait until tomorrow to get their widgets.

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