4 ms·
Nobody has ever asked me to routinely check my work email outside work hours, nor to subscribe to work email on my personal phone, nor to stay logged in to slac
by marssaxman 9y ago
Nobody has ever asked me to routinely check my work email outside work hours, nor to subscribe to work email on my personal phone, nor to stay logged in to slack outside work hours, nor any of the other always-on practices which have supposedly become universal. I don't take my work laptop home unless I plan to work from home; on the rare occasions I've had a work phone, I've left it on my desk when I go home. I keep imagining that someday somebody is going to take issue with this, and then we'll get to have an interesting conversation about expectations - but nobody in management, anywhere I've worked, has ever talked about such practices as though they are expected, given me any hassle for being unavailable outside work hours, nor - so far as I can tell - noticed at all that I have continued to divide my life into work time and not-work time.
I've been reading articles for years now where people talk about these sorts of expectations as though they have become universal, and yet I can't find any evidence that they actually exist in my own experience. It's confusing. Why do people believe this? Is this just not a tech industry thing, or perhaps is this just not a Seattle thing? Or is this something that has sort of collectively emerged in people's awareness without actually being real, and people just go along with it because they think everyone else is doing it, and they don't want to be the odd one out?
- fitpolar 9y agoPlease tell me where you work and how I can get a job there. Your work's culture is very rare.
- noir_lord 9y agoNot that rare, OP's description is exactly my work situation. I go in at 9, leave at 5 on the dot (+/- 15 minutes), no one contacts me outside of work, only the MD even has my mobile number. Boss actually gets annoyed if I work on stuff outside of work time. I think the secret is to find a decent none-tech place to work, everyone else works 9/5 so there is no expectation on me not to.
- marssaxman 9y agoI am currently working at a little AI startup, which does have an unusually good culture, but I was talking about my overall experience across 20+ years in the West Coast tech industry, mostly in startups but also some larger places, including two of the Big 5. I have seen all kinds of cultural failures, certainly, but I've been watching out for this one, because I've been curious about how it was happening, so it surprises me that I haven't seen anyone in management doing anything to make it happen.
- chomp 9y agoCorporate life! I'm a very staunch 9-5'er, the entire company basically shuts down at 5pm. We do have on-call rotations but outside of those hours, we don't have communication with each other. It's a boring, but quiet life.
- akgerber 9y agoI've work in the startup world in NYC for years and no one has ever complained that I don't check my emails outside of work hours — I do have Slack installed on my phone, and occasionally answer things outside of work hours, but not habitually, and no one's complained when I don't.
- ghaff 9y agoI personally find mobile connectedness a quality of life enhancement over the “old days.” Used to be that if I wasn’t by the phone or email, I effectively wasn’t working. Today, I answer some evening and weekend mails when it’s not too big an imposition to do so. In exchange I have a fair bit of flexibility about where I am and how available I am during regular hours. I realize many people have more rigid requirements but I much prefer my situation today than how I worked for much of my career when I had much more obvious separation between work and non-work.
- noir_lord 9y agoNot only are you doing the right thing, you are communicating the expectation from day one. (poor) Managers generally treat you the way they do because you set the expectations. It's like unplanned ad-hoc overtime, if you work lots of overtime to meet some arbitrary deadline you didn't set, you get a well done but the next time they set arbitrary deadline you are just expected to work overtime. If instead you work your contracted hours and the deadline is missed you then force them to either a) deal with deadlines better or b) deal with you clearly about overtime. I learnt that lesson painfully. As my mum tried hammering into me and I never really got until I was a grown up - "People can only treat you the way you allow them to".