16 ms·

Emails while commuting 'should count as work'

232 points by onuralp 8y ago

AndrewDucker 8y ago
Well, obviously. Doing things which are part of work counts as work is hardly an innovative statement. The question is, how did companies persuade people that they should work for free on the way into the office?
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  Pressure to compete. I don't think it's anything companies convinced people into doing, it seems more like one of those unwritten rules. Especially in tech. Your system breaks, you are responsible. Not good to simply look at the clock and say 'well that's a day' if you want more responsibility, leadership, respect, trust etc.
  - mstade 8y ago
    > Not good to simply look at the clock and say 'well that's a day' if you want more responsibility, leadership, respect, trust etc. Sadly, the effect of this is that there's less incentive to build resilient systems, since there's always someone available to fix things quickly. Trying to convince corporate to spend more time and money on building a system that looks/smells/feels the same, but is presumably more resilient, is very very difficult.
    - craig1f 8y ago
      Sad but true. As I climb the ladder, all the decisions management use to make that I use to regard is idiotic make a lot more sense to me. It's so hard to predict which projects will succeed and fail. People will spend time setting up Jenkins pipelines and all kinds of unit tests, and their stuff still breaks. I argued for unit-testing on our current project to add resiliency, and I swear 70% of my energy is fucking unit tests now. Whoops!
    - maxsilver 8y ago
      > Sadly, the effect of this is that there's less incentive to build resilient systems, since there's always someone available to fix things quickly. Yep. It's often double-bad end result, since if you do build a resilient system, no one sees you "fix" it, so it looks like you did no extra work. But if you build something broken, and then swoop in and "fix" it, you get extra credit for pulling "more" work after hours / during an emergency.
    - matwood 8y ago
      > Sadly, the effect of this is that there's less incentive to build resilient systems, since there's always someone available to fix things quickly. I found this to be the opposite as long as the developer who wrote the system also owns the running of said system. It will not take many late night/weekend calls before the developer makes it more resilient. Selling this to the business can be easy, because even if someone is there to fix it the system was presumably still down. This is why I push every developer to learn communication skills, and rudimentary business skills. If the developer (or their manager) cannot communicate to the business why a more resilient system is better for the business that's on them. This also requires developers to come off the "I only want to do it perfectly to 999999s", and again think about what can the business reasonably afford to do.
      - tomatotomato37 8y ago
        What they do is make it resilient to multi-hour fixes, while still keeping the light issues that look like emergencies but can be fixed by running a bat file to still go through, minimizing the work they have to do personally while still making them look like a hero. Of course this will fall apart once their manager catches on but in some monolithic organizations that could take years
    - s-shellfish 8y ago
      Resilient systems will still break. They may break less, but it's impossible to anticipate every possible usage permutation of a system from here until eternity. There are tons of reliable methods to build resilient systems and they can still have their faults. What I'm talking about is resilient system or not - someone has to be there to fix it if it breaks. There is no silver bullet when it comes to software - sometimes the difference really only can be who puts the most time in. Minds require rest to function optimally, so pushing yourself to an extreme comes at a cost that gets realized down the line instead. Identifying which means of functioning comes at the greatest cost is not easy to analyze or ascertain. So working together in addition to competing is important as well. All principles of capitalism. Just, never before in history has there really been so much attention paid to the mind. Software, eesh, yep.
      - mstade 8y ago
        This is precisely why it’s difficult to sell upward – why spend time and money on something, yet still not be able to guarantee that things will work? Especially when you can roll the dice, have things work great until such time it doesn’t, and then just throw some man power on it till it’s fixed. When thinking about cost, it can be really hard to justify something you can’t really see the benefits of, until after the fact.
        deleted 8y ago
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- dfxm12 8y ago
  If you get paid by the hour and you're required to be in an office during a set period of time, then yeah, I hope you aren't working for free on the train. This is far from the only situation though... I guess I'm lucky enough that my managers have never hounded me about when I come in and leave, so if working an hour on the train means I get my work for the day done an hour early, it also means I leave the office an hour early. Yeah, maybe I could use that hour to read for fun instead, but I'd rather finish everything sooner and get on with my day sooner.
- craig1f 8y ago
  I don't think it's this black and white. First, I'm sure plenty of companies are basically stealing from their employees, but this is also situational. I answer emails and slack whenever I can. On the flip side, I get work from home privileges, I show up when I want, I leave when I want, and I get put on exciting projects instead of boring ones. People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients. I typically don't bill time until my laptop comes out. I'm two-minds about this. Companies really do abuse their employees and try to get all the work they can out of them. This is a problem that leads to abusive employers. But employees also look for ANY entitlement they can receive, whether or not it is useful to their professional development. This is also a problem that leads to lazy and useless employees. It's sort of a feedback loop. It's also probably very different outside of my field (and probably most people's field on this site), which is software development.
  - Frondo 8y ago
    "People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients." If you own the business, you're always on, yeah. If you're a worker, this is paid work. Pinning career advancement to uncompensated work is bullshit.
    - tvh 8y ago
      Yet so common.
  - Xylakant 8y ago
    > People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients. Why not? Requiring off-hour access is admitting project management failure. That’s what on-call is for, and on-call engineers and management should rotate and be paid for on-call duty. For them, it’s working hours. When I’m on call for a client, I bill _for being available_, so basically for keeping the phone on.
    - sandworm101 8y ago
      "Demanding client" doesnt mean unlimited funding. i find that the most demanding ones also look most closely at their bills.
- deleted 8y ago
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- briandear 8y ago
  Most people who have answering emails as part of their job are not working for an hourly wage. The other aspect is that some of us actually like our work and want to succeed at it: we don’t see work as slavery or some kind of adversarial relationship with the “boss.” Many people actually believe in what the company is trying to do and actually care about the job. And the work has to get done at some point right? Most jobs that involve answering emails aren’t like factory jobs where you simply make as many widgets as possible during your shift and that’s is. Every email I answer “on the train” means one less thing to do when actually at the office. Which means I can take a longer lunch or just relax a bit more or just have a slightly less frenetic pace.
  - shady-lady 8y ago
    > The other aspect is that some of us actually like our work and want to succeed at it: Work is work. Your employer pays you money to do work. If you do work outside of that, it doesn't mean anything other than you don't want/can't enforce a boundary between your work life and private life. Also, yet another aspect is that even more of us like our work and want to succeed at it but have been around for longer than x years where the novelty of being "always on" has worn thin. An employer taking advantage of one's lack of boundaries is bad form regardless of whether the employee can't/won't see how detrimental it can be.
    - tvh 8y ago
      Well said. As someone else said above, tying career success to off-call work is bonkers (both for the employers and the employees), yet sadly common.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    "The other aspect is that some of us actually like our work and want to succeed at it" I like my work and want to succeed at it too. Do not insinuate that someone who values their time outside of work doesn't. That is demeaning and insulting to the rest of us who have lives outside of work.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  > The question is, how did companies persuade people that they should work for free on the way into the office? That's the fun part - companies didn't, people did it to themselves. Probably started as just some people answering emails they got overnight on their morning commute. Thanks to smartphones and always on connectivity, other colleagues get a ping that there's an email. And before long you've got your employees mailing each other. I don't think there's ever been an actual company policy that codified the expectation that people should be answering company emails in their own time.
- tvh 8y ago
  They don't have to persuade anymore. People mostly self convinced long ago that this was acceptable and expected.
- jjrh 8y ago
  It's not just "on the way into the office" it's at night, it's being on call without being paid to be (expecting one to read emails after hours) Companies didn't persuade people, the tools (smart phones, laptops/home computers, fast residential network) just made it too easy and when all your peers do it it's hard for you not to.
stephengillie 8y ago
Please don't read/send email while driving. Use your bus/train time to study things that will help your career, at this job and the next. Don't just give that time away to your current employer for free - unless your employer is a charity. Edit: Even if you work for a charity, giving away your time for free may not be a good idea. ;)
- iambateman 8y ago
  As an employee of a charity, I don’t think working off the clock makes sense there either. ;) Charities pay for work just like anyone else. If you like, sure, make a donation. But make sure it’s formal. Otherwise you are robbing someone else of an opportunity to generously support the work AND if the “employee stretching to give” becomes organizational culture it can endanger the entire organization. Burn out is real.
  - Declanomous 8y ago
    Most of my experience is with non-profit orgs, but unlike a lot of people in the NPO space I have a fair amount of for-profit experience. I think people who work for NPOs tend to burn out at even higher rates than people in for-profit orgs because they get emotionally invested in the mission, fail to set reasonable boundaries, and because they typically make less than people who work for for-profit orgs and therefore have more money related stress and fewer resources to deal with stress. Working for an NPO can be existentially rewarding, but I hear a lot of myths about how NPOs provide better work life balance, etc, and I don't think that's true at all. I have a theory that a lot of people do things in certain ways in order to keep up appearances. For instance, a lot of startups waste a lot of money on things that are 'business-y' to legitimize themselves as a 'real business'. To that extent, I find that a lot of NPOs waste a lot of resources appearing 'thrifty' (read: cheap). I've worked with a lot of NPOs that waste tons of employee time and money because they don't want to spend money because of the 'optics'. What this means is that getting anything done takes more time and energy at an NPO. My specialty is database marketing, and I've literally done thousands of experiments across millions of mailed letters. I've found that for most donors, anything that can make a letter appear 'cheaper' improves response rate and the average donation. Most people interpret similar data as people preferring more 'personalized' letters, but I think that's because there is a lot of overlap between 'low-budget' and 'human touch'. The irony is that at once place we spent more than three times as much per letter to make them appear cheaper. This mindset also applies to people who work at non-profit orgs. People would spend 3 days doing stuff by hand rather than paying $100 to have it automated. On a similar note, I was stuck with an ancient Pentium 4 for a long time because the IT department bought them used. They were eventually replaced with Core 2 Duos. They were slow as hell, which was bad enough, but if you did the math the lifetime cost was much higher than buying a new computer due in large part to how much power Pentium 4's used. Not to mention it took them forever to upgrade from CRTs, which use so much more electricity than LCDs.
perlgeek 8y ago
We have an electronic time sheet, and I've always added answering emails during commute as work time. Nobody ever complained. Maybe it's different in the UK, but I don't understand the big deal.
- lbriner 8y ago
  It's not a UK thing, it's a company thing. For billable companies like legal and accounting, you are more likely to bill hours wherever you are. For most others, it is "up to you" if you want to do work outside of paid hours but if you don't, maybe you won't keep up, maybe the boss won't like you etc.
wayanon 8y ago
Was expecting a mention of BMW who were forced to switch off their email servers after working hours I think after a court ruling brought by a union in Germany.
zaphar 8y ago
I absolutely consider time commuting as part of my work hours. I leave the office early and count the 45 minutes on the train as work time. Whether it's answering emails, writing some code, or working on documentation it's definitely work.
- eximius 8y ago
  I don't log hours so it's kind of not relevant, but I mentally count lunch, especially if with coworkers. I can't quite bring myself to count the commute (also 30-45 min here). Counting both reduces 'real' working hours considerably. Picking one or the other would be nearly equivalent anyway.
aaron695 8y ago
Why is it always the company that "steals" time from workers? I've seen plenty of time "stolen" from the company. We all know most white collar workers don't do 8 hours work. Check your emails on the train and take a long lunch with mates. Meh.
unixhero 8y ago
Of course it does. I charge hours in my in transit because I am emailing and interacting with people at work and in my client projects.
sxp62000 8y ago
If you reply to emails before 9 and after 6, you're telling your manager/client ... hey! I am at your disposal 24/7. By the way, if your boss gave you a "work laptop" you're already screwed.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Not just your manager / client, but your direct colleagues too.
  - sxp62000 8y ago
    It's shocking to see people take pride in staying up all night to finish a presentation before a 7am call. We're all suckers.
SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
Does this open the door for me billing my evening shower when the design finally clicks in my head?
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Depends - what did you do at work while that design didn't click? I was on HN, not doing much work worth paying for.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    I believe the answer to that is "dealt with the thousand distractions an open office floor-plan encourages while answering intrusive emails". The shower would have been the first time all day I could think for 10 minutes uninterrupted.
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  I have a consultant friend that bills shower time. Of course, it's not a separate line item due to the questions that would arise, but he does include it in the total billable time.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    They must have a generous time allotment in which to bill.
    - OJFord 8y ago
      You must have a generous time allotment for your showers...
      - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
        Well yeah - it's where I do all my thinking.
PeterStuer 8y ago
After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per family on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level it was at the end of the 19th century. While per person average 'working' hours are down in large parts of what we call the Western world, woman were brought en mass into salaried employment, raising the time on the company clock for a family significantly. The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is now 'required' for many. I personally feel that the relative recent introduction of 'work from anywhere' technology for the knowledge worker class, has indeed lead to yet another expansion of salaried-time, even when no 'salary' is provided for it. We should also ask ourselves if the stance on 'working-from-home', which should be a normal evolution of the technology, hasn't been hampered by a standing tradition of externalizing the costs of commuting by companies to employees. Commuting in itself is for many parts an anachronism that lost its grounding with the introduction of personal computers and the internet. It should be seriously questioned why this is allowed to stand, when it comes at great costs to both the employee's health as well as the environment. (P.S. Before you go 'but even for knowledge workers nothing beats working together', you can be right, but do we need the 'gold-standard' of collaboration every working day now that the alternatives are for most business activities more than good enough and still getting better with each year? As in many things it is a trade off. Yet often, we see that in those trade-offs were companies are left holding the bill instead of the employee (office furniture and architecture, IT equipment, ...), the balance goes in the direction of 'good-enough' rather than the 'best-of-the-best'.)
- yomly 8y ago
  >After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per family on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level it was at the end of the 19th century. While per person average 'working' hours are down in large parts of what we call the Western world, woman were brought en mass into salaried employment, raising the time on the company clock for a family significantly. >The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is now 'required' for many. These two facts often make me ponder whether we are regressing as a society but simply blind to this fact because various quality of life things have become cheaper (e.g. going on holiday and electronics). Meanwhile, we are mostly collectively losing at the wealth game and I am quite convinced we are losing at the wealth game globally - despite many people's attempts to illustrate that global poverty is decreasing (I lack data and drive to prove this point sadly). As such, social mobility also seems to regressing as who your parents are seems to be more important now than it might have been 50-60 years ago - I need only to look to my parent's achievements (and their peers) to be reminded of this fact.
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adultSwim 8y ago
Commuting should count as work
- megablast 8y ago
  Oh no, lets not reward people who do not value their time, and choose to live further from work than others.
  - 3chelon 8y ago
    I've lived where I live for 18 years. I've been in my current job less than a year. Does that justify pulling my kids out of school just before they do their exams so I can move house? Where you live is not a simple choice for many of us. History of previous jobs, family commitments, schools, house prices, etc., etc... Like lots of things, it's a compromise.
  - notfromhere 8y ago
    Not everyone can afford to live in the city center or is able to freely move to be next to their job.
  - syeaj 8y ago
    Then cities need to invest into noise reduction, pollution reduction, etc. Maybe it's not that people don't value their time, but rather value not walking streets which smell like trash.
  - Raphmedia 8y ago
    Even living in the same city taking the subway + a bus, you can end up wasting up to 90 minutes in commute daily.
- 3chelon 8y ago
  That's a difficult one. I have a 2 hour commute. If I treated it as work I'd only have to spend 4 hours in the office. Not sure I'd get away with that. On the flip side, having a long commute gets me preferential treatment re. remote working, so it's swings and roundabouts.
- 8y ago
j45 8y ago
The question I often ask clients is, are they busy doing other people's work from their mobile emails? Looking at the types of emails we send/recieve, a trend seems to emerge, some people ask a lot more question using email, and some emails require us to do a lot more answering. Today's email habits are still rooted in the blackberry culture that created it - there was no structure and framework around email use. I still believe mobile emails are more beneficial for the people asking the questions, and not so good for people who have to answer answering the questions, often on their own time to keep up. How does poor planning on someone else's part require you to reply instantly, or within the same business day? Very little should be that critical if the organization is truly-proactive. Processing several hundred emails a day used to be a norm on a few recent projects. A few trends emerged to manage sanity: - Poor emailing habits exist. Triaging is incredibly important, on top of GTD. Those 2 minute email replies can really add up, scheduling replies is important. - The more we try to get ahead and email in our off time, the more replies we recieve in a vicious cycle. The more we send emails. Our time will never scale to meet the available time of all the people we simultaneously communicate with. - I try to use mobile email only to read emails and to write as little as possible. - Where I do have to write mobile emails, especially after hours, I consider if I want to be at the top of the person's inbox or not, and that's probably best achieved by scheduling an email to go out at 7 or 8 AM instead of the night before. - The email scheduling feature in Aquamail is invaluable. I wouldn't be able to switch back to iOS without a comparable email client. Boomerang is handy too for automatic follow ups that can be scheduled at the time of sending. - Try to centralize communication as much as possible and check email 1-3 times a day. Email can be followed up on, it isn't always the case with Slack. Slack/Chats are extremely valuable for realtime input. I'd love to hear any other tips or strategies folks are using to manage their email flow.
11eleven 8y ago
I feel one of the aspects of this that's not covered is: Yes while the employer may not be able to legally force you to handle emails outside of official work hours and doing so counts as working... Depending on your job, if you don't check and reply to some time sensitive emails outside of work hours, you might a) become a roadblock on someone else's project that's due soon b) be late to respond to "emergencies" and this can affect how people perceive your overall effectiveness and performance. Of course, company culture can minimize last minute requests, unrealistic deadlines, etc. to minimize these "emergencies" that need quick replies but many don't.
- ptero 8y ago
  > if you don't check and reply to some time sensitive emails outside of work hours, you might a) become a roadblock on someone else's project that's due soon, ... Of course, but for the vast majority of cases the right mental model is "too bad". Whoever needs you to be available after hours needs to learn how to plan and execute his work. Emergencies happen, but those should be rare; if not, wean them off or look for another employer. Being on call all the time is not healthy long term. Today's job market is very friendly to engineers; if your company does not minimize those emergencies, consider working elsewhere.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  You could just bounce that back with "A lack of planning on your part doesn’t constitute an emergency on mine". If a project is due soon and needs your attention outside of work hours, it should've been planned earlier. Yes I know that's an ideal world etc. But how did people handle that before there was email? That's right, they didn't, and it had to wait until tomorrow.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Before email there were phones, and from speaking to older friends in manufacturing it was pretty common for people to be called at all hours of the day and night to fix critical machinery (on the phone or to attend site in person) whether officially "on call" or not. This is not a new phenomenon. Edit: Just wanted to add that I'm not trying to justify this behaviour. It was wrong to intrude into people's personal lives and expect unpaid work then and it's wrong now.
kapauldo 8y ago
Clock watchers will always unfairly be reviewed as worse employees.
alexanmathis 8y ago
Well duh. You ARE working. That's the thing
cmurf 8y ago
"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." Wernher von Braun Of course lawyers bill for research, phone calls, and emails. So do consultants. Why would considering work emails during commuting counting as work be at all a controversial? What's the contrary argument?
devmunchies 8y ago
Women joining the workforce increased the labor supply which decreased wages on the whole. This makes it so many women HAVE to work as opposed to GET to work. A double income for many families is required nowadays.
- User23 8y ago
  Women joining the workforce lead to a long term decrease in the labor supply. The only reason wages haven’t gone up is a massive influx of foreign born workers that keeps supply high.
  - tejtm 8y ago
    ... because they were not home having babies?
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      ...that does sound like a long-term decrease in the labor supply?
    - tejtm 8y ago
      please not that this is not a rhetorical question on my part. down voting statements looking for more information/ clarification seems out of place here
  - eikenberry 8y ago
    From what I've read the birth rate has long been on a gradual decline as wealth has increased. That there was no sudden drop when women went back to work, just a continuation of the trend.
    - User23 8y ago
      That doesn't appear to be true. Birth rates plummeted in the 60s and 70s[1], which is when women started to really join the work force in quantity. Perhaps the people inclined to down vote think I'm advocating for banning women from work? Please realize I'm saying no such thing, I'm simply pointing out an obvious consequence for long term labor supply that simple reasoning can deduce and the data bears out. [1]http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/18/is-u-s-fertility-at-an-all-time-low-it-depends/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/18/is-u-s-ferti...
deevolution 8y ago
If you take into consideration the near future of autonomous cars where people will be capable of working during their commute, which some people have up to 3+ hour commutes - absolutely this should count as working hours. Hopefully it also means less hours in the office.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Really these sort of metrics are missing the point in my opinion along with "employee engagement" and "focus" tracking. What they should care about is the deliverables and not some puritan pennywise pound foolish get as much toil out per dollar. IT is one classic example with the lazy sysadmin is a good sysadmin. If everything is secure and operational and all desired expansions are either met or properly analysed as not worth it then their slacking off doesn't matter.
vesak 8y ago
If your employer tracks you by the hour, then of course email while commuting is work. Also thinking about a design while taking a shower in the evening is work. Also waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep because work issues are bothering you is work. Why employers (in the knowledge business at least) track people by the hour is beyond my understanding.
- noja 8y ago
  Why is it not work, if your employer doesn't track you by the hour?
  - vesak 8y ago
    I mean, of course it is, but if your salary is monthly-based then it's not such a big deal then. That of course implies that you can have 5 hour weeks when your time is not required as much, and get paid the same.
- yacse 8y ago
  From an employers point of view, tracking hours does not make sense. At least as long as we are talking about creative work, where people tend to stay longer than they would be required to, without even noticing how much time they were working. At least in Germany, working unions are fighting against not counting working hours, because it is better for the employees and is also a saftey net against related health issues. Without counting, legal rules are not enforceable and people may even work on weekends without any compensation. This also leads to the fact that managers start to expect those extra hours from everyone, and consequently see it as an lack of motivation or dedication not doing them.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    I worked as a salaried government employee for a long time. Time reporting is a key part of our business, as without it you cannot spend appropriately. Attorneys do the same thing. It’s no big deal.
- deleted 8y ago
mattlondon 8y ago
I am guilty of triaging emails on the underground train in on the morning. No one seems to have mentioned my perspective: Its not that I feel compelled to do this (far from it), its more that the commute is BORING AS HELL. At least for London, the wifi and network is only available during the 30 seconds you are in a station (i.e. not in the tunnels), so more productive things that need a persistent network connection wont work very well (e.g. Duolingo, netflix etc). You cant even look out of the window since its in a tunnel the whole way! :-) The other alternative to doing emails is reading cached news articles (I actually do this a lot - load up a series of 10-15 articles before getting on the train), or desperately trying to connect to the wifi then load a webpage in the 30 second window you have before you are back in a tunnel. Or you can get paid-for Duolingo or download netflix shows the night before etc. Its all a bit of a faff though really, while your inbox is sitting there full of juicy unread emails from your colleagues in another hemisphere that you'll need to read at some point anyway .... too tempting to jump in and start triaging when your alternative is staring at the floor or the blackness outside the windows :)
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Duolingo? Netflix? Why aren't you replying e-mails? Tunnels are no excuse, mortal [1] [1] http://www.offlineimap.org http://www.offlineimap.org (Wink)
browsercoin 8y ago
Slack should count as work too while commuting. I'd prefer emails but now you are de facto on call when you have Slack on your phone.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Problem is that not everything on Slack is... "productive"... (Though the same could be true for e-mail.)
  - browsercoin 8y ago
    I'm not talking about shooting the shit but video conference calls eating up precious data, panic support channels to fight fire.... I feel like companies use Slack exactly for this reason...it tethers your employees to a very intimate possession-your smartphone and it's far more invasive than a phone call or email and your are expected to respond immediately. It has all the dynamics of any email or regular office conversation. Somebody has a grudge in the office and want to make you look bad for remote working? Call them and immediately hang up and tell managers 'so and so isn't responding in real time' or take a convo out of context where emoticons play a far more conflicting messages to the receiver. For example, somebody using a animated flashing parrot and mistaking it as a slight. I feel like Slack has been more times counter-productive than advertised.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I disagree strongly with this statement in the article: "There's a real challenge in deciding what constitutes work," said Dr Jain, from the university's Centre for Transport and Society. "Work" is anything I would be doing while sitting at my desk in your office building. So if I'm doing that on a train or in your office they are both "work." And if my train ride takes 1.5 hours to the office and 1.5 hours home, I'll get on the train around 8AM and leave the office at 3:30 to arrive at the other end by 5PM and count that as an 8 hour work day. On the other hand, if I am in my car driving, I don't think of it as work until I can actually concentrate on doing work.
- mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
  Possible alternate definition: Anything that you wouldn't do if you weren't paid for it. This would include driving to the office.
  - caymanjim 8y ago
    It's not reasonable to expect your employer to pay for your commute time if you don't use that commute time to work. You can work for them on the train. You shouldn't work for them on the train if you're not getting paid for it, but you're generally also not expected to work on the train. You can't work for them while you're driving. You can think of that driving time as work, but you shouldn't expect your employer to consider it work. Where you choose to live and work are up to you, and need to be factored in to the burden. Commuting is only "work" if you're expected to do something during the commute.
    - punnerud 8y ago
      In Norway you have to be paid when you ‘are available to the job’. If you are on standby the minimum pay is 1/3. If you have to work outside your normal workhours the pay is minimum 50% extra. If you are «forced» to drive, example as a consulatant normaly based in the city and have to comute longer than normaly, the comute is paid.
      - 8y ago
collyw 8y ago
Should surfing the web for a couple of minutes during work hours be deducted then?
Kluny 8y ago
I still don't understand why half the threads on HN talk about how there's not as much work anymore due to automation, and the other half talk about how people are overworked and working longer hours. We can't have UBI because that would encourage people to be lazy, but all jobs are bullshit anyway. When are we going to rise up and seize the means of production?
adultSwim 8y ago
If engineers had our own unions, we could actually have these discussions with our employers.
thx4allthestuff 8y ago
I’ve largely disconnected from email, both work and personal. I guess one day I just smelled another internal phishing campaign and decided that it would be the last I participated in. After that I informed my bosses that if they needed to reach me then to do so in team chat. The unspoken part of that was, “and if that’s a problem, then fire me, please.”
mirimir 8y ago
As a consultant, I've billed for work, regardless of where I did it. At home. On trains and planes. On the beach. In Internet cafes in Amsterdam. Why not? But on the other hand, I recall being shocked (this was some years ago) when a seriously enterprise-level customer service rep emailed me at midnight. Because, you know, I was billing for reading her message, in 15-minute blocks, but she was paid on a salary basis.

232 points by onuralp 8y ago

Well, obviously. Doing things which are part of work counts as work is hardly an innovative statement. The question is, how did companies persuade people that they should work for free on the way into the office?

s-shellfish 8y ago
Pressure to compete. I don't think it's anything companies convinced people into doing, it seems more like one of those unwritten rules. Especially in tech. Your system breaks, you are responsible. Not good to simply look at the clock and say 'well that's a day' if you want more responsibility, leadership, respect, trust etc.
- mstade 8y ago
  > Not good to simply look at the clock and say 'well that's a day' if you want more responsibility, leadership, respect, trust etc. Sadly, the effect of this is that there's less incentive to build resilient systems, since there's always someone available to fix things quickly. Trying to convince corporate to spend more time and money on building a system that looks/smells/feels the same, but is presumably more resilient, is very very difficult.
  - craig1f 8y ago
    Sad but true. As I climb the ladder, all the decisions management use to make that I use to regard is idiotic make a lot more sense to me. It's so hard to predict which projects will succeed and fail. People will spend time setting up Jenkins pipelines and all kinds of unit tests, and their stuff still breaks. I argued for unit-testing on our current project to add resiliency, and I swear 70% of my energy is fucking unit tests now. Whoops!
  - maxsilver 8y ago
    > Sadly, the effect of this is that there's less incentive to build resilient systems, since there's always someone available to fix things quickly. Yep. It's often double-bad end result, since if you do build a resilient system, no one sees you "fix" it, so it looks like you did no extra work. But if you build something broken, and then swoop in and "fix" it, you get extra credit for pulling "more" work after hours / during an emergency.
  - matwood 8y ago
    > Sadly, the effect of this is that there's less incentive to build resilient systems, since there's always someone available to fix things quickly. I found this to be the opposite as long as the developer who wrote the system also owns the running of said system. It will not take many late night/weekend calls before the developer makes it more resilient. Selling this to the business can be easy, because even if someone is there to fix it the system was presumably still down. This is why I push every developer to learn communication skills, and rudimentary business skills. If the developer (or their manager) cannot communicate to the business why a more resilient system is better for the business that's on them. This also requires developers to come off the "I only want to do it perfectly to 999999s", and again think about what can the business reasonably afford to do.
    - tomatotomato37 8y ago
      What they do is make it resilient to multi-hour fixes, while still keeping the light issues that look like emergencies but can be fixed by running a bat file to still go through, minimizing the work they have to do personally while still making them look like a hero. Of course this will fall apart once their manager catches on but in some monolithic organizations that could take years
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    Resilient systems will still break. They may break less, but it's impossible to anticipate every possible usage permutation of a system from here until eternity. There are tons of reliable methods to build resilient systems and they can still have their faults. What I'm talking about is resilient system or not - someone has to be there to fix it if it breaks. There is no silver bullet when it comes to software - sometimes the difference really only can be who puts the most time in. Minds require rest to function optimally, so pushing yourself to an extreme comes at a cost that gets realized down the line instead. Identifying which means of functioning comes at the greatest cost is not easy to analyze or ascertain. So working together in addition to competing is important as well. All principles of capitalism. Just, never before in history has there really been so much attention paid to the mind. Software, eesh, yep.
    - mstade 8y ago
      This is precisely why it’s difficult to sell upward – why spend time and money on something, yet still not be able to guarantee that things will work? Especially when you can roll the dice, have things work great until such time it doesn’t, and then just throw some man power on it till it’s fixed. When thinking about cost, it can be really hard to justify something you can’t really see the benefits of, until after the fact.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
dfxm12 8y ago
If you get paid by the hour and you're required to be in an office during a set period of time, then yeah, I hope you aren't working for free on the train. This is far from the only situation though... I guess I'm lucky enough that my managers have never hounded me about when I come in and leave, so if working an hour on the train means I get my work for the day done an hour early, it also means I leave the office an hour early. Yeah, maybe I could use that hour to read for fun instead, but I'd rather finish everything sooner and get on with my day sooner.
craig1f 8y ago
I don't think it's this black and white. First, I'm sure plenty of companies are basically stealing from their employees, but this is also situational. I answer emails and slack whenever I can. On the flip side, I get work from home privileges, I show up when I want, I leave when I want, and I get put on exciting projects instead of boring ones. People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients. I typically don't bill time until my laptop comes out. I'm two-minds about this. Companies really do abuse their employees and try to get all the work they can out of them. This is a problem that leads to abusive employers. But employees also look for ANY entitlement they can receive, whether or not it is useful to their professional development. This is also a problem that leads to lazy and useless employees. It's sort of a feedback loop. It's also probably very different outside of my field (and probably most people's field on this site), which is software development.
- Frondo 8y ago
  "People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients." If you own the business, you're always on, yeah. If you're a worker, this is paid work. Pinning career advancement to uncompensated work is bullshit.
  - tvh 8y ago
    Yet so common.
- Xylakant 8y ago
  > People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients. Why not? Requiring off-hour access is admitting project management failure. That’s what on-call is for, and on-call engineers and management should rotate and be paid for on-call duty. For them, it’s working hours. When I’m on call for a client, I bill _for being available_, so basically for keeping the phone on.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    "Demanding client" doesnt mean unlimited funding. i find that the most demanding ones also look most closely at their bills.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
briandear 8y ago
Most people who have answering emails as part of their job are not working for an hourly wage. The other aspect is that some of us actually like our work and want to succeed at it: we don’t see work as slavery or some kind of adversarial relationship with the “boss.” Many people actually believe in what the company is trying to do and actually care about the job. And the work has to get done at some point right? Most jobs that involve answering emails aren’t like factory jobs where you simply make as many widgets as possible during your shift and that’s is. Every email I answer “on the train” means one less thing to do when actually at the office. Which means I can take a longer lunch or just relax a bit more or just have a slightly less frenetic pace.
- shady-lady 8y ago
  > The other aspect is that some of us actually like our work and want to succeed at it: Work is work. Your employer pays you money to do work. If you do work outside of that, it doesn't mean anything other than you don't want/can't enforce a boundary between your work life and private life. Also, yet another aspect is that even more of us like our work and want to succeed at it but have been around for longer than x years where the novelty of being "always on" has worn thin. An employer taking advantage of one's lack of boundaries is bad form regardless of whether the employee can't/won't see how detrimental it can be.
  - tvh 8y ago
    Well said. As someone else said above, tying career success to off-call work is bonkers (both for the employers and the employees), yet sadly common.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  "The other aspect is that some of us actually like our work and want to succeed at it" I like my work and want to succeed at it too. Do not insinuate that someone who values their time outside of work doesn't. That is demeaning and insulting to the rest of us who have lives outside of work.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
> The question is, how did companies persuade people that they should work for free on the way into the office? That's the fun part - companies didn't, people did it to themselves. Probably started as just some people answering emails they got overnight on their morning commute. Thanks to smartphones and always on connectivity, other colleagues get a ping that there's an email. And before long you've got your employees mailing each other. I don't think there's ever been an actual company policy that codified the expectation that people should be answering company emails in their own time.
tvh 8y ago
They don't have to persuade anymore. People mostly self convinced long ago that this was acceptable and expected.
jjrh 8y ago
It's not just "on the way into the office" it's at night, it's being on call without being paid to be (expecting one to read emails after hours) Companies didn't persuade people, the tools (smart phones, laptops/home computers, fast residential network) just made it too easy and when all your peers do it it's hard for you not to.

stephengillie 8y ago

Please don't read/send email while driving. Use your bus/train time to study things that will help your career, at this job and the next. Don't just give that time away to your current employer for free - unless your employer is a charity. Edit: Even if you work for a charity, giving away your time for free may not be a good idea. ;)

iambateman 8y ago
As an employee of a charity, I don’t think working off the clock makes sense there either. ;) Charities pay for work just like anyone else. If you like, sure, make a donation. But make sure it’s formal. Otherwise you are robbing someone else of an opportunity to generously support the work AND if the “employee stretching to give” becomes organizational culture it can endanger the entire organization. Burn out is real.
- Declanomous 8y ago
  Most of my experience is with non-profit orgs, but unlike a lot of people in the NPO space I have a fair amount of for-profit experience. I think people who work for NPOs tend to burn out at even higher rates than people in for-profit orgs because they get emotionally invested in the mission, fail to set reasonable boundaries, and because they typically make less than people who work for for-profit orgs and therefore have more money related stress and fewer resources to deal with stress. Working for an NPO can be existentially rewarding, but I hear a lot of myths about how NPOs provide better work life balance, etc, and I don't think that's true at all. I have a theory that a lot of people do things in certain ways in order to keep up appearances. For instance, a lot of startups waste a lot of money on things that are 'business-y' to legitimize themselves as a 'real business'. To that extent, I find that a lot of NPOs waste a lot of resources appearing 'thrifty' (read: cheap). I've worked with a lot of NPOs that waste tons of employee time and money because they don't want to spend money because of the 'optics'. What this means is that getting anything done takes more time and energy at an NPO. My specialty is database marketing, and I've literally done thousands of experiments across millions of mailed letters. I've found that for most donors, anything that can make a letter appear 'cheaper' improves response rate and the average donation. Most people interpret similar data as people preferring more 'personalized' letters, but I think that's because there is a lot of overlap between 'low-budget' and 'human touch'. The irony is that at once place we spent more than three times as much per letter to make them appear cheaper. This mindset also applies to people who work at non-profit orgs. People would spend 3 days doing stuff by hand rather than paying $100 to have it automated. On a similar note, I was stuck with an ancient Pentium 4 for a long time because the IT department bought them used. They were eventually replaced with Core 2 Duos. They were slow as hell, which was bad enough, but if you did the math the lifetime cost was much higher than buying a new computer due in large part to how much power Pentium 4's used. Not to mention it took them forever to upgrade from CRTs, which use so much more electricity than LCDs.

perlgeek 8y ago

We have an electronic time sheet, and I've always added answering emails during commute as work time. Nobody ever complained. Maybe it's different in the UK, but I don't understand the big deal.

lbriner 8y ago
It's not a UK thing, it's a company thing. For billable companies like legal and accounting, you are more likely to bill hours wherever you are. For most others, it is "up to you" if you want to do work outside of paid hours but if you don't, maybe you won't keep up, maybe the boss won't like you etc.

wayanon 8y ago

Was expecting a mention of BMW who were forced to switch off their email servers after working hours I think after a court ruling brought by a union in Germany.

zaphar 8y ago

I absolutely consider time commuting as part of my work hours. I leave the office early and count the 45 minutes on the train as work time. Whether it's answering emails, writing some code, or working on documentation it's definitely work.

eximius 8y ago
I don't log hours so it's kind of not relevant, but I mentally count lunch, especially if with coworkers. I can't quite bring myself to count the commute (also 30-45 min here). Counting both reduces 'real' working hours considerably. Picking one or the other would be nearly equivalent anyway.

aaron695 8y ago

Why is it always the company that "steals" time from workers? I've seen plenty of time "stolen" from the company. We all know most white collar workers don't do 8 hours work. Check your emails on the train and take a long lunch with mates. Meh.

unixhero 8y ago

Of course it does. I charge hours in my in transit because I am emailing and interacting with people at work and in my client projects.

sxp62000 8y ago

If you reply to emails before 9 and after 6, you're telling your manager/client ... hey! I am at your disposal 24/7. By the way, if your boss gave you a "work laptop" you're already screwed.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Not just your manager / client, but your direct colleagues too.
- sxp62000 8y ago
  It's shocking to see people take pride in staying up all night to finish a presentation before a 7am call. We're all suckers.

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago

Does this open the door for me billing my evening shower when the design finally clicks in my head?

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Depends - what did you do at work while that design didn't click? I was on HN, not doing much work worth paying for.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  I believe the answer to that is "dealt with the thousand distractions an open office floor-plan encourages while answering intrusive emails". The shower would have been the first time all day I could think for 10 minutes uninterrupted.
stronglikedan 8y ago
I have a consultant friend that bills shower time. Of course, it's not a separate line item due to the questions that would arise, but he does include it in the total billable time.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  They must have a generous time allotment in which to bill.
  - OJFord 8y ago
    You must have a generous time allotment for your showers...
    - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
      Well yeah - it's where I do all my thinking.

PeterStuer 8y ago

After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per family on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level it was at the end of the 19th century. While per person average 'working' hours are down in large parts of what we call the Western world, woman were brought en mass into salaried employment, raising the time on the company clock for a family significantly. The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is now 'required' for many. I personally feel that the relative recent introduction of 'work from anywhere' technology for the knowledge worker class, has indeed lead to yet another expansion of salaried-time, even when no 'salary' is provided for it. We should also ask ourselves if the stance on 'working-from-home', which should be a normal evolution of the technology, hasn't been hampered by a standing tradition of externalizing the costs of commuting by companies to employees. Commuting in itself is for many parts an anachronism that lost its grounding with the introduction of personal computers and the internet. It should be seriously questioned why this is allowed to stand, when it comes at great costs to both the employee's health as well as the environment. (P.S. Before you go 'but even for knowledge workers nothing beats working together', you can be right, but do we need the 'gold-standard' of collaboration every working day now that the alternatives are for most business activities more than good enough and still getting better with each year? As in many things it is a trade off. Yet often, we see that in those trade-offs were companies are left holding the bill instead of the employee (office furniture and architecture, IT equipment, ...), the balance goes in the direction of 'good-enough' rather than the 'best-of-the-best'.)

yomly 8y ago
>After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per family on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level it was at the end of the 19th century. While per person average 'working' hours are down in large parts of what we call the Western world, woman were brought en mass into salaried employment, raising the time on the company clock for a family significantly. >The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is now 'required' for many. These two facts often make me ponder whether we are regressing as a society but simply blind to this fact because various quality of life things have become cheaper (e.g. going on holiday and electronics). Meanwhile, we are mostly collectively losing at the wealth game and I am quite convinced we are losing at the wealth game globally - despite many people's attempts to illustrate that global poverty is decreasing (I lack data and drive to prove this point sadly). As such, social mobility also seems to regressing as who your parents are seems to be more important now than it might have been 50-60 years ago - I need only to look to my parent's achievements (and their peers) to be reminded of this fact.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

adultSwim 8y ago

Commuting should count as work

megablast 8y ago
Oh no, lets not reward people who do not value their time, and choose to live further from work than others.
- 3chelon 8y ago
  I've lived where I live for 18 years. I've been in my current job less than a year. Does that justify pulling my kids out of school just before they do their exams so I can move house? Where you live is not a simple choice for many of us. History of previous jobs, family commitments, schools, house prices, etc., etc... Like lots of things, it's a compromise.
- notfromhere 8y ago
  Not everyone can afford to live in the city center or is able to freely move to be next to their job.
- syeaj 8y ago
  Then cities need to invest into noise reduction, pollution reduction, etc. Maybe it's not that people don't value their time, but rather value not walking streets which smell like trash.
- Raphmedia 8y ago
  Even living in the same city taking the subway + a bus, you can end up wasting up to 90 minutes in commute daily.
3chelon 8y ago
That's a difficult one. I have a 2 hour commute. If I treated it as work I'd only have to spend 4 hours in the office. Not sure I'd get away with that. On the flip side, having a long commute gets me preferential treatment re. remote working, so it's swings and roundabouts.
8y ago

j45 8y ago

The question I often ask clients is, are they busy doing other people's work from their mobile emails? Looking at the types of emails we send/recieve, a trend seems to emerge, some people ask a lot more question using email, and some emails require us to do a lot more answering. Today's email habits are still rooted in the blackberry culture that created it - there was no structure and framework around email use. I still believe mobile emails are more beneficial for the people asking the questions, and not so good for people who have to answer answering the questions, often on their own time to keep up. How does poor planning on someone else's part require you to reply instantly, or within the same business day? Very little should be that critical if the organization is truly-proactive. Processing several hundred emails a day used to be a norm on a few recent projects. A few trends emerged to manage sanity: - Poor emailing habits exist. Triaging is incredibly important, on top of GTD. Those 2 minute email replies can really add up, scheduling replies is important. - The more we try to get ahead and email in our off time, the more replies we recieve in a vicious cycle. The more we send emails. Our time will never scale to meet the available time of all the people we simultaneously communicate with. - I try to use mobile email only to read emails and to write as little as possible. - Where I do have to write mobile emails, especially after hours, I consider if I want to be at the top of the person's inbox or not, and that's probably best achieved by scheduling an email to go out at 7 or 8 AM instead of the night before. - The email scheduling feature in Aquamail is invaluable. I wouldn't be able to switch back to iOS without a comparable email client. Boomerang is handy too for automatic follow ups that can be scheduled at the time of sending. - Try to centralize communication as much as possible and check email 1-3 times a day. Email can be followed up on, it isn't always the case with Slack. Slack/Chats are extremely valuable for realtime input. I'd love to hear any other tips or strategies folks are using to manage their email flow.

11eleven 8y ago

I feel one of the aspects of this that's not covered is: Yes while the employer may not be able to legally force you to handle emails outside of official work hours and doing so counts as working... Depending on your job, if you don't check and reply to some time sensitive emails outside of work hours, you might a) become a roadblock on someone else's project that's due soon b) be late to respond to "emergencies" and this can affect how people perceive your overall effectiveness and performance. Of course, company culture can minimize last minute requests, unrealistic deadlines, etc. to minimize these "emergencies" that need quick replies but many don't.

ptero 8y ago
> if you don't check and reply to some time sensitive emails outside of work hours, you might a) become a roadblock on someone else's project that's due soon, ... Of course, but for the vast majority of cases the right mental model is "too bad". Whoever needs you to be available after hours needs to learn how to plan and execute his work. Emergencies happen, but those should be rare; if not, wean them off or look for another employer. Being on call all the time is not healthy long term. Today's job market is very friendly to engineers; if your company does not minimize those emergencies, consider working elsewhere.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
You could just bounce that back with "A lack of planning on your part doesn’t constitute an emergency on mine". If a project is due soon and needs your attention outside of work hours, it should've been planned earlier. Yes I know that's an ideal world etc. But how did people handle that before there was email? That's right, they didn't, and it had to wait until tomorrow.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Before email there were phones, and from speaking to older friends in manufacturing it was pretty common for people to be called at all hours of the day and night to fix critical machinery (on the phone or to attend site in person) whether officially "on call" or not. This is not a new phenomenon. Edit: Just wanted to add that I'm not trying to justify this behaviour. It was wrong to intrude into people's personal lives and expect unpaid work then and it's wrong now.

kapauldo 8y ago

Clock watchers will always unfairly be reviewed as worse employees.

alexanmathis 8y ago

Well duh. You ARE working. That's the thing

cmurf 8y ago

"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." Wernher von Braun Of course lawyers bill for research, phone calls, and emails. So do consultants. Why would considering work emails during commuting counting as work be at all a controversial? What's the contrary argument?

devmunchies 8y ago

Women joining the workforce increased the labor supply which decreased wages on the whole. This makes it so many women HAVE to work as opposed to GET to work. A double income for many families is required nowadays.

User23 8y ago
Women joining the workforce lead to a long term decrease in the labor supply. The only reason wages haven’t gone up is a massive influx of foreign born workers that keeps supply high.
- tejtm 8y ago
  ... because they were not home having babies?
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    ...that does sound like a long-term decrease in the labor supply?
  - tejtm 8y ago
    please not that this is not a rhetorical question on my part. down voting statements looking for more information/ clarification seems out of place here
- eikenberry 8y ago
  From what I've read the birth rate has long been on a gradual decline as wealth has increased. That there was no sudden drop when women went back to work, just a continuation of the trend.
  - User23 8y ago
    That doesn't appear to be true. Birth rates plummeted in the 60s and 70s[1], which is when women started to really join the work force in quantity. Perhaps the people inclined to down vote think I'm advocating for banning women from work? Please realize I'm saying no such thing, I'm simply pointing out an obvious consequence for long term labor supply that simple reasoning can deduce and the data bears out. [1]http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/18/is-u-s-fertility-at-an-all-time-low-it-depends/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/18/is-u-s-ferti...

deevolution 8y ago

If you take into consideration the near future of autonomous cars where people will be capable of working during their commute, which some people have up to 3+ hour commutes - absolutely this should count as working hours. Hopefully it also means less hours in the office.

Nasrudith 8y ago

Really these sort of metrics are missing the point in my opinion along with "employee engagement" and "focus" tracking. What they should care about is the deliverables and not some puritan pennywise pound foolish get as much toil out per dollar. IT is one classic example with the lazy sysadmin is a good sysadmin. If everything is secure and operational and all desired expansions are either met or properly analysed as not worth it then their slacking off doesn't matter.

vesak 8y ago

If your employer tracks you by the hour, then of course email while commuting is work. Also thinking about a design while taking a shower in the evening is work. Also waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep because work issues are bothering you is work. Why employers (in the knowledge business at least) track people by the hour is beyond my understanding.

noja 8y ago
Why is it not work, if your employer doesn't track you by the hour?
- vesak 8y ago
  I mean, of course it is, but if your salary is monthly-based then it's not such a big deal then. That of course implies that you can have 5 hour weeks when your time is not required as much, and get paid the same.
yacse 8y ago
From an employers point of view, tracking hours does not make sense. At least as long as we are talking about creative work, where people tend to stay longer than they would be required to, without even noticing how much time they were working. At least in Germany, working unions are fighting against not counting working hours, because it is better for the employees and is also a saftey net against related health issues. Without counting, legal rules are not enforceable and people may even work on weekends without any compensation. This also leads to the fact that managers start to expect those extra hours from everyone, and consequently see it as an lack of motivation or dedication not doing them.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  I worked as a salaried government employee for a long time. Time reporting is a key part of our business, as without it you cannot spend appropriately. Attorneys do the same thing. It’s no big deal.
deleted 8y ago

mattlondon 8y ago

I am guilty of triaging emails on the underground train in on the morning. No one seems to have mentioned my perspective: Its not that I feel compelled to do this (far from it), its more that the commute is BORING AS HELL. At least for London, the wifi and network is only available during the 30 seconds you are in a station (i.e. not in the tunnels), so more productive things that need a persistent network connection wont work very well (e.g. Duolingo, netflix etc). You cant even look out of the window since its in a tunnel the whole way! :-) The other alternative to doing emails is reading cached news articles (I actually do this a lot - load up a series of 10-15 articles before getting on the train), or desperately trying to connect to the wifi then load a webpage in the 30 second window you have before you are back in a tunnel. Or you can get paid-for Duolingo or download netflix shows the night before etc. Its all a bit of a faff though really, while your inbox is sitting there full of juicy unread emails from your colleagues in another hemisphere that you'll need to read at some point anyway .... too tempting to jump in and start triaging when your alternative is staring at the floor or the blackness outside the windows :)

Fnoord 8y ago
Duolingo? Netflix? Why aren't you replying e-mails? Tunnels are no excuse, mortal [1] [1] http://www.offlineimap.org http://www.offlineimap.org (Wink)

browsercoin 8y ago

Slack should count as work too while commuting. I'd prefer emails but now you are de facto on call when you have Slack on your phone.

Fnoord 8y ago
Problem is that not everything on Slack is... "productive"... (Though the same could be true for e-mail.)
- browsercoin 8y ago
  I'm not talking about shooting the shit but video conference calls eating up precious data, panic support channels to fight fire.... I feel like companies use Slack exactly for this reason...it tethers your employees to a very intimate possession-your smartphone and it's far more invasive than a phone call or email and your are expected to respond immediately. It has all the dynamics of any email or regular office conversation. Somebody has a grudge in the office and want to make you look bad for remote working? Call them and immediately hang up and tell managers 'so and so isn't responding in real time' or take a convo out of context where emoticons play a far more conflicting messages to the receiver. For example, somebody using a animated flashing parrot and mistaking it as a slight. I feel like Slack has been more times counter-productive than advertised.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

I disagree strongly with this statement in the article: "There's a real challenge in deciding what constitutes work," said Dr Jain, from the university's Centre for Transport and Society. "Work" is anything I would be doing while sitting at my desk in your office building. So if I'm doing that on a train or in your office they are both "work." And if my train ride takes 1.5 hours to the office and 1.5 hours home, I'll get on the train around 8AM and leave the office at 3:30 to arrive at the other end by 5PM and count that as an 8 hour work day. On the other hand, if I am in my car driving, I don't think of it as work until I can actually concentrate on doing work.

mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
Possible alternate definition: Anything that you wouldn't do if you weren't paid for it. This would include driving to the office.
- caymanjim 8y ago
  It's not reasonable to expect your employer to pay for your commute time if you don't use that commute time to work. You can work for them on the train. You shouldn't work for them on the train if you're not getting paid for it, but you're generally also not expected to work on the train. You can't work for them while you're driving. You can think of that driving time as work, but you shouldn't expect your employer to consider it work. Where you choose to live and work are up to you, and need to be factored in to the burden. Commuting is only "work" if you're expected to do something during the commute.
  - punnerud 8y ago
    In Norway you have to be paid when you ‘are available to the job’. If you are on standby the minimum pay is 1/3. If you have to work outside your normal workhours the pay is minimum 50% extra. If you are «forced» to drive, example as a consulatant normaly based in the city and have to comute longer than normaly, the comute is paid.
    - 8y ago

collyw 8y ago

Should surfing the web for a couple of minutes during work hours be deducted then?

Kluny 8y ago

I still don't understand why half the threads on HN talk about how there's not as much work anymore due to automation, and the other half talk about how people are overworked and working longer hours. We can't have UBI because that would encourage people to be lazy, but all jobs are bullshit anyway. When are we going to rise up and seize the means of production?

adultSwim 8y ago

If engineers had our own unions, we could actually have these discussions with our employers.

thx4allthestuff 8y ago

I’ve largely disconnected from email, both work and personal. I guess one day I just smelled another internal phishing campaign and decided that it would be the last I participated in. After that I informed my bosses that if they needed to reach me then to do so in team chat. The unspoken part of that was, “and if that’s a problem, then fire me, please.”

mirimir 8y ago

As a consultant, I've billed for work, regardless of where I did it. At home. On trains and planes. On the beach. In Internet cafes in Amsterdam. Why not? But on the other hand, I recall being shocked (this was some years ago) when a seriously enterprise-level customer service rep emailed me at midnight. Because, you know, I was billing for reading her message, in 15-minute blocks, but she was paid on a salary basis.