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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

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.

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.