6 ms·
Sustainable work-life balance with Personal SLA (2019)
- darkerside 6y agoA better approach might be: make sure everything you do for work is sustainable. When it's not, make sure you are letting beneficiaries know. (e.g. Yes, we're working weekends for this release, but it's for X and Y reason, and it won't happen regularly)
- Ididntdothis 6y agoOnce you start working weekends for a release it usually will become the norm. You can deal with this by putting a price tag on overwork, e.g. two times salary on weekends or comp time. Don’t give away things for free.
- BurningFrog 6y agoI'm happy to deal with emergencies 1-2 year. Things go wrong sometimes. It's never become the norm where I've worked. So I don't really have advice for that.
- darkerside 6y agoThe reason is that tech leadership is doing what I described. Making clear to involved stakeholders that this is not normal and can't be expected every time. As parent commenter has seen, it doesn't happen automatically.
- BurningFrog 6y agoYeah, I keep hearing that, but - over 10+ jobs - have never experienced it. Maybe I screen out those jobs in my searches. Or they screen me out :) My bigger point is that there are many different SW engineering worlds even in SV. You, and everyone you know, may be in the one you describe. But there are other and better ones out here. One caveat: You may have to "level up" to join some of them.
- darkerside 6y agoI believe you misunderstood my comment. I am not disagreeing with you. There are organizations that properly value people's time and make sure that overwork is both rare and rewarded. I'm lucky enough to work in one. But, even in those organizations, it doesn't just happen by itself. The management in your company is working hard to keep leadership in check and communicate your value. Because if they don't, organizational inertia will result in your team getting more and more work (or losing resources to do your existing work), no matter how great your company is. It's not magic, it's good leadership and management.
- icelancer 6y agoIf employees work on the weekends, just feed them + pay them a premium, and give them an equivalent amount of days off later in the week/month. It's pretty simple.
- Ididntdothis 6y agoIt should be simple but a lot of companies don't seem to understand that principle and prefer free overtime.
- xupybd 6y agoI've never had time off in compensation for time worked. If it's busy enough to require me to work overtime, it's too busy to take leave no matter how much I have built up.
- shostack 6y agoMany do not have the privilege, particularly now, to push back on such requests if they need their paycheck.
- Pfhreak 6y agoI believe working on the weekends is a failure, and we should treat it like any other engineering failure. Why did it happen, how can we improve things so this failure doesn't happen again. Track and assign AIs, and hold people accountable to them.
- darkerside 6y agoI think, like most things, this is dependent on circumstances. Planned weekend work (downtime needed, pre-planned release, or timing with external factors) isn't always a failure. Separate but related, an engineering team that is able to coordinate aggressive cycles on a regular basis, with built-in time to recover, is probably more productive over the long term than one that can't.
- hkt 6y agoAmen. Working more than 9-5 four days a week is a travesty. (yes, I said four)
- war1025 6y agoCan someone please enlighten me what the heck an SLA is? I skimmed through the article and felt like he teased at providing a definition several times and then never actually did.
- rrdharan 6y agoService Level Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-level_agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-level_agreement
- PunksATawnyFill 6y agoI guess some people feel all "leet" by using abbreviations without (or before) defining them and expecting everyone else to run around looking them up. It's tired and lame.
- maest 6y agoWhat does "leet" mean?
- echelon 6y ago> I guess some people feel all "leet" by using abbreviations without (or before) defining them and expecting everyone else to run around looking them up. > It's tired and lame. It's an incredibly common term we use at my workplace, and I expect many other engineering orgs use it as well. We use it not only for services ("five nines"), but also for tasks and human initiated things. It's a simple and useful stand-in for a complicated and abstract concept. I don't expect to have to explain SLAs every time they are discussed.
- lucasyvas 6y agoHaving never read it, the part from Google's SRE book is amusing in the best of ways - a perspective I had never considered in the way it was framed!
- PunksATawnyFill 6y agoDon't use an abbreviation BEFORE defining it. Come on. This is tiresome.
- xupybd 6y agoI need to get this down. Right now it's 8pm on a public holiday. I did a little over 8 hours at work between 9 and 5:30. I'm still working... (Running two long running tasks in the background so it's not high focus stuff)
- red_admiral 6y agoI like the Swiss approach to overtime. 1. It can only be demanded for exceptional circumstances, with justification. "Poor planning or lack of staff are insufficient." [1] 2. It must be compensated with 25% extra salary, or extra holiday (if the employee agrees). An employee cannot waive their right to this. 3. Even then, there is a limit by law on the number of extra hours you can do in a year, [2] says 170 hours per calendar year. Got a big crisis in January? Employer had better start planning ahead so everyone's time budget isn't exhausted by December. 4. Like many countries, Switzerland has an exception for "management". So you don't call your cleaner a "facility manager", the Swiss law specifies this as "management AND earning at least CHF 120'000 a year". [3] For context, according to expatica [4] the OECD calculated the Swiss average wage in 2017 as 62.3K. I personally think the principle that you cannot be expected to work "all hours that are necessary" unless you're paid around twice the average salary is brilliant and gets rid of a lot of potential abuse of this rule. [1] https://www.legalexpatgeneva.com/employment-law/contractual-statutory-overtime/ https://www.legalexpatgeneva.com/employment-law/contractual-... [2] https://www.ch.ch/en/overtime-and-extra-hours/ https://www.ch.ch/en/overtime-and-extra-hours/ [3] https://www.kmu.admin.ch/kmu/en/home/concrete-know-how/personnel/employment-law/recording-working-hours.html https://www.kmu.admin.ch/kmu/en/home/concrete-know-how/perso... [4] https://www.expatica.com/ch/working/employment-law/switzerland-minimum-wage-995110/ https://www.expatica.com/ch/working/employment-law/switzerla...
- tsbinz 6y agoIf you look at [3], you'll see that it has been simplified and "manager" isn't required anymore - if you are flexible in your working hours and earn 120k+ (which isn't that much - if you work in tech or at a bank you'll likely earn more) the company can agree with you to not record working hours (there's still legal limits to how much you can work, of course) - this is relatively new, since 2016
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]