12 ms·

When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

138 points by keyboardJones 3y ago

mydriasis 3y ago
I try and make a point as often as I can of drawing the line between work time and personal time. Unfortunately being a programmer, my job is also one of my favorite things to do... so I often find myself eyeballing slack messages about the latest interesting problem the team is solving.
swayvil 3y ago
If it's a truly worthy riddle then you will spend all waking hours solving it. You will feed it your "whole soul". This is, of course, troubling in retrospect and warrants mulling.
NoahECampbell 3y ago
I mean this isn't actually a large problem, at least in programming where I am familiar with a lot of trends. It is very common for people to immediately sign off for the day the minute their work day/shift is over and not do anything else after. If people want to do that then sure they can, but they also trade off the ability to earn raises and promotions by doing the bare minimum. Getting a work-life balance is important absolutely, but the answer is also not to only work the bare minimum you have to in order to get paid, especially in fields like software development where your job is not to write code, but to deliver a product that currently requires code to be written. When something breaks in software development, you don't wait 12 hours for someone to get back on shift, someone does need to be on that as soon as possible, since if that happens with something as important as say google or AWS, it breaks the infrastructure of most things, certainly most important things, on the internet.
- mjmsmith 3y ago
  If people work hard in the hours that they're paid for, that is not "the bare minimum".
  - NoahECampbell 3y ago
    If something breaks and suddenly no customer can use the product and its 5pm and the engineers say "Welp sorry, my shift ended a few minutes ago so I'll fix it tomorrow!", that is in fact the bare minimum. If an engineer does that, they can be expected to not be earning any raises for actually doing what they're supposed to do, which is not to sit at a desk for a few hours a day, but to deliver a product
    - danwee 3y ago
      If the company doesn't have a decent on-call plan for such issues that happen outside of regular hours, then why on earth should I be the one who has to fix that? The company is not making me a favor by giving me a job, nor I am making a favor to the company either; it's just a regular business transaction and contracts matter. If my contract says 40h/week, then why the company should expect more? If my contract says that I'm getting paid X per week for doing on-call, then sure it's my job to fix shit outside working hours. If you tell that "you break it, you fix it", I say "agree, but during working hours" > which is not to sit at a desk for a few hours a day, but to deliver a product Please, let's be professionals. You work is whatever your contract says (which yes, it usually says "to deliver a product" but it also says "40h/week"... at least mine says so)
    - sdf4j 3y ago
      No. If the product needs to be available 24/7 then is sensible to expect a budget to do that. As in every other industry, you have around-the-sun resources allocated, proper oncall shifts, and whatever other safe net you can think of. Expecting a proverbial engineer to jump and fix things adhoc is poor business planning and fantasy-football level management.
    - zerodensity 3y ago
      It's only the engineers problem if the engineer has signed a contract specifically stating that they have to work overtime in emergencies. If not then it's the company's problem.
    - kcb 3y ago
      The solution to this is proper support chains and on call schedules. Not to have every engineer on call 24/7. If your application is so mission critical, just expecting someone will always pick up the phone is irresponsible.
- mikrl 3y ago
  That sounds exactly like something an adversarial participant in the SWE market would say to make me burn out and drop out. Keep that forked tongue in your mouth!
  - NoahECampbell 3y ago
    I mean if you can't handle working when something breaks, you probably shouldn't be working there in the first place. Work is.....well work.
    - mikrl 3y ago
      I will defer to my employment contract and stated hours of work. You do honour contracts… right? More people than you think don’t, especially if the other party is less powerful and the jackal thinks they can get away with it.
    - bombolo 3y ago
      Being on call is scheduled and paid.
      - daok 3y ago
        Many places is not. They hang the carrot of bonus, stocks and promotion...
- edu 3y ago
  You should work hard and be productive during your regular work schedule, not doing that is a breach of contract. But expecting to put more hours than required regularly, it's also a breach in contract. If you need to be available outside of regulars hours, you must be paid. If something must be up 24/7h, hire more people and set proper work shifts so it's covered. Raises and promotions should come if you do good work, not if you work longer hours. Which will probably lead to burnout or depression. When I go to a restaurant and order a hamburger, I don't expect to get a sirloin.
  - NoahECampbell 3y ago
    I never said anything about not paying people for working more?
    - bamfly 3y ago
      > It is very common for people to immediately sign off for the day the minute their work day/shift is over and not do anything else after. If people want to do that then sure they can, but they also trade off the ability to earn raises and promotions by doing the bare minimum. So, when this happens, the employer is offering more money if the employee continues working? The employer is asking them to do that, and employees are saying "no, thanks" to the extra money? The way you wrote your whole post really reads like you aren't talking about paid overtime.
      - NoahECampbell 3y ago
        So what you're saying is you made an assumption about what I said, took that assumption and wrapped your entire thing about it without knowing it was true. I recommend taking things at a surface level and not trying to read 50 layers into it
        bamfly 3y ago
        I am reading the surface level, in which your described compensation for overtime work is an advantage at promotion time. Again: are these workers being offered overtime pay, and refusing it?
- _ZeD_ 3y ago
  [flagged]
- lopis 3y ago
  Please, enough with this mentality. You don't need to work overtime or sacrifice your work-life balance to grow and earn raises or bonuses. For anyone reading that is working in a company that works like this, just know that there's a better world out there. Your brain can't focus for 12 hours a day no matter how much you try to convince yourself, and the more you push it the worse. It's ok to be paid to be on-call, but that's totally different than working extra hours for free to earn your CEO a big fat bonus.
  - NoahECampbell 3y ago
    I did say work-life balance is important, but also you are not being paid to sit at a desk for a few hours a day. If you work more then you should get paid more, I never said anything about working more for free, so please stick to what I was actually saying? Also try reading a book called Stolen Focus regarding the human brain's ability to focus, which is diminishing due to people actually not working on expanding their focus
    - danwee 3y ago
      > If you work more then you should get paid more I guess you meant "if you produce more then you should get paid more", right? If so, yes I agree. But if you imply that just by working 25% more hours peer week than my peers I should get paid more, well, that's idiotic (maybe I'm working more because I cannot be as good as others who need less time to do the same?). At least in IT, working more doesn't necessarily mean to produce (things of value) more.
    - lopis 3y ago
      > If you work more then you should get paid more Yes but the habit of working overtime in companies often leads to others feeling like their are "just doing the bare minimum" as you say. Working 8 hours and being productive throughout the week is not the "bare minimum". Companies that encourage people to work overtime are usually toxic places to work on that see jobs as a privilege instead of a partnership. In my workplace we strive to make sure that people don't over do it, regardless of being paid. You can't be on-call forever, and you can't work overtime forever. That's just not healthy and sets bad examples to juniors. Thanks for the book recommendation, although that's missing the point.
- mathogre 3y ago
  From 2010 through 2020, I was working as a mathematician, programmer, analyst, researcher full time on an odd schedule, Tuesday through Saturday. I was also working on a side hustle. I was doing fashion photography as a hobby, with the intention of going full time. When the work week ended, my photography week began. Work was on its own computer and I never included any work communications in any of my personal devices. When we hit lockdown, everything was done from home. That said, they gave us iPhones for our regular telephone communications. My time is mine. I earned raises and promotions, and had benefits based on my desires. I worked my schedule. If someone scheduled a meeting during a time when I was off, I would discuss that with the person. If I was needed, I'd attend; otherwise, it was my time off. Yes we had Outlook, Teams, Slack for communications. I would stay connected during the work week, but when I was off, it was my time. My supervisors had ways to contact me in an emergency, and I let them know it was okay to do so in an emergency. The fashion work ended, but it was one heck of an adventure! It was my time.
- danwee 3y ago
  There is a huge difference between "doing the bare minimum" and working outside of your regular working hours. One can do nothing at all working 10h/day, while another can provide high value working 9-5 (or even less). Obviously, there are people who work 10h/day and produce high value as well, but it's not a requirement and most sane tech companies out there do not expect that from you.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  You are not getting a promotion for working extra hard. Google and Amazon can afford to staff 24 hours a day if the service requires it. The way you get promotions is through networking. You are better off spending time on the golf course. The next level isn't about working harder throughout the night. That's code monkey thinking. It's about being able to understand and communicate big picture while fitting in personally. The midnight jolt cola sessions leave you tired, sicker looking and sounding crazy to the suits above. Show them you can do the new job don't show them you can do the job of two of you.
- tristor 3y ago
  The idea that someone who leaves work when their day is over is "doing the bare minimum" is an incredibly toxic mentality, and it leads to burnout but doesn't get you ahead. I know from personal experience. Based on your post history it seems you're still a student and have never worked in a professional capacity. I highly recommend you introspect about this and disabuse yourself of the notion that you will in any way be rewarded for working unpaid overtime, which is exactly what it is when you are in tech. It's something a lot of people don't realize, but many technical roles are exempt from overtime, even when hourly, /by federal law/ in the US. Most roles are also salaried. You gain no direct benefit from working more hours, and it has many fringe downsides and no upsides. Working unpaid overtime skews capacity planning and budget cycles, and leads to teams which are consistently understaffed and under-resourced without reduced expectations. Being "a hero" is actually bad for yourself, your team, and your company. Now that I'm involved in budget processes, resource allocation, and prioritization much more heavily than I was in the past as an IC engineer, I can see exactly how damaging this behavior is. In /reasonable/ companies, capacity planning is usually based on trend analysis of past completed story points and sizing, averaged against headcount. Being "a hero" fucks up the average and messes up capacity planning. In unreasonable companies, ignorant managers will happily work you to burnout if it helps them drive a sale and take credit for it without any care for your health and wellbeing. Burn out isn't something you can fix by taking a vacation, it's a serious serious problem that can have life-altering repercussions. I have so many acquaintances over the year in tech that developed substance abuse problems, serious mental health conditions, and in many cases had their lives fall apart because they inappropriately managed their work/life balance and burned out. You should really reconsider sharing advice when you have never actually had any experience. I realize in your 20s you think you know everything and you're invincible, but I'd posit you consider an alternative, which is that you don't know shit and you too one day will get old and die. Perhaps you should re-prioritize before you pay the toll.
jader201 3y ago
I’ve been working from home 100% for going on 10 years. I’ve had a mix of experiences re: disconnecting from work, and three things that I believe are key: 1. Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door. Don’t go in that room except when you’re working. If you work from a laptop, (mostly) never take it out of that room. Obviously some don’t have this luxury, but if you do and you’re not doing this, I highly suggest trying it. 2. Remove work communications from your phone. If you have a separate email account for work (highly likely), remove it from your phone. If you have Slack or some other chat app installed for work, remove it or remove your work account. If your company truly cares about a healthy work-life balance, this shouldn’t be an issue. If you need it for oncall, only install it then, then remove it. 3. Stick to a schedule. Log on and off about the same time each day. Don't jump on work for an hour or two here and there throughout the whole day. Log on, put your time in, log off. Don't work on weekends. There are times when you may need to put in extra and/or odd hours, but this should be the exception, not the norm. With these three things in place, I am — quite successfully — able to get the pre-smartphone feel of disconnecting from work while working from home.
- athenot 3y ago
  Point 1 is very important, I can confirm with also a decade of doing this. One note I'd like to add is pay attention to your lighting, have a special "work-mode" set of lights that you turn on when you work and then turn off when you are no longer working. I use the same work desk for non work stuff, but I turn off my "office lights" and it's a completely different vibe. Everyone's tastes will be different but as for me, these are my preferences: - Office lighting: at least 20k lumens of 5000K light with high CRI. For me I like to approximate the brightness of daylight. It's especially useful during the cloudy days of winter. My office is in a basement so the cheapest way to do that is string lights (like for outdoor patios), but with high quality LED bulbs. - Personal lighting mode: regular house lighting, 3000K (so skewing towards a more yellowish, incandescent-like light). I still enjoy high CRI because I can't stand things looking bland but that's less important. More spot lights, less ambient light.
  - spacemadness 3y ago
ttul 3y ago
In the 1990s, even as a software developer, I never answered emails after working hours. Why? Because we didn’t have access to the office mail server outside the office. It was physically impossible to work from home. Add to this the fact that I didn’t have a cell phone or a pager, so when I left the office, nobody could get in touch with me even if they wanted to. On reflection, the separation of home and work was so natural that everyone took it for granted. Time moved more slowly. You felt more free because you could just disappear for an hour by going for a drive or a walk. We don’t realize what we have lost.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  In the late '80s, my coworkers would work at night by answering emails (proprietary network) and looking through code on hardware supplied by the employer.
- ghaff 3y ago
  There's a flip side to that though. It also meant that, when I was "in the office," I pretty much needed to be IN THE OFFICE. I couldn't really disappear during the workday on a regular workday by going for a walk or being available at home for this that or the other thing without making specific arrangements. I had the flexibility to do that from time to time but it wasn't a casual I'll be in my home office while the contractor is doing stuff. It's a tradeoff but, for me, not a bad one overall. No one expects me to jump into action at 9 at night but if I'm watching the TV and can solve someone's problem in 5 minutes I can do so--if I feel like it.
  - commandlinefan 3y ago
    > when I was "in the office," I pretty much needed to be IN THE OFFICE Well, we're getting back to that anyway... they're pretty much demanding that we all drive 45 minutes to sit at a hoteling spot that we reserved ahead of time in a noisy open office so that we can get on zoom calls with our remote coworkers all day (and be asked to "please mute because your background noise is very distracting") - and then drive home and still be available "after hours". Glad I spent years of my life getting an advanced degree for this, I guess.
policepost 3y ago
Don't connect your phone to work. Close your laptop at 5. Walk away. Keep to a standard schedule.
- spacemadness 3y ago
  Seeing the amount of people that answer late night chats from people in other timezones upsets me. What upsets me more are the people on vacation answering chats as soon as they’re pinged. That behavior changes work culture and expectations the more it happens. Bad managers love this sort of thing. I learned a long time ago that to keep my sanity I need a wall up between work hours and my personal life.
  - doublerabbit 3y ago
    Its not always that easy. Enterprise just doesn't work that way. Where multiple timezones come in to play you need to be around. If I need email comms for an important document regarding to something super tight. I can't just wait till tomorrow. Information can be crucial at times and emails can cause break down in communications. Spreadsheets need to be spread and PowerPoints need to be pointed. Work yes, you can step back from, communication you can't just shut off.
    - spacemadness 3y ago
      Sure but this is why I don’t work in that field and neither do these people.
    - DeltaCoast 3y ago
      Is there anyone on your team that just isn't around? Keeps a strict schedule - I've found that even working across time zones with tight deadlines, some people just have a hard stop.
      - doublerabbit 3y ago
        Its not the matter of my team. Its more talking to the VPs of other department's.
msla 3y ago
Medical people who take call had work follow them home a long time before Generation X.
- riffraff 3y ago
  It's a completely different thing. My father had on-call in his job for decades in the last century, that did not mean he was constantly thinking about his job, it meant he could be reached to go if anything bad happened. Being reachable via phone is not really the same as checking slack notifications every ten minutes.
nofinator 3y ago
As someone in their 40s, the Slate article he links to was fun to read. There's a discussion of it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402076
intrasight 3y ago
I finished my masters (wrote thesis) while working full time. That was in 1990. It was pretty hard. Also had a baby at the time. My father did his bachelor's degree an NYU while working full time. He's told me how hard that was. My GF got her law degree as a single mom with two young kids at home. She win's for hardest. I have a separate work phone that stays on my desk unless I'm going to be away from my desk during work hours - then I take it with me.
JohnFen 3y ago
> There’s a lot about early 2000s culture I’m not eager to excavate, but this idea of the constrained workday certainly seems worthy of nostalgia. It's not nostalgia to me. Except when working on my own businesses or a real emergency, my work ends at the end of the workday. It always has, and that has never changed. Working outside of work hours is a choice, and one that I mostly choose not to do for other people.
donatj 3y ago
So as someone who has worked as a developer for 15+ years now, this is an honest question. What kind of things are you getting emails about after hours that can’t wait until tomorrow? I have heard these horror stories for years but never experienced any of it. Everyone who would be sending me email wants to be off work as much as I do. They’re not working after hours so neither am I. Even when I worked for an agency earlier in my career I can count on two hands the number of times I was contacted after hours, and it was usually an emergency like some clients database imploded.
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  Enterprise works different hours. If I need to relay something important and where email could cause broken communication, I need to work after hours. East Coast in five hours behind of me. West Coast is eight. If we have the regulators chasing us upon an urgent thing you need to be have the information ready for the next day. Unfortunately the whole "don't email after work" can only be applied to roles where staff are all within the reasonable timezone.
  - donatj 3y ago
    Huh, so the whole timezone thing might put me at a huge advantage working in the Midwest? We have people on the east and west coast but I'm at most 2 hours off from them.
    - doublerabbit 3y ago
      Probably. I'm in the UK. The midwestern folk have always been the most pleasant to talk too.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    > regulators chasing us Unless I've got serious equity the regulators are chasing you, make it worth my while to solve your problem.
    - 3y ago
ghusto 3y ago
It's alright for us oldies who already have firm boundaries on this kind of thing, but the new batch could use our support here. Always-contactable is becoming (has become?) normalised, and it's just not on. My practical advice: - Do not put Slack / work e-mail / any comms to do with work on your personal phone. When they ask "why don't you have X on your phone", the answer is that you have a security policy to keep your personal accounts safe, but if they'd like to buy you a work phone, and pay for the contract, you'd consider carrying it. Which leads me to ... - Establish whether you are being paid for on-call. If not, then you are not on-call - "I sent you a message", isn't the same as "I spoke with you and made sure you understood the message I relayed outside of work hours" I realise that these things are easier here in Europe than in the U.S.A. where labour laws are a little less fleshed out, but well, I can't help there :P
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
Indeed. Work fills the time allotted to it. If you know (even subconsciously) that you can take work home with you, it becomes easier to give yourself permission to dilly-dally during work hours. And it becomes easier for everyone to dilly-dally at work during work hours and in such a way that they feel less guilty disrupting others because, hey, you can just work later just like I can, right? This is especially true when you are young and single. Some people have families and they do not have the time to drag out their tasks until the late hours of the night because of the severe consequences of neglecting their other responsibilities. Young people are also often under the delusion that only the moment exists, and that they will live forever and stay young forever. Nope, you only ever get older and you will be old sooner than you realize. And then you'll be leaving annoying comments like this one in the comment section. But even single people should be able to appreciate how stretching things out means you can do less with your time. It's not like you fill those in-between moments with valuable activity. You usually procrastinate doing worthless things. Besides, task switching isn't free. You have to build up context which allows sustained deep work to take place. We've lost the culture of maturity and seriousness. FOMO is a symptom of that. Self-promotion and social media are a symptom of that. We prefer engaging in shallow put-ons instead of being adults.
jrockway 3y ago
I kind of like work following me home. It lets you get a foot into those arguments about how "you don't have a real job, because I have to go to a coal mine and extract coal for 8 hours a day and you just sit in front of a computer". You can respond, "yeah, but the work never ends! that's what they pay us for."
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tobyjsullivan 3y ago
We’re witnessing a categorical shift in how people sell their time. Once upon a time, maybe a hundred years ago, people worked “days”. This was a product of the available technology at the time. The average labourer didn’t have a pocket watch to know exactly what hour it was to clock in and out. If someone worked Tuesday, they worked from sun up to sun down. They got paid “a day’s wage”. As time-keeping technology became more prevalent, people started working hours, not days. People started to work “8 a.m. to 5 p.m.” In this period, the constraint was now commuting. The average person lives approximately 30 minutes travel from their work and this has held roughly true for most of history. If you need to travel to work, you’d better earn enough hours’ wage to make it worth it. Now we’re seeing something new as commuting evaporates. People are working on the order of minutes. E.g., “I have a 30-minute meeting at 2 p.m., then I’m making lunch for the kids. After that, I’ll put 60 minutes into project X before the repair guy comes by to fix the oven.” To get the same work done, people are starting to distribute it across a full waking day (even if subconsciously). Our systems and ideas haven’t caught up to this new world yet. We aren’t earning “a minute’s wage”. But it’s hard to not see the progression now that I’ve noticed it.
- DeltaCoast 3y ago
  Are you saying now people are no longer working "8am to 5pm" because the commute is no longer the boundary? I'm not sure I follow.
SomeRndName11 3y ago
This is not when work follows you, this is when JOB that follows you. Work is something you enjoy, job is something you make only for money.
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quantumstar4k 3y ago
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pmontra 3y ago
> But what would you do when you had work emails? This is probably unfair because I'm self employed but: My customers are on Slack so I don't have much mails going on with them. I have Slack on my laptop and my tablet but I didn't install it on my phone. They know that if I'm offline on Slack they can whatsapp me or call me. That rarely happens, especially the phone call. Not every year. I check my mail a few times per day. It's a very long time since I disabled push notifications of new mail message. Nearly all of them would be for automatic notifications of events. This means that when I'm not easily reachable if I'm not working unless my customers really want to contact me. Apparently this doesn't bother them. I've been going on like this for at least 10 years. I wonder what we used before slack, maybe Skype: I remember many more Skype chats and calls. Meet and Slack replaced nearly all of them. Actually Skype screen sharing is better than theirs: it can be zoomed and gets closer to be full screen. Finally, I don't have anybody to compete with inside my company, because my company it's me.
makeitdouble 3y ago
> When work was done at work, and there was no chance of continuing your labors at home, your job didn’t seem nearly as all-consuming or onerous . Working as a software engineer in the early 00s, when you had no chance of continuing labor at home, you'd stay at the office way later and potentially miss the last train home. I'm sure there were better and less demanding companies, but the picture depicted in the article is IMO way too rosy. In several companies I've had months where my extra hours' pay litteraly doubled my base salary as we stuck in the office to meet crazy tight deadlines.
alexpotato 3y ago
I remember reading the following quote (origin lost to me): "Look at photos of businessmen on the streets of New York in the late 1890s. Then compare them to photos of people today. One of the first things you'll notice is how little they are carrying e.g. no briefcase, laptop bag etc. This is because in those days if you left the office there was no expectation of doing work. Everything you would need to be productive only existed in your office. Plus, you were completely unreachable once you stepped outside so why bring anything work related?" Now, sure, a messenger could be sent to find you at lunch and you could argue that a business lunch is still 'work' but I've always like the idea of "out of the office, out of touch".
dopylitty 3y ago
It’s really time for office workers to unionize to demand basic rights like: - Ability to disconnect after work - Explicit pay for any after hours work (no more salary workers being forced to work 24/7) - Limits to hours worked per week - Meal breaks (no being forced to eat lunch while on videoconference ) - Safe work environments with minimum distance between workers and air flow / filtering requirements
- n4r9 3y ago
  A lot of this is standard EU worker's rights.
dang 3y ago
Recent thread about the article this one points to: Life before cellphones: The after-work activities of young people in 2002 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402076 - June 2023 (138 comments)
pjmlp 3y ago
At least in most European countries, if you're answering emails or phone calls outside work hours, that is on you.
Simulacra 3y ago
Working from home 100% felt like work followed me from room to room.
nuancebydefault 3y ago
I started working as sw dev in 1998. I remember being quite exhausted after work. Had a dial up connection at home, mostly used for chatting and napster, but I also continued working after hours, either on pc or laptop. There were floppies and cdrw's, so it was certainly possible to take work home or homework to work. Bottom line is that if you are very much invested in tech or work, it can be exhausting, even without any direct line to work. I dreamt about being connected to the internet wirelessly and roaming. As soon as that came in our pocket, it became handy (you can look up anything at any time) but also addictive. What i want to say... It's not the tech itself that supposedly made things worse, it is the habits that you make from them. If you tell your boss that you will not respond after hours or won't work late hours, that would take courage but today that is still plausible. Work/life balance should be a personally checked boundary, it takes practice and patience to get it right, no matter of whic era of tech.
kashunstva 3y ago
In some fields, if you choose to not allow work to follow you home, you have to be at peace with not having certain opportunities. That horse is already out of the barn. My wife is an academic; and there are two parallel careers going on with her. First, the work of the day. Then there’s “homework” - Zoom committee meetings, reviewing papers as journal editor, constant, year-round. Possibly Cal Newport has discovered something that most of the academy has not. But much of academic work and politics of the academy goes on after hours. I’d imagine other fields are similar.
Nellyz 3y ago
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carlotte 3y ago
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eggy 3y ago
I miss those days! I had them from the 80s on after high school. You did focus more while at work with a sort of weekend mentality when 5 or 6 pm rolled around. Now, I run my second company with a single phone with my personal number on it and an eSIM for my business number. If I have told clients I will be away, I simply filter text, email, and calls by the account and/or SIM they come in on. It's not the same, but it buys me peace of mind not to jump on my phone or laptop. I am very honest to clients about stepping away and if I will be available in off hours. I started studying for my CDL, because at age 59, I was actually considering taking 100k to 150k driving a 25 to 50 ft long fuel truck 35 to 45 hours a week and dropping out or tuning out of tech. Working retirement!

138 points by keyboardJones 3y ago

I try and make a point as often as I can of drawing the line between work time and personal time. Unfortunately being a programmer, my job is also one of my favorite things to do... so I often find myself eyeballing slack messages about the latest interesting problem the team is solving.

swayvil 3y ago

If it's a truly worthy riddle then you will spend all waking hours solving it. You will feed it your "whole soul". This is, of course, troubling in retrospect and warrants mulling.

NoahECampbell 3y ago

I mean this isn't actually a large problem, at least in programming where I am familiar with a lot of trends. It is very common for people to immediately sign off for the day the minute their work day/shift is over and not do anything else after. If people want to do that then sure they can, but they also trade off the ability to earn raises and promotions by doing the bare minimum. Getting a work-life balance is important absolutely, but the answer is also not to only work the bare minimum you have to in order to get paid, especially in fields like software development where your job is not to write code, but to deliver a product that currently requires code to be written. When something breaks in software development, you don't wait 12 hours for someone to get back on shift, someone does need to be on that as soon as possible, since if that happens with something as important as say google or AWS, it breaks the infrastructure of most things, certainly most important things, on the internet.

mjmsmith 3y ago
If people work hard in the hours that they're paid for, that is not "the bare minimum".
- NoahECampbell 3y ago
  If something breaks and suddenly no customer can use the product and its 5pm and the engineers say "Welp sorry, my shift ended a few minutes ago so I'll fix it tomorrow!", that is in fact the bare minimum. If an engineer does that, they can be expected to not be earning any raises for actually doing what they're supposed to do, which is not to sit at a desk for a few hours a day, but to deliver a product
  - danwee 3y ago
    If the company doesn't have a decent on-call plan for such issues that happen outside of regular hours, then why on earth should I be the one who has to fix that? The company is not making me a favor by giving me a job, nor I am making a favor to the company either; it's just a regular business transaction and contracts matter. If my contract says 40h/week, then why the company should expect more? If my contract says that I'm getting paid X per week for doing on-call, then sure it's my job to fix shit outside working hours. If you tell that "you break it, you fix it", I say "agree, but during working hours" > which is not to sit at a desk for a few hours a day, but to deliver a product Please, let's be professionals. You work is whatever your contract says (which yes, it usually says "to deliver a product" but it also says "40h/week"... at least mine says so)
  - sdf4j 3y ago
    No. If the product needs to be available 24/7 then is sensible to expect a budget to do that. As in every other industry, you have around-the-sun resources allocated, proper oncall shifts, and whatever other safe net you can think of. Expecting a proverbial engineer to jump and fix things adhoc is poor business planning and fantasy-football level management.
  - zerodensity 3y ago
    It's only the engineers problem if the engineer has signed a contract specifically stating that they have to work overtime in emergencies. If not then it's the company's problem.
  - kcb 3y ago
    The solution to this is proper support chains and on call schedules. Not to have every engineer on call 24/7. If your application is so mission critical, just expecting someone will always pick up the phone is irresponsible.
mikrl 3y ago
That sounds exactly like something an adversarial participant in the SWE market would say to make me burn out and drop out. Keep that forked tongue in your mouth!
- NoahECampbell 3y ago
  I mean if you can't handle working when something breaks, you probably shouldn't be working there in the first place. Work is.....well work.
  - mikrl 3y ago
    I will defer to my employment contract and stated hours of work. You do honour contracts… right? More people than you think don’t, especially if the other party is less powerful and the jackal thinks they can get away with it.
  - bombolo 3y ago
    Being on call is scheduled and paid.
    - daok 3y ago
      Many places is not. They hang the carrot of bonus, stocks and promotion...
edu 3y ago
You should work hard and be productive during your regular work schedule, not doing that is a breach of contract. But expecting to put more hours than required regularly, it's also a breach in contract. If you need to be available outside of regulars hours, you must be paid. If something must be up 24/7h, hire more people and set proper work shifts so it's covered. Raises and promotions should come if you do good work, not if you work longer hours. Which will probably lead to burnout or depression. When I go to a restaurant and order a hamburger, I don't expect to get a sirloin.
- NoahECampbell 3y ago
  I never said anything about not paying people for working more?
  - bamfly 3y ago
    > It is very common for people to immediately sign off for the day the minute their work day/shift is over and not do anything else after. If people want to do that then sure they can, but they also trade off the ability to earn raises and promotions by doing the bare minimum. So, when this happens, the employer is offering more money if the employee continues working? The employer is asking them to do that, and employees are saying "no, thanks" to the extra money? The way you wrote your whole post really reads like you aren't talking about paid overtime.
    - NoahECampbell 3y ago
      So what you're saying is you made an assumption about what I said, took that assumption and wrapped your entire thing about it without knowing it was true. I recommend taking things at a surface level and not trying to read 50 layers into it
      - bamfly 3y ago
        I am reading the surface level, in which your described compensation for overtime work is an advantage at promotion time. Again: are these workers being offered overtime pay, and refusing it?
_ZeD_ 3y ago
[flagged]
lopis 3y ago
Please, enough with this mentality. You don't need to work overtime or sacrifice your work-life balance to grow and earn raises or bonuses. For anyone reading that is working in a company that works like this, just know that there's a better world out there. Your brain can't focus for 12 hours a day no matter how much you try to convince yourself, and the more you push it the worse. It's ok to be paid to be on-call, but that's totally different than working extra hours for free to earn your CEO a big fat bonus.
- NoahECampbell 3y ago
  I did say work-life balance is important, but also you are not being paid to sit at a desk for a few hours a day. If you work more then you should get paid more, I never said anything about working more for free, so please stick to what I was actually saying? Also try reading a book called Stolen Focus regarding the human brain's ability to focus, which is diminishing due to people actually not working on expanding their focus
  - danwee 3y ago
    > If you work more then you should get paid more I guess you meant "if you produce more then you should get paid more", right? If so, yes I agree. But if you imply that just by working 25% more hours peer week than my peers I should get paid more, well, that's idiotic (maybe I'm working more because I cannot be as good as others who need less time to do the same?). At least in IT, working more doesn't necessarily mean to produce (things of value) more.
  - lopis 3y ago
    > If you work more then you should get paid more Yes but the habit of working overtime in companies often leads to others feeling like their are "just doing the bare minimum" as you say. Working 8 hours and being productive throughout the week is not the "bare minimum". Companies that encourage people to work overtime are usually toxic places to work on that see jobs as a privilege instead of a partnership. In my workplace we strive to make sure that people don't over do it, regardless of being paid. You can't be on-call forever, and you can't work overtime forever. That's just not healthy and sets bad examples to juniors. Thanks for the book recommendation, although that's missing the point.
mathogre 3y ago
From 2010 through 2020, I was working as a mathematician, programmer, analyst, researcher full time on an odd schedule, Tuesday through Saturday. I was also working on a side hustle. I was doing fashion photography as a hobby, with the intention of going full time. When the work week ended, my photography week began. Work was on its own computer and I never included any work communications in any of my personal devices. When we hit lockdown, everything was done from home. That said, they gave us iPhones for our regular telephone communications. My time is mine. I earned raises and promotions, and had benefits based on my desires. I worked my schedule. If someone scheduled a meeting during a time when I was off, I would discuss that with the person. If I was needed, I'd attend; otherwise, it was my time off. Yes we had Outlook, Teams, Slack for communications. I would stay connected during the work week, but when I was off, it was my time. My supervisors had ways to contact me in an emergency, and I let them know it was okay to do so in an emergency. The fashion work ended, but it was one heck of an adventure! It was my time.
danwee 3y ago
There is a huge difference between "doing the bare minimum" and working outside of your regular working hours. One can do nothing at all working 10h/day, while another can provide high value working 9-5 (or even less). Obviously, there are people who work 10h/day and produce high value as well, but it's not a requirement and most sane tech companies out there do not expect that from you.
ipaddr 3y ago
You are not getting a promotion for working extra hard. Google and Amazon can afford to staff 24 hours a day if the service requires it. The way you get promotions is through networking. You are better off spending time on the golf course. The next level isn't about working harder throughout the night. That's code monkey thinking. It's about being able to understand and communicate big picture while fitting in personally. The midnight jolt cola sessions leave you tired, sicker looking and sounding crazy to the suits above. Show them you can do the new job don't show them you can do the job of two of you.
tristor 3y ago
The idea that someone who leaves work when their day is over is "doing the bare minimum" is an incredibly toxic mentality, and it leads to burnout but doesn't get you ahead. I know from personal experience. Based on your post history it seems you're still a student and have never worked in a professional capacity. I highly recommend you introspect about this and disabuse yourself of the notion that you will in any way be rewarded for working unpaid overtime, which is exactly what it is when you are in tech. It's something a lot of people don't realize, but many technical roles are exempt from overtime, even when hourly, /by federal law/ in the US. Most roles are also salaried. You gain no direct benefit from working more hours, and it has many fringe downsides and no upsides. Working unpaid overtime skews capacity planning and budget cycles, and leads to teams which are consistently understaffed and under-resourced without reduced expectations. Being "a hero" is actually bad for yourself, your team, and your company. Now that I'm involved in budget processes, resource allocation, and prioritization much more heavily than I was in the past as an IC engineer, I can see exactly how damaging this behavior is. In /reasonable/ companies, capacity planning is usually based on trend analysis of past completed story points and sizing, averaged against headcount. Being "a hero" fucks up the average and messes up capacity planning. In unreasonable companies, ignorant managers will happily work you to burnout if it helps them drive a sale and take credit for it without any care for your health and wellbeing. Burn out isn't something you can fix by taking a vacation, it's a serious serious problem that can have life-altering repercussions. I have so many acquaintances over the year in tech that developed substance abuse problems, serious mental health conditions, and in many cases had their lives fall apart because they inappropriately managed their work/life balance and burned out. You should really reconsider sharing advice when you have never actually had any experience. I realize in your 20s you think you know everything and you're invincible, but I'd posit you consider an alternative, which is that you don't know shit and you too one day will get old and die. Perhaps you should re-prioritize before you pay the toll.

jader201 3y ago

I’ve been working from home 100% for going on 10 years. I’ve had a mix of experiences re: disconnecting from work, and three things that I believe are key: 1. Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door. Don’t go in that room except when you’re working. If you work from a laptop, (mostly) never take it out of that room. Obviously some don’t have this luxury, but if you do and you’re not doing this, I highly suggest trying it. 2. Remove work communications from your phone. If you have a separate email account for work (highly likely), remove it from your phone. If you have Slack or some other chat app installed for work, remove it or remove your work account. If your company truly cares about a healthy work-life balance, this shouldn’t be an issue. If you need it for oncall, only install it then, then remove it. 3. Stick to a schedule. Log on and off about the same time each day. Don't jump on work for an hour or two here and there throughout the whole day. Log on, put your time in, log off. Don't work on weekends. There are times when you may need to put in extra and/or odd hours, but this should be the exception, not the norm. With these three things in place, I am — quite successfully — able to get the pre-smartphone feel of disconnecting from work while working from home.

athenot 3y ago
Point 1 is very important, I can confirm with also a decade of doing this. One note I'd like to add is pay attention to your lighting, have a special "work-mode" set of lights that you turn on when you work and then turn off when you are no longer working. I use the same work desk for non work stuff, but I turn off my "office lights" and it's a completely different vibe. Everyone's tastes will be different but as for me, these are my preferences: - Office lighting: at least 20k lumens of 5000K light with high CRI. For me I like to approximate the brightness of daylight. It's especially useful during the cloudy days of winter. My office is in a basement so the cheapest way to do that is string lights (like for outdoor patios), but with high quality LED bulbs. - Personal lighting mode: regular house lighting, 3000K (so skewing towards a more yellowish, incandescent-like light). I still enjoy high CRI because I can't stand things looking bland but that's less important. More spot lights, less ambient light.
- spacemadness 3y ago

ttul 3y ago

In the 1990s, even as a software developer, I never answered emails after working hours. Why? Because we didn’t have access to the office mail server outside the office. It was physically impossible to work from home. Add to this the fact that I didn’t have a cell phone or a pager, so when I left the office, nobody could get in touch with me even if they wanted to. On reflection, the separation of home and work was so natural that everyone took it for granted. Time moved more slowly. You felt more free because you could just disappear for an hour by going for a drive or a walk. We don’t realize what we have lost.

readthenotes1 3y ago
In the late '80s, my coworkers would work at night by answering emails (proprietary network) and looking through code on hardware supplied by the employer.
ghaff 3y ago
There's a flip side to that though. It also meant that, when I was "in the office," I pretty much needed to be IN THE OFFICE. I couldn't really disappear during the workday on a regular workday by going for a walk or being available at home for this that or the other thing without making specific arrangements. I had the flexibility to do that from time to time but it wasn't a casual I'll be in my home office while the contractor is doing stuff. It's a tradeoff but, for me, not a bad one overall. No one expects me to jump into action at 9 at night but if I'm watching the TV and can solve someone's problem in 5 minutes I can do so--if I feel like it.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  > when I was "in the office," I pretty much needed to be IN THE OFFICE Well, we're getting back to that anyway... they're pretty much demanding that we all drive 45 minutes to sit at a hoteling spot that we reserved ahead of time in a noisy open office so that we can get on zoom calls with our remote coworkers all day (and be asked to "please mute because your background noise is very distracting") - and then drive home and still be available "after hours". Glad I spent years of my life getting an advanced degree for this, I guess.

policepost 3y ago

Don't connect your phone to work. Close your laptop at 5. Walk away. Keep to a standard schedule.

spacemadness 3y ago
Seeing the amount of people that answer late night chats from people in other timezones upsets me. What upsets me more are the people on vacation answering chats as soon as they’re pinged. That behavior changes work culture and expectations the more it happens. Bad managers love this sort of thing. I learned a long time ago that to keep my sanity I need a wall up between work hours and my personal life.
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  Its not always that easy. Enterprise just doesn't work that way. Where multiple timezones come in to play you need to be around. If I need email comms for an important document regarding to something super tight. I can't just wait till tomorrow. Information can be crucial at times and emails can cause break down in communications. Spreadsheets need to be spread and PowerPoints need to be pointed. Work yes, you can step back from, communication you can't just shut off.
  - spacemadness 3y ago
    Sure but this is why I don’t work in that field and neither do these people.
  - DeltaCoast 3y ago
    Is there anyone on your team that just isn't around? Keeps a strict schedule - I've found that even working across time zones with tight deadlines, some people just have a hard stop.
    - doublerabbit 3y ago
      Its not the matter of my team. Its more talking to the VPs of other department's.

msla 3y ago

Medical people who take call had work follow them home a long time before Generation X.

riffraff 3y ago
It's a completely different thing. My father had on-call in his job for decades in the last century, that did not mean he was constantly thinking about his job, it meant he could be reached to go if anything bad happened. Being reachable via phone is not really the same as checking slack notifications every ten minutes.

nofinator 3y ago

As someone in their 40s, the Slate article he links to was fun to read. There's a discussion of it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402076

intrasight 3y ago

I finished my masters (wrote thesis) while working full time. That was in 1990. It was pretty hard. Also had a baby at the time. My father did his bachelor's degree an NYU while working full time. He's told me how hard that was. My GF got her law degree as a single mom with two young kids at home. She win's for hardest. I have a separate work phone that stays on my desk unless I'm going to be away from my desk during work hours - then I take it with me.

JohnFen 3y ago

> There’s a lot about early 2000s culture I’m not eager to excavate, but this idea of the constrained workday certainly seems worthy of nostalgia. It's not nostalgia to me. Except when working on my own businesses or a real emergency, my work ends at the end of the workday. It always has, and that has never changed. Working outside of work hours is a choice, and one that I mostly choose not to do for other people.

donatj 3y ago

So as someone who has worked as a developer for 15+ years now, this is an honest question. What kind of things are you getting emails about after hours that can’t wait until tomorrow? I have heard these horror stories for years but never experienced any of it. Everyone who would be sending me email wants to be off work as much as I do. They’re not working after hours so neither am I. Even when I worked for an agency earlier in my career I can count on two hands the number of times I was contacted after hours, and it was usually an emergency like some clients database imploded.

doublerabbit 3y ago
Enterprise works different hours. If I need to relay something important and where email could cause broken communication, I need to work after hours. East Coast in five hours behind of me. West Coast is eight. If we have the regulators chasing us upon an urgent thing you need to be have the information ready for the next day. Unfortunately the whole "don't email after work" can only be applied to roles where staff are all within the reasonable timezone.
- donatj 3y ago
  Huh, so the whole timezone thing might put me at a huge advantage working in the Midwest? We have people on the east and west coast but I'm at most 2 hours off from them.
  - doublerabbit 3y ago
    Probably. I'm in the UK. The midwestern folk have always been the most pleasant to talk too.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  > regulators chasing us Unless I've got serious equity the regulators are chasing you, make it worth my while to solve your problem.
  - 3y ago

ghusto 3y ago

It's alright for us oldies who already have firm boundaries on this kind of thing, but the new batch could use our support here. Always-contactable is becoming (has become?) normalised, and it's just not on. My practical advice: - Do not put Slack / work e-mail / any comms to do with work on your personal phone. When they ask "why don't you have X on your phone", the answer is that you have a security policy to keep your personal accounts safe, but if they'd like to buy you a work phone, and pay for the contract, you'd consider carrying it. Which leads me to ... - Establish whether you are being paid for on-call. If not, then you are not on-call - "I sent you a message", isn't the same as "I spoke with you and made sure you understood the message I relayed outside of work hours" I realise that these things are easier here in Europe than in the U.S.A. where labour laws are a little less fleshed out, but well, I can't help there :P

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

Indeed. Work fills the time allotted to it. If you know (even subconsciously) that you can take work home with you, it becomes easier to give yourself permission to dilly-dally during work hours. And it becomes easier for everyone to dilly-dally at work during work hours and in such a way that they feel less guilty disrupting others because, hey, you can just work later just like I can, right? This is especially true when you are young and single. Some people have families and they do not have the time to drag out their tasks until the late hours of the night because of the severe consequences of neglecting their other responsibilities. Young people are also often under the delusion that only the moment exists, and that they will live forever and stay young forever. Nope, you only ever get older and you will be old sooner than you realize. And then you'll be leaving annoying comments like this one in the comment section. But even single people should be able to appreciate how stretching things out means you can do less with your time. It's not like you fill those in-between moments with valuable activity. You usually procrastinate doing worthless things. Besides, task switching isn't free. You have to build up context which allows sustained deep work to take place. We've lost the culture of maturity and seriousness. FOMO is a symptom of that. Self-promotion and social media are a symptom of that. We prefer engaging in shallow put-ons instead of being adults.

jrockway 3y ago

I kind of like work following me home. It lets you get a foot into those arguments about how "you don't have a real job, because I have to go to a coal mine and extract coal for 8 hours a day and you just sit in front of a computer". You can respond, "yeah, but the work never ends! that's what they pay us for."

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tobyjsullivan 3y ago

We’re witnessing a categorical shift in how people sell their time. Once upon a time, maybe a hundred years ago, people worked “days”. This was a product of the available technology at the time. The average labourer didn’t have a pocket watch to know exactly what hour it was to clock in and out. If someone worked Tuesday, they worked from sun up to sun down. They got paid “a day’s wage”. As time-keeping technology became more prevalent, people started working hours, not days. People started to work “8 a.m. to 5 p.m.” In this period, the constraint was now commuting. The average person lives approximately 30 minutes travel from their work and this has held roughly true for most of history. If you need to travel to work, you’d better earn enough hours’ wage to make it worth it. Now we’re seeing something new as commuting evaporates. People are working on the order of minutes. E.g., “I have a 30-minute meeting at 2 p.m., then I’m making lunch for the kids. After that, I’ll put 60 minutes into project X before the repair guy comes by to fix the oven.” To get the same work done, people are starting to distribute it across a full waking day (even if subconsciously). Our systems and ideas haven’t caught up to this new world yet. We aren’t earning “a minute’s wage”. But it’s hard to not see the progression now that I’ve noticed it.

DeltaCoast 3y ago
Are you saying now people are no longer working "8am to 5pm" because the commute is no longer the boundary? I'm not sure I follow.

SomeRndName11 3y ago

This is not when work follows you, this is when JOB that follows you. Work is something you enjoy, job is something you make only for money.

deleted 3y ago

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quantumstar4k 3y ago

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pmontra 3y ago

> But what would you do when you had work emails? This is probably unfair because I'm self employed but: My customers are on Slack so I don't have much mails going on with them. I have Slack on my laptop and my tablet but I didn't install it on my phone. They know that if I'm offline on Slack they can whatsapp me or call me. That rarely happens, especially the phone call. Not every year. I check my mail a few times per day. It's a very long time since I disabled push notifications of new mail message. Nearly all of them would be for automatic notifications of events. This means that when I'm not easily reachable if I'm not working unless my customers really want to contact me. Apparently this doesn't bother them. I've been going on like this for at least 10 years. I wonder what we used before slack, maybe Skype: I remember many more Skype chats and calls. Meet and Slack replaced nearly all of them. Actually Skype screen sharing is better than theirs: it can be zoomed and gets closer to be full screen. Finally, I don't have anybody to compete with inside my company, because my company it's me.

makeitdouble 3y ago

> When work was done at work, and there was no chance of continuing your labors at home, your job didn’t seem nearly as all-consuming or onerous . Working as a software engineer in the early 00s, when you had no chance of continuing labor at home, you'd stay at the office way later and potentially miss the last train home. I'm sure there were better and less demanding companies, but the picture depicted in the article is IMO way too rosy. In several companies I've had months where my extra hours' pay litteraly doubled my base salary as we stuck in the office to meet crazy tight deadlines.

alexpotato 3y ago

I remember reading the following quote (origin lost to me): "Look at photos of businessmen on the streets of New York in the late 1890s. Then compare them to photos of people today. One of the first things you'll notice is how little they are carrying e.g. no briefcase, laptop bag etc. This is because in those days if you left the office there was no expectation of doing work. Everything you would need to be productive only existed in your office. Plus, you were completely unreachable once you stepped outside so why bring anything work related?" Now, sure, a messenger could be sent to find you at lunch and you could argue that a business lunch is still 'work' but I've always like the idea of "out of the office, out of touch".

dopylitty 3y ago

It’s really time for office workers to unionize to demand basic rights like: - Ability to disconnect after work - Explicit pay for any after hours work (no more salary workers being forced to work 24/7) - Limits to hours worked per week - Meal breaks (no being forced to eat lunch while on videoconference ) - Safe work environments with minimum distance between workers and air flow / filtering requirements

n4r9 3y ago
A lot of this is standard EU worker's rights.

dang 3y ago

Recent thread about the article this one points to: Life before cellphones: The after-work activities of young people in 2002 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402076 - June 2023 (138 comments)

pjmlp 3y ago

At least in most European countries, if you're answering emails or phone calls outside work hours, that is on you.

Simulacra 3y ago

Working from home 100% felt like work followed me from room to room.

nuancebydefault 3y ago

I started working as sw dev in 1998. I remember being quite exhausted after work. Had a dial up connection at home, mostly used for chatting and napster, but I also continued working after hours, either on pc or laptop. There were floppies and cdrw's, so it was certainly possible to take work home or homework to work. Bottom line is that if you are very much invested in tech or work, it can be exhausting, even without any direct line to work. I dreamt about being connected to the internet wirelessly and roaming. As soon as that came in our pocket, it became handy (you can look up anything at any time) but also addictive. What i want to say... It's not the tech itself that supposedly made things worse, it is the habits that you make from them. If you tell your boss that you will not respond after hours or won't work late hours, that would take courage but today that is still plausible. Work/life balance should be a personally checked boundary, it takes practice and patience to get it right, no matter of whic era of tech.

kashunstva 3y ago

In some fields, if you choose to not allow work to follow you home, you have to be at peace with not having certain opportunities. That horse is already out of the barn. My wife is an academic; and there are two parallel careers going on with her. First, the work of the day. Then there’s “homework” - Zoom committee meetings, reviewing papers as journal editor, constant, year-round. Possibly Cal Newport has discovered something that most of the academy has not. But much of academic work and politics of the academy goes on after hours. I’d imagine other fields are similar.

Nellyz 3y ago

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carlotte 3y ago

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eggy 3y ago

I miss those days! I had them from the 80s on after high school. You did focus more while at work with a sort of weekend mentality when 5 or 6 pm rolled around. Now, I run my second company with a single phone with my personal number on it and an eSIM for my business number. If I have told clients I will be away, I simply filter text, email, and calls by the account and/or SIM they come in on. It's not the same, but it buys me peace of mind not to jump on my phone or laptop. I am very honest to clients about stepping away and if I will be available in off hours. I started studying for my CDL, because at age 59, I was actually considering taking 100k to 150k driving a 25 to 50 ft long fuel truck 35 to 45 hours a week and dropping out or tuning out of tech. Working retirement!