17 ms·

I like the Swiss implementation of this. A manager _can_ contact an employee on a Sunday, but then the employee is immediately on weekend-rate overtime even if

I like the Swiss implementation of this. A manager _can_ contact an employee on a Sunday, but then the employee is immediately on weekend-rate overtime even if they just got an email with "deal with this next week". So, many companies have systems that hold back e-mail sent outside of working hours until the next working day unless specially authorised and costed. Never underestimate an economics-based solution to a legal problem, a.k.a. "if you really want to ban it, tax it".

KoolKat23 2y ago
I'd rather not work on the weekend, even for an overtime rate. Thanks.
- silisili 2y ago
  That's the benefit of working on a small team/startup. Whoever smelt it dealt it kind of situation. Basically, at first at least, whoever's application is erroring is getting a call when it breaks. It sounds bad, but it encourages everyone to write more fault tolerant code. Way moreso then a random bigcorp with an on call team.
  - aqme28 2y ago
    This is how you end up in situations where no one wants to work on the team that actually needs the most help
  - grecy 2y ago
    I used to get called all the time because our in house infrastructure would fall over, and my apps would crash. It didn’t matter how many times I explained my apps couldn’t run without good infra, and that I wasn’t on that team, and that I had no access or authority to do anything… when my apps when down I got called. So actually, I really don’t like your idea.
    - majewsky 2y ago
      Or, to be more specific, you don't like your company's implementation of their idea. We have the same setup in my org, but we get to define alerts ourselves. All our own alerts are built so that they don't go off if the underlying infra is borked, and only if there's something we can actually do on our level. We are being kept honest because there is a big kerfuffle when an incident is reported by customers first (instead of alerting).
      - potamic 2y ago
        What metrics do you alert on? How do you distinguish between error due to faulty database client vs error due to database disk failure?
        dullcrisp 2y ago
        Define SLOs based on what can realistically be achieved with underlying infrastructure, only alert if those SLOs are breached?
        majewsky 2y ago
        Taking my managed container image registry service as an example. - The only critical alert that can actually page people is if the blackbox test fails. Every 30 seconds, it downloads a test image and if the contents don't match the expectation, an alert is raised (with some delay). - Warning alerts are mostly for any errors being returned from background tasks, but these are only monitored during business hours.
        perfect_wave 2y ago
        i dont see how that is separated from the underlying infra. If the network/server/some dependency goes down, the blackbox test will fail and you'll get paged.
        silisili 2y ago
        You can test for this. For example, we had routines that were called on repeated HTTP failures that would then get 5 or so of the top US websites. If those fail too, it moves from an application error to an infra one.
  - watwut 2y ago
    Unless of course the "guilty" is not immediately apparent. If it happens frequently, the guilty is the process, team lead or whoever runs the things.
  - teeray 2y ago
    > Whoever smelt it dealt it Until whoever dealt it just leaves the team. Then it’s everyone’s problem.
  - amrocha 2y ago
    I joined a startup a couple years ago, and got handed a poisoned chalice. It was a project that was critical to the company, but that was not very reliable, and broke overnight very often, sometimes 3-4 days per week. I was the 4th dev on it. Everyone else who worked on it before had burned out and quit. The dev before me couldn’t tough it out another 2 weeks and quit before i joined. Eventually I burned out after a year and quit too. All this to say, that’s great when it works, but when it goes bad it’s real bad hahaha.
  - Flop7331 2y ago
    There's also the call you get when the founder breaks something and blames the person who touched it before them.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dukeyukey 2y ago
  That's fine, but I'd be willing to. Always a chance I'm I'm far from a laptop or even signal, but if I'm having a quiet weekend and something comes up, some overtime sounds great.
  - KoolKat23 2y ago
    I understand. Problem is this kind of thing is a race to the bottom. Because of the silly ways humans work (mostly due to imperfect information), I'd feel obliged and will agree to it, despite not wanting to (concerns I will automatically be perceived as a lesser employee). And then we're all working weekends.
    - dukeyukey 2y ago
      This is one of those things that I can see happening, but also has never happened anywhere I've worked.
    - Xylakant 2y ago
      A sufficiently large overtime/weekend bonus will prevent that easily. I've had quite a few conversations both internally and with customers that started with "we need that by monday" and went via "we can do that, but it will cost X extra" to "well, i guess wednesday is fine, too." Mandatory weekend work is an extremely rare occurence here, I can count all occurences in the last five years on one hand and still have fingers to spare.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - KoolKat23 2y ago
        It tends to be an issue with more "vulnerable" workers, ones with less leverage. Shift work, nurses and hospitality. Margins are ample to cover low wages.
        Xylakant 2y ago
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Law again takes care of that, because the right to rest also exist. So if you are asked to work 1h during the weekend, you usually gain 2.5 to 3 hours of rest in exchange.
Propelloni 2y ago
Does the manager also get weekend-rate overtime if she sends out e-mails on the weekend? I mean, she _is_ working! Sounds like an incentive mismatch here. Or is this just a protection of workers on a tariff and does not cover "exempt" employees, ie. most IT people.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  Weekend work etc. needs to be approved by a person's manager, so weekend-work without approval would in practice not be compensated (it's possible that technically they should compensate it then fire you for insubordination). The hurdles for "exempt" are way higher than in the US. I doubt it is actually done much in practice, although an employee who wants to be left alone on the weekend certainly could. I would also expect that guidance of "don't read your e-mail outside of working hours" would be sufficient to be able to send e-mail to employees at any day or hour without triggering overtime etc.
  - technothrasher 2y ago
    > I would also expect that guidance of "don't read your e-mail outside of working hours" would be sufficient to be able to send e-mail to employees at any day or hour I sometimes want to send my employees emails over the weekend as I think of something and don't want to forget. But there are certain employees that I know will immediately act on the email, which I actually don't want. So I end up emailing myself and then forwarding them the email on Monday morning.
    - IanCal 2y ago
      Does your client not support delaying emails? Gmail has schedule send for example.
    - latexr 2y ago
      > So I end up emailing myself and then forwarding them the email on Monday morning. Certain clients (like Apple’s email app) allow you to schedule emails to be automatically sent at a later date.
jajko 2y ago
Even that is not out-of-blue call to devs, rather just PROD support guys if some massive issue happens suddenly. I live and work here 14 years, 2 companies, and never had to pick up phone I didn't want to pick up, or react anyhow. Even if for some reason they would expect to - 'sorry hiking in the mountains, 5h from computer' and they know it. But since everybody is in same mode, there is nobody to call me. Our Pune colleagues on the other hand, I see them working regularly long weekend hours on top of long week days during crunch time.
amelius 2y ago
But employers will strike back with a law: if you read HN during work hours, your rate will be halved.
- oezi 2y ago
  Surveillance of employees is obviously banned anyway.
- duckmysick 2y ago
  No need to speculate, we can check if such situation indeed takes place in Switzerland.
- rammer 2y ago
  Yeah it is ridiculous to see all of the "employees" complain so heavily about one important work email that comes over the weekend, when the business patiently puts up with hundreds of personal phone calls, time spent scrolling on the phone, hacker News / Reddit posts and much more. There needs to be a little bit more of a give and take. If employees are not expected to receive a single phone call or email outside of working hours. Would it be acceptable if the same restrictions were placed on personal calls and emails during working hours? How many of the same people would be screaming murder, if their bosses came to them and complained about them taking personal email during work time.
  - defrost 2y ago
    Effectively pointless apples to oranges whataboutism. If employees at work are not completing tasks then by all means carpet them, warn them and fire them. During working hours. You don't get to follow them home physically or digitally and take them to task outside of contract and labour laws.
skizm 2y ago
Is everything hourly there? Would this work with salaried employees that don't log hours? Or maybe everyone does? A running joke in my first company out of school was "can't wait to see that overtime check!" whenever we saw someone working after 5. The implication is no one ever gets overtime as a salaried employee.
- amonith 2y ago
  I don't think true US-like "salaried contracts" exist at all in EU. Speaking as a Polish contractor. There might be fixed-price short-term project-based contracts but it has nothing to do with employment and definitely it's not a monthly/yearly thing without any hour limit. At best you have something like "minimum X hours per week" but there's always "up to Y" and while those hours are technically "preordered" upfront, you are supposed to log them. That being said lots of people still do unpaid overtime, but only because they're afraid about losing the job / care too much. Not because they actually legally have to. There are legal means to defend yourself from that.
  - rolandog 2y ago
    Heh. At a $SOME_PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER, they literally disabled the option to log overtime in the portal, because workers were "getting confused", and the official policy was "no overtime".
- semanticist 2y ago
  Even 'salaried' in the UK means a contract that has a specified number of hours in it. In theory if you work more than that you should be getting either overtime or time in lieu, but in practice that might not always happen depending on your role in the company and the type of company. I don't get overtime, but I do get time in lieu - I did about four hours extra the week before last doing set up for one of our busiest days of the year, and I'm taking Thursday afternoon off to make it up. Things like 60 hour work weeks also aren't even legal without signing away your EU Working Time Directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003) rights (which isn't even an option in every EU country). I don't _think_ the post-brexit legislation did away with that, but it wouldn't surprise me.
eric_cc 2y ago
Overtime rates are not worth being interrupted during time off. I’d rather lose out on money and have my precious time.

KoolKat23 2y ago

I'd rather not work on the weekend, even for an overtime rate. Thanks.

silisili 2y ago
That's the benefit of working on a small team/startup. Whoever smelt it dealt it kind of situation. Basically, at first at least, whoever's application is erroring is getting a call when it breaks. It sounds bad, but it encourages everyone to write more fault tolerant code. Way moreso then a random bigcorp with an on call team.
- aqme28 2y ago
  This is how you end up in situations where no one wants to work on the team that actually needs the most help
- grecy 2y ago
  I used to get called all the time because our in house infrastructure would fall over, and my apps would crash. It didn’t matter how many times I explained my apps couldn’t run without good infra, and that I wasn’t on that team, and that I had no access or authority to do anything… when my apps when down I got called. So actually, I really don’t like your idea.
  - majewsky 2y ago
    Or, to be more specific, you don't like your company's implementation of their idea. We have the same setup in my org, but we get to define alerts ourselves. All our own alerts are built so that they don't go off if the underlying infra is borked, and only if there's something we can actually do on our level. We are being kept honest because there is a big kerfuffle when an incident is reported by customers first (instead of alerting).
    - potamic 2y ago
      What metrics do you alert on? How do you distinguish between error due to faulty database client vs error due to database disk failure?
      - dullcrisp 2y ago
        Define SLOs based on what can realistically be achieved with underlying infrastructure, only alert if those SLOs are breached?
      - majewsky 2y ago
        Taking my managed container image registry service as an example. - The only critical alert that can actually page people is if the blackbox test fails. Every 30 seconds, it downloads a test image and if the contents don't match the expectation, an alert is raised (with some delay). - Warning alerts are mostly for any errors being returned from background tasks, but these are only monitored during business hours.
        perfect_wave 2y ago
        i dont see how that is separated from the underlying infra. If the network/server/some dependency goes down, the blackbox test will fail and you'll get paged.
        silisili 2y ago
        You can test for this. For example, we had routines that were called on repeated HTTP failures that would then get 5 or so of the top US websites. If those fail too, it moves from an application error to an infra one.
- watwut 2y ago
  Unless of course the "guilty" is not immediately apparent. If it happens frequently, the guilty is the process, team lead or whoever runs the things.
- teeray 2y ago
  > Whoever smelt it dealt it Until whoever dealt it just leaves the team. Then it’s everyone’s problem.
- amrocha 2y ago
  I joined a startup a couple years ago, and got handed a poisoned chalice. It was a project that was critical to the company, but that was not very reliable, and broke overnight very often, sometimes 3-4 days per week. I was the 4th dev on it. Everyone else who worked on it before had burned out and quit. The dev before me couldn’t tough it out another 2 weeks and quit before i joined. Eventually I burned out after a year and quit too. All this to say, that’s great when it works, but when it goes bad it’s real bad hahaha.
- Flop7331 2y ago
  There's also the call you get when the founder breaks something and blames the person who touched it before them.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dukeyukey 2y ago
That's fine, but I'd be willing to. Always a chance I'm I'm far from a laptop or even signal, but if I'm having a quiet weekend and something comes up, some overtime sounds great.
- KoolKat23 2y ago
  I understand. Problem is this kind of thing is a race to the bottom. Because of the silly ways humans work (mostly due to imperfect information), I'd feel obliged and will agree to it, despite not wanting to (concerns I will automatically be perceived as a lesser employee). And then we're all working weekends.
  - dukeyukey 2y ago
    This is one of those things that I can see happening, but also has never happened anywhere I've worked.
  - Xylakant 2y ago
    A sufficiently large overtime/weekend bonus will prevent that easily. I've had quite a few conversations both internally and with customers that started with "we need that by monday" and went via "we can do that, but it will cost X extra" to "well, i guess wednesday is fine, too." Mandatory weekend work is an extremely rare occurence here, I can count all occurences in the last five years on one hand and still have fingers to spare.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - KoolKat23 2y ago
      It tends to be an issue with more "vulnerable" workers, ones with less leverage. Shift work, nurses and hospitality. Margins are ample to cover low wages.
      - Xylakant 2y ago
prmoustache 2y ago
Law again takes care of that, because the right to rest also exist. So if you are asked to work 1h during the weekend, you usually gain 2.5 to 3 hours of rest in exchange.

Propelloni 2y ago

Does the manager also get weekend-rate overtime if she sends out e-mails on the weekend? I mean, she _is_ working! Sounds like an incentive mismatch here. Or is this just a protection of workers on a tariff and does not cover "exempt" employees, ie. most IT people.

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
Weekend work etc. needs to be approved by a person's manager, so weekend-work without approval would in practice not be compensated (it's possible that technically they should compensate it then fire you for insubordination). The hurdles for "exempt" are way higher than in the US. I doubt it is actually done much in practice, although an employee who wants to be left alone on the weekend certainly could. I would also expect that guidance of "don't read your e-mail outside of working hours" would be sufficient to be able to send e-mail to employees at any day or hour without triggering overtime etc.
- technothrasher 2y ago
  > I would also expect that guidance of "don't read your e-mail outside of working hours" would be sufficient to be able to send e-mail to employees at any day or hour I sometimes want to send my employees emails over the weekend as I think of something and don't want to forget. But there are certain employees that I know will immediately act on the email, which I actually don't want. So I end up emailing myself and then forwarding them the email on Monday morning.
  - IanCal 2y ago
    Does your client not support delaying emails? Gmail has schedule send for example.
  - latexr 2y ago
    > So I end up emailing myself and then forwarding them the email on Monday morning. Certain clients (like Apple’s email app) allow you to schedule emails to be automatically sent at a later date.

jajko 2y ago

Even that is not out-of-blue call to devs, rather just PROD support guys if some massive issue happens suddenly. I live and work here 14 years, 2 companies, and never had to pick up phone I didn't want to pick up, or react anyhow. Even if for some reason they would expect to - 'sorry hiking in the mountains, 5h from computer' and they know it. But since everybody is in same mode, there is nobody to call me. Our Pune colleagues on the other hand, I see them working regularly long weekend hours on top of long week days during crunch time.

amelius 2y ago

But employers will strike back with a law: if you read HN during work hours, your rate will be halved.

oezi 2y ago
Surveillance of employees is obviously banned anyway.
duckmysick 2y ago
No need to speculate, we can check if such situation indeed takes place in Switzerland.
rammer 2y ago
Yeah it is ridiculous to see all of the "employees" complain so heavily about one important work email that comes over the weekend, when the business patiently puts up with hundreds of personal phone calls, time spent scrolling on the phone, hacker News / Reddit posts and much more. There needs to be a little bit more of a give and take. If employees are not expected to receive a single phone call or email outside of working hours. Would it be acceptable if the same restrictions were placed on personal calls and emails during working hours? How many of the same people would be screaming murder, if their bosses came to them and complained about them taking personal email during work time.
- defrost 2y ago
  Effectively pointless apples to oranges whataboutism. If employees at work are not completing tasks then by all means carpet them, warn them and fire them. During working hours. You don't get to follow them home physically or digitally and take them to task outside of contract and labour laws.

skizm 2y ago

Is everything hourly there? Would this work with salaried employees that don't log hours? Or maybe everyone does? A running joke in my first company out of school was "can't wait to see that overtime check!" whenever we saw someone working after 5. The implication is no one ever gets overtime as a salaried employee.

amonith 2y ago
I don't think true US-like "salaried contracts" exist at all in EU. Speaking as a Polish contractor. There might be fixed-price short-term project-based contracts but it has nothing to do with employment and definitely it's not a monthly/yearly thing without any hour limit. At best you have something like "minimum X hours per week" but there's always "up to Y" and while those hours are technically "preordered" upfront, you are supposed to log them. That being said lots of people still do unpaid overtime, but only because they're afraid about losing the job / care too much. Not because they actually legally have to. There are legal means to defend yourself from that.
- rolandog 2y ago
  Heh. At a $SOME_PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER, they literally disabled the option to log overtime in the portal, because workers were "getting confused", and the official policy was "no overtime".
semanticist 2y ago
Even 'salaried' in the UK means a contract that has a specified number of hours in it. In theory if you work more than that you should be getting either overtime or time in lieu, but in practice that might not always happen depending on your role in the company and the type of company. I don't get overtime, but I do get time in lieu - I did about four hours extra the week before last doing set up for one of our busiest days of the year, and I'm taking Thursday afternoon off to make it up. Things like 60 hour work weeks also aren't even legal without signing away your EU Working Time Directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003) rights (which isn't even an option in every EU country). I don't _think_ the post-brexit legislation did away with that, but it wouldn't surprise me.

eric_cc 2y ago

Overtime rates are not worth being interrupted during time off. I’d rather lose out on money and have my precious time.