When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

https://calnewport.com/when-work-didnt-follow-you-home/

by keyboardJones • 3 years ago

138 145 3 years ago

mydriasis• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

NoahECampbell6• 3 years 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.

mjmsmith2• 3 years ago

If people work hard in the hours that they're paid for, that is not "the bare minimum".

NoahECampbell6• 3 years 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

mikrl2• 3 years 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!

NoahECampbell6• 3 years 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.

edu• 3 years 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.

NoahECampbell6• 3 years ago

I never said anything about not paying people for working more?

lopis2• 3 years 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.

NoahECampbell6• 3 years 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

robotburrito• 3 years ago

Not that I agree with this sentiment. But you do need to do these things if others are doing so. It’s like weight cutting in combat sports. It only takes one person who does it to force all others to as well.

mathogre• 3 years 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.

danwee3• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

tristor3• 3 years 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.

jader2015• 3 years 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.

athenot2• 3 years 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.

spacemadness4• 3 years ago

Anecdotally, I don’t find point 1 to be necessary at all. Points 2 and 3 are vital, however. As long as I cut work off at the end of the day, I’m fine.

dotnwat• 3 years ago

Would be interested to know which lighting products you are specifically using. I've started dipping my toe into the pool of improved lighting, but the number of products out there is quite overwhelming.

rqtwteye• 3 years ago

Good points. I religiously turn on my laptop at 9 in the morning and turn it off at 17:30. During that time I am always reachable but after that the laptop is off and I have no work related apps on my phone.

Also: when I am on vacation I am gone and won’t work. My team has my phone number for extreme emergencies but that never happened so far.

jader2015• 3 years ago

Also: when I am on vacation I am gone and won’t work. My team has my phone number for extreme emergencies but that never happened so far.

If you're already doing #1 (don't take your laptop out of the office) and #2 above, then this is automatic. But yes, those should especially be followed when you're on PTO.

tra3• 3 years ago

How do you disconnect and shutdown the problem solving part of your brain?

I’ve found that writing a log or a daily summary, a core dump, if you will, helps me disengage. But not always.

jader2015• 3 years ago

I feel like the other 3 points above all help with this. That's not to say that I don't log off, and still think about something I'm working on, or wake up thinking about it (this depends on what I'm working on, how much pressure I'm feeling, and how complex/interesting it is).

But honestly, this doesn't feel any different than it always did. Pre-smartphones, I still would sometimes drive home and think about what I was working on on the way home, or "bring work home" with me.

I think the brain thing is (mostly) independent of the WFH/WFO thing -- as long as you're doing the other three things above. Otherwise, the brain thing is compounded.

dijksterhuis• 3 years ago

I’ve found doing a “fake commute” where I go for a walk for 30-60 minutes after work is pretty helpful.

being able to decompress walking around a leafy park is much better than trying to decompress stuck in a busy train with no seats.

freedomben• 3 years ago

Not OP but many years of working from home.

The best thing I've found is Logseq. Any other note taking app would probably do, but the important thing is that it's a "daily journal" style where I brain dump relevant things into bullet points. This has come in really handy for many other reasons as well.

PhazonJim• 3 years ago

I leave my home office and connect with my kids or go outside. Just the action of getting up and leaving the work space and starting a new activity seems to do the trick for me, YMMV of course.

swader9992• 3 years ago

You need to do this even if you don't subscribe to the idea of work life separation. You'll find better solutions to complex problems if you can rest, exercise, pursue a hobby or other distraction for part of each day. The subconscious needs recruitment for anything non trivial. Log it and state the problem that isn't yet solved explicitly in writing. Then affirm to yourself that you will come back with a solution.

pierat• 3 years ago

How do you disconnect and shutdown the problem solving part of your brain?

I dont.

Instead, I substitute MY OWN projects and goals and things INSTEAD OF work's goals. So instead of killing my innate curiosity and problem solving, I change its focus to serve me.

riffraff2• 3 years ago

going 10+ years remote, I second all these!

I would also add

1. disable notifications, if you can't get rid of work-connected devices: perhaps your work computer is your only computer, and you want to watch a movie on it, just configure chat/mail whatever to only work in _pull_ mode rather than _push_. Don't worry, if something is really important it will reach you.

2. enforce time boundaries through routine. E.g. go to the gym at 17:30 every day so logging off means physically detaching yourself. Or pick up your kids, or take the dog for a walk. Make yourself accountable to non-work.

3. corollary to 2: start work when work start, not before. Do not work in pajamas, do not check your email during breakfast. Do your own things, then start working.

I have not been 100% good at doing all of these, but even doing this a bit has had massive positive effects to not doing it.

wmwragg• 3 years ago

Yep point 1 I think is the most important, but if you don't have the luxury of an office at home, having a start of work process, and an end of work process is really important e.g. at end of day, close laptop, put away in a drawer, and tidy up work paraphernalia, then sit down and have a cup of tea while reading a book. It mentally bookmarks the start and end of work, and allows your mind to reset from work mode.

wpietri3• 3 years ago

Agreed. I've been using RoutineFlow to help establish routines and it has been great.

neilv• 3 years ago

Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door.

A small-apartment version of this is to have a work laptop at home (or carry it home from in-office), but to keep it in a drawer when not in use. Same with a work smartphone.

For people who have to be reachable in emergencies, a real radio pager (best privacy, still company-issued, and it could maybe also go in the drawer), or their preferred automated emergency contact method to their personal smartphone (SMS, email, app). Optionally with a de jure on-call human in the loop. Or just a work-issued smartphone or tablet that can be configured in software to only alert on emergencies.

When emergency contacting personally-owned devices, to minimize taint with business information, the only information conveyed is to check work laptop within X minutes. (The company should also have be a rock-solid log of each such contact, for various reasons.)

(One early startup, where I was leading engineering and had bespoke MVP appliances as part of a factory production line halfway around the globe, and I hadn't yet set up a better alerting method, I just used an iPad for this. The iPad had 2 purposes, about the only things it could do: (1) compartmentalize the sketchy videoconferencing app we used, away from the Linux laptop that was early-startup powerful; (2) be a fairly discreet "picture frame" display in the evening, so that I'd notice emails from factory management or our alert system. With more time this could've been polished to be better for my nerves, but it was still definitely better than having the work laptop visible 24/7.)

wpietri3• 3 years ago

To extract one bit from that: I'm a huge fan of separate devices for separate purposes. Work laptop vs personal laptop. Work phone vs personal phone. Games device vs reading device. Social media device vs productivity device.

I'm much better at contextually driven focus than I am at working mentally to keep things separate. Which I've come to be ok with, in that a lot of my creativity comes from divergent thinking, from jumbling and sorting out things. But that flexibility is a pain when I want to really focus. Different devices help me be clear about what I'm choosing, raise a barrier to distraction, and make it way easier to notice when I'm off task.

E.g., I only use HN from what I think of as my distraction laptop. Social media, fun Slacks, and HN only work on this device. Which is old, so its battery doesn't last, and which is plugged in and kept in a hidden niche next to a not-super-comfortable couch. Taking this approach let me turn off the noprocrast setting here while keeping my fuck-around-on-the-internet time in check.

makeitdouble2• 3 years ago

These are all valid point if that's your thing. It reminds me of coffee brewing advice where the very first stated goal is "make repeatable brews" and the expert explains a very meticulous protocol they've repeated and perfected for years now。

It's nice and fine if you never get bored of it.

When people bring their laptop in the kitchen or closet, or go to coffee shops, libraries etc. it's often not because they haven't found a perfected routine, but because they don't want to sit/stand in the same exact spot in the same posture 8h a day every weekday for decades.

Point number 2 also has caveats: with a family it can be easier to allow semi-random interruptions a few times a day and work a bit after everyone's asleep than sticking to an ironclad schedule and being absolutely unavailable when your kid's having tea time or needs a quick help.

jader2015• 3 years ago

For sure, a lot of the things you're describing boils down to the flexibility -- as a perk -- you get from working from home.

But I believe it's the flexibility that make it hard for people to mentally disconnect -- it blurs the lines between work and life.

And, to your point, that's totally fine if that's your preference. I think what we're both saying is that the three points I make above are, in a way, sacrificing some flexibility in order to maintain that separation.

For me, I'm completely fine giving up some of that flexibility so that I can maintain the mental separation. But, to me, I have the best of both worlds in that I still have the option of flexibility in cases where I really need it. But I only try to exercise it when I really need it.

jtode• 3 years ago

The not having work on my personal phone was a big gamechanger for me as well, even before I worked from home. Not sure when or why I made the decision but very glad I did.

swader9992• 3 years ago

If I didn't have to travel, I'd go for a desktop and it works better for the separation aspects too.

Roark66• 3 years ago

My recommendation (working 100% remote since 2018).

2b - have a separate work phone If people choose to send emails outside business hours it's their choice, but you don't have to answer. If you do, as part of your contract... Well, you saw the contract before you agreed right?

2c - Set clear boundaries between when you're off work, off, but on call and at work. How? Personally I don't mind being "on call" for <25% of a time, but I absolutely positively have to have extra money every single hour I'm on call(lets say 10~20% of normal hourly rate), and 150~200% rate for incident response time. That's the only way I can do it. But what if your employer pays you double the hourly rate all the time and "implies" it's a 24/7 on call commitment? Isn't that even better financially? Well, yes, but it's definitely not better for my peace of mind. Somehow I don't mind being on call when I see a tally for it at the end of each month, if it "just happens" (and frequently) I quickly start hating it.

korpsey• 3 years ago

I've been working from home since 2016 and I had similar problems with the addition of having a hard time "getting into work mode".

It took me 6 months to adjust to it and I can't even think about going to an office anymore nowadays.

nerdchum• 3 years ago

I follow these similarly except use a coworking space and use a separate phone for work in case on call or something.

ttul• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

ghaff2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

sheepybloke• 3 years ago

I agree. I feel a lot more OK to take time to run errands or grab lunch offsite because I know if someone needs me, I can just answer on Slack. Similarly, I can work from a coffee shop or other location and know that they can reach me if needed.

lumost3• 3 years ago

I'm honestly surprised that more companies haven't invested in broader vacation policies. My experience has been that the constant "on" state wears you down. The only way to get to "off" is to be OOTO officially for a week+. Add in parental responsibilities and you really don't have any headspace for yourself.

Would love to have 5-8 weeks per year, that would let me take at least 1 week's worth of time per quarter to recharge from the constant 24/7 rush.

ye-olde-sysrq4• 3 years ago

Add in parental responsibilities

Out of curiosity, how many of your coworkers have kids?

I have 3, and I've always found it a bit ominous that even when I'm on large teams (8+) I'm typically still the only person with kids. So far:

1. job 1, team of 8, only 1 other IC had kids

2. job 2, team of 10, nobody else had kids

3. current job, team of 8, nobody else has kids. If you expand it to the suborganization we're in, you get ~16 people and only one other person has kids.

And it's not like these teams are mostly college new grads or anything, it's usually people like me in their 30's.

I always wonder how much of a disadvantage it is that other people get to clock out of work, enjoy an evening, sleep through the night, and then wake up and go to work. Whereas a parent is going to clock out of work and clock in to parenting, and then when it's kid bedtime, you finally get 2-3 hours to fit in personal time that's usually still not "you" time but is you spending time with your partner.

I'd never trade my kids for my career, and I find the time I spend with them incredibly fulfilling, but it's definitely extra load. And I do depend on being good at my job to help feed them and stuff. And I did opt into this, so it's hard to say it's "unfair". But I feel like our society doesn't need more reasons not to have kids given fertility is already below replacement rate.

pyrale• 3 years ago

I'm honestly surprised that more companies haven't invested in broader vacation policies.

As an EU person, the existence of places where people never stop working is mind boggling.

Aurornis• 3 years ago

Would love to have 5-8 weeks per year, that would let me take at least 1 week's worth of time per quarter to recharge from the constant 24/7 rush.

At least 1 week of vacation per quarter (in addition to normal holiday time) has been fairly standard for every senior-level tech job I’ve had in a long time.

I had one job with a generous vacation policy that resulted in some people taking 8-10 weeks of vacation or more per year, in addition to normal holidays. They had a great time, but honestly it started to become a burden for everyone else to work around them.

Toward the end it was getting bad enough that some projects were basically stalled because you could never get everyone on the project to be available at the same time. We’d push the project forward as much as we could, then wait a week for another round of people to come back to work, then push it forward as much as we could while working around the rest of the people on vacation this week, then repeat.

It would have been okay if it was a lifestyle business where delivering quickly didn’t really matter much, but it was a less established business where we were slowly running out money. They tried hiring more people but that only increased the burn rate.

The end game was that they clamped down hard on vacation time. A lot of the people who were only there for the lax vacation schedules left. Ironically, it was more relaxed to actually do work there after it became more predictable and you could depend on people actually being available to work.

There’s probably a good middle ground but it’s not as easy as just letting everyone take a lot of vacation all the time.

nonameiguess• 3 years ago

It's still like this in some limited cases. My brother-in-law is a glazier. He clearly needs to be on-site to do this. Work can't follow him home. My wife works in software just like I do, but she's worked exclusively on classified projects for 20 years, so work can't follow her home because she can't legally receive any of the relevant data at home. Work phone and work e-mail are on airgapped networks not accessible from home.

policepost• 3 years ago

Don't connect your phone to work. Close your laptop at 5. Walk away.

Keep to a standard schedule.

spacemadness4• 3 years 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.

doublerabbit7• 3 years 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.

alexpotato2• 3 years ago

Having managed teams in Asia from the US, let me provide the alternate view.

You are in Asia and it's 10am HKT/10pm ET. You are facing a problem/issue that you are 90% sure someone in the US knows the answer to.

You are faced with: - being blocked all day till US business hours

- trial and erroring your way through the problem

My view as the manager was always "I trust you to send me a message up till 10:30pm if you need something and I will respond. Don't abuse that but I'd rather be contacted late once in a while vs you being blocked all day."

msla• 3 years ago

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

riffraff2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

intrasight• 3 years 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.

JohnFen2• 3 years 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.

donatj2• 3 years 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.

doublerabbit7• 3 years 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.

donatj2• 3 years 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.

willcipriano2• 3 years ago

regulators chasing us

Unless I've got serious equity the regulators are chasing you, make it worth my while to solve your problem.

nathan_compton• 3 years ago

Have you considered the possibility that you don't in fact need it tomorrow? Like maybe if someone is bothering you for something that you need tomorrow, maybe you fucked up somewhere and you should pay the penalty for it instead of expecting a coworker to reply to a message while they not working.

AlotOfReading• 3 years ago

I'm someone who occasionally sends an after hours email, but I don't expect them answered or even received until work-hours. They usually result from starting some very long process (e.g. full rebuilds, expensive tests, automated bisections, etc) that can take 30m+ near the end of the day, so I walk away to go cook and clean. I'll check on them and fire off relevant messages before I lose the mental context with sleep.

ghusto• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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."

tobyjsullivan• 3 years 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.

DeltaCoast2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

pmontra• 3 years 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.

makeitdouble2• 3 years 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.

alexpotato2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

A lot of this is standard EU worker's rights.

dang• 3 years 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 - June 2023 (138 comments)

pjmlp• 3 years ago

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

Simulacra• 3 years ago

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

nuancebydefault• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

eggy• 3 years 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!

When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

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