Respecting private life.

JerryMungo said:
Work life balance is very different depending whether you live on the east / west coast or mid west for example. The US is a thousand countries and cultures under one name.
Click to expand...
So kinda like South Africa then. Must say most of the US guys i have worked with have been very “hustle” oriented as if your current project or job title or whatever was the defining feature of your entire being and nothing on earth was more important. Not really my vibe.
 
JerryMungo said:
"Oracle is laying off up to 30,000 employees"
All USAID staff (280k or so) were just told "Your services are no longer requried"
In 2001, 2 million Americans were fired
Google dropped 12000 jobs in 2023

Americans love to go big and then drop you at a minutes notice.
Work life balance is very different depending whether you live on the east / west coast or mid west for example. The US is a thousand countries and cultures under one name.
Click to expand...

I was talking about working with them. Not company attitude.
 
If you want to see what work life abuse looks like, speak to any Indian IT professional.
 
JerryMungo said:
I still don’t get it. I work with many decent Americans outside of America.
Click to expand...

Then that's good. In some situations I've come across very arrogant contract Americans but back home their equal counterparts are much friendlier.

One sees that in some industries where being American is even remunerated at a higher rate than being from Europe and then from being from a country like India or the Philippines.
 
neoprema said:
In my years i've found the distinction simple: Some people will do the work after hours because they love their job, and they have a level of maturity to understand they're needed by the company.

Other people will just turn off a device, go offline and be completely unreliable and un-contactable claiming that the 2h of extra work in the week is encroaching on their personal time because they don't own a company and their immaturity does not allow them to realize how much work goes into running a business.
Click to expand...
Ah, yes, the age-old guilt tripping.

neoprema said:
Thankfully, we've been able to weed out the latter driftwood and have good reliable people for now, who i'm happy to give off-time to when they need it and ask for it, because I know if its 5pm and I need them for something, which ultimately will pay their salary, they'll be there.
Click to expand...
So you bind people to your contracts, but then have an issue with it when they adhere to it because you want to squeeze more out of them. You want people to work extra hours, you pay them, why should they give you anything for free?
 
SauRoNZA said:
You see there are two sides to this and it all boils down to flexibility.

If you are going to be that rigid about out of hours, then you shouldn’t have a moan when the employer expect you to be at the office exactly at 8:00 and then do your full 9 hours and also take exactly and only the allotted lunch time.

No shortcuts, no leaving five minutes earlier, no “quickly shooting out to the doctor” you should then be booking leave by the hour or taking a half day etc.

On the flipside if you company is offering you loads of flexibility, rocking up when you want and leaving when you want and not constantly clock watching your arrival or god forbid expecting time sheets from you, with lunch time being a loose suggestion then is it really such a drama to do a bit of after hours work once in a blue moon? Especially when the flexibility means you just start a bit later the next day and your schedule shifts and you aren’t really doing any “extra” work.

I operate in exactly that latter system and it works just fine for me, and on average it all levels out.

Entirely different story if it’s exploitative in nature and week after week you are doing 10 extra hours for free and they are all in your personal time.

And the “for free” part of it the other side of that coin. Being in IT a bit of standby is always on the cards but this isn’t extra work and isn’t adhoc in nature but something agreed on up front and you should be paid for being on standby as well as any serious work you have to do while on standby.
Click to expand...
Aren't you the guy who also likes to circle jerk with his teammates in a resort?
 
After 5pm if it's critical there is overtime I claim, they tried the whole oh but you're management level so that doesn't apply.
Until the one day when I was on leave and systems fell over that no one else could fix.
I was like I would love to but I'm on leave and I don't get overtime. Now I do
 
Lupus said:
After 5pm if it's critical there is overtime I claim, they tried the whole oh but you're management level so that doesn't apply.
Until the one day when I was on leave and systems fell over that no one else could fix.
I was like I would love to but I'm on leave and I don't get overtime. Now I do
Click to expand...
This is an issue that should be addressed though; it' rather bad liability.
 
SauRoNZA said:
You see there are two sides to this and it all boils down to flexibility.

If you are going to be that rigid about out of hours, then you shouldn’t have a moan when the employer expect you to be at the office exactly at 8:00 and then do your full 9 hours and also take exactly and only the allotted lunch time.

No shortcuts, no leaving five minutes earlier, no “quickly shooting out to the doctor” you should then be booking leave by the hour or taking a half day etc.

On the flipside if you company is offering you loads of flexibility, rocking up when you want and leaving when you want and not constantly clock watching your arrival or god forbid expecting time sheets from you, with lunch time being a loose suggestion then is it really such a drama to do a bit of after hours work once in a blue moon? Especially when the flexibility means you just start a bit later the next day and your schedule shifts and you aren’t really doing any “extra” work.

I operate in exactly that latter system and it works just fine for me, and on average it all levels out.

Entirely different story if it’s exploitative in nature and week after week you are doing 10 extra hours for free and they are all in your personal time.

And the “for free” part of it the other side of that coin. Being in IT a bit of standby is always on the cards but this isn’t extra work and isn’t adhoc in nature but something agreed on up front and you should be paid for being on standby as well as any serious work you have to do while on standby.
Click to expand...
Exactly my point. Well said :)
 
Lupus said:
You'd think that, but hey, headcount has been frozen since 2023.
Click to expand...

I mean as IT nerds we like to moan about being the only ones who can fix certain things, but in most cases it’s where our job security has come from.

It may not be intentional on our part, but it’s not such a bad place to be all things considered.

As much as I work to fixing key man dependencies to some degree they are part and parcel of the work.
 
SauRoNZA said:
I mean as IT nerds we like to moan about being the only ones who can fix certain things, but in most cases it’s where our job security has come from.

It may not be intentional on our part, but it’s not such a bad place to be all things considered.

As much as I work to fixing key man dependencies to some degree they are part and parcel of the work.
Click to expand...
Yeah mine wasn't intentional at all, in 2019 we lost the senior guy and the guy just under me in the same month. Of course 2020 occurred so we had no new hires directly after that, so I ran the systems with an intern from late 2019 to 2021, was stressful to say the least.
We managed to hire two guys in 2021 and it got easier as we were doing an upgrade in that year and the intern had really pulled up his socks and got himself going, in 2022 we hired another guy so we were like yeah finally team back to normal size.
2023 one of the guys from 2021 resigns and leaves, fine we've stabilised the systems and we can handle it, 2024 the guy from 2022 resigns like okay we're down a bit but we're still fine.
Ex intern is promoted to senior position in 2024, but salary disputes means he resigns in early 2025, then the first guy from 2021 has a major car accident and is having some memory issues.
So literally from 2019 I've kept the systems running, upgraded and monitored, especially since I needed to ensure new guys could get up and running quickly and that my weekends don't get disturbed too much.
So sadly I became the only one who can handle the current systems, but the new guys want to migrate to their system, but having done a migration in 2016 it can take 3 years to do that especially if you want BAU, so will see.
 
SauRoNZA said:
I mean as IT nerds we like to moan about being the only ones who can fix certain things, but in most cases it’s where our job security has come from.

It may not be intentional on our part, but it’s not such a bad place to be all things considered.

As much as I work to fixing key man dependencies to some degree they are part and parcel of the work.
Click to expand...
Well if that's your only job security within your current employment it's a problem.

It's probably good to be an active asset rather than being an expense whom only can fix that problem don't you think?
 
Herr der Verboten said:
Well if that's your only job security within your current employment it's a problem.

It's probably good to be an active asset rather than being an expense whom only can fix that problem don't you think?
Click to expand...

Oh yes fully agree if it’s your only job security then it’s a problem.

I rather meant it’s a large contributor to job security, alongside institutional knowledge.

You can be both an active asset and the only person (or one of a few) who can manage or fix particular things.

I was also thinking along the lines of departmental job security. The threat of managed services and such is kept at bay quite easily when you already run a lean team looking after complex things that someone else can’t just walk in and take over.

My point was that not every responsibility we moan about in IT should be seen as a negative.
 
Herr der Verboten said:
Well if that's your only job security within your current employment it's a problem.

It's probably good to be an active asset rather than being an expense whom only can fix that problem don't you think?
Click to expand...
When you're thrust into it though it's a different story. Not for a lack of trying to get more people to know the system. The only one who could probably run it is in Sweden as he has been for a good couple of years now, as our supplier took him on.
But even then he doesn't have the new underlying knowledge that came from all the other changes, I was originally just hired as a normal sys admin back in the day until everyone started leaving :-(. Some people just like to use companies for their training programs and after three years leave :-(
 
The division within the company I worked at the last 26 before retiring never had respect for private life.

In that time, I never went on leave without being phoned for advice, information or suggestions regarding problems with analytical equipment under my responsibility. Even after leaving the company on retirement, I was still being phoned. The worst one was when my wife and I had a weekend breakaway for my birthday, I was caught up in a call for almost two hours when they've been struggling with one specific online analyser, of which I was one of two in the country factory trained on it. My wife sure wasn't happy about that call.

I submitted my intention three months before my end date even though 30 days was the requirement. What a big mistake that was. When word got out that I was planning to leave, I was inundated with requests for assistance. There is a flexible working hours system in place where overtime worked could be taken off. I had so much to do before leaving, I accumulated exactly 30 hours of overtime, and because of everything that was requested from me to before leaving, all requests to take of overtime was denied, thus the 30 accumulated overtime hours that I forfeited.

I was supposed to be put on fixed hours the last month of employment but was kept on the flexible working hours because they knew I would work diligently and longer hours to attend to all the work request piled on me.
 
Pretty chilled where I work at. Just one employee that always has something urgent that needs to be done 10 mins before home time on a Friday which then becomes my problem.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X