March 18, 2024 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Protecting Off Hours
March 18, 2024 at 9:31 am
One of the tenets of agile development is that the team should be able to sustain the development pace indefinitely.
The important question for both employee and employer has to be whether extra hours are productive hours? What is the quality and throughput of someone working a 40 hour week vs ever increasing hours? Do you end up with a 60hr/week employee producing no more than a 40hr/week employee because the latter isn't perpetually overtired.
The need to work 60 hours a week could be legitimate. Change in legislation with a tight deadline, Y2K issue, security incidents, needing to migrate due to licence termination clauses etc. In my experience, although what I would call legitimate need does arise, the vast majority of deadlines are artificial.
If companies push employees to do 60hr/week I'm wondering what is the team unable to do as a result? Training, knowledge share, documentation (necessary and beneficial as opposed to tick box), thinking time. Ours is a thinking profession, not a typing profession.
March 18, 2024 at 1:46 pm
In my experience, most of the time it is the employee who controls how many hours per week he/she is going to work. You need to establish boundaries with your employer as to what you will tolerate. That really only works if you are a strong worker. If you slack off all day and refuse to work extra to meet the deadlines, you will be let go. But if you are consistently doing great work but limit yourself to 40 hours, you're employer/boss will be receptive to that. It helps for both sides to have the same expectations when a new job is accepted.
Obviously in our line of work certain times arise that require more work and off-hours work, but those should be the exception, not the norm.
In most cases when I have co-workers emailing me at night, it is because they want to put in the crazy hours, not because they're being pressured into it.
March 18, 2024 at 2:23 pm
I've certainly seen a mix of situations. There are certainly some managers who expect people to get xx work done, everyone, and expect them to work 50+ hours a week. Especially for last-minute things, which come every week, they want employees to stay late and finish things. Or be on call.
There are also a lot of heroes, whether they want to get ahead and impress someone, or just feel they want to get things done, that work a lot of hours. Or they may imagine there is pressure from managers.
I think I've been both those people in the past, but I try hard now to balance things out well and earn my salary, but also not overwork myself.
March 18, 2024 at 2:43 pm
Heh... I work with a "Director" that I've worked with for nearly 2 decades. He had a sign on his wall that said...
"Piss Poor Planning on YOUR part DOES constitute an emergency on MY part. YOU need to start planning a whole lot better"!
He's right... especially in the world of IT.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
March 18, 2024 at 2:44 pm
"The need to work 60 hours a week could be legitimate."
David. I agree with this to a certain extent, but not for an extended period. There are times when this is appropriate, but if it is continuous, there are probably big problems, either with you or your management.
In my worst experience, the extended work week was mostly due to an IT policy of allowing a "quality control" group to determine if and when system changes were allowed and/or implemented. This group was largely younger, less-experienced folks who were allowed far too much control of production systems. Further, due to a management gulf between front-end developers and the DBA/SQL developer group, the result was that many system changes, often the ones causing the most disruption and thus off-hour support due to servers being scattered across time zones and countries, were never released to production. Front-end systems often had data-validation issues that could cause repeated production disruptions and these often were never corrected or could be held for months for release in a 'new version' scenario only. We DBA's often even had to resort to un-authorized fixes to reduce the occurrences.
Sometimes it becomes necessary for one to take control of off-hours by serious negotiation to rectify the situation. I spent a 42-year career in IT with NEVER any formal agreement regarding required off-hours support.
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )
March 18, 2024 at 3:17 pm
That legislation in Australia, sounds very interesting. I think we should have something similar here in the US. I agree with you, Steve, that bad managers will find ways around it, to continue their bad management styles, but at least it will help with those managers who may have taken advantage of their employees, but now realize that they shouldn't be doing so.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
March 18, 2024 at 4:26 pm
Because my company operates manufacturing facilities (many 24-6 or 24-7 operations) across time zones, after hours work is part of the job description. It's a known quantity going in and our compensation reflects the requirement. Our lower level management is very concerned with making sure nobody is horribly overloaded or feeling uncompensated for lots of extra hours. Every 3-4 years there is a situation of multiple projects doing after hours upgrades in the same time span which makes things intense for awhile, but we are strongly encouraged to "recapture the time" after the upgrade process is complete. It has also been the justification our director used to allow us to continue 100% WFH after most of IT returned to office. Given that all the current DBA team members have been on the team more than 20 years we seem to have struck an appropriate balance.
March 18, 2024 at 4:46 pm
This subject reminds me of several observations from my years in IT.
First of all, maybe we put far too much emphasis on 'uptime' that isn't really all that important. Maybe on a certain day, everyone needs to take their lunch hour at the same time. Maybe internal and external-facing systems need to be better integrated but more insulated to handle downtime of one or the other. I don't even have trouble with a website telling me "On March 25, this site will be unavailable between the hours of 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM Pacific time for an upgrade to bring you better service". A little inconvenience never hurts, and the clients who get upset are probably not your most important ones anyway.
And I recall that probably forty years ago one of my tasks was to modify a factory production system to actually make several data collection workstations independent of each other and of the central system to assure that data collection work could continue during system down-time. The only effect on users was that workers might have to walk a hundred feet to a different station.
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )
March 21, 2024 at 1:03 pm
The terms "off hours" or "after hours" is subjective, and it depends on your job description. If you are a DBA or network administrator and the system crashes at 11pm, then you should expect a call. That's why we get paid the big bucks.
But if you're an intern and a manager with no life outside work wants to call and talk shop about some non-time-sensitive project task, then yeah that should be considered off limits.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
March 21, 2024 at 4:10 pm
Great points, Eric. Your job might certainly vary with hours. For me, I don't tend to work too often outside core hours (M-F, 8-5), but I do travel and I do also work with the rest of the world, so I know at times I have 7am calls, or 8pm calls.
Fortunately, I'm fine with that and my boss flexes with me. I also get some time back for traveling outside of those hours.
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