How the Smartphone Killed the Three-day Weekend 232
An anonymous reader writes "As we in the U.S. settle in for Memorial Day weekend, this article points out how our cultural addiction to technology is making it less of a vacation than it used to be. 'The average smartphone user checks his or her device 150 times per day, or about once every six minutes. Meanwhile, government data from 2011 says 35 percent of us work on weekends, and those who do average five hours of labor, often without compensation — or even a thank you. The other 65 percent were probably too busy to answer surveyors' questions.' Even for those of us who don't have any work to do over the weekend, we'll probably end up reading all of our work-related emails as they roll in, and take time out of our day to think about what's going on — to the detriment of our weekend activities: 'A study at the University of California, San Francisco, found that new experiences fail to become long-term memories unless brains have downtime for review.' I imagine it's even worse for your average Slashdotter, who's likely plugged in to more technology at home and at work. How can we make our employers understand that downtime needs to remain downtime? 'It took labor unions 100 years to fight for nights and weekends off, some say, while smartphones took them away in about three years.'"
You forgot to mention... (Score:5, Funny)
...posting to Slashdot.
I think I'll go investigate this "outside" that I keep hearing about.
Re:You forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno what the deal is with people and this crap.
You do it to yourself.
Yes, I have a cell phone, but when I'm off work and not scheduled to work again for awhile, I do NOT answer any calls that I do not recognize for one thing. And those I do recognize, if it is anything but personal related, it goes straight to voice mail. I will check that at my leisure.
I don't do work on MY time. The only reason I do work in the first place, is to earn enough money to live the lifestyle I want, and I do that on my free time. It wouldn't make sense to work all days....or I'd not be able to enjoy my 'toys' and other things money enables me to get.
If you answer the phone for work or are a slave to work...then it is YOUR fault.
You *do* know that most modern phones have voicemail don't you? USE IT.
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I went on holiday for three weeks in March. While on the train to the airport, I set the work email account "check frequency" to "never".
My manager has my personal email address (I have hers). She has used it once: on the final day of a holiday last year she emailed to tell me that the office was shut to non-essential staff due to a problem with the water supply. That's the way it should be! She also has my mobile phone number, but she's never called it.
I'm on holiday again this week. I don't have a se
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I went on holiday for three weeks in March. While on the train to the airport, I set the work email account "check frequency" to "never".
The most recent Gmail update for iOS added the ability to log out of individual email accounts rather than all of them at once. Since my personal email is on Gmail, and my workplace is using Google Apps, this is an important ability to have.
However this weekend I'm on call, so it's rather moot at the moment.
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I don't think it's calls they are talking about - I know people checking for and responding to texts every 3-4 minutes all day long. I send 1-2 texts a month and am lucky if I even check my phone 3x a day, so I'm drastically below average.
Re:You forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
> If you answer the phone for work or are a slave to work...then it is YOUR fault.
Sorta. I've had managers with these habits, and they expect me to keep up with them. When I don't, I'm "not a team player" and "the reason why this project failed" and "up for another performance review."
Not answering the phone one weekend was the reason given as to why I was the only person on my team who did not get a cost-of-living pay raise. It was unreasonable, and petty, and it was the stated reason.
So, when you say "YOU do this to YOURSELF," I gotta respond "sure, but the alternative is for someone else to punish me for not doing it."
Re:You forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
Find a new job. Or move somewhere that legally protects people from bullying pencil necks.
Re:You forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's insightful. The slavery here is voluntary.
Re:You forgot to mention... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was 'on call' for almost 2 years with one company I worked for, and almost got fired because I slept in on a Saturday and didn't answer my phone for about 3 hours. After that, I called a meeting with my manager and HR exec. I told them if I was to be considered 'on call' at all hours of the day, 24/7/365.. then they needed to pay me for the hours I was expected to answer the phone.
I then laid out the math, considering 1/4th of my salary for 'on call' status outside of normal work, they would have to raise my salary to 75% greater than my current pay. I was told they would hire another person, and divide the 'on call' status across the group to make it 'fair'. After that, I received almost no calls outside of work(except on my 'on call' weekend). They figured spanning the 'on call' status to everyone on the team, was cheaper than any one of us getting that extra 75%.. and that's just at 1/4th of MY pay, and I was a mid-level dev at the time.
I got my free time back, and they were happy that I brought the fact that I was upset with the matter to them, rather than just leaving because I was mad at the situation.
On a side note: I used to work for a very well known in-house tech service.. on my week, once every 6 months, I was paid 1/4 time 8hrs a day for them to be able to call me at any hour, and have me answer. Even when I worked that day.
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maybe you should just find a new job and sue the old one for not paying for overtime for the time they thought you should have worked.
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I've got a smartphone, but it's mostly useless. Why read work email when I can just use the computer at work? If I'm not at work, there is no possible way I'm going to be reading work email, that's just stupid. And I don't have anyone texting me either. It's really not all that convenient a device.
Re:You forgot to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can retrain your boss. It starts with turning off all notifications on all electronic communication means - IM, Email, Texts, etc. If they don't notify you, they don't interrupt your day. These actions change your day from being interrupt driven to actually being productive. I check email 3-4 times a day during working hours, or after every meeting, since I'm already interrupted. Yes, occasionally I'm late to the meeting that was scheduled 23 min ago, so what? If it wasn't important enough to tell you about, it's not that important. This also trains people to stop reacting to everything and to think their personal small emergency deserves immediate attention from everyone.
This approach serves me well, and makes my work day manageable. It also has set expectations of "work" time and "timely" responses. Email is not instant. Neither is Text nor IM. Even phone calls aren't always immediate. It's a good lesson to relearn.
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Why not just go the whole hog and eliminate that nasty pay all together? That way they company can be super competitive.
Re:Ah well, no... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you think they invented unpaid internships?
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Again something that's pretty much unique to America. The UK certainly doesn't stand for that kind of nonsense.
Re:You forgot to mention... (Score:5, Funny)
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LoL.
But I'm sure there's some kind of fakery involved.
Re:You forgot to mention... (Score:5, Funny)
It's just a pre-rendered cutscene.
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Real life:
Pros: realistic physics and lighting, imperceptible antialiasing.
Cons: permadeath.
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Re:You forgot to mention... (Score:5, Funny)
I never forget anything... (Score:4, Funny)
...as far as I can remember. :p
Crap. (Score:5, Insightful)
What took away the three day weekends is having unreasonable deadlines... and wanting to keep a job.
Has nothing to do with a smartphone.
Re:Crap. (Score:4, Interesting)
What took away the three day weekends is having unreasonable deadlines... and wanting to keep a job.
I know the common reply here is simply, "Find another job if you don't like it." And that's one possibility, but not feasible for many people. Do you know what fixed unreasonable working conditions in the past? Collective bargaining. If you're afraid of sticking your neck out there by talking to HR and your boss about how you're being treated, get together a group of your coworkers and do it together.
Do they want people on-call on three-day weekends? Fine -- pay you to be on-call. Do they want ridiculous amounts of overtime to meet "unreasonable deadlines"? Fine -- pay you bonuses for that overtime to meet special deadlines.
If you have reasonable requests, and a lot of your coworkers feel the same way, you can probably negotiate some changes. You shouldn't feel like your job is on the line if you can't commit to doing overtime whenever asked and coming in over holiday weekends whenever is convenient. Unless you're mid-level management or above, you probably don't get paid enough to deal with that sort of crap.
On the other hand, a lot of tech companies in the past couple decades seem to have developed some sort of crazy work ethic where you have a bunch of guys all under 35, with no lives, who are willing to work 80 per week all the time. I know a few guys who thrive on this sort of thing -- they just seem to keep looking for jobs that will punish them like that.
If all of your coworkers are like that, then your only recourse probably is to find a new job to improve working conditions. But if you spend your lunchtime complaining about these things with your coworkers, you can probably work to change it.
(Of course, this is all assuming that your company isn't ready to fire all of you and outsource the work to India. But if you and your coworkers are actually doing good work in your positions, that scenario is unlikely.)
Re:Crap. (Score:5, Insightful)
<sarcasm>
But that's socialism. Don't fall into the trap America!
<sarcasm/>
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There's a third option - start your own company. If you think an existing company is unfairly underpaying
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What took away the three day weekends is having unreasonable deadlines... and wanting to keep a job.
Has nothing to do with a smartphone.
My wage is low enough that I can respond to my employer "Oh, you want me to work in the weekend? Double time, then?" The answer is invariably that "We don't pay overtime". So, I'll have a look at it Monday morning :)
Where I live the norm is that if you earn above about USD 105k a year, all your time belongs to the company, depending on your contract. The concept of overtime is not applicable, as you're expected to contribute your time if necessary. This is normally specified in your contract.
If your wage is
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Some of us don't have corporate-issued phones but are still expected to be reachable if it's urgent (which is, of course, defined by the powers that be).
Some of us would also probably choose to use our personal phones anyway if the corporate phone wasn't of our preferred brand/OS.
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As long as they're willing to pay for triple overtime for after hours calls, they can call anytime they like. Up till 9pm, after that I expect a partnership.
If you're going to eat shit, don't be surprised when people feed it to you.
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Start looking for a new job then. One that has overtime for when the managers pull stunts like that.
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Overtime? What the F**K is that? I am a salary engineer and I don't get overtime, and the company can say oh we need you to finish this project by yesterday or ELSE. We management are off to a wonderful weekend of hookers, champagne, and blow.
So, your contract says nothing about work hours or compensation for working in your spare time? I hope your salary is high :)
Turn the sucker off! (Score:3)
No way to change (Score:5, Interesting)
(this is NOT a troll)
As a person (senior management) who has been told by his CEO "I don't care about what happens to the employees, I care about my company making money," I don't see there is anything you can do to get 'companies' to recognize the value of vacations... other than quitting and making them scramble to find someone else they can screw over. Sadly, the perception of vacations, much like IT and paid training in general, is that it is a drain on the company (doesn't produce IMMEDIATE revenue but DOES result in IMMEDIATE costs), and if it was possible to run the company without it, most companies would do so in a heart beat. Of course, those companies are often hell-holes to work in and fail on a regular basis.
Re:No way to change (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what unions are for.
If you do it alone, nobody will notice. You have to unionize. Read some history.
unions? thats tantamount to killing all the jews (Score:4, Funny)
dont you know? unions are only on this earth to promote the obama socialist muslim communist agenda to abort our children and fill our cheese with unhealthy dragon feces.
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"socialist atheist muslim communist agenda"
TFTFY
Re:Unions (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah unions are great. That steel industry sure is kicking ass and the cost/quality of American cars can't be beat!
The Germans [forbes.com] and Japanese [wsj.com] don't seem to have any trouble building competitive cars with union labor. So either American unions are considerably worse than their counterparts in other countries, or the problem lies somewhere else. The Big Three haven't exactly had brilliant management. In fact, their management has traditionally been crappy and shortsighted.
German workers get paid much more than American workers and even have representation on corporate boards. Yet manufacturing in Germany is thriving and the quality of their goods is among the best in the world.
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You forgot that the 200 hours is paid at 50c an hour. And then you thank your employer on bended knee.
Re:No way to change (Score:5, Insightful)
These people (including your CEO) are fundamentally incompetent. Vacations were not established to do the workers any good. They were established because people with adequate vacations make less mistakes, get sick less often, have better ideas and higher productivity, etc. and that pays off financially. Henry Ford, among others, realized this, and he was definitely not pro-worker in any sense. But he valued his own profits and sought to maximize them. Reasonable working hours and vacations are part of that maximization process. Your CEO is costing your company a lot of money. Any senior manager that does not know this is incompetent and should be removed as the amateur he is.
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They were established because people with adequate vacations make less mistakes, get sick less often, have better ideas and higher productivity, etc. and that pays off financially. Henry Ford, among others, realized this, and he was definitely not pro-worker in any sense.
Henry Ford was in a "race to the bottom" for employers and didn't care one bit, by offering better conditions than anyone else he could get the cream of the crop and lower turnover significantly leading to a highly skilled, highly experienced workforce that trashed anyone else. I doubt there was any conclusive proof to show that the average worker would be more productive on a shorter day, all other things being equal.
QUICK! Pile Blame on the NEW thing! (Score:2)
Not me (Score:4, Interesting)
We have an on call rotation at work, and I am plugged into my work smartphone when on call. That's it. When I'm not on call, the smartphone stays at home (and gets ignored while I'm at home).
There are those who get forced into spending weekend time on work, and I do have a lot of sympathy for those people (though I would encourage them to find a job with an employer who isn't abusing them). But a lot of people who spend weekend time on work don't do so because they'll get fired or anything... they just do it out of a misguided sense of loyalty to their employer and dedication to their job. Those people are fools, unless their employer is repaying them for that devotion (which almost none do).
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Same here, though I don't even check the phone when I'm on call, just wait for a text message if something goes wrong.
I'll check work email at weekends after we've just rolled out a major software upgrade or something else that could break things in a big way, but otherwise weekends are time away from work. And that's only because if I screw up and don't fix it, I could be seeing news stories about the consequences by Monday.
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Yeah, I don't check either. I have some email alerts set up, and my phone only plays a notification if one of those comes in (or if someone calls, obviously).
And like I said, I'm sympathetic to people who get forced into that stuff by management. But there are so many people that voluntarily give up their work life balance, and then complain about how much time they spend working. Well, you're the one who chose to work 7 days a week...
Re:Not me (Score:4, Interesting)
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Plus, if you don't work those extra hours nothing bad will happen! The boss may make it seem like it's mandatory, but people don't get fired for it and rarely get dinged during performance reviews (you'll get a far larger raise by changing jobs than from the yearly review anyway). This system of tricking employees into working 80 hour weeks or being on call 365 days a year only works if the employees allow it to work. I never see anyone fired over stuff like this as long as they get the job done, and I n
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Now is this a senior job, or just an entry level grunt job? I just can't imagine senior positions being stuck "on call". That's for help desk stuff maybe, or when a company is severely understaffed and needs someone to guard the building at night. It should also be something that is RARE. If your particular job requires this, then you need to get compensation for it, you take time off later. If you are forced to work during the three day weekend then you will take a different three day weekend with NO
Depends on your priority and speed (Score:3)
I nearly never checked my work e-mails at home, even if I've been a lead in most companies. I started a successful company with other people. Even then, my evenings were my evenings, and my week-ends were my week-ends, not my company's. Some exceptions of course, but they remained exceptions.
I give my all when I am at work, and disconnect myself from work at home. Like every good geek, I check my personal e-mails, and I check my personal phone messages approximately 594,000,000 times per microsecond (slightly exaggerating, but let's just say that number would be higher if I didn't have to drive sometimes ;) ), and everyone @ work knows they can call me or phone me if they are stuck. However, I will not jeopardize my mental sanity or my family's sanity for work. Starting a company is enough hard work to feel the strain, starting early AM and ending late PM (if ever), I won't add up a chain up on my nose when I'm away.
Which doesn't mean it doesn't work for you, I mean, I have people whose job it is to be 24/7 (some IT and some managers). Then you have to adapt your rhythm so you are relaxed most of the time, so your brain can work during long marathons, instead of 8 hours sprints. Even then, they all know the meaning of disconnecting, and will resort going to a place where their phone doesn't work if needed, but they will relax.
And if you feel like you work too hard, then don't :) There are other jobs elsewhere that doesn't require constant connection. Just change. It's your life. You do what you want.
i work in a bangladeshi clothing factory (Score:2)
and whenever im away on the weekend, i check my cellphone to see if my friends are dead.
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I check my personal e-mails, and I check my personal phone messages approximately 594,000,000 times per microsecond
You mean, you don't have push notifications?
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hahahaha, yes, but not for everything. Because the Fruity Device I got doesn't handle spam correctly, it means it gets _all_ the e-mails from my provider. So I wait for them to be filtered out by my computer, and then, I read them. No Push for e-mails.
Nor for the Social company, not particularly granular for the different wall posts, so I prefer to actually check them myself.
In other words, I mostly use Push notifications to get informed of the state of my servers at home, some messaging, and that's mostly
The problem is the users (Score:2)
It is quite enough to check it once per day. Or not at all on the weekend. That users have panic of becoming "unreachable" is not really rational. Almost all things can wait a few hours, typically a few days. Switching the phone off is not treason to the world, it is just rational. Oh, and when answering work-stuff on the weekend (which I occasionally do), it of course goes onto my time-sheet and gets fully paid for. Otherwise I would not even bother looking at it.
tell the customers you are off (Score:2)
so if something goes down on the weekend you just leave it down until work time and screw the customers?
i'm sure they won't mind their paid services being down until lunch time on Monday
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We tell them, if they want someone to fix their problems at weekends, they can pay $50,000 a year to have them on call. Seems to work for us, and people line up to be on call for the extra few hundred dollars a week.
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If my employer considers it important enough to have production problems addressed on the weekend, then they'll prepare for it. They'll hire enough people to have staff to cover things on weekends. They'll assign an on-call rotation. They'll provide the beeper or cel phone to contact the on-call people (since the device goes with the role it can be passed from one person to the next). And they'll provide compensation for working that time (either as part of salary negotiated at hire or as additional compens
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i will take working on weekends and flex work time. like if i need to work from home because one of my kids is sick and i don't want to spend $70 on a baby sitter. or i work from home one day a week so i can pick up a kid from public school and not spend the money on after school
last few years i worked from home 30-40 days out of the year because of sick kids. and wasn't charged one day vacation since i was actually working
This is a cultural problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, in the context of the American mind this makes sense but in fact it's totally incorrect. Nights and weekends off has been lost over the last 30 years or so because corporations and governments worked together to reduce labor laws that protect workers and reward offshoring of labor as another avenue to damaging worker rights. Taking away our right to unionize did not make them enough money, so they had to exploit slave labor in Southeast Asia to have another implement to control workers: threatening not only individuals but entire communities with factory shutdowns.
And then they realized that with the militarization of our police forces they didn't have to threaten anything, so now they're just taking.They take our national wealth through tax loopholes, they drain our coffers with lucrative government contracts, and yet they continue to demand more and more money because there's no such thing as enough. Apple can't afford to pay full taxes, and they can't afford to pay Americans a living wage to build their products, but somehow they have over one hundred billion dollars in hard cash. They have so much money they haven't figured out how to spend it yet, and pretty much every corporation operates in a similar fashion.
Corporations continue to take and take and the only thing that will stop them is a popular labor movement, which may or may not be around the corner. Until Americans understand the root of the problem -- corporate power far outpacing democratic will -- corporations will continue to take our rights, our money, and the inheritance of a living planet away from our children. That's not because corporate people are evil, it's because absolute power corrupts absolutely, and despite all of their protestations to the contrary, they operate as any warlord or king or priest does when they are in centers of power. If they see something they want and they can get away with it, they will take it.
Smartphones don't have much to do with it.
This is biology (Score:2)
Supernormal Stimuli & the Pleasure Trap (Score:2)
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/B0057DC3VY [amazon.com]
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx [drfuhrman.com]
Which agree with your point and then go beyond it... People become "neuroadapted" to the new level of stimulation and have as much pleasure as before, except they tend to have negative health effects of a diversity of things they need for true health.
The smartphone isn't killing the 3 day weekend... (Score:3)
get a nice box to put your phone in (Score:3)
a nice gilded wood box with a velvet lining works wonders in the whole "can't call you" thing.
If its a real emergency they will track you down.
list as follows
1 Job is ON FIRE
2 Boss is dead/out of action
3 somebody wants to say the words "You have Been Served" to you
4 somebody that did work the weekend dropped out/over
5 TLAs have shown up and they are making frowny faces
99% of the rest can wait until Tuesday
Life or death! (Score:2)
No, this call from work is top priority and vitally important. It's life or death!
Except I'm not an MD, I'm not doing heart transplants. I'm just a software engineer writing drivers for smartphones and tablets.
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I think #3 can wait until Tuesday, too.
How to restore your three- and four-day weekends (Score:2)
It's your own fault.... (Score:3)
... if you can't go through a long weekend without constantly checking your smart phone.
Either you are in a job that you choose that requires 7x24 support, or you choose to work on a project that has a tight deadline, or you put up with a bad corporate culture for fear of having to find a new job, or you haven't trained co-workers, or you haven't faced the fact that you are a work-a-holic, etc.
There are companies that value employees and recognize the benefits of personal time. Go find one.
PS: This comment does not apply to situations where real emergencies occur. Those are obviously exceptions.
How can this even be true? (Score:3)
The average smartphone user checks his or her device 150 times per day, or about once every six minutes.
How in the world can someone check their smartphone that often? You'd have calluses from sliding the unlock icon surely.
I check my android phone if it buzzes from a message and I'm not already doing something else, or if a voice call comes in. But I'm definitely not getting voice calls every six minutes.
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Check phone. Play angry birds. Check again before setting it down. Go get a drink. Check again. Browse facebook. Check again.
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That's really ony one check. If I pick up my phone and check facebook, email, and texts then play a game, then go on wikipedia. That's 1 check, or maybe 4 or 5. But are we counting every second I'm holding my phone as checking my phone? Do we also count checking the time on my phone when I don't wear a watch? Should we compare checking a phone with checking a wrist watch, it might be interesting but I don't know what that would tell us about people.
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If a quarter of all smartphone users are teens who check their smartphone 500 times a day, then the rest of the users only have to check 33 times a day (about twice an hour while awake) for the average (mean) to be 150 times per day.
This is one of those cases where you want to be us
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get rid of salaries pay or have a high min level t (Score:2)
get rid of salaries pay or have a high min level to be on it with no OT pay say min of 80K-100K + cost of living bumps.
about about going some where with poor coverage (Score:2)
about about going some where with poor coverage and or a place to loud to hear the phone.
Just Say No (Score:3)
I've made it exceptionally clear that I am not available 24x7. If my boss would like me to be on call for some period, I'm willing to discuss that, but it needs to be arranged in advance for a clear time period.
If some communication is coming in for work right now, I don't even know about it and I'll handle it on Tuesday, given the 3-day weekend. Weekends are not "extra work days", they are my time to relax, unwind, and come back to the office ready to do a much better job than if I were constantly tired, fatigued, and burnt out. Ultimately, that benefits my employer, too.
3 day weekend (Score:2)
Not everybody works Monday to Friday
(or 9 to 5 for that matter)
I have a 3 night weekend (I work nights) every 2 weeks. (Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights)
But then I have to work the other weekend.
Statutory holidays don't make any difference, I work every Monday (and Wednesday)
I get alternate Tuesdays and Thursdays off. (Total 72 hrs every fortnight)
So strange... (Score:5, Insightful)
Being a little older its interesting to see the arc of human behavior. Younger people don't question the way it is, it's just the way it is and they rationalize why it's that way and they thing it's normal, even good. There was a time when people actually mattered as people and not interchangeable widgets in a service based industrial engine that consumes people in precisely the same way it consumes paper or water or raw materials.
When people mattered, their human needs mattered. How the company was loyal to the employee just the way an employee was supposed to be loyal to a company. My Father worked for the same company for 30 years and got a generous retirement from them. Today the shrinking bone and the increasing number of ever hungrier dogs forces us to be happy to give away all our human time, with our families, with our interests and personal joys and passions, or we are forced to do work that leads to living a life that is hungry and wanting.
The problem isn't and can't be cell phones. It is a ceaselessly ravenous industry that wants all of you, and when it is done will spit you out sans vital juice. The future bodes that human labor is coming to an end. But the industries are the only recipient of the changing world. We must begin to look at how we will deal with a human population that no longer can compete in the market place with robot labor Or society itself will unravel.
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There was a time when people actually mattered as people and not interchangeable widgets in a service based industrial engine that consumes people in precisely the same way it consumes paper or water or raw materials.
Would this have been when they had children working in coal mines, or when you couldn't get paid in anything but company scrip? The good old days really weren't, but that doesn't mean there aren't people working diligently to bring them back.
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Actually that was before that time. The days of company scrip were the first days when companies considered workers an interchangeable commodity to be used up and replaced. Then government regulation came in and forced companies to treat workers decently and provide certain benefits. That forced companies to change, because the best way to recover the cost of investing in an employee became to keep that employee for a long time. Give them time to learn, become more productive, contribute value that came onl
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Well, even when I was younger this sort of stuff never happened, and I was actually in IT then. The thing was though that I was with a defense contractor and you had time cards (even if salaried). So if they ever had a need for you to work on the weekend you were given that time off on a later date. Now you could work late if you wanted to (no overtime and such) but it was voluntary and it never lasted and became a habit.
Even my friends at other companies were very similar, even with the lack of time car
Antiannoyance App (Score:2)
Justice = my boss + razor encrusted dildo. (Score:2)
I have blocking software and use it. There are four people on this earth who can call me during vacation or holiday who can get past my shields. Not even POTUS can get my fucking phone to ring.
Yea right fire me you fucking marionette.
digital vacation one day a week (Score:2)
If you work in a service industry... (Score:2)
Why the hell... (Score:2)
...would you work weekends without getting paid?
Employers don't say to computer manufacturers, "We want seven PCs, but we're only going to pay you for five", so why would you let them do this with your labour?
Weekends are your free time. You never get this back. If your employer wants you to work on a weekend, tell them to pay you.
Re: (Score:2)
many do: some of us get very good salaries for all the extra bother of an IT job.
and let's not forget those rights the unions fought for 100 years ago was for very hard manual labor. most of us sit on our butts pushing buttons staring at a screen, not exactly Sinclair's "the Jungle"
One could always... (Score:2)
One could always just shut it off!
Seriously. If you're at home, why do you need to play with a smartphone?
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This is how I handle it. If I'm not on the clock, they don't get a response. Hell, a lot of the time my weekends are spent 10 to 20 miles from the nearest cell coverage.
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Indeed. The problem is that these people cannot relax in the first place. Now they are working themselves into the ground. But I predict that the problem will be solved in a few years, by a flood of burn-outs. Most companies need to have a longer-term focus with regard to employees or they will fail.
Re: TL:DR (Score:4, Informative)
Not all of those 7 billion can do certain jobs.
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Or rather if the job requires any kind of specific experience, most people cannot do most jobs. Experience cannot be replaced be replaced by anything else.
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That is pretty much untrue for pretty much any non-menial job. Or rather "the right education" does not exist and cannot be created.
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stolen iphone i call one of the other IT people and ask them to wipe it
or i find the nearest computer with a web browser and wipe it remotely
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Re:Move to Canada (Score:5, Informative)
"I work in technology in Canada, and extremely few people check their work email on (long) weekends. "
Ditto here in Luxembourg.
"It's simply not expected."
Nobody would even think to do it. It would be working for free, only stupid people do that.
If you're on call you have to be paid, always, it's the law.
If you're not paid to be on call, people don't even pick up the phone if the number is blocked or comes from a company phone.
Overtime has to be taken as free time until the end of the following month or it has to be paid _and_ taken as free time..
Re: Move to Canada (Score:3)
Same here in Australia - people are not expected or pressured to give up their holidays and/or weekends in this way. Indeed, most managers actively discourage this kind of mentality. It's a work to live country and I suspect there'd be rioting in the streets if someone tried to change that.
This kind of article, combined with the tiny amount of vacation Americans get per year compared to every other country makes it sound like (working) hell on earth. Or maybe Americans just love working :)