The key is not to force your preference on others.
The problem is that employers will start pushing from-home work on people who DON’T want it (like myself – I’ve learned to LOATHE working from home full-time) if the industry allows for it. Why? It saves them on office costs, and if people have all the tools needed to work from home, there are suddenly no boundaries between home and work. Welcome to 24/7 on-call Hell.[/quote]
Yeah, that’s tricky. Since my wife switched to remote 2 years ago, we’ve had to get a lot more strict about setting boundaries with work. She used to check Slack occasionally while idling on the couch outside of working hours. Little things like that were cut out pretty early on, else she ended up doing a lot of little work sessions during family time. If you aren’t good at setting those boundaries, remote work might not be right for you.[/quote]
There’s a tradeoff between flexibility and taking calls outside of your timezone. We’ve had a few years to refine things but it’s pretty simple.
We have a planned short morning “standup” meeting at 9am PST in the morning and a meeting in the afternoon at 2pm PST. If you’re not in the PST timezone, you either have to be available at those times OR you must have someone covering for you.
You are not to respond to slack or team messages past your 6pm in your timezone, unless you are happen to be the engineer on call for a production launch week. At which there’s a rotation schedule across US timezone and asia, so at most you’ll be on call for +2hrs from 6pm until the other team takes over.
Managers and above are exempt and expected to attend corporate meetings as early 7am PST when needed because there are times you’ll need to get on a call with the east coast team… The flipside is there are days that things get quiet by the time it’s 3pm PST (because everyone on the east coast it’s already 6pm). So some days, I’m off by 3:30pm PST, just in time to volunteer for my kid’s robotics team.
No one is allowed to ring personal mobile numbers. Everyone is expected to message in slack or teams, and if you’re on call, you need to have slack/teams on your phone and logged in.
If you don’t respond during hours, don’t check in your code or submit a PR or show up for a code review, design meeting. You will get tarred and feathered over slack and teams by your teammates and get shit on by them.
Managers and above have learned here to use the “Scheduled messages” after hours, if they want to put something in a slack channel that is not meant to be actioned upon until the next business day. Before, I wasn’t doing this, people were thinking I was expecting a response off-hours and finally people complained to me about it. I didn’t expect people to respond off-hours.. I just didn’t want forget and posted it in the slack channel meant for tomorrow.
My philosophy is don’t be a dick to people on your team. And one day if you end up working for one of them, (hopefully) you won’t work for a dick.
