[quote=Rustico]How is it that a few of you on this thread manage to be here posting extensively, all hours of the day and night and speak of activities outside of your own job that are incredibly demanding or fun and still be worth the 6 figures they pay you at your primary job?
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It’s quite simple actually…
1) when part of your team or otherwise is in the Bangalore office trying to integrate to the stuff you have, and you’re waiting for things like network, IT work to be done, or you’re on hold waiting for a deployment, or trying to listen to a status meeting in the wee hours…You’re sort of half awake. That might be with your full time job or with your side job (assuming you bought into the outsourcing thing)…. You can’t go to sleep, but it’s not the most time intensive/thought provoking thing you need to do So you try to kill time to stay awake while you’re kinda in a zombie state waiting for feedback on whether something you asked to get done was done or not, vice versa. At the same time, you’re not exactly in the most coherent frame of mind to do really any real meaningful work, like write an application.
Ironic, I can’t imagine what production support/operations folks do. But then again, they get paid to be on call all the time.
2) You have a stubborn kid that wakes you in the wee hours at night. And then you have an accute case of insomnia, and cant fall asleep afterwards.
3) You literally get use to it that you can’t sleep longer than 4-5 hrs at night. Because you end up feeling worse if you actually get 8+ hours.
4) You’re addicted to a blog. And despite BA (blogger anonymous), where’ you’re desperately trying not to crack open the browser), somehow in some twisted means, you sort of miss the folks you bash or bash you if you don’t check in every so often. Frankly, I’m trying to find a blog much more interesting, but by far this one takes the cake in the level if interesting information and diverse posts.
So the fact is Rustico, that at least in my industry, a lot of us have VPN access, and a lot of us use our own personal computers to actually do work when we get home. It’s sort of the territory when the company gives you the benefit of more flexible time and hours. The companies I work for are more interested in (1) can you get the work done on time (and work means not only stuff you were asked to do, but any thing you need to do to put the group ahead) and (2) can you deliver on what you said you can deliver.
Shit happens at work sometimes. You get stuck into an unproductive meeting, where it requires a semi-conscious participation, yet distracting enough you can’t get your work done. Someone breaks your build, and you need to wait for stuff to get fixed. Someone forgets to setup network access, and it takes 24 hrs to do a turnover. Etc etc etc. Ok, for some of this, this occurs all the time versus just sometime. So, a management team, says get your work done, get us ahead of the curve by doing more things that we didn’t ask you to do, we don’t care how you do it as long as it gets done by date X, and as long as you show up for meetings Y, and that pretty much is it.
Provided I dont (1) look at porn at work (2) participate in any illegal activities, this sort of flexibility benefits the employer..The amount of moonlighting at work in comparison to the amount of AH work is trival. If a company really has an issue with my random moonlighting on the web, then there wouldn’t be an expectation that “i need to do whatever it takes to deliver something” if the sh!t hits the fan that’s beyond my control too. It would be 8-6pm for me, and don’t call me after hours, and don’t give me a company phone in case you need to get a hold of me. Fact is, a lot of us do a lot of “undocumented hours” of work, which pails in comparison to actual non-work inside the company.
“Old school” employees punch in and punch out at preset times, regardless of the tasks gets done and/or demand overtime pay if they need to do otherwise….Large defense companies are an example. Typically, punch in and punch out, unless your a C level exec. In constrast, some of the other companies, overtime is expected if that’s what it takes to deliver (without overtime pay).
wow, it’s 7am…Time to go to work… Oh wait, I was already at work…Time to go to work again 🙂
