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Comment by pfp | Hacker News Reader

I really, _really_ don't understand the constant fuss about after-hours email. It's not a phone call or an IM, it's mail. It's expected to be an asynchronous and a somewhat slow medium, and I've never encountered a workplace that expected immediate responses, let alone after hours responses at all. Maybe this is some US/Anglo specific issue?

Personally, I work at silly hours, from the afternoon til 2-4 AM. If I had to delay sending emails because of such odd sensitivity, I'd never be able to contact anyone in time. When I'm not at work, I'm not touching my work mail, IMs etc - don't even have them configured on my personal devices, so I don't get any notifications. Pretty simple IMHO.

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It's a law being proposed in the US. It's a problem here. Just out of curiosity, where are you from?

The proposed law doesn't prohibit you from sending emails. It prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who don't respond to the emails. It doesn't prohibit employees from responding to emails. It also allows your job to define when your "normal work hours" are, so if you work at 2 AM and that's when your office is open, you can expect people there and responding

It's super great that your work experience does not intrude upon your life. For many people in the US it does, and they feel like they cannot do anything except accept this intrusion. This law allows them to, like you, not touch their work emails when they're not at work.

Originally Finland, currently working in a multinational based in Germany. Same experiences in both countries, I've never felt any "soft" pressure of the kind described in this thread that'd call for such legislation.

On call hours are controlled by legislation though, at least in Finland. Compensation for being on call isn't just "included in your regular salary"; employers are required to pay 50% (IIRC) on top of that just for the fact that you're able to work (read: sober and not innawoods) during a certain defined time period, and if you're actually called in, salary for the actual overtime hours worked. Obviously this gets pretty expensive for employers though so they tend to make optimal use of their on call people, but at least the rules are pretty clear.

And that seems to be the direction legislation like this would be pushing employers towards. The problem is, as demonstrated elsewhere in this thread, that many people don't appreciate the idea that working 24/7/365 isn't what most people want. If you do, that's cool, do you, but forcing that culture on people makes problems which makes market regulations.

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