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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

How universal is it to get work emails in the evening that you have to respond to?

I run a small agency and we wouldn't dream of it unless it was an emergency. It seems pretty horrific to me (outside of high-powered corporate roles where you get rewarded enough to make up for it).

And is this regional? i.e. maybe US and East Asia but not Europe so much?

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I work for a large US Corp in the US. I close my laptop at 430-5 and don't open it again until the next day. I don't have work email on my phone. Most of my friends who work for corps are the same. So I dunno. We are all on our 40s so maybe younger folks in their 20s are more connected or something but I don't think so.

> we wouldn't dream of it unless it was an emergency.

Everything seems to be an "emergency" now. Which means you need to take the time to log back into work, figure out what is going on and then find out it could have waited until the next work day. Repeat the cycle.

Legitimately, though. It does seem like many individuals are no longer able to really differentiate between emergency, important, and standard. The number of e-mails I get with high importance marked now is sort of shocking.

Everything needs to be done immediately. Not today, not this week. Right now, in this moment.

Instant gratification is killing us, I think.

I’ve worked one tech company in my life where this was an expected norm (a fruity place in Cupertino), and it was pretty miserable. There are plenty of places where you leave work and you’re done until the next day. Highly recommend finding one.

I can’t get some of my friends and acquaintances to finish a sentence if their phone rings. They will dump out of the middle of telling a story to two or three people in order to talk to someone who isn’t even hear. I find it obnoxiously rude and they think it’s perfectly normal.

Let it go to voice mail. If they really wanted to talk to you they’d be here listening to the story too.

This is hardly new though. Even after answering machines became a thing, there were a lot of people who could not not answer a ringing landline. In fairness, a lot of people were probably conditioned pre-answering machine to phone calls being a less common thing and that if you didn't pick up, who knows who called and why?

> In fairness, a lot of people were probably conditioned pre-answering machine to phone calls being a less common thing and that if you didn't pick up, who knows who called and why?

I grew up during this transition, phone calls to our family's landline were considered important so you'd always pick up when it rang.

Fast forward to nowadays: I actively ignore phone calls. I don't live in the US so never had the nightmarish experience of robocalls all the time, and still if some number which is not my immediate family's or close friend's calls me without a previous heads-up (can be just a message "can I call you around time X?") I ignore it.

I don't know what it is about phone calls but they became increasingly disruptive, even without robocalls there are a lot of marketing calls, phone companies trying to upsell me, some random recruiter trying to reach me during working hours. Picking up the call takes me to a different universe, I simply don't want to be interrupted like that.

The look of horror on people’s faces when they realize I’m going to keep talking to them instead of stopping and answering my phone was probably the worst part.

Yes, you’re here, they are not. They can wait.

In the 1980s I worked for an arcade company as in the guy who collected the coins not manufacturer or developers of them. We also had some grey poker (not legal not illegal). I was on call one week each month at the time the pager was huge. Literally paged as in the person called a number and then that service called the page with the number saying it in a voice call over a radio.

Then early 2000s I worked for government lottery and was on call one week out of three. It was a cellphone I think we got voice or text but then later email.

Then a tech at a casino where I had a cellphone with email and it was constantly going off. So life was good up until about 2005.

For government lottery I got paid three hours for any time up to three hours. Then after that it was regular pay. So if I got the job done in 30 min I made money if not it was just a regular pay.

Europe (Netherlands) here, where I've worked so far, you would not expect a mail to be read and answered out of (individual) work hours. Only if things went south and someone was needed (because the company was too small to make all expertise fully redundant and sync up holidays), after a lot of hesitation, help would be asked (!).

Now I'm running a startup with 1 cofounder, we Slack also in evenings and weekend, but there's no real expectations there either. We just both prefer to be flexible (wrt work-life and life-work) and put in a bit of effort right where it is needed instead of hammering all the time.

Europe here. I check my mail manually, I disabled push and notifications or my life would be a hell of automated messages of a number of services. I check my mail a few times per day, delete useless stuff, reply to the few real messages. Costumers write me on slack. If it is urgent they use WhatsApp. If it is really urgent they call me. It doesn't happen every year.

"we wouldn't dream of it unless it was an emergency."

Where you get to define what is an emergency?

A service degradation sufficiently severe that tomorrow/Monday morning we'll have developers taken away from whatever they are working on to diagnose and fix the problem — whether that's a proper fix, an automated workaround, or a change in the monitoring system to reduce the severity of this problem from 'emergency'.

I took on a role with lots of outage alerts happening, at least a couple of times a week. I think my predecessor liked to play hero, by reporting every day or two what he'd 'fixed' (restarted) the previous evening/night. We had almost all of them fixed within a couple of months.

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