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Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

The big draw for me was that my phone wouldn't work.

Peers had a habit of calling me for non-critical, non-production problems. The worst was Mardi Gras, where I'm on Bourbon Street for Fat Tuesday, and my operations head calls me with an analyst on the line and burns fifteen minutes with a problem that turned out to be development coding.

My phone did occasionally explode with voicemails and texts when I got back to port.

Some of my peers have been forced to take a corporate credit card to pay for internet access on their ship.

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This is a fading benefit. The ship I took this summer had free Starlink connections powering their WiFi. It wasn’t great for calls and they blocked video, but texting was possible. (You had to be careful though because they also exploitatively ran a mobile cellular microcell that charged insane data roaming fees, which meant you had to be very careful about when you turned on roaming.)

Never tried doing a Zoom call, but the trans-Atlantic crossing I did in the the spring, I didn't pay for video streaming but Starlink at $20/day was pretty good for Internet generally. Was tempted to unplug but I didn't. Kept my phone on airplane mode the whole time.

We used to run an exploitative cruise ship terminal internet cafe where people would pay dollars for access to minutes of like, yahoo and msn messengers so really nothings changed.

Separate your work and personal phone? It seems not the healthiest of companies to work for. If you can’t set boundaries, might need help by using. A second phone

My colleagues and I put the work line on an eSIM so we can turn the work “phone” off completely with a toggle in the Settings app.

(If anyone from Apple is reading this, would be great to be able to schedule DND on a eSIM line.)

Should be able to do that through shortcuts and automation?

Here someone disables it entirely, but should be able to do something less intense than that too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/comments/16hoo4h/automati...

Or is the issue that there is no way to set DND on a particular SIM on the front end?

That certainly sounds like an express lane to burnout.

Please take care of yourself, and consider the implications of peers who think it's OK to call you at these times. There are a lot of ways to say "no" without saying it.

I am within three years of retirement, so the problem will soon solve itself.

As we age, we start to think about legacy.

Yours could include teaching your company to respect vacation time.

Why not just not answer your phone while on vacation?

Presumably because of pressure from superiors. If they know you're in cell range and ignoring them, they'll be pissy. If you're simply unable to receive communications, that's just the way it is. It shouldn't be like that, but it is.

> If they know you're in cell range and ignoring them, they'll be pissy.

Frankly, I'd be "pissy" if my superiors tried calling me when I'm on holiday and I would have no qualms informing them of that fact.

But then I'm not American.

This is not an "American" thing. I'm American, and I would never, ever, ever in any known universe within the multiverse, bring my work phone with me on a vacation, let alone answer it or do work stuff. And, I would never give anyone at work my personal phone number. Strict separation of work and personal, and never the twain shall meet. We should not accept jobs that keep you on the leash even during your vacation and after working hours, unless on-call is agreed-to part of your official duties.

I mean, vacation is vacation. I've also agreed to do interviews and such if I'm on vacation and it's convenient. I may also have glanced at email from time to time and sent a quick response to something with the proviso that I'm on vacation.

Not intending this to be snarky, but do you not have friends you meet at work? Is it a case of your friends knowing not to call your for work reasons?

A few from past jobs, and they're welcome to call if they want to do personal/social stuff together, but they are not welcome to call because the build is broken or they need me to do a database roll back because production is down.

The implication that it's typical for one's friends to call them on vacation for work reasons is bonkers to me. What kind of friends are those?

It was a question related to the GP saying they never handed their personal phone number out to people they worked with, which seemed rather limiting to me.

> But then I'm not American.

Europeans being smug about how much better their society is than Americans’ is such an annoying cliche at this point. We get it, Europe is a paradise.

Btw, I’m American and I would simply not answer if my work tried to contact me while on vacation. Conversely, I know multiple Europeans with terribly unhealthy work/life balance who work constantly while on vacation.

> Americans’ is such an annoying cliche at this point. We get it, Europe is a paradise.

I get it, for Americans this is an unusual experience but the rest of the planet putting up with American Chiche’s about us is Tuesday

I am the smug American which reminds all the euros that they make 1/3rd of what an American does while simultaneously working harder than the average rest and vest engineer at a tech retirement home like Microsoft.

Everyone I think about how bad American WLB is, I take a look at the supposed utopias of Europe and find that they’re whole nations of crabs in a bucket.

> I am the smug American which reminds all the euros that they make 1/3rd of what an American does

Including healthcare and public facilities? Or does this only apply to tech workers?

PP is bragging that USA 2%ers do better financially than the European 2%ers, as long as their kids don't get murdered at school, because they can watch their investment portfolio grow while playing video games at the office all summer instead of going on vacation.

Yeah above a certain income threshold, healthcare is actually rather cheap here. Like ~$700/month total cost for the employer and mostly $0 for employees. For excellent care. Annually that’s 4.2% of a 200k salary. That’s significantly less than what you would pay in your social contributions in Europe. but of course it sucks for people who don’t make good money, which is the whole point of complaints.

In one of the Carlos Goshen documentaries, in his time at Renault he required so much overtime that one salaried employee threw himself off a balcony at the Renault technical center in France.

I guess that Renault employees are American, even if they are French.

I think this is described in Apple's documentary, not the one from Netflix.

There are plenty of jobs where it’s not like that.

Of course it depends on the job, so this isn’t 100% guaranteed to be the case, but I find people who think they always have to be online are often just imagining that they have to because of anxiety, and if they just didn’t respond, nothing bad would happen to them.

I sort of agree. Like who is so important that their peer or superior can't handle issues if they're out? How do leaders see their business surviving if the person they're calling gets hit by a bus?

But at the same time, it does seem that most tech jobs expect you to be available after hours for calls and extend that to vacation by default.

I'm Germany HR should be punishing managers for doing that, as a single call is basically directly an entire day of new vacation time, plus punitive damages for disturbing the employee. Of course employees who can't afford to bankroll the lawsuit tend to get shafted.

> it does seem that most tech jobs expect you to be available after hours for calls and extend that to vacation by default

Not any tech job I’ve ever had, except very occasionally after hours if unavoidable due to working with people in Asia, and planned well in advance. Never during vacation, that would be crazy.

But there have probably been people on my same teams who thought it was expected, due to them being workaholics or just bad at sticking to boundaries.

You have a separate team for on-call? Never need to do off-hours elevations? That sounds wild.

Obviously on-call is an exception. That would fall under “rare and planned in advance”.

Except for my very first job when I was running shipyard jobs, no one has ever expected that they'd be able to reach me off-hours though they may have left messages of various types.

Back in the day, I took some month-long vacations to places like Nepal that were really off the grid at the time. Some people I knew were incredulous that I did so. My actual managers didn't care because I did my best to pick "good" times to do so and did my best to inform people and make arrangements. It was never a problem.

I do think, over time, being more or less continuously in-touch became more normed.

Just tell them you’ll be out of range?

So tell them you're on a cruise, then just turn the phone off..

How does someone know you are in cell range?

Why do you care what that wage thief thinks?

"Bring work to your whole self."

Because I was enjoying myself on Bourbon Street.

That is time that I paid for that they took from me. I will never get it back.

You should reread the comment you replied to.

"The big draw for me was that my phone wouldn't work."

There isn't really a shortage of other options with that feature (though it's shrinking); granted they mostly don't have people waiting on you.

Personally I'm a fan of "I'm on vacation, my phone is at home" though I understand that doesn't work for everyone. If there is an actual emergency, there are people who know how/where to reach me.

My sister in law brings her work phone everywhere and then finds the spot in the house with no signal and just leaves it there for hours on end. I can see it.

Show her the Airplane Mode button?

Airplane mode exists, as much as people don't pay attention to the security briefings anymore

Someday, I hope the FAA will catch on that it's a safety issue that the incessant droning on about shit-tier credit card programs is training people to ignore cabin crew announcements.

Tell me you live in the US without telling me you live in the US...

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