ETA: Actually I really think the idea of "work-life boundaries" is a useful framing to have alongside "work-life balance"
At more senior levels, shit happens - servers blow up, deals come out of nowhere, and your top client with millions of dollars in arrears declares bankruptcy. It's generally unreasonable to declare all those situations unworthy of your consideration, let alone time, ex ante.
You're just reinforcing the culture that it's ok for these things to steal you life from you.
- Outside of a young startup you should be paying someone to monitor/fix your servers overnight as their job.
- It's very very rare that a deal shows up that can't wait until morning and by handling it right away you are telling the client that you'll drop everything to deal with them...which isn't a good or sustainable practice.
- What could you possibly do at 10pm one night when a client declares bankruptcy? Deal with it in the morning.
By not declaring all these situations unworthy of your consideration/time ahead of time you are saying to everyone that it's okay to interrupt you at any time for any reason...fuck whatever else you are doing at the time.
Such a shitty deal.
That said, there is a flip side to the coin. In a client-driven business, you tend to have more flexibility when something isn't on fire. I used to work at a law firm and now I work for a judge. I liked my work-life balance substantially more at the firm. Before, if the baby had a rough night, I'd just sleep late and roll in at 10. Not so now. Uncle Sam expects me to be at my desk by 8:30 sharp. Before, if I wasn't busy I'd take a long lunch with my wife. Now, I've got 1 hour for lunch, minus 10 minutes to get through security. I don't take work home anymore, but I also don't get to go home when I don't have work.
So I guess I don't find that Microsoft ad as troubling as David does. To me it doesn't signify filling all the crevices of my life with work, but rather having the flexibility to do my work when I want to and need to.
David's contention is ultimately that work-life boundaries can result in better work than simply being on call at all times, because people are more productive when work is not in conflict with their significant personal relationships.
If David is right, then client driven businesses that maintain robust boundaries will perform better than those that do not.
If 24/7 responsiveness is the highest priority for your clients, the implication is that they themselves do not understand the value of work-life balance and that by going along with their demands, you are acting as a facilitator of a dysfunctional behavior that is also bad for you and your business.
Moreover, the more-responsive firms compensate for the worsened work-life balance by paying their employees more. If employees would rather have work-life balance, they can always jump to a more balanced firm for a smaller salary.
Presumably they do this because they expect to be able to lean on you when the work needs to be done.
I love what I do - when something comes up at 11PM or 4AM I'm jumping, not groaning, to the phone. I can reciprocate that by reserving the option to take long lunches and spontaneous time off when I am not needed. It is a mix of gradients, not a balance of discretes.
>What could you possibly do at 10pm one night when a client declares bankruptcy? Deal with it in the morning.
Get a stay put on an account which, as it happened, had a large withdrawal by international wire scheduled for the morning.
Everything doesn't need to propel you from your seat. But I find value in being able to triage. This is not for everyone - I am slow to get stressed or agitated and can sleep on an urgent-in-the-morning-but-not-tonight issue. I also work with smart people - they don't shove their bad planning onto my evening.
There has been an amazing increase in productivity over the last 20+ years, but all it's led to is companies making their employees do more. The ads just reinforce that this is ok. That you are at the mercy of your job 24/7/365. It's a disturbing trend.
When I didn't have a family, I worked 10-12 hours a day, no problem. Mostly because I wanted to and not because it was required. I feel like no job (unless it's your own making) is worth the crap that dhh talks about in his post. Sadly with tech, it is definitely headed in that direction.
Ultimately, being FT is not a good thing in tech. You rarely work only 40 hours, there's always pressure to work on vacation (such bs that one is), weekends, etc - basically the MS posters. The only way to avoid this is to be the boss (altho that has certain requirements as well) or be a contractor with very fixed boundaries (I simply say "I have 9-5 M-F available only. I"m not available for emergencies or weekend work."). And for the stock; unless you're a higher level employee in the company that can negotiate a great stock and benefits package, you get nothing compared to those at the top.
So the ultimate question is: are you willing to be a wage slave that makes someone else's dreams come true?
That said, tech is _the_ platform to make any dream happen as long as you're creative and persistent.
Looking at things more historically, yes we are seeing work show up in more areas of our lives, but we are also getting a bunch of flexibility in return: e.g. who has set work hours? who needs to get approval to go on vacation? Is anyone tracking your time in/out of the office? when there isn't some emergency, can't you just leave work any time you want to take care of personal business?
Maybe it depends on where you work, but I don't find myself worrying about this kind of stuff. And to be fair, I don't ever have the experience of "the boss asking me to make him a spreadsheet at 7PM for the next day" but I have had the "this server just fell over and users are complaining, can you help debug it right now?" experience.
That's a sign of a badly-run company. It happens, but by no means all companies are like that (and in an area like IT with generally high mobility, it might be a sign that you should be updating your CV). There _are_ genuine emergencies, as you say, but they're typically rare.
For those who have less-portable skills, or are in a more competitive labor market, telling your boss to go to hell is a much more dubious choice.
Sometimes business emergencies do just pop up, but it's surprising how quickly an emergency dissipates as soon as there's an extra cost associated with solving it (or not surprising, depending on how jaded you are). Assigning explicit costs to emergency work is an easy way to make a team more efficient.
Well, I think the actual answer here is that your boss doesn't ask you to do things like this in the first place. When he or she asks you to you're going to be hard-pressed to say no.
When I hear an employer talk about 'work-life balance' I hear "we expect you to be available all the time, but you can take comp-time in a less formal way when we don't need you." I think that is the standard interpretation these days.
"Work-life boundaries" sounds like something different entirely.
Technology is an enabler. If you want to work, the advertised technology enables you to work. If you don't want to work, the technology does not hold a knife to your throat and force you to work. This is coming from someone who refuses to take a smartphone from work because it raises expectations about answering phone calls and emails over evenings and holidays.
I do appreciate VPN though, because it means I can leave early on Friday evening if I have something fun to do, and catch up on the work on Sunday night. And that's why DHH argument comes across as so silly, because it is dystopian not to allow technology that allows me to time shift my work.
By DHH's same metric, the following are dystopian because they enable you to work outside your office: Remote desktop, VPN, Google Apps, SaaS offerings, web based tools, smartphones with work email.
Google even has a similar pitch for their Google apps:
>Need to attend a meeting from your kid’s soccer game?
>Access your work from any device with a web browser – your computer, phone or tablet – and stay productive even when you’re away from the office
>Google Apps makes it easy to stay connected to projects you’re working on and the people you work with, no matter where you are or what device you’re using.
Ads like these can have a funny effect, such as making the idea of working during your child's recital or soccer game okay. Notice the specific example Microsoft provides, where the child is about to score a goal while the parent is turned away while on his cell phone (presumably doing "work"). This is ghastly to me.