Comment by malyk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by malyk | Hacker News Reader

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"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.

If you're in a product-driven business, then the idea of working during appetizers is pretty horrific. If you're in a client driven business, it's just what clients demand, and if you don't give it to them they'll find someone else who will.

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.

A client driven business doesn't have to give in to every demand any more than a product driven one does.

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.

It depends on the firm. Some legal and accounting firms offer 24/7 responsiveness to clients, and charge accordingly. Other firms provide work-life balance to their employees and make it clear to their customers that they won't be available after Xpm, or before Yam, and correspondingly charge significantly less for their services.

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.

You don't actually know any of this as fact, do you?

It's the difference between optimizing for latency and optimizing for throughput. Clients tend to want to optimize for latency rather than throughput. To them, a "good enough" analysis by tomorrow morning (before some important meeting) is often much more valuable than a perfect analysis tomorrow afternoon (after the meeting is over).

This is true, but it sounds as though this is just because your clients are facilitating this kind of behavior in their clients by not scheduling the meeting for a time when the material can be prepared without people working in their family time.

Presumably they do this because they expect to be able to lean on you when the work needs to be done.

>steal you life from you

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.

To be honest, I'm also someone who doesn't mind jumping online to fix something quickly in off hours. But I think the ad that prompted the post by dhh is part of a trend in our society that is only going to get worse. It's ok for you and me who can find a job in a week, but that isn't most people. Most people don't have the option of telling their boss that it's after hours. They'll lose their job, or significantly endanger their job/raise/bonus/performance eval/etc. if they do so.

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.

The product is named "Office365" after all. It is paving the way for that future in a not too subtle way...

I have to really agree with this, well put. I'm FT at a startup now, love everyone I work with (we're a very small team of 5) and we all feel an urgency to 'make things happen'. I'm the oldest person in the group, have a 2yr old and another one on the way. I've been lucky (sad to say) to be able to work at home a few days of the week and I'm usually out of the ofc, heading home at 5/5:30. I have to because of family.

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.

I would try to look at this in a different way: Is there some kind of flexibility that your employer could offer you in return that would allow it to ask for this kind of flexibility from you? If there is, why is this a problem?

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.

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