| There are a number of factors such as psychological ones that play a role here, but one major one is distributed teams. I'll go into below what my solution is to the whole off-hours problem is. As a DevOps guy, you have to bail people out of situations or assist with a scary release (because things are rarely sufficiently automated, it takes years to convince management and fix tech debt, especially in a startup). For that and other reasons, there's an expectation that 'it's just part of the job' to 'be available' in case someone in the globe needs you. After suffering such things for well over a decade, I've chosen the stubborn consulting route. My health care sucks and it's hard to find roles, but once I do I get paid hourly and well, and let me tell you something about company behavior when you're on the clock: suddenly they volunteer OTHER people for off-hours work, suddenly they're reluctant to let you work more than 40 hours. That realization should clue you workaholics (employee workaholics, not founder workaholics) in on what's really at stake here, and the real reason you're checking Slack nervously at 3 pm Saturday before your colleagues do: it's free overtime for your company. And quite frankly I think many of you are doing your colleagues a disservice by setting availability standards too high. There's no reason to race to the bottom. |
Never again.