[Cd00d]

I get that in the "most secure boundary" sense, I should have a work provided phone for work stuff, BUT...

I don't want to carry two phones. I'm part of a team that owns some responsibility for fixing things that break in the night. I find it freeing to be able to reply to a Slack or Outlook email while I'm with my kids at the playground.

I see the above advice all the time, but I can't help but think it only relates to an IC with no career ambition, no outside responsibility distractions (kids schedules), that's 100% committed to 9-5 life and has little opportunity for big promotion based on being part of a chain of ownership for things that are customer facing.

Personally, I've mostly worked at small companies (my preference), and have ambitions. I have a healthy work/life balance, but also don't want my products to fail and occasionally want the flexibility to help my colleagues while AFK.

In the end, the above advice is very popular, but I just see a jaded burnout mercenary in a company with tens or hundreds of thousand employees.

[xenophonf]

> I find it freeing to be able to reply to a Slack or Outlook email while I'm with my kids at the playground.

You can spend as much time on work as you want, but you only get so much time with your children. OP's point is that you should guard the time you have and spend it wisely. Personally, I find carrying a second device and keeping things separate part of maintaining a healthy balance between my work and my personal time.

I also don't want my personal devices or projects tied up in some corporate legal proceeding, so I keep them separate for that reason as well.

[shakezula]

I can attest to the importance of this legal separation. I had a personal laptop stolen that had work files on it from before my work had given me a laptop, and I had the uncomfortable responsibility of disclosing that to my boss.

I hadn't even done anything wrong but it made me hella uncomfortable thinking about my work or the cops getting their hands on my laptop. It just feels too personal.

I had to file police reports and everything, and ultimately it was never found, but I still hate the idea and sometimes think about where that laptop ended up.

[merrywhether]

Part of the thought process is that he wouldn’t be at the playground with his kids in the middle of the day at all if it made him completely unavailable to respond to stuff. Similarly, I go surfing some mornings and respond to people on my watch to keep them unblocked while I’m having some fun at a time strict 9-5 wouldn’t allow.

[Cd00d]

This is exactly correct.

[convnet]

I maintain a pretty optimal WLB at my current job (I don't remember the last time I've done any work outside of normal work hours) but I do like having work Slack and calendar on my phone. In my case I feel it adds freedom to my day since it makes it easier to just go run a quick mid-day errand without worrying that you're missing a meeting or something. I didn't used to have any of it on my phone because I always heard it was bad psychologically, but as a result I always felt nervous stepping away from my desk for too long because I'd have no way of knowing if someone needed me. I think if I was in a position where I was asked to do work outside of work hours I'd feel differently about this though, but the extent of my after work Slack is mostly requesting days off and browsing some announcement threads.

[smabie]

Some people don't want any boundaries, and that's fine too.

[anigbrowl]

You can be ambitious and committed to the success of your team/projects while still maintaining clear boundaries. Indeed if you're that ambitious (as you repeatedly emphasize), I think it's wiser to maintain such a clear boundary. What if you either have to leave your firm due to an emerging problem or receive an offer that you dearly wish to accept, but you're so entangled with your employer that disconnection if going to be fraught and/or have legal complications? What if your employer winds up in messy litigation and your personal data ends up as part of the evidentiary record, as mentioned in that Twitter thread?

I've known people who are very driven and can't unplug, who later on end up being very resentful of their own careers because they've structured everything around pleasing others and never saying no.

[kodah]

This is where I think the new line of Linux phones need to put in a lot of work. Properly sandboxing applications and defending against corporate snoopers should be a top priority of any open source phone OS.

[XorNot]

I mean you need an undetectable virtual machine for a phone really. That's the reality: I'm content with my phone running some type of hard to crack secure element so companies can convince themselves it's secure, but what I want is that thing isolated and it's network and cellular access gated.

[perryizgr8]

This is what Samsung Knox is. I use it for my company email and slack etc.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

I think you are dramatically overestimating the actual challenge of carrying two phones. Phones these days have great battery life, and they make pretty small models. The phone is like 0.2% the mass of your body. It’s not that big of a load.

I’ve been promoted several times while having separate work and personal phones.

[blitzar]

If more phones is less ambitious, is having 0 phones the maximum ambition? I have tapped away on slack on my work phone while at the playground or sports or recital on weekends etc 100's of times.

Yes I feel like a right prick pulling two phones out of my pocket - I mitigate this by not being the kind of person who sits down and places their phone on the table face up at dinner.

As for the suggestion that the seperation or work/personal is a sign of less ambition, that you somehow care less about work than your personal life - my work phone is set to ring 24 hours a day, my personal phone vibrate only. There are times where I am not keeping my work life from getting in the way of my personal life, but keeping my personal life from getting in the way of work.

Watching someone go to check their work slack on their phone only to have their attention dragged away to group chats with friends on competing attention apps gives me pause to consider. At the end of the day, whatever works for people, I have found what I think works for me.

[treebot]

I also just want to say, as a full time remote worker, I need Slack on my personal phone. Remote work allows you to work anytime and thus break out of the 9-5. But to properly do that and still be a member of a team, I need to be reachable on my regular phone. If I decide to switch up my day and work at night, I need to still be reachable for random things during other people's working hours. It's usually just someone has a quick question. Team members in other time zones have discussions on Slack that are outside of the time I'm sitting in front of my computer. I like seeing these discussions and contributing while I'm at the grocery store or some such. If mission critical software is blowing up, I need to know that I need to get back to my computer. If I don't have any real work to do that day, I can go do something else, and just check my phone to see if I need to get back to my computer because someone who actually is working needs me. I can actually sort of take days off this way, without having to actually ask for the day off.

In general, as a remote worker, having Slack on my personal phone allows me to work less and more efficiently. It gives the illusion that I am always working, whereas I'm actually working only when I want to and am most effective.

[jasonkester]

You don’t have to do that.

I also work remote, in a different time zone to my team who communicate mainly on slack. I would never consider installing it on my phone.

Yes, it is possible that somebody will send me a message when I’m not at my machine. They’ll get a response the next morning I’m in.

To me, that’s just the most basic form of boundary setting. If I’m not at work, I’m not working. Being remote doesn’t change that.

[beermonster]

> I don't want to carry two phones.

Neither did Hilary Clinton

[sysadmindotfail]

Relevant Between Two Ferns: https://youtu.be/xrkPe-9rM1Q?t=317

[jay_kyburz]

When things break at night, can't they just call your personal phone? Can't you login to slack on your personal phone, from the browser if you have to?

Why does cooperate IT need to own your tech just for you to be reachable.

[nxpnsv]

I have found few things as freeing as removing slack from my phone, especially at the playground - i enjoy the time i spend with my kids more.

[vanviegen]

To me, being at the playground is not a prime example of spending time with my kids. I'm fine with replying to some work related messages while basically watching my kids play.

Playing soccer together, reading to them, playing a board game, doing a joint Lego construction project, learning them to skate, etc. That's spending time together. It doesn't mix well with work.

[nxpnsv]

What activities mean what depends on the kids age a lot, and the kids and the parent. We agree that spending time together doesn’t mix well with work.

[JohnFen]

> To me, being at the playground is not a prime example of spending time with my kids.

It is if you actually play with them while there.

[megablast]

You take your kids to the playground at night?? Ok.

[lmm]

If you're trying to get promoted by doing unpaid overtime and/or unpaid oncall shifts, you're a class traitor screwing over your colleagues. Help them by setting healthy boundaries even if you don't actually need them yourself.

[dylan604]

This is just not a good outlook. Class traitor is ridiculous. If someone is of marrying age and/or child rearing age, are they a traitor to their class because they choose to work instead of whatever your preconceived notions are? People are different and have different work/life conditions than you. You're just going to need to come to terms with this.

[mattigames]

The key term in their comment is "unpaid overtime", that's the part that makes them a traitor to their class.

[anigbrowl]

It might make them a sucker, it might make them a sycophant, but you have no right to dictate someone else's values like that. I think this sort of tankie rhetoric is worse than useless.

[dylan604]

if they want to work because they have no life, that's fine and really none of your business. if you work for a company where working off the clock like this is accepted, then it should be taken as a red flag.

when employees are on the clock, there are protections established for both employee and employer. if someone is injured while on the clock, workers comp is at play as well as corp insurance. if someone is working off the clock and injury occurs, shit storms are coming. if you were clocked out and working because company expects it, you can sue them. if you were doing it on your own to be "a good employee", you can get the blame.

in terms of coders, say you're off the clock and you accidentally truncate a table while connected to production when you thought you were in dev. if you're off the clock, you can actually be accused of "hacking" and doing a malicious act by the corp. if you were on the clock, then they would have a harder time with those accusations.

on the other end, i've worked for companies that were very good on the on clock/off clock recognition. if you were on a paid vacation and the company needed you to answer a call or respond to email, they would credit you that vacation day back even if it only took 5 mins. i miss that company. best work/life balance company i every worked.

[smabie]

Salaried workers don't get over-time.

Also what's a class traitor? it's not like I'm working so hard not to become filthy rich. All my colleagues are doing the same.

[lmm]

> Salaried workers don't get over-time.

Abusive employers classify many de facto line workers as overtime-exempt, often illegally, and workers should not be complicit in this. An employer who tried to treat a unionized industry the way programmers are treated would be laughed at.

> Also what's a class traitor? it's not like I'm working so hard not to become filthy rich. All my colleagues are doing the same.

Sure, but remember that you're not actually a "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" - you most likely have much more common interest with your colleagues than with your bosses. When you find yourself in a prisoner's dilemma situation, remember that the correct metastrategy is to cooperate with people like you and with people who will cooperate themselves, not with a group that's well known to select for sociopathy.

[brokenmachine]

I agree with you in principle, but you come off as a dick for the way you expressed it.

[anigbrowl]

class traitor

I talk about class issues and economic justice a lot, but nobody owes prior allegiance to a particular class in a way that you can call them a traitor, unless it's some extreme example like a union official being willingly corrupted by a corporate fat cat - in which case a person is reneging on a promise they made, not some unilateral obligation.

You might not like or disapprove of someone's work/life choices or values, this person's certainly don't appeal to me as expressed. But someone's failure to share my values does not in any way make them a 'traitor'. That sort of assumption of mandatory loyalty and cultish denouncement isn't any kind of socialism or liberation; you cannot bully people into freedom.

This is an asinine and immature way of doing politics and I urge you grow out of it.

[lmm]

They're framing their position as wanting to "help their colleagues" and not be a "mercenary", while in actually they're harming those colleagues for the sake of their "big promotion"; they're not just embracing a different value system but performing allegiance to communal values while actually undermining them. I'd have a certain respect for someone who openly acknowledged that they were trying to win a race to the bottom, but not for that kind of disingenuity and hypocrisy.

[anigbrowl]

That kind of reasoning is a great way to impress other Marxist-Leninists (of which I am not one) and alienate everyone else. I seriously doubt this person has ever professed or aimed to perform 'allegiance to communal values'; You're excoriating them for going back on a promise they never made, which is a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand. Whether that's what you intended or a reflex you've developed, it has no basis in reality.

As I said, I don't think much of this person's choices or attitudes, but you can't betray that which you never signed up for to begin with.

[lmm]

I'm by no means a Marxist-Leninist; I meant communal in the normal everyday sense of "belonging to this community". Again, they talk about wanting to help their colleagues and not wanting to be too mercenary - values most of us will sympathise with - but their actions are actually opposed to those values.

[Cd00d]

You might want to check that anger a bit.

As I said, I do have a healthy work life balance. I also have responsibilities to my family and to my colleagues, and balancing those is difficult. Especially during a pandemic with no child care - I'm full time working and full time parenting.

Can you empathize with that?

[lmm]

> As I said, I do have a healthy work life balance.

If you're working overtime and on-call outside of work hours then no, you don't. That's not healthy and there's no way to make it healthy. You talk about "owning" responsibility for fixing this thing if it breaks, but real ownership is two-sided - do you have a meaningful equity stake (token stock options don't count) in whatever that system does so that you're getting the upside as well as the downside?

If you're choosing to spend your life and health on something you actually own, fair enough, it's your funeral. But if you're a worker then it's not your job to deal with that. I can understand that as a parent you're vulnerable, you don't want to lose your job, and when the bosses say the business wouldn't be viable if they had to pay for a proper night shift (or whatever rate it would take for them to get enough coverage from you and your colleagues voluntarily taking those shifts - funny how the biggest fans of "free markets" don't seem to like being on the receiving end) then it's hard to stand up to that. But doing free favours for the bosses is like paying Danegeld - once you start it will only get worse.

You keep talking about responsibility to your colleagues, but what you're doing hurts them a lot. That's where my anger comes from.

[Cd00d]

I'm not actually working meaningful overtime.

I am working a more flexible schedule where I handle some details from my phone AFK and work dedicated hours at times that fit better with family obligations.

I actually believe setting that expectation helps my colleagues.

And again, I work at small companies by choice. If we fail a product, the company may fail, then we are all out of a job.

[lmm]

> If we fail a product, the company may fail, then we are all out of a job.

My view remains that if you're going above and beyond then that shouldn't be just to avoid the downside - you should also be getting a proportionate piece of the upside. For a small software company skilled workers are often bringing most of the value to the table, so you should have a corresponding ownership stake (I don't mean that purely rhetorically - from a friend who works at a consultancy that's structured as a cooperative it sounds like it's very much a "normal job" in practice).

Of course in a more capital-intensive business, or if you're blitzscaling, then maybe the owners are bringing something else to the table that you couldn't replicate with just a gang of programmers. But in that case capital is almost always a part of what they're bringing, and that means the company should be in a position to be paying what things cost.

[Razengan]

Maybe they want to ascend to a higher class?

[roudaki]

You are wasting your breath. You know he thinks most people are lazy and earning below 200k "for a reason."

A guy won Nobel prize proving your quality of life or happiness does not improve above 75k. Thats what you need.

And in IT you dont need to do unpaid overtime or sacrifice your time with family to get to 75k. Everything above that and you are doing it on purpose cause you value money over family and personal relationships. And that is your choice. But that is not healthy and that should not be norm.

And if you need your workers to work 16h a day with unpaid overtime but they are refusing your workers are not lazy you are incompetent CEO. Or just evil level of greedy.

[merrywhether]

That Nobel winner wasn’t trying to buy a house in the Bay Area.

[bumby]

That study is old, but I still suspect there’s a grain of truth that the financial cutoff is lower than many would suspect.

A rough off-the-cuff calculation is that $75k is roughly double the median US income. If the same rough estimate is applied to SV, that’s about $110k. I bet that’s much much lower than many SV/HN would suspect for a happiness threshold. If you can’t find a way to be happy on double the median income, it implies the system is rigged to make an awfully lot of people miserable.

The problem is often not that happiness isn’t possible, but that we compare ourselves to our peer group to calibrate our expectations. As Roosevelt said, comparison is the thief of joy.

[Cd00d]

You sure are projecting a lot about me.

Might want to introspect on that a bit.

I haven't called anyone lazy.

[techrat]

> I don't want to carry two phones.

Ah, so you're willing to trade privacy for convenience.

[fuyu]

I'm not sure what tone your comment is intended to give off, but does there exist a person who _isn't_ willing to trade privacy for convenience to some degree? One certainly couldn't be using the internet or participating in society if they weren't willing to give up some privacy.

[manmal]

Privacy vs convenience is a spectrum, the question is not _whether_ you trade between those, but rather _how much_.

[janderland]

In many circumstances, yes I am. :)

[smabie]

You are too

[aaronbrethorst]

OK, Dave Morin.