Bruno

Discussion (7) ¬

1. 
   Mr Lapin

   April 15, 2016 at 2:12 am | #

   No, such is NOT the way of the world. It’s the way of the USA, China, and other corrupt, end-stage-capitalist and near-third-world nations. Most of the rest of the civilized world’s countries still have sane working hours, mandatory vacation time, parental leave, and more. They usually have strong unions, too.
2. 
   John Daniels

   April 15, 2016 at 5:34 am | #

   Sysadmin everywhere have on call time, even in socialist Europe.

   There will always be some jobs which require unsociable working hours, unless you’d like the fire brigade to only respond during standard business hours? :)

   The thing you get over here is recognition of the work and limits on the amount of unsociable/night working you can do.
3. 
   iamjoal

   April 15, 2016 at 7:57 am | #

   It is, I’m sorry to say. I have a couple of friends whose medical professions require them to be on call from time to time, and I am very grateful to them that they do it even though it can occasionally disrupt their social lives. The very website you are looking at now may well be up because some some system administrator somewhere got woken up and asked to make things work again.

   Civilised working hours and strong unions will grant such people niceties such as time in lieu and other arrangements, but the world doesn’t just shut down from 5pm – 9am.
4. 
   Jeffrey Nonken

   April 15, 2016 at 2:30 pm | #

   I was going to mention farmers having to stay up all night to nurse a sick animal or deliver a calf… but all those others work, too.

   I’ve been to the emergency room, bleeding on the carpet, more than once. The first time was not conveniently at 10 in the morning.

   (… OK, I wasn’t ACTUALLY bleeding that badly. But it sounded more dramatic that way. :)
5. 
   Pete Rogan

   April 16, 2016 at 12:36 am | #

   The tech world is a particularly nasty bit of Hell dropped on Earth whose proudly un-unionized peons gratefully labor fourteen, sixteen, even eighteen hours a day out of a sense of misplaced professional pride and a secret sense of arrogant superiority — ‘without me this T3 line would be as dead as a rope,’ that sort of thing. Though the techno-peons would never admit it.

   When I realized my professionalism was being taken for granted by an industry whose culture expected long, uncompensated hours in pursuit of the ideal of an eighty-hour week, even when they knew it was causing burnout and dropouts and they didn’t seem to know how to change it, I bailed. It was one thing to be part of the Marine Corps of technology, always there when something went wrong, storming the beaches of recalcitrant networks and stubborn servers. It was quite another to find that management felt backed into a corner to demand such effort from their people and couldn’t get the budget or the customer buy-in to change to something less killing and ultimately cheaper. Because what could be cheaper than the lowest-cost solution maintained in perpetuity by helpless, broken-willed drones?

   This situation will continue until the people involved stand up for themselves and put family time and health above keeping a $49 server running at twice its rated capacity at 4 am. And I don’t see it happening. Because those jobs could always be outsourced to India or some worthy wallahs can be brought in on H-1B visas at half your salary. And THAT will continue until we demand the tech industry become a capitalist operation and leave the data plantation days behind.
6. 
   iamjoal

   April 16, 2016 at 8:12 am | #

   Not all tech workplaces are like that, Pete.
7. 
   John Daniels

   April 16, 2016 at 10:25 pm | #

   Yeah, while I’m nominally on call basically all the time, I work my hours during the week (36.5) and that’s enough. If I work extra because of an unexpected horror (normally an OpenSSL vulnerability!) then I’m offered time back, or we’re flexible about the odd two-hour-lunch.

   This isn’t especially unusual in the tech industry *outside of the US*.

   Professionalism is telling your client that they need to buy another server if they want to keep serving that amount of traffic, not shoe-horning it into less than it needs by ‘heroic efforts’ that will be impossible to maintain. That’s amateur hour bullshit, done by people who either aren’t experienced or have stopped caring about their profession.