I work for a company with both European and American employees. Even the European employees didn’t know how bad it was, and we work for the same employer. I hope I can live till retirement and not get diagnosed with cancer the day after like my Dad. Would be nice to do something those last years if there’s a planet left, I have some money and my body isn’t broken.
Trump is gonna make it all better. And by better I mean worse. FAR worse.
The biggest reason to knock off working on vacation or after hours is that it creates a false expectation on the the workload. If you can’t get it done during regular office hours, than that means your company needs more people or a process improvement.
If you are working these extra untracked hours, you are the problem. If you get rewarded for doing so, your company is toxic and will only expect more as you move up the ladder.
I’ve worked at plenty of places which have made it fairly clear that the only way you can progress up in the company is to work out of hours. Extremely illegal business practice but they did it anyway.
One of the places was a law firm, because lawyers always think that they know how to break the law.
I told a manager that, if you work 60h a week, you don’t know how to do you job. I slipped in that hourly payment isn’t terrible either if you do so.
He never bothered to try to make me work “for free” ever again.
No one on there deathbed will say they wish they worked harder. They will regret all the other moments they missed because they were working too much.
Time is more than just money, it’s your life.
I read somewhere on a study of male americans on their deathbedd, that they were 100% who regretted being in the office to much.
I’ll put my hand up and say that I will wish I worked harder. My job is simple and i work remote. If I was willing to work harder, I could either move up in the company or move to a competitor. That would get me more money. More money would help me to pay rent on a nicer place to live. And then with the new nice place, I could get the rest of my head in order. So I will absolutely go to my doom wishing I worked harder, put in more hours, and showed a high degree of dedication.
When you can’t afford to move but you live on the Florida coast
You can’t tell, but that’s her living room…
Actualy we can tell because it’s wet
Sell their houses to whom, Ben? Fucking Aquamen?
She is paying rent for that.
Well I’ve just been paid to start drinking at 3:00 p.m. because apparently I haven’t taken enough holiday this year.
Sucks to be free I guess.
I felt even more like I was getting a raw deal when I realized the Germans and French were largely taking the entire month of August off.
They what? Why didn’t any of my fellow Germans tell me?
Most jobs, at least the better paying ones, include 6 weeks of vacation. However, you can use them all at once.
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I never take august because of this. EVERYONE and their mothers take august so everything is crowded and extremely overpriced.
I prefer getting some time in september and then spread the rest of my days the rest of the year.
How to know that somebody has no children without telling you
Have you ever heard of countries where kids go back to school after september 10th? I grew up in one of those countries, we started school normally on september 13th or later.
Best to spend vacation in April and October. You want 6 months(or less) between your vacations to not hate your job. Summer is already good, winter also has it’s charms and you don’t want to contrast to much. But it’s not the season in my favourite resort! Well it’s a bad resort, go to Asia, spend a bit more on the tickets, much less on the ground, enjoy foreign culture. Doesn’t work for Asians though.
I usually take a couple of weeks in June, but with Global Warming getting on, this year I took them in May… It was great, we took the road and didn’t even reserve anything in advance, just found an hotel the day before we reached a location.
Germans and French vacations are a lot more spread out than this.
In Italy instead it’s pretty much mandatory to take vacations in August, as whole industry sectors close down for 2-3 weeks. Factories go on a hiatus beginning from the second week of August to the start of the fourth week, or the end of the month.
Sometimes it’s surreal when you stay home in August and the whole city is deserted, no one to be seen, no traffic, no noise, just scorching heat. At least in the North, in the south it’s the exact opposite, with everyone going to the sea and the population doubling overnight at the start of August.
June and July instead are pretty much taken by the Germans, especially around the lakes of the North.
It’s December for me…
I’m just one of countless victims of the launch of the cell phone in North American IT. This shit kills. Figurative and literally.
24 hour reachability is 24 hour work. Shit accumulates and all of a sudden you haven’t actually relaxed in 20 years and you get phantom phone vibrations.
Funny enough I wear a pager for 1/4 of my life now. But it’s totally fine because there’s on then off. Work days and not work days. Day and night. Work and life.
Were you paid properly for overtime?
European cell phone adoption was about on par with the US. I don’t think the technology is completely to blame here.
Cell phones and wall street yuppies became a thing at relatively the same time, yuppy culture really threw work life balance out the window and changed US working culture. There was no European equivalent to the wall street yuppy.
Oh we’ve had grind culture for a long time. It just didn’t apply to finance yet.
Yeah, but I’m browsing Lemmy, not checking if I have received an email from work.
I work as an electrician on a construction site, and one of the greatest perks of the job is that you leave it there. It’s not like you can work from home in the first place, and we don’t really have shifts. Everybody comes in at the same time and leaves at the same time, so you don’t have to bother with covering extra shifts.
That isn’t to say it’s a dream job of course, the perks are great, but the work itself will probably bite me in the ass later with health issues…
PPE buddy - personally protect yourself
I was on call 24/7 for years. It’s been a long time since I had to deal with that (with a slide into a related career rather than changing careers) but I will never forget how terrible it was. I wasted what should have been my best years on that shit.
Now there’s only one person at work who has my number. He doesn’t call except for the one time I forgot to put my day off on the calendar. My work apps are paused at 5pm and all weekend. I only get alerts on my computer. However, I still twitch sometimes when my phone goes off after hours because it was a learned and deeply reinforced response for so many years.
Yup, worked enterprise IT for a global call center, and I was expected to answer my phone at a moments notice. Even if I was in bed with my wife, I was expected to stop and answer. All while being paid 50% below market. Since the overseas IT teams were worthless, getting called at 2am was common.
You think I wait for holidays to be unavailable? :,D
I stopped going to dinner with my wife and her father when he’s in town. We will go to a restaurant and he’ll pull out his laptop and phone and start working, while vaguely listening to what we’re saying
I hope he was paying
Got to get gold in league somehow
Did you tell him that directly? I think you should.
My wife always brings it up. He’s one of those people who just does his own thing and doesn’t really care about anyone else’s plans or preferences, so that’s another reason I stopped going out with them. It could be a group of 10 and he wants Indian food but everyone else wants Mexican, so he compromises by having us all go to the Indian place… Where he can order his food in an Indian accent to the Indian waiter
Gonna go take a bath with my work laptop if anyone needs me.
Remember to plug it in, you don’t want to have to go scrambling for a charger in the middle of the meeting.
Was that the bad thing?
Shockingly yeah
But it does make your hair nice and frizzy.
Bad as in German?
Labour laws my dude! When the government protect people and not corporations. I can just ignore them for 60 days a year and it’s cheaper to accept than fire me
It’s not that simple when most people actively choose the cruelty.
It is that simple but it’s not that easy. Lots of problems have simple fixes that are extraordinarily difficult to implement for a whole host of reasons.
That doesn’t really change what you’re getting at though. I guess I was feeling pedantic. Feel free to ignore me 😊
Trying to bring that European holiday energy to my American workplace 😤
Funny
For the last few years, I’ve been trying to get them to assign me at least someone part-time to learn my tribal knowledge. I’ve been writing documents and leaving copious notes in Slack canvasses to stakeholders. If something happens to me, they’ll be struggle-bussing it.
When I go on vacation, I’m still stuck for end-game support for p0 stuff. If production is down, I’ll stop what I’m doing, If they can’t make money, they can’t pay my salary. I’ll answer P1 questions off hours to an extent.
I don’t absolutely hate it. I’m paid well for the inconvenience but they’re playing with fire. I only go places that have some form of internet somewhere (doesn’t need to be everywhere) and I’m always within 15 minutes of grabbing my laptop.
That’s that me. But the company I work for is big enough that if they’re fucked, it looks worse on my bosses for only having one of me and no plan. So fuck that, off I go. I told them how badly things could go if someone grabbed my laptop, so that stays very safely behind too.
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