That when we look up at distant stars, nebulas, & galaxies and the like...we are looking back in time. What we see could have been gone for decades, centuries, or longer.
“longer” is an understatement. The Andromeda galaxy, which is viewable by the naked eye, is 2.5 million lightyears away. And that’s the closest galaxy to us.
I am a software developer living just outside of Philadelphia, PA.
I have over ten years of professional experience working as a developer across a range of different industries. Software development is something I’m passionate about and enjoy improving my skills and learning new things.
This is certainly a very good reason to not put your work account on your personal phone, but my primary reason not to is that it's my device and I pay for the service. If my company needs me to be available beyond my 9-5 workday, they can pay for it.
If there's an emergency, they can always call, but I don't like being "always on".
I recently got a new job where the email is completely locked down (only accessible on a networked computer or via the awful outlook web interface). It's been awesome not getting work emails on my phone.
I used to have work email and slack on my phone. While it made some things easier (heading out in the work day and not blocking people who might need my input, for example), it also made me feel tethered. Slack in particular was very addictive to me (to be fair, not just work slack, but other slacks which I was on).
When I got a new phone, I simply didn't install the email or slack clients. It's led to occasional text messages, when I really needed to communicate with a team member, but all in all has been a fantastic experience. Highly recommended.
One of the things I miss most about my previous BigCo job was only being able access work tools via my work phone. I could go on vacation and tell my team that I wasn't taking my work phone or computer (I needed a corporate VPN installed on my work computer to access anything internal) and everyone knew I was completely unreachable.
Exactly- if work doesn't pay, they don't get to play on my phone. I'd be willing to check work email sporadically, and it's unfortunate that doing so in any capacity means allowing an unknown admin "wipe my phone" privileges. Companies don't handle that stuff with any sort of finesse and mistakes happen. Ultimately email on a phone may be a moot point for software developers: We use more independent chat apps like Slack, no one worries about texting you, and it's hard to do anything really more involved than messaging without opening your laptop (which probably is provided by work).
Exactly. Your employer is not going to enforce boundaries to ensure healthy work/life balance for you, you must do it yourself (until labor regulations catch up; see France [1] and NYC [2] labor law regarding checking email outside of work hours for examples).
Are you, with a straight face, saying that you'd rather receive a PHONE CALL than a notification from an app that you can set time-sensitive notification methods for (i.e. DND overnight, etc.)? I'm not fan of getting any kind of work message outside of working hours, but I'd FAR rather let my co-workers send me a slack message that I can ignore and/or deal with when I feel like it than call me on the phone. No one at my office except my direct manager and HR has my phone number (and in the 5+ years I've worked here), no one has called me on it.
You're not wrong, but there's also the filter of "is this a real emergency or could this be an email he'll see tomorrow morning?" that goes through the coworker's head when his options are call vs. email. And, at least in my position, if it is a real emergency I'd like to know.
That said, other than a handful of coworkers who I'm friends with outside of work, only my manager & HR have my personal number. This adds an extra step where the coworker should determine if getting in touch with me immediately is actually worth the effort.
So far, I've received one such phone call in 3 years. It was an actual emergency, and easily resolved by me at that time because they called me. If they had waited until the next working day, the issue would have blown up and taken much more effort for me to resolve.
This might alternatively be an argument for working with people who respect your time.
Pretty much this, it's an instant bullshit filter.
If I were to ever receive so many phone calls it becomes a problem I'll solve that problem. Right now I've had all of zero calls this year so I think I'll be right for the moment.
Yes I do. Why? It raises the bar. Its all too easy to whisper someone via electronic communication. If you need to get to speak to the person, and they hear my kid yelling at the background, perhaps they'll wonder if I got other things to do in my leisure time.
Furthermore, I don't find it particularly bright to host sensitive data by such a vague company. Bonus negative points for the infosec community using such.
At least on iOS, Do Not Disturb covers phone calls, too. With the ability to set overrides for calls from Very Important Numbers. Voice mail exists as well.
No joke, we recently went to a BYOD model with no "assistance". I'm expected to be available 24/7 in most cases. So I'm refusing to be available until I get some compensation.
Google pays for on-call hours. You are credited with 33.3% time for each hour on call if you have a 30 minute response requirement, and 66.6% time for each hour on call if you have a 5 minute response requirement. These can be taken as extra holiday, or cashed out. [0]
The really dumb thing is paying for overtime works great. Some younger employees want to do it for the extra cash or vacation for a longer holiday. I know there were times I wanted to work on a holiday day/bank holiday to save up time in lieu.
The problem is companies where default on-call becomes part of the culture. They also have little incentive to fix terrible ops. I hear AWS can be like this, depending on the service.
I'd leave. Unless you're a contractor who gets paid a lot and equipment costs are expected in that contract (similar to plumbers, carpenters, etc.) there is no reason for a full-time/salaried employ to purchase their own IT equipment. That's just insane.
we're pretty close to full employment. lots of industries are job-seekers' markets right now. which doesn't mean that management recognizes this and wouldn't do something stupid like fire a good worker, but that doesn't have a lot to do with the labor market.
> If there's an emergency, they can always call, but I don't like being "always on".
Personally, I choose the opposite: you need to email me to tell me you want to call me (so that I’ll turn on my softphone app), otherwise you’ll just automatically go to voicemail (which will also go to my email.)
I notice that with Gmail’s inbox categories, you only get push-notified when something lands in Primary or Updates; so as long as you’ve trained the system to push the irrelevant/lifecycle stuff into the other categories, your phone won’t ding all that often. (Mine doesn’t, and I get a good amount of raw email.)
I can't believe anyone can handle having push notifications on email. I only read my email when I go to check it. For both work and personal.
I have hundreds of rules for email filtering. With most mailing lists never hitting my inbox. But it's still way too much for individual email push notifications.
The other thing I do is to separate my personal and work email accounts. I’m signed into both on my phone, but I only get push-notified about personal mail. I want to know if a family member is in trouble; servers burning down can wait until tomorrow.
Yeah, my last job wanted me to install their rootkit/spyware on my personal phone for the privilege of being able to check my work email at night. I resolved this by letting my manager know how to contact me after hours in the event of an absolute emergency, and that otherwise I'll check my messages at the office when I get in to work.
The counter to this is that oftentimes I'm at work and not at my computer so I need access to my email/calendar on a mobile device. This doesn't happen often enough for me to warrant a work phone but happens often enought to where it would be a pain to always go back to my computer to pull that up.
My solution so far has been to just use the outlook web app. Sure it's not as nice as the app but it lets me get to the info I need while also preventing me from having to install any sort of profiles on my device, as an added bonus I do not allow the site to send me notifications so I do not have to worry about being bothered off-hours.
How do you even lose days off to some work emergency? If I was scheduled to be on vacation but I have to come in for some emergency, I don't lose those days, and you shouldn't either, since you never actually took those days off.
I meant that less literally. While I might still be technically out of the office, if I'm spending time worrying about an on-going problem it's not nearly as restful as if I'm blissfully ignorant.
This is precisely why I make it clear that I do not want a work phone. My mobile number is published in the global address book for emergencies, but otherwise if I'm not at work then I'm not working, and I do my best to not think about work when I'm not working. Having a block of metal and plastic specifically to intrude into my free time for the benefit of my employer is not something that I am interested in.
> If my company needs me to be available beyond my 9-5 workday, they can pay for it.
If you're salaried then they are paying you for it based on the job requirements, it's part of the job and one of the things that separates hourly employees from salaried ones.
Unless you're talking about the cost of your cell plan or device? But even then, a lot of companies will pay for your plan and subsidize part/all of your device if they have a legitimate work reason to need to contact you and expect a fairly quick response outside the office.
EDIT: To be clear I'm referring to US law/practices. The entire point of salaried as opposed to hourly work is that it is based on performance rather than hours, and it's up to you and your employer to come to agreement on what performance means. At some companies salary might be for 40 hours, at others it's for 60 or 80 regularly. It's your own responsibility to find out before taking the job, and decide for yourself what you're willing to provide or not.
This of course depends on your particular employment contract. In some cases, someone may agree to be on call whenever they're not working and AFAIK (IANAL) such contracts are legal in some circumstances.
Meanwhile, in Europe, they have employee protection laws that outright prevent these practices. If you need someone to be available outside of work hours, you need to pay them extra for it, similar to how overtime is mandated in the US for hourly workers.
Wish we had those laws here. Fortunately I work at a company where I am compensated extra for my oncall shifts that take place outside of normal work hours -- it ends up being a few extra tens of thousands of dollars per year. That should be the mandated standard though, not just for those who are lucky.
Depends on the jurisdiction. I think there's a clear separation of work time and free time in most of Europe. Here in Finland an employee can never be forced to work over their daily working time (usually 7.5h between 8-5); doing so is always voluntary, though of course pressuring exists. For force majeure circumstances there's the legal concept of emergency work, but that's very rarely invoked.
I worked for a University that paid cell phone plan steepens back in 2012. In Illinois, it now required by law for employers to pay cell expensive if they're required for work.
What if you're being reimbursed for your phone? I assume they can only see activity on my logged in GSuite account. Can't imagine that they have access to anything beyond that.
All they do is hand me a certain amount of money every month. The plan is my own, and they didn't install any software on my phone. All I do is run Gmail through the built-in mail and calendar apps on my iPhone. I also have Slack on my iPhone.
It could have something to do with some of my extensions, but every time I open the new Twitter on Firefox, it has me logged out...but if I refresh the page, I'm back to being logged in and I can browse my feed.
I seem to recall Gmail doing this a couple years ago. I was working for a marketing company at the time and there were questions as to how we'd track metrics for Gmail addresses since Google would essentially "open" every email and load the images on their servers for their users.
https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-t...