When you can’t afford to move but you live on the Florida coast
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?
Bad as in German?
Shockingly yeah
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 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.
Trying to bring that European holiday energy to my American workplace 😤
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.
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.
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…
European cell phone adoption was about on par with the US. I don’t think the technology is completely to blame here.
Yeah, but I’m browsing Lemmy, not checking if I have received an email from work.
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.
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.
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 😊
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s December for me…
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.
I really wish that Americans didn’t lump an entire continent with their own laws, cultures, and customs together.
Yes, the American attitude towards work sucks, but comparing Germany and the UK is like comparing New York with Kingston…
is like comparing New York with Kingston
Haha, the second I wrote it I thought “I bet there’s a Kingston in NY”, right after I was looking at places to rent in NY…
I’m gonna guess the meme was made by a European, to make fun of us Murrikans.
I highly doubt it, since any European with sense will know that some countries have far different attitudes towards work than others, and complicated relationships between eastern and western Europe in regards to skilled trade work and immigration…
Me when I’m “working remote” but actually starting vacation a day early, or just doing my thing as I want because “working” means being available to solve problems, not being in an office.
Sorry, this meme looks like something posted by a non-American who has no idea how things really work.
Of course, this also means being on a support call for 27 hours because of a serious outage. For which my management always offers comp time, and usually some kind of bonus/award.
Been this way since the mid-90’s for me. People appreciate those who are willing to put in the effort. From my perspective I don’t work any more than anyone else. On any given day I’ll be out shopping while on the phone working through a problem, or attending a meeting where I’m requested just in case my expertise is needed.
Since the mid-2000s, most companies expect everybody to be pseudo on-call at all times without any additional compensation thanks to cell phones and the internet making everybody reachable at any time. Your boss calling you after work, on the weekends, or while you’re on vacation to talk about work is normal and they expect you to be accessible at all hours of the day. At shittier jobs like retail, you can even expect to be called on your days off and asked to come in if somebody doesn’t show up or something, even in the middle of the day, and if you aren’t available or “flexible” you can expect it to negatively impact your job.
At my first job for a small business, I didn’t take a vacation (not even a single day) in 10 years because the boss didn’t give us vacation days and instead said that anybody could take days off at anytime and he’d make the schedule work, but we were always understaffed and he’d make you feel guilty for taking days off. That’s closer to the norm these days in the US than the 6 weeks of vacation time that is the norm in Europe. Large companies are required to give you 2 weeks plus a handful of sick days, and that’s it.
The culture, especially for younger people these days, is that management constantly “drops hints” that people who don’t let them commit labour violations will be first to get laid off. You’ve been working for at least 30 years and have a senior position but, bud, it ain’t like it was.
My dad’s a very well qualified verification engineer and even he’s finally starting to realize how toxic that environment truly is. If you don’t let people walk all over you don’t have a job. If you complain when execs set unreasonable deadlines you don’t have a job. If you go home at the end of your 40hrs you’re not a team player don’t have a job. Oh you’re complaining about your two yearly sick days and measly two weeks of vacation fine here’s a long vacation and don’t come back.
I got canned in March because “it just wasn’t working out”. I got along with people, did a good job, and was on large projects so what was the problem? I asked for more money in as polite a way as I could. I pushed back against a senior engineer who wasn’t even aware that his building code needed to be updated. I didn’t make the partners feel like special little boys. North American work culture is, for the vast majority of people, incredibly toxic. I’m glad your experience is different.
Similar story at my last job.
I was a beer sales rep in Washington DC, a potentially VERY lucrative market that was already brimming with good product. However, I realized very quickly that the people above me in the organization had no idea what they were doing. It started with small things, like “sales reps have to deliver beer sometimes”, “sales reps need to help do QC at the brewhouse”, and “paper checks this week, payroll is broken”, then started escalating rapidly when they fired the head of sales, a long-time industry veteran, on July 3rd for trying to clean up some of the internal mismanagement.
After that, management started hounding us basically daily to increase sales numbers without actually offering any advice or help on how to do so. It was so bad that I basically ignored any email or text from them unless I had specifically messaged them first. I had one customer tell me that they couldn’t justify ordering anything at that time due to budget constraints, and my boss’s advice was “Sell them more so each case costs a dollar less!”, completely ignoring that that just made the problem worse for the customer. Just completely useless advice.
It was about 3 weeks in before the paperwork problems came to my attention; in DC, if you are importing alcohol or cannabis, and you don’t have a warehouse in DC to supply from, you need to supply a permit with each shipment. Several of my customers got their first orders and asked where the permits were, and I told them I had no idea what they meant. Turns out, management had done zero research into the import laws for DC, and these missing permits could lead to fines more expensive than the actual orders, to BOTH parties, if we didn’t get them filed. I hounded management for WEEKS about this, and they kept saying “We’re working on it, and they should be ready Soon™️!” A month and a half later, they finally started sending the out… is what I’d love to say, but they actually forced ME to write them and send them out. Needless to say, neither me nor my customers were happy.
Meanwhile, staff at the brewery proper were getting absolutely RATFUCKED. In my conversations with staff there, when I had to come up for samples or paychecks or meetings, I learned a shocking amount of things, including:
- They’d fired the delivery team, then tried to hire new drivers, none of which lasted more than a week or 2
- The drivers were working 15 hour days because the inventory system was nonexistent
- The brewers were getting massive orders dumped on them regularly, with zero notice, and incredibly short deadlines, forcing them to work split shifts 20 hours a day just to meet demands
- The brewers were also regularly getting accused of stealing 40% of the beer from each batch, somehow
- The admin staff were being forced to work 70 hour weeks for seemingly no reason
- The kitchen staff were cycling rapidly because the Head Chef “liked to fire people”
- QC issues were through the roof due to overwork, lack of staff, and horrendous space optimization
- Admin staff were regularly asked to “”“assist”“” on canning runs, despite knowing nothing about canning
- Management was trying to supply 5 states with beer at once, without actually having the capacity to do so
- All the equipment was bought at auctions, and none of it worked right
- All the other sales reps were being run ragged as delivery men, because they couldn’t keep drivers around
I could keep going. There were so many issues at the brewery.
Towards the end of my time there, I messaged management that I would be out of town on vacation for a week over Labor Day, and gave them 3 weeks notice for it. They didn’t respond to that message in any way, so I mentioned it in the next meeting, where they brushed it off as ok. THE DAY I LEAVE, I get a text asking when I’ll be back, and if I can call them. I don’t respond because I’m on vacation. They then email me a giant, wildly exaggerated list of complaints with my performance that they could’ve brought up before I left, and DEMAND to know how I was going to fix them. I don’t respond because, again, I’m on vacation. The next day, my boss texts me, demanding I call him later that day. I don’t. I’M ON VACATION MOTHERFUCKER. He texts me that night, saying he “doesn’t enjoy doing this” and then fires me with a text. I don’t bother responding.
So yeah, lots of crippling mismanagement and toxic bro culture, leading to a horrendous work environment and ultimately getting fired for not playing their petty power games. I’m happier now though, since I don’t have to deal with them breathing down my neck all the time, and I can pursue other interests in the alcohol industry.
Overall, what a fucking disaster of a business. I don’t see them lasting another year, now that everything is falling apart and the staff are leaving.
Jesus H Christ that’s wild.
Good on you for standing your ground, though. I think if more people said “wow you should have planned that better then, huh?” we’d be in a much better place. I’ve done longer days only to still get bitched at and so I decided that I will only ever work overtime if I feel as though it was a personal failing or a promise I failed to keep that someone is relying on.
I seriously don’t get how these people get themselves so much power and money. Well, I do, and that’s that they get there on the backs of others who let them do it for one reason or another. If we just stopped taking their bullshit they’d have nothing since they have no real skills on there own. They aren’t fuckin’ archmages who’ll bend us to their will, they’re dweebs with no real skills and their power is only as strong as the people willing to enable them.
Believe me, I was just as baffled about how they got where they are. That is, until I found out that they’d all grown up together and were all rich off their parents’ money. They were MORE incompetent than I thought they were, and every time I reach out to any of my coworkers there, that fact is just further cemented. Rich Kid Syndrome is real, and it is destroying small businesses everywhere.
Amen to that.
Glad you avoided the meat grinder bud. The rest of us didnt have such a gracious fall from the bin.
