Reply to post: Re: Not office hours? No contact

This always-on culture we're in is awful. How do we stop it? Oh, sorry, hold on – just had another notification

logicalextreme

Re: Not office hours? No contact

Yep, completely agree — it's a "luxury" that I think a lot of us have in IT that you wouldn't necessarily find elsewhere in an office and especially not outside of one. I find that it's extra-infuriating when people with that "luxury" don't take advantage of it, as it shouldn't be a luxury for anybody, so subscribing yourself to a life-dominating concept of what work should be is just helping to maintain the status quo.

I'm hoping that the net effect of Covid will be positive in this space, however — it's exposed how easy it is for a lot of people to work from home to everybody, whether they can or not. I know a fair few people who've always worked insecure jobs who, after Covid, aren't prepared to go back to that world except on fairer terms. Even before that I've usually encouraged them to either get into something more secure, or make sure they've got a support network ready to catch them if it backfires and then put their foot down to try and change their insecure workplace. Although the people that I know, while sometimes desperately poor, aren't usually desperately vulnerable. I'd hope that Brexit cutting off some of the flow of labour would be able to help starve the supply of workers somewhat to make these companies rethink their practices (may as well get something out of it) — other than that the best we can do is vote with our wallets; I've managed a couple of years clean from Amazon with no problems whatsoever and I'd be perfectly happy if they sold or abandoned their retail operations and just focused on their cloud biz. I'm also prepared to help my mates out financially wherever possible so they can afford to be a bit more daring with how they approach their work life.

Now that I've put that all down I've realised how much I enjoy helping people improve their work lives, so maybe I'll go find a job doing that for when I finally get completely sick of computers!

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