Presumably because of pressure from superiors. If they know you're in cell range and ignoring them, they'll be pissy. If you're simply unable to receive communications, that's just the way it is. It shouldn't be like that, but it is.
There are plenty of jobs where it’s not like that.
Of course it depends on the job, so this isn’t 100% guaranteed to be the case, but I find people who think they always have to be online are often just imagining that they have to because of anxiety, and if they just didn’t respond, nothing bad would happen to them.
Back in the day, I took some month-long vacations to places like Nepal that were really off the grid at the time. Some people I knew were incredulous that I did so. My actual managers didn't care because I did my best to pick "good" times to do so and did my best to inform people and make arrangements. It was never a problem.
I do think, over time, being more or less continuously in-touch became more normed.
I sort of agree. Like who is so important that their peer or superior can't handle issues if they're out? How do leaders see their business surviving if the person they're calling gets hit by a bus?
But at the same time, it does seem that most tech jobs expect you to be available after hours for calls and extend that to vacation by default.
> it does seem that most tech jobs expect you to be available after hours for calls and extend that to vacation by default
Not any tech job I’ve ever had, except very occasionally after hours if unavoidable due to working with people in Asia, and planned well in advance. Never during vacation, that would be crazy.
But there have probably been people on my same teams who thought it was expected, due to them being workaholics or just bad at sticking to boundaries.
Except for my very first job when I was running shipyard jobs, no one has ever expected that they'd be able to reach me off-hours though they may have left messages of various types.
I'm Germany HR should be punishing managers for doing that, as a single call is basically directly an entire day of new vacation time, plus punitive damages for disturbing the employee.
Of course employees who can't afford to bankroll the lawsuit tend to get shafted.
Europeans being smug about how much better their society is than Americans’ is such an annoying cliche at this point. We get it, Europe is a paradise.
Btw, I’m American and I would simply not answer if my work tried to contact me while on vacation. Conversely, I know multiple Europeans with terribly unhealthy work/life balance who work constantly while on vacation.
I am the smug American which reminds all the euros that they make 1/3rd of what an American does while simultaneously working harder than the average rest and vest engineer at a tech retirement home like Microsoft.
Everyone I think about how bad American WLB is, I take a look at the supposed utopias of Europe and find that they’re whole nations of crabs in a bucket.
PP is bragging that USA 2%ers do better financially than the European 2%ers, as long as their kids don't get murdered at school, because they can watch their investment portfolio grow while playing video games at the office all summer instead of going on vacation.
Yeah above a certain income threshold, healthcare is actually rather cheap here. Like ~$700/month total cost for the employer and mostly $0 for employees. For excellent care. Annually that’s 4.2% of a 200k salary. That’s significantly less than what you would pay in your social contributions in Europe.
but of course it sucks for people who don’t make good money, which is the whole point of complaints.
This is not an "American" thing. I'm American, and I would never, ever, ever in any known universe within the multiverse, bring my work phone with me on a vacation, let alone answer it or do work stuff. And, I would never give anyone at work my personal phone number. Strict separation of work and personal, and never the twain shall meet. We should not accept jobs that keep you on the leash even during your vacation and after working hours, unless on-call is agreed-to part of your official duties.
It was a question related to the GP saying they never handed their personal phone number out to people they worked with, which seemed rather limiting to me.
A few from past jobs, and they're welcome to call if they want to do personal/social stuff together, but they are not welcome to call because the build is broken or they need me to do a database roll back because production is down.
I mean, vacation is vacation. I've also agreed to do interviews and such if I'm on vacation and it's convenient. I may also have glanced at email from time to time and sent a quick response to something with the proviso that I'm on vacation.
In one of the Carlos Goshen documentaries, in his time at Renault he required so much overtime that one salaried employee threw himself off a balcony at the Renault technical center in France.
I guess that Renault employees are American, even if they are French.
I think this is described in Apple's documentary, not the one from Netflix.
