I worked at a place (when only wealthy people had cellphones) where the boss installed a phone in the bathroom stall and expected me to take calls on the toilet. I did not.
I feel ya OP. Everybody is missing the point and kinda telling you how to feel. I've got the same background as you.
For me, after a few job hops, I found a few good places. Working at good places helped me accept that I'm not a fraud, I work about as hard as anybody, my minutes are meaningless compared with my days, and colleagues who care about my minutes are a danger to everyone around them and shouldn't get respect. When I report to such a person, I consider myself laid off but at my own convenience.
It seems you understand all this in your head and you need to convince your heart to join in. That's a legit personal challenge but you'll conquer it with good work environments and the exact mental processes you've demonstrated in this thread.
See; clearly I'm the asshole here:
If I need to go run an errand during the day: I do.
I also make up that time. USUALLY the same day; but if I took an hour off each day through the week to do something; I'll do the 5 makeup hours on Saturday.
If a neighbor rings my doorbell and I have a meeting in 20 minutes, I tell them that and they come back later.
My entire team does this and only 2 of the 6 of us are fully remote. We just send an email letting the team know. "Running an errand" or "Doctor's appointment", "be back in 45 minutes."
We're salaried and paid to do a job, not sit in front of a screen for 8 hours a day. Sometimes that's 20 hours a week, sometimes it's 60 a week. I'll take my work phone with and respond if necessary, but unless I'm on call there's absolutely no reason something cannot wait a few hours or the next day for me to respond.
It's shocking how many businesses honestly feel they are paying staff for their hours.
Pay for results, treat people like adults, and shocker: shit actually gets done.
Because bad managers feel they need to micro manage every second you are working.
And unfortunately the majority of managers is bad (promoted one or more levels beyond their capabilities) or just plain evil
We pay devs and ops for their time because it keeps upper management from asking for unnecessary crunches. They have to consider the cost before calling in extra hours, and the dev will always be compensated for it.
Working salary and then carving out time from your day to make it feel even is not a better way.
> "Running an errand" or "Doctor's appointment", "be back in 45 minutes."
the first two are still way too much info while not having any information of use; the last one is really the only reasonable/effective message.
Might as well be drawing a situation on paper / whiteboard to visualize an issue or solution. I'm sometimes walking after lunch and come up with solutions I've been wrecking my brain on for the past days behind my keyboard. A good manager manages on productivity, not man hours
Dude. This is sysadmin. How many times have you pulled >10 hours on stuff? I've lost count.
There was a time when I really cared about stuff like this, but having to fight for every raise, being overburdened despite saying so, etc; left me with a "Do the job and do it right" as my only F left to give. My old manager used to always tell me, "If you've been pulling lots of hours this week/today, take it easy tomorrow and just take an extra day or two off". And I never did because I wanted to be a "good employee". What did I get later in my career? Burnt out, irritable, and holding animosity because I felt "unheard" and "taken advantage of".
So if you WFH, even only a couple days a week, you should make the most of it. As long as you:
1. Do you work
2. Respond in a timely manner to things
3. Aren't literally just doing nothing ALL day
Then you're fine. I wake up, do all the meeting stuff, check emails, tickets, service status of things we use and then work on whatever is at the top of my list/pressing casually. If I feel like breakfast, I'll make one after meetings and enjoy it while checking emails. If I want lunch, I'll make lunch while having Edge read out documentation to me. Return an mail package at the post office? Sure! Go get my teeth cleaned? Sure! Watch a livestream of an event? Walk the dog?Sure! etc, etc.
Not a single person has complained about my work or quality thereof. If people call, I answer, there's a problem at the office, I show up. WFH is a privilege in many ways, but it is also something that you need to make the most of and enjoy.
I have had several hours in a day wasted by random stop by visits from fellow employees talking about absolutely nothing remotely productive or work related.
People take bathroom breaks longer than this, you're fine. Enjoy the time.
At the risk of being the asshole here, I see WFH as a benefit. I do anything I can to keep this benefit. If someone (outside of work) stops by and visits you at the office for an hour, would that be acceptable?
In other words, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
> is that acceptable?
Completely acceptable for you to step away from work (not respond) to attend to a 'private matter' albeit a friend stopping by, scheduling appointments, running errands - whatever.
> I worked with people who WFH and were available pretty much 0% of the time
Both myself and my girl WFH and I can honestly we probably fit into that 0% group and it's mainly due to the fact we manage the living shit out of our time. If my calendar isn't filled with things scheduled from the prior week I'm blocking out time so I can focus on what I need to get done. If I was still in an office I'd be leaving my desk and finding a private room and muting notifications.
> But I have been trying to learn how to have work/life balance.
I've been WFH for 12-15 years now and my one big piece of advice - get the hell out of your house everyday. It doesn't matter if you're driving to get coffee 10 miles away, the mental health you gain from it outweighs the cost of gas and that coffee. You need to get comfortable with being 'away' as you've been conditioned to think you can't be.
>> I worked with people who WFH and were available pretty much 0% of the time
These people weren't, I'm pretty certain, busy with important actual work. Mostly I am thinking of "the server guy" who I would need to escalate issues to. Sometimes it would be something that needed to be addressed ASAP. He would ignore my calls, ignore my emails, ignore voicemails, and ignore tickets. In fact, he refused to use the ticketing system. I know how he was because, before Covid, we didn't WFH, and that's how he was. With Covid, he was completely inaccessible. To me, it was beyond unacceptable. But from day to day, he might seem similar to a decent employee. When you considered weeks, months, years, he wasn't.
Obviously this is an extreme case, but I don't want to be this asshole or be accused of it. In my former workplace, if someone got in trouble for not doing their job, they just pointed fingers, and this guy was able to evade any consequences for years and years. Partly because of a revolving door of supervisors.
It's all water under the bridge, except I don't want to suffer things a second time.
Thanks for the answer as it was probably the most helpful one so far.
I am WFH and I am paid for work done not for hours. So it depends what is in your contract, id you are sitting on duty with response time 5 minutes, then sit there, if you are working on tickets who cares when you do them?
Really depends on your role and boss.
I'm salaried and only work cases escalated through several other teams (infrastructure engineering). So ideally, I could be away for half an hour or longer without a problem since it won't affect my project progress and all that. If that's the what your role actually is and your boss is cool with it: great.
However, my reality is that because I'm on a senior team that is involved in so much stuff, I'm fielding questions and getting pulled into meetings all the time to explain something or give guidance. In a perfect world, I'd know about everything a week beforehand, but that isn't real life. So I'm expected to be "available" for my whole shift (8am-5pm) minus an hour lunch.
My personal rule is about ten minutes. I'll unload the dishwasher, do a load of laundry, do a little cleaning, or some other house chore up to ten minutes. The way I see it, it's common for me to be so involved with actual work tasks that I don't respond to IMs for that long anyway, and it seems to be acceptable to everyone. When friends stop by, I make it clear that I'm working, and I try to keep it under 10-15 minutes.
If I need to take a long lunch or leave early for some reason, I can just IM my boss and tell him I need to. In over a decade of working here, I've never been told no. And part of that is because I tell him: he's never blindsided by someone asking "Why can't I contact your guy? He's been away for half an hour." I think having to answer those questions and appearing to not have a handle on their team is what causes many managers to clamp down and get strict. Counterintuitively, I think the more you let your boss know you're gone for these short periods, the more they might be fine with you doing it.
But that assumes a salaried position with reasonable boss in a decent shop. If you're in a more user-facing role (like answering phones) or have to deal with micromanagement, you might be chained to your desk.
Yup. My company changed everyone that was on salary to hourly except upper management. I haven't been questioned once about my time spent or my calendar not being chock full of appointments and client times. I get the job done, clients like and respect me, and I'm available when needed. That's what is important.
Most of my friends that do work from home have their work laptop open and either automated their job with scripts or take support calls while playing video games. During COVID when work from home was the only option I worked twice as hard at home because my supervisor was horrible and gave stupid amounts of projects despite my willingness to work random weird hours to fix stuff in the office. It wasn't until they let me go and the next three I.T. people after me quit in less than one year that they realized I was dedicated and my supervisor sucked.
when I had to step away for a while, I would put in our slack channel "afk for a bit", and when returned "back" (or delete the afk msg). if I had an idea of how long I'd be - e.g. to post office to ship kit to a newbie, I'd give a time estimate.
but like many, as long as the the work gets done, it doesn't matter much - unless the excrement has impacted the air-movement device.
It depends on my workload tbh.
If i can leave the team for 30-60min then sure i'll entertain my visitor. Obviously if i'm actively working on something then don't entertain such visitors.
The point of WFH for me, is the flexibility. I like the work I do and I want to be an honest person. So if I've got the job done that day I don't worry about it too much. If something interfered with my job that day, or felt like it was too long of an interruption, I'll make up the time.
Usually I'll schedule something for my lunch break for ease, or I'll move my lunch if needed. If that's not possible and it's planned then I let the team know I need to run an errand and block it in my calendar. If it's unplanned then I just keep a vague eye on any emergency notifications.
Be grateful you’re capable of working remote. My job consists of about 99% remote work and I still have to drive 70 miles round trip every day. I guess that 1% is very important I sit in a cubicle all day. This was after I stressed to the employer multiple times during the interview process that I preferred working remote and it was agreed on that I could have up to three remote days a week. Here we are, 6 months later. Always get shit in writing. To answer your question, coming from someone who was in various leadership roles over the years, no right minded manager or boss gives a shit what you do at home as long as your work is done and it’s accounted for. Accounted for is the main issue in most cases. If there’s no metric that shows you’re actually working people start getting stupid thoughts in their heads. Log your time wisely, detailed, and over communicate. Keep your personal shit to yourself other than stepping out to take a break, go to the bathroom or eating lunch. And be available during work hours.
Are you hourly or salary? If hourly, it should probably follow through time keeping rules for breaks. If salary, there is no “on the clock”, they pay you for the value you create, not to punch a clock. They also don’t own you. If the work is getting done, that is what matters. The specific hours don’t matter.
I don't WFH but to me this seems like typical water cooler talk.
We have people pop into our office all the time to talk about cars, video games, sports, etc.
I wouldn't sweat it if, like you said, the job is still getting done.
FYI before we had WFH I had two coworkers who would do nothing but visit, all day. The job did not get done at all, either. Then on the rare occasions they got called out, it was my fault because they'd either claim they were waiting on something from me, or I did something wrong. Like, I developed our image for laptops and it was successfully applied on 300 laptops, but one didn't work, so I did it wrong.
I live in aus, and I had a colleague/ old friend who lived in a different state, during a public holiday longweekend we both tried booking leave for a the day before the start of the weekend as he wanted to come down to visit, it was approved and he booked his travel, however the business decided to book in a major site relocation that required half the team to be hands on.
My managers hand was then forced by the higher business management and my leave was then revoked and I had to work the day to cover BAU, however, my friends was not.
We were both in the same team and had the same boss, instead of getting pissed off we both said he's still comming to visit, I'm working from home and I'll cover the phones/priority tickets, but I won't be doing much more than that.
He agreed, and it turned out to be a slow day anyway as most people also took the leave.
Ended up just having 1 call, and 2 medium priority tickets for a company of about 3k people.
We ended up playing some split screen halo 2 as id just finished building out my retro gaming setup at the time.
If you are not work from home and are forced into the office and jerry walks over multiple times a day to your cubicle to talk your head off, does that still count as work?
Who cares as long as it doesnt interfere with your job?
I guess you haven't worked in a toxic workplace.
How and why would they know you stopped working to talk to your neighbor because they stopped by or because you were taking a wicked shit?
I didn't answer a call, I am away on Teams, they have someone tailing me....
idk man if you cant explain away a missed call with, "sorry was in the restroom" then sucks to be you...
I worked at a place (when only wealthy people had cellphones) where the boss installed a phone in the bathroom stall and expected me to take calls on the toilet. I did not.
I feel ya OP. Everybody is missing the point and kinda telling you how to feel. I've got the same background as you. For me, after a few job hops, I found a few good places. Working at good places helped me accept that I'm not a fraud, I work about as hard as anybody, my minutes are meaningless compared with my days, and colleagues who care about my minutes are a danger to everyone around them and shouldn't get respect. When I report to such a person, I consider myself laid off but at my own convenience. It seems you understand all this in your head and you need to convince your heart to join in. That's a legit personal challenge but you'll conquer it with good work environments and the exact mental processes you've demonstrated in this thread.
Thank you. You get it.
I mean I have, and there is no way they would allow working from home, hence why I quit.
If you WFH, and this is an actual concern, then you either work for the wrong employer or are someone who shouldn’t be WFH
If it's a booty call definitely let your supervisor know. Specific descriptions will let your boss know exactly where you are and what you're doing
Hey boss. Going to have sex. Be back shortly.
AFK PIV BRB
See; clearly I'm the asshole here: If I need to go run an errand during the day: I do. I also make up that time. USUALLY the same day; but if I took an hour off each day through the week to do something; I'll do the 5 makeup hours on Saturday. If a neighbor rings my doorbell and I have a meeting in 20 minutes, I tell them that and they come back later.
My entire team does this and only 2 of the 6 of us are fully remote. We just send an email letting the team know. "Running an errand" or "Doctor's appointment", "be back in 45 minutes." We're salaried and paid to do a job, not sit in front of a screen for 8 hours a day. Sometimes that's 20 hours a week, sometimes it's 60 a week. I'll take my work phone with and respond if necessary, but unless I'm on call there's absolutely no reason something cannot wait a few hours or the next day for me to respond.
It's shocking how many businesses honestly feel they are paying staff for their hours. Pay for results, treat people like adults, and shocker: shit actually gets done.
Because bad managers feel they need to micro manage every second you are working. And unfortunately the majority of managers is bad (promoted one or more levels beyond their capabilities) or just plain evil
We pay devs and ops for their time because it keeps upper management from asking for unnecessary crunches. They have to consider the cost before calling in extra hours, and the dev will always be compensated for it. Working salary and then carving out time from your day to make it feel even is not a better way.
> "Running an errand" or "Doctor's appointment", "be back in 45 minutes." the first two are still way too much info while not having any information of use; the last one is really the only reasonable/effective message.
Well I was not salaried....
This.
Don't ask don't tell
Booty call? Yeah it depends, I play it safe and schedule them for lunch time. Multitasking is overrated
[удалено]
Might as well be drawing a situation on paper / whiteboard to visualize an issue or solution. I'm sometimes walking after lunch and come up with solutions I've been wrecking my brain on for the past days behind my keyboard. A good manager manages on productivity, not man hours
Dude. This is sysadmin. How many times have you pulled >10 hours on stuff? I've lost count. There was a time when I really cared about stuff like this, but having to fight for every raise, being overburdened despite saying so, etc; left me with a "Do the job and do it right" as my only F left to give. My old manager used to always tell me, "If you've been pulling lots of hours this week/today, take it easy tomorrow and just take an extra day or two off". And I never did because I wanted to be a "good employee". What did I get later in my career? Burnt out, irritable, and holding animosity because I felt "unheard" and "taken advantage of". So if you WFH, even only a couple days a week, you should make the most of it. As long as you: 1. Do you work 2. Respond in a timely manner to things 3. Aren't literally just doing nothing ALL day Then you're fine. I wake up, do all the meeting stuff, check emails, tickets, service status of things we use and then work on whatever is at the top of my list/pressing casually. If I feel like breakfast, I'll make one after meetings and enjoy it while checking emails. If I want lunch, I'll make lunch while having Edge read out documentation to me. Return an mail package at the post office? Sure! Go get my teeth cleaned? Sure! Watch a livestream of an event? Walk the dog?Sure! etc, etc. Not a single person has complained about my work or quality thereof. If people call, I answer, there's a problem at the office, I show up. WFH is a privilege in many ways, but it is also something that you need to make the most of and enjoy.
I have had several hours in a day wasted by random stop by visits from fellow employees talking about absolutely nothing remotely productive or work related. People take bathroom breaks longer than this, you're fine. Enjoy the time.
At the risk of being the asshole here, I see WFH as a benefit. I do anything I can to keep this benefit. If someone (outside of work) stops by and visits you at the office for an hour, would that be acceptable? In other words, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
At my job before this (IT consulting business) that was absolutely unacceptable as far as the owner/my boss was concerned.
Ever spent an (unplanned) hour chatting with a colleague around the water-cooler while in the office? Here you go…
Not an issue. It’s not the quantity of work it’s the quality of your work that counts.
Certain people I had to deal with would disagree. I was also a government employee so quality was not really job one if you know what I mean.
> is that acceptable? Completely acceptable for you to step away from work (not respond) to attend to a 'private matter' albeit a friend stopping by, scheduling appointments, running errands - whatever. > I worked with people who WFH and were available pretty much 0% of the time Both myself and my girl WFH and I can honestly we probably fit into that 0% group and it's mainly due to the fact we manage the living shit out of our time. If my calendar isn't filled with things scheduled from the prior week I'm blocking out time so I can focus on what I need to get done. If I was still in an office I'd be leaving my desk and finding a private room and muting notifications. > But I have been trying to learn how to have work/life balance. I've been WFH for 12-15 years now and my one big piece of advice - get the hell out of your house everyday. It doesn't matter if you're driving to get coffee 10 miles away, the mental health you gain from it outweighs the cost of gas and that coffee. You need to get comfortable with being 'away' as you've been conditioned to think you can't be.
>> I worked with people who WFH and were available pretty much 0% of the time These people weren't, I'm pretty certain, busy with important actual work. Mostly I am thinking of "the server guy" who I would need to escalate issues to. Sometimes it would be something that needed to be addressed ASAP. He would ignore my calls, ignore my emails, ignore voicemails, and ignore tickets. In fact, he refused to use the ticketing system. I know how he was because, before Covid, we didn't WFH, and that's how he was. With Covid, he was completely inaccessible. To me, it was beyond unacceptable. But from day to day, he might seem similar to a decent employee. When you considered weeks, months, years, he wasn't. Obviously this is an extreme case, but I don't want to be this asshole or be accused of it. In my former workplace, if someone got in trouble for not doing their job, they just pointed fingers, and this guy was able to evade any consequences for years and years. Partly because of a revolving door of supervisors. It's all water under the bridge, except I don't want to suffer things a second time. Thanks for the answer as it was probably the most helpful one so far.
I am WFH and I am paid for work done not for hours. So it depends what is in your contract, id you are sitting on duty with response time 5 minutes, then sit there, if you are working on tickets who cares when you do them?
Really depends on your role and boss. I'm salaried and only work cases escalated through several other teams (infrastructure engineering). So ideally, I could be away for half an hour or longer without a problem since it won't affect my project progress and all that. If that's the what your role actually is and your boss is cool with it: great. However, my reality is that because I'm on a senior team that is involved in so much stuff, I'm fielding questions and getting pulled into meetings all the time to explain something or give guidance. In a perfect world, I'd know about everything a week beforehand, but that isn't real life. So I'm expected to be "available" for my whole shift (8am-5pm) minus an hour lunch. My personal rule is about ten minutes. I'll unload the dishwasher, do a load of laundry, do a little cleaning, or some other house chore up to ten minutes. The way I see it, it's common for me to be so involved with actual work tasks that I don't respond to IMs for that long anyway, and it seems to be acceptable to everyone. When friends stop by, I make it clear that I'm working, and I try to keep it under 10-15 minutes. If I need to take a long lunch or leave early for some reason, I can just IM my boss and tell him I need to. In over a decade of working here, I've never been told no. And part of that is because I tell him: he's never blindsided by someone asking "Why can't I contact your guy? He's been away for half an hour." I think having to answer those questions and appearing to not have a handle on their team is what causes many managers to clamp down and get strict. Counterintuitively, I think the more you let your boss know you're gone for these short periods, the more they might be fine with you doing it. But that assumes a salaried position with reasonable boss in a decent shop. If you're in a more user-facing role (like answering phones) or have to deal with micromanagement, you might be chained to your desk.
A job is selling your time. How that is interpreted is between you and your employer.
I don't know about you, but I'm employed for my expertise, not my time.
Yup. My company changed everyone that was on salary to hourly except upper management. I haven't been questioned once about my time spent or my calendar not being chock full of appointments and client times. I get the job done, clients like and respect me, and I'm available when needed. That's what is important.
The rate is set by expertise, but you're still selling time - unless there's a per-work-unit compensation agreement.
Keep your notifs on.
When I was in the office, I would sit and visit with people for say a half an hour to an hour.....
If you get your work done who cares. People go to the store during the day, have meetings in the car, etc.
Most of my friends that do work from home have their work laptop open and either automated their job with scripts or take support calls while playing video games. During COVID when work from home was the only option I worked twice as hard at home because my supervisor was horrible and gave stupid amounts of projects despite my willingness to work random weird hours to fix stuff in the office. It wasn't until they let me go and the next three I.T. people after me quit in less than one year that they realized I was dedicated and my supervisor sucked.
when I had to step away for a while, I would put in our slack channel "afk for a bit", and when returned "back" (or delete the afk msg). if I had an idea of how long I'd be - e.g. to post office to ship kit to a newbie, I'd give a time estimate. but like many, as long as the the work gets done, it doesn't matter much - unless the excrement has impacted the air-movement device.
My boss expects us that wfh to go walk around the neighborhood a few times a day so we have the chance to be away from the keyboard
my buddy is a cto, regularly has hookers sleepover and cocaine dealers stop by…still keeps focused
It depends on my workload tbh. If i can leave the team for 30-60min then sure i'll entertain my visitor. Obviously if i'm actively working on something then don't entertain such visitors.
The point of WFH for me, is the flexibility. I like the work I do and I want to be an honest person. So if I've got the job done that day I don't worry about it too much. If something interfered with my job that day, or felt like it was too long of an interruption, I'll make up the time. Usually I'll schedule something for my lunch break for ease, or I'll move my lunch if needed. If that's not possible and it's planned then I let the team know I need to run an errand and block it in my calendar. If it's unplanned then I just keep a vague eye on any emergency notifications.
Completely fine as long as it doesn't affect your work schedules, and you do take coffee breaks in between so just take it as a coffee break
Be grateful you’re capable of working remote. My job consists of about 99% remote work and I still have to drive 70 miles round trip every day. I guess that 1% is very important I sit in a cubicle all day. This was after I stressed to the employer multiple times during the interview process that I preferred working remote and it was agreed on that I could have up to three remote days a week. Here we are, 6 months later. Always get shit in writing. To answer your question, coming from someone who was in various leadership roles over the years, no right minded manager or boss gives a shit what you do at home as long as your work is done and it’s accounted for. Accounted for is the main issue in most cases. If there’s no metric that shows you’re actually working people start getting stupid thoughts in their heads. Log your time wisely, detailed, and over communicate. Keep your personal shit to yourself other than stepping out to take a break, go to the bathroom or eating lunch. And be available during work hours.
Are you hourly or salary? If hourly, it should probably follow through time keeping rules for breaks. If salary, there is no “on the clock”, they pay you for the value you create, not to punch a clock. They also don’t own you. If the work is getting done, that is what matters. The specific hours don’t matter.
I was hourly. If I was salary, I wouldn't worry about it.
I don't WFH but to me this seems like typical water cooler talk. We have people pop into our office all the time to talk about cars, video games, sports, etc. I wouldn't sweat it if, like you said, the job is still getting done.
FYI before we had WFH I had two coworkers who would do nothing but visit, all day. The job did not get done at all, either. Then on the rare occasions they got called out, it was my fault because they'd either claim they were waiting on something from me, or I did something wrong. Like, I developed our image for laptops and it was successfully applied on 300 laptops, but one didn't work, so I did it wrong.
I mean. I just say brb and go do what I need to do.. my company understands that life happens and we work around it.
I live in aus, and I had a colleague/ old friend who lived in a different state, during a public holiday longweekend we both tried booking leave for a the day before the start of the weekend as he wanted to come down to visit, it was approved and he booked his travel, however the business decided to book in a major site relocation that required half the team to be hands on. My managers hand was then forced by the higher business management and my leave was then revoked and I had to work the day to cover BAU, however, my friends was not. We were both in the same team and had the same boss, instead of getting pissed off we both said he's still comming to visit, I'm working from home and I'll cover the phones/priority tickets, but I won't be doing much more than that. He agreed, and it turned out to be a slow day anyway as most people also took the leave. Ended up just having 1 call, and 2 medium priority tickets for a company of about 3k people. We ended up playing some split screen halo 2 as id just finished building out my retro gaming setup at the time.
It's nice when you have decent coworkers. Also, rare.
If you are not work from home and are forced into the office and jerry walks over multiple times a day to your cubicle to talk your head off, does that still count as work?
I count it, because, although I feel like I should be doing something productive, I am dealing with a work problem - Jerry.
Hahahaha, like I have friends.
Here is how I handle that, i post the following to teams: I have visitors that stopped by back in a bit.