Slashdot Mirror
Does Your Company Pay For Broadband?
masq57 writes "My fellow administrators and I used to have company provided ISDN lines in our homes so that we could respond quickly to issues after hours. That was changed in the last few years to letting us expense our broadband service. Now our new CIO has elected to stop that benefit using the argument that we should be dedicated staff who desire to be responsive and should do what it takes to make that happen. The rumor now is that we should also pay for blackberries, cell phones and pagers. What sort of experiences do the rest of slashdotters have along these lines?"
Next thing's to work on finding an employer that isn't run by such cheap bastards.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
In my experience, it's been assumed that IT pros would have home Internet access because, well, what IT pro wouldn't have at least a consumer dial-up account if not broadband.
Paying for those things is a company's way of passing the employee some cash-value compensation without it being considered taxable income. So, add 20%-30% (depending on your personal tax rate) to the cost and consider that as have been subtracted from your pay package... consider yourself insulted.
Aside from that, this might be a good sign that it's time to start looking around for another job. This isn't 2002 anymore -- employers who still think they can get away with this sort of shit are wrong, wrong, wrong.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
My opinion and stance has always been "if you want me to have it, then you (the company) will pay for it." I've told employers that if they want me to have a cellphone then they had better pay for it themselves, 'cuz I won't have one if it's my choice.
You DON'T want a pager anyway. In my experience, when they give you one, you are expected to respond if it beeps.
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
*/
If you're stuck paying for your own broadband, can you write it off on your taxes like auto milage?
I consistently insisted that my cell phone not be listed in the company employee directory. I threatened to change the number when once it was listed. If someone needed me over a weekend, they could call my home, and if I didn't answer, then tough. If the company wanted to pay for my cell phone service, THEN they could reach me after hours.
Don't give in on this issue. Do you really want your employer to have you at their beck and call 24/7 on your dime?
Yes, my company does pay for my home broadband access..and they are remarkably liberal about it. They don't care what servers I run or how I use the bandwidth (3 Mb/1Mb), just so long as I can still effectively do my job. Of course, I work from home full time, so the situation is a bit different than that of many in our profession. Josh.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
I have DSL at home ($50/month), a pager ($20/month), a cell phone (+/- $80/month), and cellular internet ($80/month). My company pays for my pager, my cellular internet (gets internet access via PCMCIA anywhere I get a cell signal), half my DSL, and half my cell bill. I'm also a 1-man IT shop supporting 30+ users and 20+ servers including clusters, so even on vacation, I have to be available and reachable. Of course, we're not hurting for money either.
Yes you should be happy to do it, if you were a happy employee. Simply outline that while they want you to innovate, to give your all for the company, to make them better than their competitors, then they should be willing to do the same for you.
Tell them that if they treat you 'competitively' to what other companies are doing, then you will either work as hard as other employees or find a company that treats you better than they do.
We are going through the same thing here, and there is nothing worse than cutting back on employee benefits, pay, and perks and justifying it by saying 'we are doing what everyone else is doing'.
It'd probably help if everyone did it, but if they won't pay for it I don't use it for business. Not that I'd ever get rid of my broadband at home but that's another matter.
My employer will pay for broadband, cell phone but not pager (what's the point? text messages cover paging) for employees it considers mobile which is almost everyone outside of our main sites. Some areas even get better broadband rates because of deals negotiated due to the amount of employees we have.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Your CIO sounds like an asshole. "Dedicated" means dedicated to the work, not dedicated to spending money for your own company. (Hint to CIO: People work to get paid money. Not to spend money for their employers.) If the company needs you to have internet access to do your job, they should pay for it.
Any company which demands you restructure your own personal finances in order to be able to afford an internet connection that they require you to have had their head up their ass. Your personal finances are none of their fucking business. I realize it's much easier said than done, but if I were in your position and had such demands placed on me, I'd quit.
Put this arrogant prick in his place. All of you should collectively refuse to pay for broadband yourselves, and let him see how "productive" you are without his help. It is not your reponsiblity to spend your own money for "the good of the company."
What a crock of shit.
The place you're working for is a sinking ship ... they've run out of cash, and they're trying to download the costs of doing business on to their employees. Having lived through the dot.com bomb, I've seen this thing a half dozen times. If you don't play ball, you'll get bad reviews, and you'll eventually be dismissed for your "poor attitude".
Better start looking for a new gig.
S
When you're in the office, that is. Tell him you are absolutely, positively dedicated to providing your company the best possible service during working hours.
When you're at home, your time is your own, unless they're paying you extra. If your job is not like that, it's time to find a new job. "It's your job, suck it up," is not an appropriate response here; you're a human being, not a disposable resource to be used up.
Your CIO needs to show YOU that he's dedicated to having the best possible service available, and that he's willing to dedicate the resources to ensure it. If he wants 24-hour cell phone availability, he better be paying for the phone. If they're going to require you to use your own resources to perform your job, then they should at the VERY least reimburse you on a prorated schedule for the amount of time you spend using your net connection from home. Even if it's only a couple of bucks a month--hell, especially if it's only a couple of bucks a month.
As it is, all he's showing you is that you're not worth a goddamn unless they can squeeze every last drop out of you that they possibly can.
Now our new CIO has elected to stop that benefit using the argument that we should be dedicated staff who desire to be responsive and should do what it takes to make that happen. The rumor now is that we should also pay for blackberries, cell phones and pagers.
What your new CIO is not telling you is that your department budget has been cut back and they are no longer able to pay for your broadband. If they won't let you itemize your broadband connection, ask if you can itemize dialup connection and phone costs for every call you have to make for business reasons.
If you have to be on-call, then they should at least reimburse you for cell phone/pagers costs. I'm not sure about blackberries, tho.
My company pays for my broadband and whenever I'm on-call, they pay for my cell phone costs and they provide the pagers. They also pay overtime for on-call related work, but my personal policy is, if I don't have to leave my house, I don't charge them. Also, they usually understand that if I stay up half the night soving a problem (from home or at the office), I'll probably be late for work in the morning and tend to look the other way.
How is your company's overall situation? Are finances suffering? Read between the lines on what your boss told you and figure out wether it's safe to protest or you should simply start thinking about employment elsewhere.
Disclaimer: IANAL, YMMV, caveat emptor, boni anima teuri amen, and all that.
No sig
My fellow administrators and I used to have company provided ISDN lines in our homes so that we could respond quickly to issues after hours.
*AHEM* Not that I'm saying your ISDN line wasn't a good tool to "respond quickly to issues after hours" but...
In reality, your fellow administrators and your used to have a company-provided ISDN line in our home, pretending to need it to respond quickly to issues after hours, so you could get free internet in reality. Trouble is, your company wisened up to the fact that you shafted them, and decided that a a regular dial-up account, an automated phone call, SMS or Blackberry messages work just as well to "solve issues after hours".
Been there, done that. The bubble is finished, get over it...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Essentially institute a "safe auto" contact policy. You have an answering machine on your home phone number that they can call when they need you. You have, as far as they are concerend, no cellphone, pager, blackberry, or non corporate internet. If they send you an email you will get it when you are at work. I can not think of a single profession where there is a similar situation. Do construction works have a BYOB policy (Bring your own Backhoe)? No then why should 24/7 IT guys (which is what your company wants) have a BYOB (Bring your own broadband) expectation?
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
I personally find non-reimbursement incredibly insulting, but let's not forget that the employer must be aware that these are deductible business expenses. At the very least, they should be willing to accept that they are getting the money back from your business expenses. There's nothing worse than an employer telling you to get certified or to fly to see client xyz but refusing to pay for the flight or training. I have had to contend with that on a number of occasions, and it's only with small companies. Any fortune .5k company will not only reimburse you, but force you to use the process. They don't want any audit screwing up their investors' opinions!
stuff |
The broadband piece may be because most people don't just use it for work, but for their own use as well, and there is no reason work should pay for that.
Having an on-call pager or cell phone is not an unreasonable way to go. I have used worked that out with my staffs in the past and it works pretty well. If you aren't on-call you never get the call because some manager HAS to use the printer right outside his/her cube, and not the one 10 feet further down the hall.
Ride it out, but make it clear (if this is really the case) that you don't have room in your personal budget for high speed internet access, and that if you get the call it will take you X minutes to get into work.
Personally I don't take work calls on my personal cell (sometimes my wife takes it, or my kids) so it's not a reliable way to contact me. I do have a company provided pager.
YMMV
Eschew Obfuscation
There is a collective struggle between workers and owners (and their proxies, bosses). This series of events shows the subjective weakening power of the workers side here. They want you to pay for the privilege of being a 24/7 on-call wage slave. There's not much you can do as an individual, although if your company gets worse than industry average you can split.
What you can do is band together with other IT workers and educate and organize. You may remember recently there was a desire to retract the FLSA laws from even moe people. Most IT people legally have no right to overtime anyhow, despite the 19th century battles for an eight hour day. In fact, your time is now around-the-clock, and at your expense. Communicating and organizing with organizations like TechsUnite, the Programmers Guild, Washtech and whatnot will keep you appraised of these things. The ITAA, the IT owners lobbying group, has been lobbying in Washington DC for years, and was flooding newspapers with stories of IT labor shortages in the late 1990s. This has been a common industry tactic - industries used to flood newspapers with stories of labor shortages in the early 20th century, which newspapers like the Industrial Worker used to mock.
The two big factors in the struggle are hours worked and pay per hour. Employers always are trying to expand hours worked, workers if they have any power are trying to reduce the number of required hours. In terms of pay per hour, the fight is over how much of the wealth you create, and workers create all the wealth, goes to you in wages, and what percentage goes to the owner in profit.
Something people say is companies are getting tighter due to the economy, as if political economy was something completely alien from people like the weather. On the contrary, employers felt their expected rate of profit was falling in 2000 so they stopped capital spending, thereby creating unemployment, which drives down wages. They do this until their expected profit rate comes into their expectation range again.
Is the company in dire trouble now (that being the reason for the cutbacks), or are they going to be in dire trouble soon because of such cutbacks?
It's almost certainly one or the other. If the company is hurting, an dthis is a part of across-the-board, temporary cost-cutting measures, they should say so, and you can decide how to react.
Otherwise, there's a clueless twit loose, and s/he needs to be dealt with, or your group (if not the company) is dead, dead, dead unless something changes.
As for the details in the meantime, I agree with the "Easy one" poster. It woiuld be one thing if you'd hired in under those terms. But just yanking them because the new guy has his own definition of reality? Maybe you should explain that a real CIO provides his people with the best tools for their job.
Plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, or pretty much any tradesman, are expected to have their own tools.
Hell, McDonalds' employees pay for their uniforms.
Is it really that unreasonable to expect computer professionals to have a computer and internet access?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
"Go figure. *shrug*" is exactly what's gone wrong in the workforce.
Will you *shrug* your way to 60 hour work weeks, pay increases that don't keep up with the cost of living, purchasing your own software, paying for any equipment repairs?
Will you *shrug* your way back into the conditions that made unionism necessary in the first place?
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Work paid for my cell phone for years.
Then they decide to stop paying for cell phones. I bitch about it being a short sighted penny-wise pound-foolish policy. Said bitching falls on deaf ears and they cut funding anyways.
Fine. My out of office message now specifies contacting my boss, not calling my cell phone. If work calls outside of my "free" hours timeslots, they pay for that portion of my monthly bill. If I use 300 minutes of the 500 plan minutes in a month, and 30 of those are for work use, then work pays for 1/10th of my bill.
If its the weekend and work calls my cell phone I do not feel an urgent need to pick up. If they leave a voice mail I feel just fine not responding until I'm in the office on Monday.
To put it short, if my employer feels that it is not important for them to be able to reach me when I am not in the building, then I'm going to act like it's not important for them to be able to reach me when I am not in the building.
And you can take your team-player should-be-willing-to-pitch-in speech and stick it where the sun don't shine. You're taking advantage of an expensive resource that I'm paying for out of pocket, if you're not willing to help mitigate that cost then I'm not willing to let you use that resource.
Saying that I should be willing to use my broadband, which incurs a usage fee, for work just because I already pay for it is like saying I should be willing to drive people around in my car just because I already pay for it.
There's a law against forcing someone to use their private vehicle for work related tasks without compensating for fuel and wear and tear... I see no reason that same principle shouldn't apply to any resource.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
You don't work from home, you don't carry a pager, and you don't give them your cell phone number.
Instead, your replacement will take care of all those pesky "issues" like decorating your cube and picking up your paycheck. If you really are an integral part of keeping a company running 24x7, then your salary probably already reflects it. Let's be honest: most folks have 1+Mb Internet connections and cell phones anyways. It's not like the co. is asking you to maintain a DS3 into your basement.
It's easy to sound-off on /. posts, but you're facing a reality of today's business world. Try negotiating an in-between solution. Discuss with management that you recognize most folks have Internet connections and cell phones anyways. (Now, they'll recognize you live in the real world with them.) Then explain you are committed to the company, cite examples, etc... (Yea, basically kiss-up a little). Then explain that you'd like to expense a portion of your business-related expenses. If 50% of your cell calls are work related and a fourth of your Internet time is resolving work issues, then you'd like to expense those percentages of those bills. Explain how this arrangement would help you adjust your budget during this transition period that the co. is going through.
After a while, you can push those numbers up a little since no-one will actually look at every in/out-bound number on your cell phone bill. ;-) And as for the so-called transition period, how many "temporary fixes" are still in place years later? ;-) Don't take any big stands on this issue. Don't bring it up in the weekly staff meeting. Let this negotiation occur quietly between you and whoever approves your expenses. It's the real world, population: us.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
CIO's wouldn't be able to pull this kind of shit if we were a union trade. We could demand better pay for having to subsidize company architcture or they would have to pay for it themselves. Otherwise we walk while the windows worm of the week burrows unopposed.
If half the CIO's of the fortune 500 were giving evil eyes to your CIO because of a sympathy strike on your behalf, this would be an entirely different story. Such a CIO could be endangering their carreer if they turn the screws too tight on their staff.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
That was YOUR choice. You volunteered to do those things, and at a startup, it was recognized and appreciated. This guy's boss is just cheap. It's more of the same old mentality: Let's squeeze as much profit and productivity from these people as we can without spending any money on them. And if they balk, hint at layoffs.
He may not have any choice, but his piece of mind will be greatly increased if he can find another job with reasonable superiors. The ones he has now are making unreasonable demands at his fiscal expense.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
A few years ago the company I worked for used to supply a few of us with ISDN lines (this was before cable/DSL was readily available) so we could work from home. They paid for the connection and footed the bill for rental and calls. At the time, though, ISDN was still metered by the minute in the UK and so you paid for the duration of your call - what's more, if you bonded the two channels into one 128Kb connection then you paid for each channel (ie. it was effectively two separate phone calls). Off peak this could be as much as 5p per minute per channel. In otherwords it wasn't cheap :)
Well, all was fine until the sorry day when I downloaded the Unreal Tournament demo to try out. Suddenly I found that being one of the l337 few with a 'low ping' connection I was really good and so I bought the full game when it was released. Next thing I knew I joined a clan and was playing all the time. Then - you guessed it - the bills started arriving....
You try explaining to your boss how you've managed to wrack up a bill for over 100 ($185) a month by 'working from home'. Not easy, especially when the server logs seem to indicate you'd never actually telneted to the server more than a couple of times to read your mail... Bah!
Yup, you sure do.
You get the "freedom" to come in on the 4th of July to work on someone else's server.
You get the "freedom" to spend your money on work related Internet.
You get the "freedom" to spend your money on work related cell phone minutes.
And for what? To be treated like a professional? Wouldn't you rather be compensated like a professional?
Where I work, we have what's called "leave days", and when we need to take leave, we do, it's why they give them to us. When we are sick, we take "sick days", we don't have to ask, that's what they give them to us for. If work requires us to be on a pager, they supply it, common sense says it's their responsibility.
I'm very sure your boss "loves" you. But as for me, I don't own the company, I require compensation for my work. And, because I work for professionals, they treat me as a professional, without asking me to shell out a lot of cash for the privilege.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
For example, if you live in California, Calif. Labor Code Sec. 2802(a) states:
An employer shall indemnify his or her employee for all necessary expenditures or losses incurred by the employee in direct consequence of the discharge of his or her duties, or of his or her obedience to the directions of the employer, even though unlawful, unless the employee, at the time of obeying the directions, believed them to be unlawful.
Of course, if you don't want to make an issue of it now, just keep track of all your expenses, document why they are necessary, and when you leave the company sue them for the expenses during the statute of limitations period.
---
The preceding is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute any form or offer of representation. You should seek the advice of a compentent legal professional licensed in your jurisdiction prior to taking any action.
IANAAccountant, but I do my own taxes and forget it.
Employee business expenses have a 2% AGI floor on Schedule A. What that means is if your income is about $60K a year, you don't get to deduct ANY of those expenses until they are more than $1200. If you have $1500 in expenses you get to deduct $300. (If you make more than $140K it's even further limited.) Whoop de frickin do.
Absolutely!
At the company I run, not only are my employees dedicated enough that they're willing to go the extra mile to ensure availability in the off hours, but they do the same during workdays as well. They work in a cubicle that they rent, with a desktop PC that they purchase from the company (at a more than reasonable rate, due to the volume discount that we get and generously pass on to them), use office supplies that they provide, and even pitch in for their share of the electric bill.
Some would call it "wage slavery". I call it "smart business".
Of course, this is only theoretical, since I haven't actually hired anyone yet. In fact, no one has even sent me a resume. I'm sure it's because everyone's such loyal and dedicated employees that they just don't want to leave the companies they're already working for.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
if you pay for it then you have 100% freedom to turn it off at any time for any reason. that goes for bandwidth or wireless leashes, doesn't matter.
If the company provides you a benefit (company car, home broadband, computer, blackberry) that you can use for personal use, they are supposed to report that personal use ($/%) to the IRS as imputed income, which Uncle Sugar uses to soak you on 4/15.
Yeah, right.
I, and many others, used to have our cellular phone bills paid completely. Then, oh maybe a year ago, the rule was changed so only a set amount of our bill was paid. Recently it has been changed so that we have to pay our entire bill on our own.
Did I complain at first? Sure, going from paying $0 to paying $80 every month was lame, but I stopped complaining pretty quick when I thought about it rationally. The proportion of minutes that people spent doing work verse the minutes people spent using the phone for personal use definitely showed most people were just using their phone on their own (or minutes were going unused). We also get the corporate rate on our plans, which is cool and adds up fast. I'm sure there are some people that use it solely for work, and I'm sure that the company will work with them appropriately, but for the general employee that isn't the case.
Back when my cell phone was bought & paid for by the company I had no problem with my number being listed in the directory - it wasn't really "my private phone", it was "the company's phone that I could use". I also expected other people to have their cell number in the directory, and when I needed to reach them after hours & it wasn't there I bitched at them.
Now that it is "my phone" and "my phone plan", you know what? It is my personal number and does not need to be listed. The people that need to be able to reach me know how to reach me. Random people that 'think' they need to call me after work... can send me email or leave voice mail on my office line. I don't expect everyone else to have their numbers in the directory anymore either.
That does kinda suck though, when we really need to get ahold of someone but can't...
Is it a cut to my benefits? Sure.
Does it suck that I have to pay for something I didn't used to? Sure.
Does it make sense that if I use my phone for personal use -way- more than business use, that I should be responsible? Sure.
Do I understand how this affects the corporate bottom line? Yep, I'm glad we're doing this too. The less expenses we pay the more money we have for other things (or the more money the company keeps, which plays in to stock prices, budgets, blah blah blah)
I think there are two sides to this. The CIO is getting pressure from the CFO/CEO to reduce overhead yet maintain the services that the organization has grown accustom to- Do more with less. The CIO is in the middle and unfortunately, isn't creative enough to develop his internal soluion without shafting his employees nor articulate enough to elicit the resources from the CFO/CEO to support such programs. At some point, management, including the CIO, needs to realize that you are only paid for 40 hours, so anything above and beyond that requires appropriate compensation or benefits - leave early, come in late, comp time, team building, etc. Most importantly, the CIO should not ask his employees to do anything that he isn't willing to do himself. Yes, the duties of my IS department are the responsibiltiy of my team - I take call too.