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Blackberry Owners Chained to Work
seriouslywtf writes "New survey data suggests that Americans are split over whether Blackberrys are chaining them to work. While people who own Blackberries feel 'more productive', those with Blackberrys are more likely to work longer hours and feel like they have less personal time than those without. A Director of Marketing Strategies who owns a Blackberry pointed out that many employees feel obligated by employers who have handed out the devices. 'While being always on in a social context is a natural for young people, many of those in the 25-54 age group with families and corporate jobs are struggling with work-life blending. There is a need for the mainstream workplace culture to offer ways to counterbalance.'" Is the constantly connected, often mobile nature of the modern workplace a good thing, or not?
Because for some reason bosses think they have a right to your leisure time, and there are enough weak-willed employees giving in to them already to make you look bad if you don't answer the damn blackberry when you're not at work.
I don't care if the company gave them to you or not. When you are ready to be uninterrupted, turn it off... and your cell phone. Esp. on weekend I do not want to be bugged, I check messages once in the afternoon before and after heading out to do "my stuff" for the day. I get chained enough with extra contract work from time-to-time... when it's down time, it's down time. Your corporate assigned blackberries, PDAs, laptops, pages, and other gizmos will not make me respond any faster. (Exception: pager when you are officially to be "on-call" for a very *specified* period of time - except I am rarely on-call ever, but some people are on a regular basis)
Is the constantly connected, often mobile nature of the modern workplace a good thing, or not?
Not. I'll work late hours, within reason, when whatever project I'm assigned to requires that I do so, but I refuse to be at anyone's beck and call 24/7. (Probably why I'm single, but that's another story).
I plan on going to a bar tonight to have a couple of beers - I'll have a designated driver - would it be a good idea for me to answer a work call or respond to a work email if I've had one too many?
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
how much of the gains in productivity reported by the federal reserve are due to precisely this; businesses wringing extra, unpaid, work out of their employees.
i let it run out of battery, i forget it, i don't use it. but i'm not climbing the ladder, i'm just sitting here watching the wheels go 'round and 'round.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
My blackberry get's turned off when I get home. IT get's turned on in the morning when I leave for work.
I am in charge of it and I command it. I was asked once by the director of marketing why I did not answer his email he sent sunday at 5am. I said, I have a life outside work and my blackberry is off on weekends and nights.
He gave me a look like I had murdered a bag of puppies and walked back to his office.
It's your choice if you want the device and your job to own you 24/7
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I have disliked the passive aggressive corporate culture for a while. Change the work environment culture! Sorry to be complaining without a solution.
I have a Blackberry for work, as do many of my peers. Most of them work tons of overtime and feel that their Blackberry runs their lives. But not me. I work efficiently and get everything done within regular working hours and rarely need to deal with my Blackberry at night.
Don't blame the device. Blame your job.
In Freemasonry, the 24-inch gauge (or ruler) is used as an emblem of the 24 hours in the day. We are taught that we are to divide this time in three parts, with 8 being for refreshment and sleep, 8 being for the service of God and our fellow man, and 8 "for our usual vocations" -- that is, our regular job. While we understand the realities of modern life, the model of "8 for sleep, 8 for work, 8 for service" is a good one that keeps proper balance in our lives. The move to more and more work eats away at that balance, and imbalance is the source of most of our ills.
BTW, if you're wondering where "family" is in that model, we tend to our families in the 8 we reserve for service. Service to our families is the source of our strength.
Believe nothing, not even if I say it, if it violates your sense of reason -- Buddha
Exactly...I leave my work behind the second that door hits me on the ass. Granted...these days I'm not doing any work where I'm on call....I like development work more...no one gets quite as pissed if you blow something up like they do if you do it to a prod. payroll box.
I dunno...some people seem to let their jobs 'define' them. Don't get me wrong, while I'm fortunate to work and earn a healthy living doing things that interest me...it is only, a job. And a job is nothing more to me than a means to earn money to buy and do things that please me, and allow me to take time off to enjoy them.
I hate to keep preaching it...but one way to cut that 'my company owns me and can call me 24/7'...is to get away from being a direct, salaried employee. I love contracting....my motto is "I never work for free".
If they have to PAY you for ever single hour you work...they will think twice on interfering with your free time...
Don't get me wrong, if there is the need for the 12th hour effort, and 110% to get something working for whatever reason...I'm there for the duration...but, I WILL get paid for that time and effort.
But really...I've never understood those that let themselves get so tied to a job. When you leave the job...it is YOUR time...enjoy it and leave them alone until they are paying you for it....
When I leave for the day, or take a vacation, I can guarantee I give not a single thought to work...not on MY time.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If you allow your Blackberry or whatever PDA/Smartphone you have to become nothing more than an extended leash, then yes, that is what is going to happen. Myself, I'm the sole IT guy for a small business. I've recently picked one of these up to reduce the time I have to spend in the office - or, more precisely, the time I have to spend coming in to fix whatever blew up. I'm hoping to reduce the times I have to make the half-hour drive into work just to spend an hour or less in the office and drive a half-hour back home.
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While the 25-30 year olds are likely to be more gadget geeks, the older crowd is more likely to be workaholics. I've seen more of the over-40 crowd get addicted to their crackberries, and they are typically more concerned with climbing the corporate ladder. After 50 changing jobs becomes a huge issue; many people at that point are hoping to just ride out their current job until retirement. If that means having an electronic leash, that's still preferable to unemployment. It's not the fear that they would lose their jobs if they didn't answer emails on nights and weekends, but the fear they would be first in line when the next round of layoffs hits.
I find my BB very freeing. I have had many leisurely morning cups of coffees on my way to work, secure in the knowledge that nobody is looking for me and that no emergencies have arisen. Same on weekends. My *job* chains me sometimes. The Blackberry simply puts me on a (much) longer leash. My options are either wait by the computer for an email, or go about my day with my Blackberry by my side. I can tell you which I prefer. Now, before a thousand people feel the need to point it out, I recognize that there is a problem with my job here. But as a corporate attorney, it's a problem I volunteered for. I knew when I took this job that I was going to be dealing with people who need (or at least think they need) answers yesterday. However, they pay me well for the usage of my time and at least, so far, I'm happy with the trade off. But the Blackberry? Best extension cord ever.
You're also being rude to whomever is speaking during the meeting by not paying attention, giving off the impression that your time is more important than theirs. That may be true, but the "competitive edge" you gain in productivity may be offset by the vibe you're giving off by actively ignoring your coworkers.
Perhaps this is not so much the blackberry per se, but rather a demographics thing. ie. People who get blackberries on corporate accounts are more likely to be the type doing 24/7 comms. Before they had a blackberry they'd have been doing 24/7 phonecalls.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I think the basic problem is the phrase "work/life blend". I'm sorry, work is work, life is life. The two are mutually exclusive. Work pays me for a normal workday 5 days a week, and reasonable emergencies and after-hours work considering I'm salaried. I don't see employers offering unlimited paid time off so people can meet the demands of life, I fail to see why they should expect me to take unlimited uncompensated time away from my life to meet the demands of work. That, after all, is what most of the people using the "work/life blend" phrase mean: how does the employee juggle his schedule to accommodate what the employer wants. I have a simple answer: I juggle it based on how much my employer's willing to pay for my time.
And that's not an empty position. I've left two employers in my life over this. Oddly, in both cases I ended up getting more money and significantly reducing my workload as a result. I'm not afraid of doing the same again. Fortunately at my current job that's not something I'm having to deal with.
I did **once** go in at 4 am with a batch of freshly baked muffins. People were walking about like zombies or lying around on their desks waiting for a build or test to complete. Hollow shells. Come approx 9 am they all went home completely stuffed and slept until about 3pm when they came back to work still half-zonked to work another overnighter of almost zero productivity. In the mean time, I did a normal 9-5 and achieved quite a bit. I then biked home at a civilised hour and played with the kids etc. Came back the next morning fresh and ready to engage!
It is well understood and documented that you often solve problems while doing something other than sitting in front of a computer. Take a dump, have a shower, go fishing.... You need the balance to be a productive worker.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
many employees feel obligated by employers who have handed out the devices
With whom does the fault rest here? The employers, or the idiots who make themselves available 24/7 at the whim of their workplace?
People, do us all a favor, and stop putting up with this bullshit. Just say no. If enough of us do it, "on call" will go back to a paid status (yes, "back" - Companies used to pay damned good money to have trained monkeys available at 3am).
It really disgusts me that people often tell me they need to actually "go away" on their vacations, or they'll get called in to work. Hello, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Stand up for yourselves! "Sorry, Dave, that third margarita looks damned good right now, so I'll talk to you when my vacation ends, on Monday morning. Beach? No, sitting in my living room, five minutes' drive from you. Buh-Bye."
As for whether or not you can "get away" with that - Yes, you most certainly can. Just do it right from day one, rather than giving in a bit at first to make yourself look more useful. Deluding your employer just sets you up for unhappyness later - Let them know right where you stand on such issues. A decent employer will even respect you for it.
Not to say I wouldn't honestly help out my coworkers, if convenient for me... I have gone in at bizarre hours to deal with emergencies - And damn well comp'ed the time the next day. But I do that at my pleasure, not as a condition of employment.
If responding off-hours became a requirement of the job, we'd have a problem, and they would need to find someone else for the position. And no, paying me more would not count as an option, because I work to live, not live to work, end of discussion.
If every manager had to pay an hour of overtime for every question he asked by blackberry, text, or cell, after office hours, there would be no problem! Most would figure out real quick what is really important and what can wait until tomarrow. I don't care if the answer takes 10 seconds, they have to pay an hour.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I work in an IT shop for a moderate sized company and our VP has told the people under him that have those things that he expects responses to e-mails within a couple of hours 24x7. And he has chewed out my boss, who currently doesn't have a device like that, for not responding to e-mails when he was on vacation. The problem here is that the VP lives with that thing attached to him and does e-mail while on vacation, so he expect that from pretty much everyone else. Seems like a good recipe for burning out a lot of good employees.
Well, first, I'd rather not be a sysadmin by trade. I'd rather be a director or move towards CTO/CIO, which is why I'm focusing my time on education/networking. By and large, a monkey could do my position (or a senior sysadmin -- or anyone who would write "peer-reviewed papers on the subject). It's the technological equivalent of being an automechanic, and anyone who writes about them would be better served writing about Joe at the local garage (might want to consider a career change, bud).
That said, I get alerts based on very specific events. The issue is that I'm motoring 10, 20-node clusters -- 200 machines with probably in the neighborhood of 2000 "important" pieces of hardware that can fail. Let me clarify what I mean by "monitoring" -- I'm the only one who does it. I'm the one who not only gets the alerts but has to head down to one of four sites to repair the nodes. I'm also in charge of optimizing and occasionally tightening the code that runs them. I'm also in charge of security (the IP on these boxes is worth about 1 billion). In any sanely run company, I would at least have 1 underling, so when a hard drive failed in node 18 of cluster 6, I could push a button and say "Johnny, go ship out a drive to the Canada site". Instead, I have to hop on a plane and remember my passport. Braindead way of doing things? Absolutely. I've argued that many times with management. But budgets are budgets and they'd rather pay one lackey a nice salary then 4 lackeys (one for each site).
As it stands right now, I have multiple scripts that weed out largely unnecessary alerts. Node 4 of cluster 2 is at 90% CPU? Don't care. However, there's only so much one can weed out if you're the only admin. I need to know when critical hardware on any of the 200 nodes fail. I need to know when a node or cluster is pinned at 100% for an extended period of time. I need to know when a competitor might be trying to break into one of the boxes. I need to know if it's safe to bring down half a cluster for a code change (which I usually have to write myself). What is your solution when you have 1 admin and about 300 recognized noteworthy events in this type of environment? "Ignore your Blackberry?"
In short, I need to act as a responsible employee, as I have no one else to fall back on to do the same. If that means checking my Blackberry on occasion, so be it. If your response is "Your job sucks," well, I agree. Most do. And I doubt I'll be here much longer.
Bottom line, though, if the alternative is losing cluster time, losing a site, or losing a couple hundred million worth of IP, I'll take a minor inconvenience of checking a blinking light.
P.s. Calling someone a "bad admin" when you know nothing about the environment, workload, etc. is bad form. My statement that you don't seem to be a sysadmin still stands -- you seem more to be a pompous prick.
I understand your point about not letting your job define you, but the counterpoint is, at 40 hours a week, you end up spending a quarter of your life doing your job, so you may as well make it something that you don't mind doing, you know? If your job is something that you want to completely shut out as soon as you walk out the door, then can you really be doing the right thing with your time there?
I think the two sides of this argument both have some merit. If you're a Blackberry-addict, slave-to-your-job type, that's just sad, because your field of interests is so narrow. What about your family, friends, eating good food, seeing good art? On the other hand, if you leave work and completely shut it out, does that mean that you consider yourself to be "wasting" a huge chunk of your life? It's true you have to work just to live, but shouldn't you try to find a way to do that having the feeling that money is the only reward for doing a good job?
Just something to think about...
I work as a contractor (freelancer) and in some assignments i get payed by the hour.
In my experience, when a manager has been spewing his crap about "it's a tight deadline and we're gonna have to work long hours and weekends to do it" and you point out that you're payed by the hour, the need for extra hours "magically" disappears.
IMHO, the vast majority of the time, the need for extra hours is born out of a bad manager knowingly giving optimistic estimates to upper management/the client to make himself look good or a bad sales person knowingly selling a project on the cheap to get the contract (and the bonus). As long as they can get out of budget extra hours from those working on the project they can keep the illusion that they're good managers/sellers. If the extra hours are budgeted, then it becomes glaring obvious that they're actually dowing a sub-par job.
The way to see if there's a real need for the extra work is if they're willing to pay for the extra hours at 150% or more rate (if they're only willing to pay the same as for standard hours, they're probably knowingly understaffed).