As a middle manager in a corporate hellscape, one of my few joys in life is setting logic traps for HR and making them choose between admitting company policy is bullshit or directly instructing me to violate labor laws.
Doing the Lord’s work there, Sonny!
if it’s the latter, just get it in writing.
Man we had someone in the army do this. Army doctrine is either outdated or very accessible to the poor, I don’t fuckin know, but you aren’t required to have a phone.
So this one weird junior Joe just decided he didn’t need a phone. Got rid of it, and as a result never got the information he needed on army shit. I loved him for it, and by the law he was in the right. Can’t tell him to get a phone.
Unfortunately I was his team lead, and every time my chain of command decided to put out bullshit last minute information over text I had to tell them to suck it and pvt NoPhone wouldn’t be at their surprise formation.
Sometimes for important stuff I would have to drive to the barracks and knock on homies door to let him know there’s surprise inspections or piss tests and shit.
The workplace should operate entirely without external communication. It worked since the dawn of man, and it should continue to work until the end of man if we want any semblance of work-life balance.
Big “thathappened” energy
Keep telling the DBAs that my company outsourced a big chunk of their tech stack to that its against company policy to work all the way on the other side of the planet, but they refuse to show up to the office.
I always refused to put work apps on my personal phone because they would make you agree to some bullshit where they could remote access your phone or potentially wipe it. So I would refuse and say they needed to provide a company phone for me if it was that important. Most companies are either ok with this or provide a phone, except for one company. This was a software company, and literally everything else about this company was a unicorn of a job. But for some reason they wanted me to have slack on my phone and also wouldn’t give me a company phone. So I dug up an old phone, reset it to factory settings, and added slack to that so I could say I did it. Then I put the phone away and they never asked about it again. So I really don’t know what the point of that was 🤷
I really don’t mind these days as long as they have a MDM so I can have it on a separate profile, but without that I’m totally with you.
It’s less cognitively taxing for me if you just comply with whatever I’ve decided
I love this.
Zeitgeist material
Amazing
The policy is you can only work from home when it benefits the company, not you.
I’m learning that the hard way. Started working for this company 2 hours from home,because I could WFH 3 days a week. Now they want me to come in 4 days a week. So I’m looking for a new job now. Which is a shame, because I do like the job.
What does your contract say? With this back to work bullshit I made sure my contract explicitly said I was remote.
Doesn’t mean they won’t change their mind but maybe I’ll get severance instead of fired for cause of they have a back to the office push.
most hires don’t get contracts
Huh? All jobs come with an employment contract.
You must not be in america. We’re lucky if we get breaks.
That’s cute you believe that
Good tip, I’ll double check that
keep me updated!
Keep us updated!
We need the update more than a windows user need a rollback.
Remote rocket ship and hiring dot cafe
Our boss was freaking out over people sometimes doing some private calls during work hours and at a certain point absolutely forbade it. So yeah, people would just end the call at 17:00 sharp and switch off the work phone. It took one week before that rule was rescinded.
And that’s ridiculous on general because you know who also does regular work hours? Everyone else!
That means if you need a call with your doctor, bank, whatever, it’s likely gonna be during the workday
This reminds me of a work-to-rule or a “White Strike.” It turns out that every company, even those that supposedly operate off of “unskilled” labor, utterly rely on employees making a ton of judgment calls and often working outside their job description. When employees start working to the letter of their job description, the whole operation quickly grinds to a halt.
“Other duties as assigned” is a bitch.
This is when “could you please send that request on writing via e-mail” becomes really useful.
That’s what gets struck in a white strike.
If it’s literally in your job description, as it has been in my last several positions, does it qualify?
A white strike, like all strikes works because of collective action, not because of some tricky technically lol.
If everyone does it then it works.
Teamwork makes the dream work.
God, I hate how often my CEO says this
In all of my IT jobs I would have been fired if I had signed into work accounts on my personal phone. It’s a pretty big security risk.
Eh, it doesn’t need to be, you just need to do the work of putting together granular access controls that can account for your risk profiles.
The risk isn’t much different between a company owned telephone and a personal telephone.
They’re both susceptible to most of the same attacks, or being left on the bus.True, but in small companies it’s not uncommon.
I was at a subsidiary of a very large company and had work slack, email, and all my code on my phone, without even the thing that lets them remote wipe your phone.
It has to do with culture and willingness to put in the effort by the security organization
Get hit with one ransom ware attack and that shit’ll pivot 180.
Yeah, or even just budget cuts. I am sure it’s cheaper to just lock it down.
Not exclusive to IT; I had to weigh the benefits of continuing to work as a caregiver for a small company, versus working in retail for a massive chain (which translates to fantastic insurance benefits.)
Sadly not a competition.
Unless it’s 24h gold service with 24k gold pay, the work phone gets turned off at the end of office hours.
There are places that pay well for on call though.
While true, most enterprises have ways to silo and encrypt their data on non company controlled devices.
Android does something like that when you install ms office apps with administrator controlled policies
Fuck their data, what about my own? That pest of an app is not getting onto my device. And neither is anything else that gives an employer any control over my device.
A totally reasonable stance.
For clarity, the android feature essentially makes a work dedicated partition on the phone. Their management app can manage that partition, and for the purposes of data movement it’s essentially a distinct phone.
If they’ve set it up correctly they can do a remote wipe without touching your personal data.In a lot of cases the drive to have users use their personal devices rather than employer owned ones comes from the users, not the workplace. Only needing to keep track of one device is easier in many cases.
My policy as well. Non-negotiable hard no. But I’m fortunate enough to have at least some choice with regard to employment.
Most companies seem to have don’t ask, don’t tell policies in place.
Technically we’re not allowed to use Teams on our phones, but most of us do, including management.
I’m also technically not allowed to use Spotify on my laptop, but if they’d enforce that ban, IT would be gone tomorrow.
Incoming employment terms amendment:
You can work from home but only to answer us when we contact you. You must answer our contact and must report to the location if requested. If you can do something cheaper (for us the company) and faster (for us the company) then that is the only time you may perform a work duty at home.
It’s EU law that if you have to be standby to pick up the phone and go on location at a moment’s notice, those are working hours and need to be paid in full. Most companies are pretty careful to not put it anywhere in the contracts or house rules that you have to be on stand-by, but just verbally keep pushing for it. If they keep pushing, push back with asking for the written rules.
That sounds like something a functioning government would do.
In America, we get the “privilege” of At-Will employment.
I can’t understand how Americans cope with so much freedom.
We don’t have time to think about it much.
Excuse me, I need to spend the next 2 hours trying to get my insurance company to pay for my medical care.
It’s the same in the US. 5 CFR 551.431
B 1 of that says it’s not the same.
What does the EU regulation say?
*ammmendment
You must answer our contact
“I cannot answer the company contact after hours because for every call I get after hours that isn’t a company contact, following an order from work to monitor those on the chance of a company contact itself represents ‘working from home’ which the company forbids. I cannot violate the previously stated company policy.”
Should be the standard anyway. Reading email and texts from work, or responding to calls, is work. Unless your contact specifies on-call hours, you should ignore your boss outside of working hours. If they really want you to respond they can pay you overtime.
Places that specify on call time also tell you not to check stuff when you’re not at work or supposed to be on call though, because that’s expensive for them. And if they tell you to check something they just put you into on call pay.
“No, not like that!”
And…? How did the story turn out?
Ol Reliable…
