You don't.

Well, she did reply tho...

Get your shit together, Brad.

No offense, but he shouldn't apologize.

If he wants to work over the weekend, he should. Shouldn't feel forced to, but if he wants, whatever.

If she doesn't feel like weekend working, she shouldn't be reading or responding. She can open those mails whenever she wants to.

I personally work plenty in the weekend.

I also take 3 hour lunch breaks during the week, or go to the beach at 2PM if the weather is nice.

And I never read my email.

Fucking email. The only useful feature is identity verification for SaaS shit, and it kinda sucks at that as well.

Email is almost on par with sending a Fax.

There's shit like Slack or Discord for immediate communication, and solutions like Jira, Asana, Trello, etc for collaborative discussion on tasks...

Really, maybe I get irrationally angry about it, but FUCK EMAIL.

@JustThat Any company measuring skilled worker output in terms of clocked hours can go die under a flood of phishing emails.

It's exactly as @JustThat said. We see this all the time too in shitty companies. Some people are working crazy unpaid overtime and don't have the guts to do anything about it. And because they don't have the guts to do anything about it they also expect everyone else to fall in line, cause since they put in the extra work being "loyal" to the company, everyone else then should too.

The ultimate worst case scenario is management becoming accustomed to this and expecting free overtime, since otherwise you are not a "team member" and everyone should give "110%" to their idea and project - even though only they stand to benefit from that effort.

Some of these are even Machiavellian tactics, frankly. If you ever find yourself in such a place - run. There are work environments where people do not gift their personal free time to a company they raised to religious levels.

If they expect free overtime, just schedule your emails to be delivered when you are not working…🤫

@Maer Overtime is a retarded custom.

Beyond 40h/w, possibly even beyond 32h/w there is no real extra gain in productivity.

I see weekend/evening/night working as an alternative, to free up office hours to do fun family things. Not as an extra.

If I see that a wednesday is a meeting-free day, I might invite an equally-minded coworker on tuesday, work together on an issue until 3AM emptying a few bottles of wine, sleep in the next day, eat pizza for brunch, and go swimming with my kid in the afternoon.

If your employer however thinks that >40h/w of clocked time is useful, fuck them, run.

If your employer *requires* you to work outside of office hours instead of just *allowing* it, they better be paying at least 50% extra for those hours.

@JustThat Deadlines are just as stupid as overwork.

They help neither developer nor client.

The point of Agile is to say: "Forget about deadlines. Just determine the end goal, prioritize tasks, and create a short term (2-week) aspirational schedule"

You negotiate an MVP with the client, which must be deliverable in 2 weeks (without requiring overtime). From that MVP, you start adding features together with the client, where each feature is small enough to fit in a "sprint".

Release date of the full product: Soon™

@JustThat

That shouldn't lead to overtime, it should lead to reprioritizing tasks by a PM during the sprint, and an adjusted velocity number so future sprints won't overflow.

And if your personal velocity stays extremely low, it should lead to coaching, or termination.

@JustThat

> PM who will now be working

Imagine that... a PM doing work.

The responsibility of a manager is to realistically estimate (not underestimate or overestimate!) time required to finish work towards the outside world.

They do this in collaboration with developers, but it is the responsibility of the manager.

The tool for making correct estimations is a Scrum process and tracking velocity. If the either developer or manager needs overtime, you over-promised compared to your velocity.

The manager should shield the team from interruptions and carry the burden of wrong estimations.

Of course, if devs are lazy, incompetent or malicious, it can be reason for termination. But that happens within the scope of personal evaluations. Within the scope of evaluating the project, ONLY the manager is to blame.

Without responsibility and ownership a manager is not a manager -- They're an assistant, and deserve entry-level compensation at best.

More correctly: You'd generally have a Scrum Master being the "inside manager", and a PM being the "outside manager" for the team, with the PM prioritizing/refining and the Scrum master doing planning/estimating.

But the principle is the same. A good manager makes sure no (structural) overtime is necessary.

Of course, where I work we also have incidents. Bugs slipping past CI, server outages. And we've also had a legal issue with an extremely hard deadline.

So there have been weeks where I worked 50 instead of 35-40h.

But my employer made sure all developers were paid 150% for that time, and made sure it wasn't a precedent for a structural culture change

-- Because overtime is fucking unhealthy, both for the employee AND the product quality.

@JustThat

It's not always perfect here. But work/life balance is something I'm near-militant about.

I think it's also more common for employers to violate private time in the US than it is in the EU, and maybe even varies per region.

But I think it's something all employers should care about.

@bittersweet Fuck yes someone agrees with me. Email is a scourge on the modern world.

You cant even follow a conversation beacuse some technically illiterate person decides to answer a different mail than the last one in the conversation chain