I can tell you something: IBM's Argentina managers do not phone their employees at dinner time to speak about ongoing projects. Neither do Sun Microsystems' or Oracle's for that matter -unless it is to discuss some strategy for an urgent meeting the next day where a projectś future might be at stake-. If an employee work day ends at 6:00pm or 8:00pm he's free to do whatever he wants with his time until the next day, go to the gym, have a drink, visit the gf or whatnot.
Sending an SMS to remind an employee of something is one thing, bugging them over the phone was news to these project leaders, so thatś why they quit, and they were hired by other software factories where this kind of thing does not happen.
> Most
> developers I know in India work through the night for their American
> customers.
I wasn't speaking about time zones or work hours. I was speaking of bugging employees at their home, after work hours.
> Almost every company I've worked with in the US has been like this. Even
> Dilbert knows this:
> http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-10-20/
Do Wal-Mart managers phone their employees after they arrive home while they are having dinner to check whether they re-arranged the groceries aisle?
> And lest we think this only applies to today's capitalism or the software
> industry, I can recall many instances in the 70s and 80s of industrial shop
> grievances about managers calling workers at night, workers falling asleep
> at work during 16-hour days, etc., etc.
Software programmers down here work during work hours. Surely some work overtime and surely others keep thinking about solutions to work problems during dinner, but sure as heck it isn't a common practice to phone employees at home to continue work discussions as if they were still on company time.
FC