Some individuals might, but on a broad basis, this is unrealistic and contrary to ingrained human behavior developed over millennia of societal development.
When there is a power differential between people, the person with more power (the boss) has to be aware of unspoken subtext and has to be aware that even explicit disclaimers might not be enough to solve the problem.
In other words, “you can wait until the morning” is not necessarily a reliable way to communicate. It might just be better not to send the message until morning.
In addition you have the increasingly common situation of employers issuing smartphones to employees, on which work e-mail is accessible.
I disagree. We’re not talking about random strangers, but people who work together over an extended period of time. If it’s not SOP to set expectation like this on a team, then the team doesn’t know what it’s doing.
You can disagree all you want. But it’s a basic fact of human relationships that there is always subtext, and unless two people are particularly close and are equal in status, you can’t get around it, no matter how rational and complete you think your communication is. That’s simply how the human brain is wired. And you can always be mistaken about how good of an understanding you have with the people around you, especially in a work situation. The basic fact is that you are taking a risk of creating a misunderstanding. You might be lucky and escape such a situation, but t’s prudent not to count on it.
If my boss and I have been chewing over a tough problem for the past couple of days, and he sends me a message to my personal email address the moment he experiences his eureka moment, it wouldn’t matter to me if it was at 10:00 AM or 10:00 PM. It just wouldn’t bother me. In fact, I’d feel honored. Because bright ideas are just too wonderful to not share with someone sometimes. Even if it’s not an emergency, sometimes the brain will churn out an idea that requires almost instant feedback or else it’s forgotten.
However, it would piss me off if he did this too often because it would make me feel like my boss expected me to think about work during non-work hours. Which would be a breach of my personal boundaries.
So I think agree with the both of you, Ascenray and John Mace.
Boss to subordinate: If I send you an e-mail after hours, I’ll be sure to let you know if it needs immediate attention or not.
Subordinate to boss: Sometimes I get e-mails from you after hours, and I’m never quite sure if you need an immediate response or not. Can we make sure we’er on the same page on that?
If your boss is taking up too much of your personal time, and you’re too timid to confront him, then you need to be looking for another job.
I second this. As your superior, he probably felt he should be the one working longer hours, putting in more effort, etc, etc. Makes no sense - and makes even less sense to shout at you for it - but that’s humanity for you.
Of course, if you were to somehow find this guy, he’d probably have next to no recollection of the incident. After more than a decade, why are you worrying about this now?
I once had a professor chastise me for sending her an email at 2 in the morning. I was momentarily confused, rolled my eyes and just set my outlook to not send emails to her address until 8am.
One of the advantages of email is you can send anyone anything at any time and not feel like you are bothering them or waking them up. It’s absurd and anachronistic to complain about an email that was sent at night. If you don’t like it, don’t check your email at night.
Now text messages, phone calls, and to some extent, faxes, can be disturbing if sent at odd hours. No so for emails. I can ignore all my incoming emails perfectly when my computer is off. They can fucking wait for me; if they can’t, why did they send it by email?
I can’t speak for the mid 90’s, but my last manager would regularly send us emails between as late as 2am. It would never occur to me that she expected a reply at that time, or any action on my part until the next business day.
But we’re not talking about NOW. We’re talking about an episode that happened back THEN. At the time, they did not break any etiquette rules. Nowadays, things might be different. (Especially considering a text would probably be more likely than an e-mail)
All that means is that the situation was similar to the situation now but perhaps slightly less acute.
Seriously, what do you think you’re arguing about?
WE are talking about a lot of things. No thread is limited to the exact parameters of an OP and the question posed by the OP leads right into the issue of what we think about the issue today, because we are all living in today.
She’s arguing the subject of the thread. Yes, threads do drift, but she specifically asked you about the subject of the thread, and you responded to her question. And her argument is that your response is wrong.
Even if you think it is a faux pas today–despite everyone else in the thread telling you it isn’t–that doesn’t inherently mean it was back then. The possible reasons it could be a problem today didn’t exist back then. You didn’t have email updates that could wake you up or otherwise inconvenience.
You responded to this post after midnight by the server time. Were you rude for daring to respond? I’m responding even later. Is that somehow rude?
It makes as much sense as saying it’s rude to write an old-fashioned letter at night. Even today, no one expects an email to get a response immediately. There is no implication that you should be awake and working on the problem.
If there were, you wouldn’t be able to find emails in your inbox that were sent at night. There is no such etiquette about when an email is sent.
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