Fffffffuuuuuuck me! I got some days off for working longer hours on a priority project than healthy humans should. Now they want me to take part of one of those days for a Very Important video call. Now canceling and rescheduling plans for that day so I can be on duty that whole day because there’s no way my head is getting or staying in relaxation mode with this interruption.

Just say "no".

Alternative view: you're becoming regarded as senior, indispensible, someone who should be involved in decisions and meetings that matter. Embrace it, chilled in the knowledge that your value is recognised and they do at least try and play fair, while still finding it difficult to get by without you.

It's unlikely that anything you will get asked isn't easy for you to answer. Enjoy the days off and relax, pre the meeting, during it and afterwards.

@ultrageoff Or he's becoming regarded as someone who's competent and easy to boss around, the "go to" guy for overtime and taking calls no-one else can be arsed with.

I'm a lead / senior and if someone told me I had to be on a very important call, I'd tell them to either wait until I was back from holiday, or I'd delegate and ask for it to be recorded so I can catch up when I'm back. If someone tried to get me to do stupid levels of overtime then I'd be asking why we hadn't scaled teams up to cope with demand.

If you're at director level then sure, sometimes there's urgent calls you just need to take, regardless as to whether you're on holiday, and sometimes you need to burn the midnight oil to stop things sinking. But if that responsibility starts to fall on individual devs, something is wrong.

I was recently promoted to manager. They tried to scale up but it backfired because nobody wants to work anymore. All we can get are foreign labor pools working for pennies. I work hard, and I’m reliable, so I have set myself up as a target for this kind of stuff. Thing is, I’m 25 years deep into this. I’m way over my younger dev years of being the guy who brought a sleeping bag to the office to make sure stuff got done. Work life balance is very underrated in this industry.