Testing people outages is a good thing for any team or organization. I always look at multi-week holidays as an opportunity to identify knowledge / skills / activities that I (or another person) provide(s) cover for.
None of us will be around forever. Some of our software might be...
Not the same, a vacation is a vacation, most people don't think of it as people outages. Most work will just be queued up until the person comes back or worse the person will be contacted during vacation to answer questions, provide information or do some work. Being hyper aware of this means no contact for the individual while on vacation and watching that work is not being queued up for them. They should not have to catch up to emails and catch up to slack conversations when they get back. A return from vacation should be truly refreshing not overwhelming.
Man, I hope that position pay really well for that kind of commitment. If anyone tries to reach me while I'm on vacation I will not even realize it, and I won't be bothering to "catch up" when I return.
Then you must not have a very important job. The hypothetical person being discussed here is someone who multiple people depend on. Their work is critical to other processes and blocks other work from happening. They own a lot of institutional knowledge that may not be shared evenly among other employees.
That's the point of the exercise: to identify mission critical people and make them not critical to the entire business. If your business hinges on one person who knows everything and works on everything, you're fucked if they disappear and you haven't ensured at least some redundancy.
The way the other person phrased it made it seem like that kind of fake vacations are the norm, which is what I was replying to.
>Most work [during someone's vacation] will just be queued up until the person comes back or worse the person will be contacted during vacation to answer questions, provide information or do some work.
Nothing in that sentence implies that the person is referring exclusively to an especially important position.
You must be lucky, but most people I know and from my own experience end up replying to email, slack or phone calls while on vacation and work piles up for them relative to how long they have been away.
Like I said, I hope you're compensated accordingly. Off time is off time, and being on call has a price attached to it. If you're being treated like you're on call but without the corresponding pay rise, that's called wage theft.
Well yeah, that's why a vacation is a good test, "important job" or not. If the person needs to respond or even check in during vacation, the team needs to fix their process.
My favorite part of working in banking. Minimum week no contact per year. All these other industries would call me about (trivial) things when I was "off". Regulations forced people to respect (some) time off
I've never been a manager, but my favorite managers always lead by example - they would take arbitrary time off, and would be completely unreachable during that time.
As a senior eng, I try to do the same when I have time off - work notifications are muted, and my away message is typically set to "I'm away for X days. If you to reach me, no, you don't."
Wow. Good insight! I have never viewed vacation this way. I always thought the only reason vacation exists is because companies have to give vacation due to laws and well being of their employee. So when I get some days off, I always feel a bit guilty because the company is losing out something.
You feel guilty that the law doesn’t allow you to give your entire time to a corporation? I can ease your conscience, the law is simply an equilibrium where capitals long term exploitation of labor and the risk of violent revolution are carefully balanced.
> So when I get some days off, I always feel a bit guilty because the company is losing out something.
Do you feel guilty when they pay you too? Paid vacation is a form of compensation.
Every day of your ~30 days of vacation which you do not use, they likely have to pay you out as a full day's worth of wages anyways.
Most will prefer you take a month or two each year off, recuperate, and come back refreshed and productive, rather than having to deal with the bookkeeping and tax hassle of paying you extra.
It's nice to see this happen, Being a good maintainer requires a particular mindset.
I do not have this mindset.
I am a maintainer.
I have been absent from one of my projects for 9 months. People actually use this thing. That eats me up inside. That anxiety is partially why it's difficult to start up again.
I am the kind of person who makes things, unfortunately when you make things you become the maintainer by default. It's not easy to hand over maintainership either though, you want to ensure the project is in good hands. One of my old projects has been absorbed into Linux Mint and that's quite gratifying to see that a project I made maybe a decade ago get a Catalan translation in just the last few months.
I do maintenance on a library and while often I feel bad about not looking at it for months at a time, I’ll try to counterbalance it by just sitting down one evening , swallowing my pride, and just chew through some of the issues.
In the end, it’s always a bit satisfying to do. Still not a great situation but I’m trying at least.
In the US, a decent company will give you three weeks total vacation. To get more than that can require decades of service (eg four weeks after 10 years with the company).
To “squander” two thirds of the allotment in one go is rare.
How many holidays do you get in addition to that? Is that in any industry, such as fast food service or grocery store clerks, or just professional jobs, or only your own industry? I know time off isn't the best in the US, but a good comparison requires a bit more info.
Generalizing a bit but there is less of a divide between “fast food service and grocery store clerks” and professionals in Western Europe compared to some other places. Workers are workers and they have certain rights as that.
Sweden here also. Quite common with 25 days and paid overtime or 30 days with unpaid overtime.
And then you have parental days which are 480 in total per child which can be used both before they start preschool and for longer vacations when they are older. In Sweden it’s also quite common that both parents split it 50-50.
So 4-5 weeks of time off in the summer is not uncommon at all for parents and totally accepted by companies.
If you work Monday to Saturday. The law requires 20 days for people that work Monday to Friday.
The effect is the same though: In both cases you get 4 weeks off.
I tried to negotiate 4 weeks when I joined my current company, but the hiring process went dead. My inside contact told me that as far as he could tell, they simply did not have a mechanism to handle someone asking for more than 3 weeks.
Was at a boring company for a long time, because it paid well enough and I had 6 weeks PTO that rolled over and even paid out when maxed. I turned down a lot of job offers because I valued that.
As you can imagine with the enshittification of literally everything in my lifetime, that moved to use it or lose it eventually. Then two years later, getting rid of it for 'unlimited PTO, how cool is that guys?'
Needless to say, that was the end of my run there.
Here in the Netherlands most people take 3 weeks in the summer. Then a week in fall, one around Christmas and then perhaps you just buy some extra days (meaning it’s unpaid time off) for a skiing trip in February.
And then we have Easter, Pentecost, ascension day, Christmas, New Year’s Day. All public days off.
Personally for a long time my contract was 36 hours, get you 1 more day off every 2 weeks.
That American system sounds so depressing, but I guess you get used to anything.
I didn’t expect the most discussed part on this submission would be about people who don’t take vacation when this one[1] is (whatever absence is about).
Testing people outages is a good thing for any team or organization. I always look at multi-week holidays as an opportunity to identify knowledge / skills / activities that I (or another person) provide(s) cover for.
None of us will be around forever. Some of our software might be...
Alternative organization discovers basic organizational concept: vacations.
Not the same, a vacation is a vacation, most people don't think of it as people outages. Most work will just be queued up until the person comes back or worse the person will be contacted during vacation to answer questions, provide information or do some work. Being hyper aware of this means no contact for the individual while on vacation and watching that work is not being queued up for them. They should not have to catch up to emails and catch up to slack conversations when they get back. A return from vacation should be truly refreshing not overwhelming.
Man, I hope that position pay really well for that kind of commitment. If anyone tries to reach me while I'm on vacation I will not even realize it, and I won't be bothering to "catch up" when I return.
Then you must not have a very important job. The hypothetical person being discussed here is someone who multiple people depend on. Their work is critical to other processes and blocks other work from happening. They own a lot of institutional knowledge that may not be shared evenly among other employees.
That's the point of the exercise: to identify mission critical people and make them not critical to the entire business. If your business hinges on one person who knows everything and works on everything, you're fucked if they disappear and you haven't ensured at least some redundancy.
The way the other person phrased it made it seem like that kind of fake vacations are the norm, which is what I was replying to.
>Most work [during someone's vacation] will just be queued up until the person comes back or worse the person will be contacted during vacation to answer questions, provide information or do some work.
Nothing in that sentence implies that the person is referring exclusively to an especially important position.
You must be lucky, but most people I know and from my own experience end up replying to email, slack or phone calls while on vacation and work piles up for them relative to how long they have been away.
Like I said, I hope you're compensated accordingly. Off time is off time, and being on call has a price attached to it. If you're being treated like you're on call but without the corresponding pay rise, that's called wage theft.
Well yeah, that's why a vacation is a good test, "important job" or not. If the person needs to respond or even check in during vacation, the team needs to fix their process.
This and insider threat mitigation is exactly why audit standards in regulated industries include mandatory vacations.
My favorite part of working in banking. Minimum week no contact per year. All these other industries would call me about (trivial) things when I was "off". Regulations forced people to respect (some) time off
I've never been a manager, but my favorite managers always lead by example - they would take arbitrary time off, and would be completely unreachable during that time.
As a senior eng, I try to do the same when I have time off - work notifications are muted, and my away message is typically set to "I'm away for X days. If you to reach me, no, you don't."
A week is too short. The bank I worked at had mandatory 3 weeks, which did not count against your PTO.
1 week, people can mostly ignore your job function and limp by
2 weeks, people can do ~50% of your job and limp by
3 weeks, you do need someone to complete all/most of your job functions.
Wow. Good insight! I have never viewed vacation this way. I always thought the only reason vacation exists is because companies have to give vacation due to laws and well being of their employee. So when I get some days off, I always feel a bit guilty because the company is losing out something.
You feel guilty that the law doesn’t allow you to give your entire time to a corporation? I can ease your conscience, the law is simply an equilibrium where capitals long term exploitation of labor and the risk of violent revolution are carefully balanced.
> So when I get some days off, I always feel a bit guilty because the company is losing out something.
Do you feel guilty when they pay you too? Paid vacation is a form of compensation.
Every day of your ~30 days of vacation which you do not use, they likely have to pay you out as a full day's worth of wages anyways.
Most will prefer you take a month or two each year off, recuperate, and come back refreshed and productive, rather than having to deal with the bookkeeping and tax hassle of paying you extra.
I hope you’re being sarcastic.
It's nice to see this happen, Being a good maintainer requires a particular mindset.
I do not have this mindset.
I am a maintainer.
I have been absent from one of my projects for 9 months. People actually use this thing. That eats me up inside. That anxiety is partially why it's difficult to start up again.
I am the kind of person who makes things, unfortunately when you make things you become the maintainer by default. It's not easy to hand over maintainership either though, you want to ensure the project is in good hands. One of my old projects has been absorbed into Linux Mint and that's quite gratifying to see that a project I made maybe a decade ago get a Catalan translation in just the last few months.
I do maintenance on a library and while often I feel bad about not looking at it for months at a time, I’ll try to counterbalance it by just sitting down one evening , swallowing my pride, and just chew through some of the issues.
In the end, it’s always a bit satisfying to do. Still not a great situation but I’m trying at least.
This is their dayjob.
Top notch communication skills on display.
Not familiar with Kernel maintainers but do some never take full 2-week long holidays??
In the US, a decent company will give you three weeks total vacation. To get more than that can require decades of service (eg four weeks after 10 years with the company).
To “squander” two thirds of the allotment in one go is rare.
Crazy how this is normal, in Germany you won't even find anybody to work for you if you offered less than 30 days of vacation
How many holidays do you get in addition to that? Is that in any industry, such as fast food service or grocery store clerks, or just professional jobs, or only your own industry? I know time off isn't the best in the US, but a good comparison requires a bit more info.
When people generalize across Jobs they often really do mean All Jobs.
https://www.statista.com/chart/15005/statutory-minimum-paid-...
Generalizing a bit but there is less of a divide between “fast food service and grocery store clerks” and professionals in Western Europe compared to some other places. Workers are workers and they have certain rights as that.
I live in Sweden where we have minimum 25 paid vacation days (I have 28) and 9 paid holidays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...
Sweden here also. Quite common with 25 days and paid overtime or 30 days with unpaid overtime.
And then you have parental days which are 480 in total per child which can be used both before they start preschool and for longer vacations when they are older. In Sweden it’s also quite common that both parents split it 50-50.
So 4-5 weeks of time off in the summer is not uncommon at all for parents and totally accepted by companies.
Brazilian here. We get a minimum of 30 days/year by law, across every industry, plus a handful of holidays.
10-12 [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_holidays_in_Germany
Better: in Germany you have the legal right to have a minimum of 24 days of vacation in the year (§3 Bundesurlaubsgesetz).
If you work Monday to Saturday. The law requires 20 days for people that work Monday to Friday. The effect is the same though: In both cases you get 4 weeks off.
Offer 300k Euros for 6 year experience and see if that still holds.
I tried to negotiate 4 weeks when I joined my current company, but the hiring process went dead. My inside contact told me that as far as he could tell, they simply did not have a mechanism to handle someone asking for more than 3 weeks.
I usually do the same. It seems to blow many minds.
Was at a boring company for a long time, because it paid well enough and I had 6 weeks PTO that rolled over and even paid out when maxed. I turned down a lot of job offers because I valued that.
As you can imagine with the enshittification of literally everything in my lifetime, that moved to use it or lose it eventually. Then two years later, getting rid of it for 'unlimited PTO, how cool is that guys?'
Needless to say, that was the end of my run there.
If in US, that'd be once in a lifetime - e.g. for your honey (half) moon.
Here in the Netherlands most people take 3 weeks in the summer. Then a week in fall, one around Christmas and then perhaps you just buy some extra days (meaning it’s unpaid time off) for a skiing trip in February.
And then we have Easter, Pentecost, ascension day, Christmas, New Year’s Day. All public days off.
Personally for a long time my contract was 36 hours, get you 1 more day off every 2 weeks.
That American system sounds so depressing, but I guess you get used to anything.
I didn’t expect the most discussed part on this submission would be about people who don’t take vacation when this one[1] is (whatever absence is about).
[1] The Git maintainer. Not a kernel maintainer.