Thankfully, the trend seems to be towards a much greater tolerance of vacation time and an increased willingness to actually take vacation. I credit the millennials for this new attitude, as their clout in the workplace gradually supplants the tedious boomer philosophy that time off of any kind is something to be avoided at all costs.
And the author makes a good point that giving workers time off can reveal things about your organization. They mention sussing out a morale-sinking middle-manager, but you could also view it is a general stress test for your team/company. It's good to know if one or two absences slow things to a halt, or if one individual is too indispensable to be gone for even a few days. After all, people get ill, injured or just quit from time to time. Better to have periodic absences be a natural part of your organization that you learn to handle, instead of crisis every time.
My understanding is that, at least historically, in finance there was some mandated time off based on the idea that if an individual were doing something sketchy, forcing them out of the office and offline for a couple of weeks might flush it out.
Yeah it still exists and is called "block leave." While on block leave, you also have to stay signed out of all email and computer systems or the leave becomes invalidated.
There's also "garden leave" for several months after leaving a job, where you're paid but can't work for a competitor/new job. Somehow it's supposed to prevent you sharing IP but I'm not sure it's effective at all, outside of being a long paid vacation.
I'd be hesitant to draw broader trends from the experience of devs and other exempt employees at large tech firms. Anecdotally, I tend to agree. When I took multi-week vacations earlier in my career, that seemed to be something of an outlier. I'm not sure that's as true today.
One factor may be that, for better or worse, people can stay at least somewhat connected while on vacation. It used to be that traveling meant that it took a real effort to reach you. And if you were on vacation, you were pretty much incommunicado for the period.
On the other hand, I'd be very hesitant to draw broader conclusions about the adult working population.
My company gives us unlimited time off - provided your team isn't going to be left with too few people then you just stick it in the calendar. It's incredibly liberating not having to plan your holidays to ensure you stay within X days, not having to request approval etc.
Curious, how much vacation do your peers at the company take each year? Rough guess is fine.
I ask because I've heard that "unlimited vacation" actually results in LESS vacation being taken because employees are afraid to be seen as the one abusing the system (even though taking 4+ week/year should be norm).
Somewhat related, I loathe the trend of grouping sick and vacation time into a single bucket (for those in the EU, in the US, if you're sick you have to burn leave, the concept of "you're sick, stay home" doesn't really exist).
It's easy to not take enough vacation at companies w/ unlimited vacation. Anecdotally, most of my peers at companies w/ unlimited vacation take less vacation than traditionally counted vacation days.
I work at a place w/ unlimited vacation and take about 4-4.5 weeks per year. A big reason I actually get to take this much vacation is because our founders & senior leadership also take vacation. I could easily see a world where our sr leadership didn't take any time off and there was implicit pressure to not use vacation time.
I get 4 weeks guaranteed and I make sure to take them. In Germany I had 6 weeks. If “unlimited” translates to 4 and you feel lucky that you actually get that much then “unlimited” feels like a scam to guilt trip people into less vacation and not having to pay out any when people leave. I guess you also don’t accrue any for a longer trip if you take off less one year.
That 4-4.5 weeks is less than the minimum amount of time I'm allowed to take off (not sure if it's strictly required but HR would start chasing me). Assuming weekends are taken off by default, 4.5 weeks is about 23 days, which is quite far down this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...
I suspect that's one of the driving factors at tech companies where many people hop between jobs every couple of years or so. The difference adds up for companies, especially if people don't take a lot of vacation anyway.
Personally, I've tended to stay at jobs for substantial periods of time although I've still gotten fairly nice vacation payouts on a couple of occasions. (Once and I think the statute of limitations is probably up on this one given the company doesn't exist--I got laid off in the dot-bomb era almost immediately after returning from a 3 week vacation I hadn't quite gotten around to entering yet.)
I have unlimited vacation and I clock in about 8-10 weeks a year. It isn't true vacation though, because I'm still on the hook to put out fires, and my teammates are accidental pyromaniacs.
I work remotely all the time, I tell my co-workers to leave me alone except in emergencies for 8-10. Sadly my coworkers are firestarters. I really need better coworkers...
I want to chime in because I've never actually witnessed horror stories about "unlimited vacation" that people talk about. I'm now at my 2nd job with "unlimited vacation". The general consensus, based on discussion with my peers, is that they take 4 - 5 weeks. This matches my own experience.
EDIT: Also to add, I have seen folks take more than that. Often these are senior people traveling to home countries that involve very long flights. They might take 6 - 8 a year.
I heard a funny story from a senior guy at one of the big Bay Area tech companies (that has "unlimited" vacation) a little while back. They apparently hired a new PR person who quit after about six months because she couldn't deal with the fact that the CEO took vacations and he really took vacations in the "I'm on vacation. Handle whatever it is without me." sort of sense. It was just so alien that it completely stressed her out.
was that the thing that really stressed her out? or was every decision second-guessed once he got back? "handle things while I'm away" isn't as easy as it sounds if you're not supported in the decisions you make.
No idea. I have no personal knowledge of the situation. However I have no trouble believing (based on personal experience) that a lot of people aren't comfortable making "executive decisions" on their own.
Yes, sometimes it's because they rightly fear potential consequences. But other times, they just don't want the responsibility.
Rough guess would be around the 6 week mark. It may not be on traditional holidays per se, but I took a day off to help my parents fit CCTV last week - those individual days start to add up too. The company will tell you to take some time off if you're not taking enough.
> in the US, if you're sick you have to burn leave, the concept of "you're sick, stay home" doesn't really exist
As always this depends where you work. There's reasons for removing "sick days", that aren't in the employees interest. I take 2-5 per year. For some people, if they have 10, they'd use 10. Kinda like how "unlimited vacation", can mean less vacation, as people don't want to be that guy, or hurt their career.
I have this privilege also, but I find that it's kind of a double edged sword. I can take "vacations" whenever I want, but I can't completely escape work when I do. I've had teammates do things like request a push to prod over vacation, while not mentioning that the prod database had also undergone a pretty large schema change (with no documentation!), then basically beg me to fix it because performance reviews were coming up in a few days.
Then that is an issue with the company culture, processes and staffing. Holiday is holiday - I've never worked anywhere which would expect me to remain contactable whilst on holiday.
Yep. I will sometimes, when on vacation, help out on something if there's an issue I can help with quickly. I figure it balances the time when I'm theoretically working but am mostly doing other stuff.
But if I'm formally on vacation, there should be no expectation that I will pickup the phone or answer an email.
It's admittedly less common than it used to be but sometimes you're vacationing somewhere that just doesn't have connectivity. Even leaving aside being off in the Himalayas or wherever, even a lot of areas in the western US like Death Valley have pretty limited coverage. And, if I'm backpacking, even if I have a cell signal there's not much I can do if it's not something I can fix with a few words based on what's in my brain.
To the broader point though. I do find being mostly connected is largely a plus. It's easier to take time off when I know that I can do a bit of flexible work and can be reached when needed rather than being tethered to a network just in case. I have worked both ways over my career and I much prefer today.
When I am on vacation my work phone is off and so I have no way to be contacted or to read work emails. My team know they have to manage things by themselves and when they are on vacation I know I can't contact them.
For me it is not a vacation if I must be reacheble all the time.
How about if you're international? If there's a serious problem at work (and the bus number is one) I can't fix it because (a) it isn't legal to work while on leave (b) I'm overseas and it isn't legal to work on my visa.
So if something goes won't, they're stuffed. at least that's they're fault.
At least for Americans, (a) is presumably very uncommon and (b) is never really a problem in my experience. Even if you're on a tourist visa, answering a work email or phone call isn't an issue. (Attending a conference or setting up in a co-work space for a few days may be, depending on the country, of course.)
Interesting - similar ‘antifragility’ concept as chaos testing. Better to discover the weaknesses and dependencies of your system by inducing a failure yourself than to learn about it when it’s imposed on you by chance.
Just shutting down for a month like many companies in parts of Europe is great. Means you don’t even have “time off work”, it means work doesn’t exist because no one else works either. You return after (at least) a month to an empty inbox.
This practice is causing huge issues in Italy. The entire country historically takes off for the week around August 15th. However, this mass holiday causes vacation prices to soar, which means many blue collar workers can no longer afford to go away, and stay at home during their forced vacation.
The government is trying to convince companies to stagger their closures. Not closing would be a good start.
The population might have grown faster than the amount of holiday accomodation supply did, coupled, I would guess, with there being much more demand from international visitors just generally.
Perhaps there is also higher income inequality between workers? I’m not sure about Italy specifically, but generally there has always been inequality, but it has usually between the upper class that didn’t have to work and the lower class that did. I would guess the upper class would holiday whenever they wanted? I would assume that now there’s a large group of middle class workers given time off at the same time, and they would be a lot more cashed up and in direct competition for accomodation and travel fares with the lower class workers.
So plenty of reasons that could be the case. I imagine the huge growth in international tourism meaning huge numbers of visitors would be the biggest contributor.
The cost of holidays in Italy has gone up a lot in comparison to real wages in the last decades (also because the expectations for a holiday are on average much higher now).
edit: Eurostat is great! Hotel occupancy is also up, indicating that prices should also have gone up. This is even in an environment with the rise of AirBnBs
In Australia/New Zealand if you are in the tech industry most employers will have a brown-out/embargo over the Christmas and New Year period. About 80% of staff will be off for those two weeks (6 days leave equals three weekends and two M-F weeks away).
What happens is the Telcos declare a brown-out/embargo [1] (in 2018 it was from 20 Dec to 7 January). The companies the next level up will follow (because they won't be able to do some network changes) and then the next layer up and so on.
The vast majority of other people will take breaks around the same time. Depends on the industry and what people are doing of course. But with many workers away the buses will run on weekend timetables and many CBD cafes will close.
This is called forced leave (shutdown period) and it's certainly not restricted to tech. The whole country seems to shutdown for two weeks, which I like, but I hate the concept of forced leave. Not everyone wants to take off during Christmas/New Years and the practice is prejudicial to those who do not celebrate Christmas and don't care about taking time off during this period of time. Mainly, the flights become super expensive so I'd rather save my leave.
My company operates a 24x7 bit of essential internet infrastructure, so someone has to be at the keyboard at all times. But nonetheless, we shut down all non essential functions over the Xmas holidays so that everyone can have a break. The industry we serve seems to go to sleep at that time too, so it all works out.
I don’t know what I’d do if it was impossible to hit pause for a couple of weeks like this every year.
That's usually done in manufacturing when I worked in that - you can shut down whole production lines for big maintenance, plan delivery (demand is seasonal for eg.) and optimize workers required (eg you are running 3 shifts 24 hours you need 3 crews - having flexible vacation and working all year means you need more backup guys than if you just shut down for x days and send everyone off).
This sucks for workers because you don't have flexibility on when you want to use your vacation.
Complete change freeze so you only need a minimum number of developers and ops people around. Although it is sometimes a good time of do that big CICD pipeline rebuild.
The lawyers, HR, finance and office support are down to minimal. Same with the cleaners (a good time to repaint the office though), internal IT, cafe and other support staff.
Sales will be down to minimal since all the customers will be on holiday. Customer support might be at normal or reduced level depending on industry.
LinkedIn shuts down for 2 weeks a year. These are the best vacation weeks. Like others say, there is no email waiting for you. No meetings or decisions that you regret not being involved in, etc.
The net amount to the public may be small. The scale offered relative to the size of the companies, and within high-value niches (enterprise customers, business partners, vendors/suppliers) may be significant.
Coordinated downtime can still be an advantage. It's actually a guiding principle in CPU scheduling systems as well -- so many cycles dedicated to processing vs. overhead.
Back when "Silicon Valley" meant hardware and production lines, the practice was to shut down entirely for at least a weak between Christmas and New Years, in cases two, as 1) operating the line with short staffing increased errors and costs and 2) stopping and restarting the line incurred large losses as well of material in start-up and shut-down phases.
Better to entirely curtail ops for a couple of weeks.
That tradition had largely continued to manifest even with the offshoring of wafer, disk, and chip production, through the 1990s and aughts, though it's been in a slow fade for a long time.
Service industries operate on a different clock, of course, but a scheduled downage can still be communicated.
Then there's Burning Man, when SF-SJ palpably empties out. New Years in August.
Precisely this. In Sweden there is the notion of industrisemester which originated from when manufacturing dominated the economy. Basically, all of Sweden (minus social services) shuts down from midsummer to beginning of August. Any “real” work done during this period is an anomaly/bonus Depending on your disposition.
Since the whole country does this, customers are just fine with it.
Something I’ve always wondered about corporate America: on Apple rumour sites and so on it’s often breathlessly reported that all staff leave has been cancelled for whatever dates. What happens if eg you’d promised to take your kids to Disneyland and had everything booked? Do you just have to lose the booking deposit and let down your kids? Why do people put up with that?
It's a totally rational, bigger-picture thought process:
1. Employer will not tolerate "absenteeism" and will retaliate with consequences up to termination.
2. Spouse will not accept lower standard of life via reduced wages. Since earning power ("a good provider") is a major reason why many spouses chose to marry their geeky/techie partner... any threat to stable employment is a threat to the stability of my family.
3. Housing is almost entirely unaffordable in Bay Area. Miss three payments and car is reposessed. Miss one credit card payment and score drops 60 points, interest rate goes up to 29.99%.
It becomes a simple expected value calculation after that. Would you prefer the 100% chance of losing Disneyland deposit/letting down your kids.... or the n% chance of becoming a homeless, carless, divorcee with a damaged credit score for the next 7 years?
To be clear: I'm not pro-corporation/anti-child... but there are reasons why working parents make the decisions they make.
"Since earning power ("a good provider") is a major reason why many spouses chose to marry their geeky/techie partner" [citation needed]
That seems like quite a bold statement. Is there any evidence that marriages involving a tech partner are more likely to be primarily based on earning power than other marriages?
Overall, marriages involving higher-earning professions and higher education are much less likely to end in divorce compared to marriages between less-educated partners, suggesting that "lost my tech job and got divorced" is not a major contributor to divorce rates overall. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_in_the_United_States#R...)
Personally I've never encountered such a thing though I'm sure it happens. Under most circumstances, I expect my reaction would be "Sorry but I booked a trip." I would be surprised to see a company reimburse significant personal expenses if that happened.
Another thing that helps is that having a person out helps you find places where only one person can do something. There shouldn't be any processes that hinge on a single point of (human) failure, but it's easy for them to sneak in, so it's good to check every now and again: What would happen if this person were hit by a bus?
Provided you're in an environment where information from failures can be rapidly fed into improvements, and failures are not terminal: fail early, fail often, fail small.
And the author makes a good point that giving workers time off can reveal things about your organization. They mention sussing out a morale-sinking middle-manager, but you could also view it is a general stress test for your team/company. It's good to know if one or two absences slow things to a halt, or if one individual is too indispensable to be gone for even a few days. After all, people get ill, injured or just quit from time to time. Better to have periodic absences be a natural part of your organization that you learn to handle, instead of crisis every time.