The hidden dangers of working in IT
debugreality.blogspot.com
debugreality.blogspot.com
my advice: recognize the marginal utility of money and plan accordingly. recognize your frivolous "needs" for what they are. I realize this is a lot harder for people with, say, a family living in san francisco with very high living expenses and you are the primary bread winner. my advice for that is....don't be the primary breadwinner with a family in a high cost of living area? sorry but you made choices without realizing what you were getting yourself into.
One place I worked even let a guy save his allowance and work 4 days weeks from September to December. Another from time to time asked people to cancel their leave at very short notice because of the projects that were on.
Ever heard of duvet days? my mate's boss let him that day off by sending a text from his bed in the morning if he didn't fancy it that day.
Due to circumstances I hadn't taken a lot of days off the last two years which meant I had quite a few vacation days saved up so I could take about four-and-a-half weeks off last December and January to help my girlfriend who was about to give birth to our second child.
There's usually a maximum to the amount of days one can save up over the years and a colleague of mine had to take a couple of weeks off last year otherwise he would lose the days.
You don't have to take it consecutively, but many people often do take it in chunks. The most common pattern is to take 1 or 2 weeks off at a time. You could also take it one day at a time, say take a few Mondays off. However, taking every Monday off is generally frowned upon.
You can take it whenever you want, so long as you announce it early enough in advance and there is nothing planned at that time that requires you to be there (e.g. "the product is being launched that week").
Normally, the process is that you check your calendar and check with your boss. Once the vacation is approved, you book your flights, etc. Typically, it is extremely unlikely for someone to cancel your vacation after you've booked it. The general consensus is that once the vacation is approved, the manager just has to accept that it will happen.
Basically, it's common sense - don't disrupt the company's work with your vacation, be sensible, announce it early enough in advance.
So no their isn't a "pile" of bankable sick days. Just know if you are sick for too long you go on disability which is a separate matter I'm not familiar with.
Take more than 5 days off and you're relying on good will and have to attend meetings to explain it, in theory you might get dumped to statutory pay.
In terms of family emergencies you either take them as annual leave or you rely on goodwill. Normally I've been able to get half days for funerals but that's based on the IT world where they know I'm making up time for them regularly.
I'd love to spend a few years in UK/Ireland, but I might be too spoiled (from Scandinavia). :-)
I always assumed they are better places to visit than to really live in.
You can claim statutory for 28 weeks, but your contract might allow more than this. After the 28 weeks, you switch entirely to the benefits system until you are fit enough to work again, but your employer doesn't have to take you on again after this.
My father was long-term sick, and was paid at 100% pay for 6 months, then 50% pay for a further 6 months, which was part of his contract. His employer extended the 50% pay to a total of a year out of goodwill.
Obviously these thing vary depending on age etc but my girlfriend has a policy like this and one for unemployment any they aren't preclusively expensive.
Then there's the question of will you get paid or not - under a certain amount of days you won't be paid (I think it's 3). After that other mechanisms kick in.
Family emergency is usually in the holidays pile. Some companies allow 1 day off per year if someone dies.
You can also (based on company agreement) take a day off and just decide not to get paid.
I don't believe that any of these leave dates are paid for by the government - but they are specifies as conditions of employment through Government legislation. It basically becomes a cost of hiring a permanent employee (vs a contractor). An employee will be absent approx 6-7 weeks of the year - 4 weeks annual leave, 1 week sick, 2 weeks public holidays (Christmas, Easter, Melbourne Cup)
Yes - In Melbourne, we have a mandated Public Holiday for a horse race.
On the other hand, if someone's got a bad case of cold but still can work, they will come to work.
If you're unable to continue doing your normal work due to some injury, you employer is expected to try to find other tasks for you that you can do despite your injury. If they cannot, you're expected to find a new job that you can perform. During this time you get 80% from the state.
There are exceptions and lots and lots of rules about all of this, but the general principles should be fairly correct.
How does it work in practice?
In general it seems to work fairly well, but as with any system there are both people who abuse it /fraud)and people who get abused by it (get defined out of the system because they're "not sick enough" - they're treated as unemployed instead).
There was a study recently with the conclusion that there is 5-10% over spending in the system (e.g. people get more than they were supposed to if everyone filled in every form correctly), including both mistakes and fraud. In my opinion that's pretty good.
Edit: link to governmental info, in English: http://www.forsakringskassan.se/nav/f86d9f2974b05d211aaa2c19...
You get 3 days a year of family responsibility leave, e.g. death of a close family member, having to take care of a sick child, etc.
You get 6 weeks (which translates to 30 working days if you work 5 days a week) of sick leave for every 36 month cycle.
I've actually been (gently) scolded for using a vacation day instead of a sick day to take care of my wife when she was ill.
You don't have to take it at a specific time of the year. It can make it easier if everyone does it at the same time. Our office closes for a week in August and December. Since not enough people are here to run things you take them whether you want to or not (or end up running the switchboard by yourself).
How this is arranged depends on the company (e.g. large corporations tend towards lots of paperwork) but they all demand a reasonable amount of notice (i.e. more notice for longer vacation periods) as well as some awareness of deadlines and upcoming work.
Different companies do have different policies though. For example, that employees use their vacation time within a certain period or lose it. And yes, some have certain times that are set vacations. My company shuts down between Christmas and New Year, and the non-public holidays count as annual leave.
In the last six months I have: taken Monday/Friday leave to visit family for an extra long weekend, a two week break to do a course (latin :), and a morning in the middle of the week (with no notice) to wait for a delivery.
For contrast: a "casual" job has no paid leave. I believe it is also much easier legally for employers to fire casual employees.
> Do you have to take vacation time consecutively?
No in general, although some companies will try to push out every one 3 weeks in a row in the summer, when activity goes down a bit.
> Do you have to take it at a particular time of the year?
For the 5 mandatory weeks of holidays, no, unless specific situations. What happens in reality is quite often you have to do trade-offs with other people going in vacation, to ensure the service can still run properly.
> Is it subject to some sort of approval process?
Typical process: your direct boss signs off your holidays request and ensure the team is not going off at the same time, then you go to HR for the final approval.
You can save a number of vacation days from year to the next, but there's a limit to how many. Unused days are exchanged for extra pay.
If you're employed on a per-hour basis you don't get paid during your vacation (but you're still allowed five weeks), but you get an extra 12.5% pay per hour to compensate this (which over a year of full-time work should be more or less the same as having paid vacation).
larger employers may have some more formal agreement. my partner, for example, can have all of february, or 3 weeks of her choosing throughout the year (this is at u chile). it's subject to approval, although being academics that is somewhat informal.
i'm not sure where you're from or if i am taking you too seriously, but i currently have a contract with a company in the usa and the deal there is a certain number of days every 6 months (can't remember how many, but it's a lot for a us company - maybe two or three weeks?). a small number of those can be taken without approval.
If your employer keeps rejecting your requests for taking leave for a certain period (not going into the details, let's pretend it's a simple rule of 6 months), you are entitled to take the leave without their permission.
The vacation time doesn't have to be taken consecutively - 3 weeks is just a general way of saying 15 working days. If your normal working week is 6 days, you'd have 18 working days of annual leave.
Now's your turn to treat us like space aliens. How does it work in Japan?
The contract also allows for sick days, bereavement days (1 day for a child/sibling/spouse, 2 days for a parent -- I'm just reporting), and days off for weddings and childbirth. These are, ahem, not utilized to their fullest extent. In practice, the only sick leave I have ever seen taken at my company involved a) a nervous breakdown and b) chemotherapy for metastatizing bone cancer. (He got better... and came back to work!) Our best engineer came in the day after his mother died (although my boss tried to send him home).
Unused leave of the first kind accumulates, which results in older employees in my company having literally months of it sitting around. They will likely never use it, and they'll lose it when they separate from the company. Japanese law specifically forbids you from paying people for unused leave because the government thought companies would force people to work until they dropped, then take the payout.
We're very slowly getting better about this. There is at least one twenty-something male at my company other than me who actually takes all his vacation days every year. (He also left at 5:30 for much of my first year at the company... and stopped after he was informed that, quote, he was less Japanese than Patrick is.)
In bigger multinationals like Sharp, it's a bit different. Some employees sued them over this a few years back, so now employees are forced to take their annual paid vacations.
Of course, as foreigners you're allowed and supposed to be a bit lazy/eccentric/quirky so you can take day off more easily (plus they understand the argument of taking days off to go see your family)
Can take that any way you want - some people take it in big chunks (4 weeks or so) other as a mix of days here and there with a few weeks as well. Approval process is pretty straightforward and is mainly about giving enough notice so that people can plan round your holidays.
My wife is a lawyer and she gets 36 days, but she rarely gets to take them all due to the pressures of her work.
We have 13 Weeks paid leave per year. 2 weeks for every 10 weeks worked, and then 6.5 weeks break over Christmas.
On top of that we have 10 days of paid sick leave each year. I can take sick leave by simply emailing that morning and letting them know that I'm not coming in. Sick leave accumulates and is paid out when you leave the employer. The beauty of this is that there is absolutely no stigma associated with taking time off work. If you're feeling over worked then take a 'mental health' day. No one will ever question you for it or demand to see medical certificates etc.
On top of this of course we also have "long service leave", which I assume every country has. It equates to 11 weeks paid leave after working for 10 years. So basically every 10 years a teacher can look forward to around 20 weeks paid leave (if the leave is taken between Christmas and term 1 break).
And at $78,000/year the pay isn't bad either :)
Basically it's the perfect job for someone who is also working on a startup.
There are about 5 Professional Development days per year and these are conducted before the end of the school year. Which is a terrible time to do it since we're all in holiday mode anyway.
Honestly, in my experience the US hasn't been much better. There's still no federal law that mandates holiday time, although may employers offer some to appear more competitive in the labor pool. I'm not speaking of unskilled positions either -- I've worked as a DBA in billion-dollar companies and told I should be grateful for my 5 days off a year (which accrue over time, not provided at the beginning of the fiscal year). Then there's watching co-workers be terminated for being gravely ill. Again, I'm talking software developers, network admins, etc.
Now that I have 25 PTO days plus the 10 NYSE trading holidays I feel spoiled -- has anyone here ever gone into work while passing kidney stones? Ever go in for work for a week, not noticing your weight has dropped from 150 to 105lbs in 5 days because Type II diabetes has onset and you're not aware what's wrong with yourself? How about having two days off in a row denied, and being told they need to be taken on separate weeks?
As someone who mostly went without them for the first 10 years of his career (I think one employer over 2 years offered 10 days and didn't place ridiculous restrictions) I can say that the mental and physical health benefits of time off are enormous -- though this is probably obvious to most.
Austria - legal minimum is 5 weeks per year.
> Do you have to take vacation time consecutively? Do you have to take it at a particular time of the year? Is it subject to some sort of approval process?
I tell my boss I want to take that many days off at that date (normally has to be well in advance - a month or more is good). Unless there is something really urgent or I'll be gone for a really long time (2 weeks or more at a time) he'll usually agree.
If you take less than 5 weeks per year the remaining get added to the next year (this is purely theoretical for me, as I have never taken fewer vacation days than what I was entitled to).
Anyway, at the places I've worked at in the US (I have 3 weeks vacation time + any carried over from the previous year), you can take it at pretty much any time you want, but it's preferred that you don't do it at "crunch time." There is an approval process, but I've never had a vacation request go unapproved and I've never not approved a request from my reports.
Some of the foreign born people I work with will take an entire 3-4 week block at once to travel to their home country but usually I just take off a Friday and/or Monday here and there to make a long weekend or at most one week at a time.
I've known people in all of these areas and it really helps me put any issues I have into perspective.
He says he could never deal with a job like IT, where you actually think about work when you go home.
Not something I could do.
Doing a pointless and futile job (i.e. teaching) stresses me [1]. Uncertainty and not knowing how to solve a problem don't. I know people who can handle pointless grunt work, but can't handle uncertainty. I could imagine enjoying an EMT or surgical job (bandage the bleed, pass them on) but not necessarily primary care (treating people for diseases they could easily have prevented by putting down the potato chips).
The trick, I suppose, is to figure out what stresses you and do something else.
[1] Teaching people who want a grade is pointless. Teaching people willing to think is not. In my experience, most teaching falls into the former category. 5 weeks left!
Below an example from 37signals
They're also unspeakably violent
They speak Japanese, they do whatever they please
And sometimes they vacation in Ireland"
-Bare Naked Ladies
http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-ninjas-lyrics-barenaked-ladie...
Now, excuse me, I have to start packing for my family's month long road trip....
I'm going to resist the urge to plug my company's IT management to make his job easier. (Although I kind of just did).
Some have quit, walked away and moved on to less stressful careers. Tasks that are less demanding on the mind. I would love to do that, but then would I really ever be happy like that? Alot of us thrive at being great at something, not just good but trying to be the best we possibly can. I know I'm constantly pushing my boundaries, yea its stressful but I also reap the rewards of higher knowledge. A part of life is learning and by giving up on that you are only hurting yourself.
The key is finding a balance, to know how to improve without losing yourself.
I've been "in IT" for 15+ years post uni, and nodded all the way through reading this (It's true that these things creep up on you).
Very recently our startup got funded (a modest Angel round), and now I can honestly say that I'm much less stressed than I have been in a very long time... I have more time for "me".
Sure, I work 80+ hours a week - but I do it on my schedule, so I can go bushwalking, fishing - have the odd random day off, and spend a few hours each evening with my family.
I think the dangers of IT can be "managed", if you have the flexibility (or discipline) to do so.
Right now, I do a little programming at night to work on my pet projects. Within a few months programming became a lobby and I am starting to love it again.
At some point I decided I could not do this anymore, and quit my job, following that I have spent then about a year playing music and basically doing nothing. it took me a year to recharge my batteries, and it wasn't easy, I had to struggle with depression. But all in all, I learned allot, I pace myself much better now, and spend much more time on things I value, mainly my friends and loved ones.
sometimes you need a break to gain perspective, and rediscover the things you love to do.
However, I was also much less interested in "computers" than I had been all my life. For a few years, I left work at the office and found other hobbies to take up my spare time. That interest has since come back in a very strong way, but I think the mental break I took over that time has helped me out by making me a more well-rounded person.
I'm planning to take another sabbatical towards the end of the year. This time, it's being planned and will not be an emergency.
This might not be a big deal for some rock-star, well known developers around here who have head-hunters beating their door down offering them truckloads full of money and a job in San Francisco, but for those of us who are the norm, we actually need to try and stay employed.
I'm in the same exact boat. Every single time I've ever taken vacation, I have a blackberry tethered to my laptop and am helping people over the VPN. I am the sole tech for a company that has three offices spread across two states, and about 100 office workers...I also do all the ad design for any marketing things we do...what this means is that I'm the sys admin, the in-house developer, the desktop support guy, the creative director, and the graphic designer. Despite this, I get the feeling that my company is just itching to replace with me a recently unemployed best-buy geek squad employee who will work for half of my salary. Grr..sorry, now I'm getting a bit rambly, but sometimes I get the feeling that nobody at my office really even knows what I do here. Everything works, and there are rarely ever any problems that take more than a few minutes to fix.
My point is that I hear this sort of advice all the time "Bah! Just leave your work at the door! They'll get the message!" Really? Cause the last time I was on vacation somebody let some people into my machine room who weren't supposed to be there...do you know what they did? They unplugged my mailserver...just unplugged it! (To their defense, they needed to charge their ipod, and the sign on the door that says "If you're name isn't Ryan you are definitely not supposed to be in here" obviously didn't mean them) Awesome! So what do I say? "Sorry, folks, looks like nobody is going to have any email for the next two weeks until I get back! Bah I'm on vacation, figure it out yourselves!" Do you think my job would still be there when I got back if I had done that?
(This isn't as much of a problem now because I bought a serial terminal with a modem in it for when things go horribly wrong).
During the same vacation, the phone system "went down"...verizon was doing some work up the street, and our voice T1 died...should I have just ignored my cell phone and told them to figure it out themselves? ("Uhh...what's a circuit ID? Errr...dmarc?")
To be clear, I'm not complaining about my job...I love it and I love the freedom that it has given me to learn a lot of new technologies that I had never even seen before. My point is that your advice of "don't make yourself available" is absolutely horrible.