Holidays are good for workers and companies alike
economist.com
economist.com
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Also, the problem with unlimited vacation days is that you don’t get paid for unused days when you quit your job.
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.)
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 worked at a place with unlimited vacation in the past, and took ~4 weeks per year. To be honest, if anything, my boss pushed me to take more.
In the end I really think it comes down to your boss.
Yes, sometimes it's because they rightly fear potential consequences. But other times, they just don't want the responsibility.
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.
But if I'm formally on vacation, there should be no expectation that I will pickup the phone or answer an email.
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.
For me it is not a vacation if I must be reacheble all the time.
So if something goes won't, they're stuffed. at least that's they're fault.
If not, UTO tends to NTO.
Not just that, you're stealing from the company. I've seriously met people with this mentality.
The government is trying to convince companies to stagger their closures. Not closing would be a good start.
What changed?
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.
Checking Eurostat for nights spent at tourist accomodation
2007: 213 mn domestic 163 mn foreign
2018: 212 mn domestic 217 mn foreign
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/cbe7ecda-...
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
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/9f9a92e0-...
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.
[1] https://sp.chorus.co.nz/product-update/protecting-chorus-net... and https://www.telarus.com.au/news/month/nov/telco-embargoes-ma...
I don’t know what I’d do if it was impossible to hit pause for a couple of weeks like this every year.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it would work for a dominatrix. "You are unworthy to see me for the next month, that will be $5,000, you may pay me now."
Since the whole country does this, customers are just fine with it.
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.
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...)
You’re asking for details on protocol to a rumored policy, which begs the question of whether this rumor can be substantiated.
In my experience with the company in question, no such policy exists.
So anytime the company is trying to force you to do something, you have to decide if resisting is worth making yourself an easy target.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/employment-at-will-d...