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Comment by Okkef | Hacker News Reader

When a person leaves a company who has been there for a long time, a similar effect occurs.

These people often do a host of small tasks to that noone is really aware of (themselves included; they don't see how it's special or that nobody else knows about it). It can take the organization a long time to recover and realign.

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That can be mitigated by making people take 2 consecutive weeks off every year, which many banks do. (It’s also considered an anti-fraud measure.)

In USA/Canada boss just going to call you during your vacations, because it's an emergency. So those task won't be understood and will continue to be seen as an exception.

Depends where you work I guess.

Even at Amazon, when I left work I left behind all ways to communicate and my bosses respected that. Nearly a decade there and never did a boss try to reach me on vacation.

Also been my experience doing technology in big banks for 20 years. Barring extraordinary circumstances, if you need to call someone who's on vacation that's an indicator of a broken process and unnecessary operational risk.

(I've also seen a person who believed he was indispensable and thought because of that he could behave like an asshole. Very satisfying to see him get fired.)

That was my experience when I worked for a law firm, it’s not my experience at a tech company.

Maybe time to look for a new employer.

Were you a lawyer before and then switched to coding? Or did you accept an in-house role?

I am a third year junior associate at a law firm, it would interest me how you transitioned.

I left tech when the dotcom bubble collapsed because obviously tech was over. Then came crawling back during the legal recession following the housing collapse. Mistakes were made.

From a fraud perspective, the point is that a consecutive 2 week vacation is enough that someone probably needs to take over your financial roles, so it would become obvious to the newcomer that you're committing fraud. An example of a type of fraud this could expose (or prevent happening in the first place) is "kiting", where you steal a payment from a customer, then apply over customer's payments to that payment, then apply other customer's payments to those misallocated payments, etc. Doing this prevents those who look at the accounts receivable summary from seeing that payments from Company X have been outstanding for a significant amount of time. Making sure someone takes a vacation makes this much harder to do since someone else will be looking closely at your work in the meantime.

Is that supposed to be a lot? Here in Sweden people usually take ~4 weeks or more consecutively during the summer vacation.

In most companies in the USA, 2 consecutive weeks off is longer than normal. Not unusual to have a total of 2-4 weeks vacation to use each year.

Sounds great to me, as a Swede I hate being forced to take 4 weeks consecutive vacation. Would love to instead have 2-4 weeks spread out through the year. It's a stressful burden for me as a single person who's life naturally revolves mostly around their job, to suddenly invent a new life for myself for 5 weeks. I just end up bored and restless, wasting time, even if I travel 4 weeks is just too long. 1 week at a time is perfect really

Edit: And you have to take those weeks in the summer as well, you can't take 4 consecutive weeks in fall, winter or spring. So it's really inflexible. If you want to go hunting in fall, and skiing in March, tough luck, in Sweden everyone "needs" to take all their vacation in the summer for some unknown reason.

It really depends on the place you work, I don't need to take my vacation during the summer for instance.

Yes but like the comment says, it's the norm so you'd be lucky if you don't have to do it and most likely it will not be possible.

It's like you have to retire every year and go through that difficult transition to a jobless person. Many people just end up drinking too much.

It’s the same in Finland. I’d hazard a guess that the reason behind it is that without it being forced people would be subtly pressed not to have the vacation.

In the US, taking 4 consecutive weeks off is literally unheard of, a lot of people don't even have 4 weeks to take off in a non-consecutive way.

Even taking 2 weeks off consecutively, it would not be unusual to require "special" permission for.

Yes, it's terrible.

I don't know about that. Many people I currently work with take a month vacation to visit India.

True, but not every year, usually. And they don't take any other vacation to save up for that trip.

OK, very few people I know get 4 weeks vacation at all, including myself, and of those even fewer could take it all at once without pre-negotiating that with their boss, it would be considered unusual.

But we know different people! I don't know a lot of people with six figure engineering jobs.

Apparently here's what the US Bureau of Labor Statistics last said about it:

> One reason for this is that American companies offer fewer vacation days. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 76 percent of private industry workers (who make up 84.7 percent of all workers) receive paid vacation days. After one year of employment, these workers were granted 10 days of paid vacation, on average.

> This number grows modestly as years of tenure with an employer increase. In 2017, the average worker with five years of experience at a company was given 15 days of paid vacation and the average worker with 20 years of experience was given 20 paid vacation days.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/05/heres-how-many-paid-vacation...

Just in case it's not clear: when Swedes talk about 4 weeks of vacation, they also count the weekend that they have off anyway, so 15 days = 3 weeks and 20 days = 4 weeks

yep, same here. Apparently it's typical here in USA, for those who get paid vacation at all (ie not restaurant staff and other low-wage hourly workers), to get 4 weeks after... 20 years of tenure at the same employer!

BLS says half of employees get 10 days off, meaning half get less...

That's not what "literally" means.

Parental leave is commonly 6-12weeks, especially among the HN audience.

I will note that here in Romania for example, maternal leave is commonly 6 months-1 year (legally you can request up to 2 years), and paternal leave is at least 4-6 weeks, at least for middle class jobs.

You might want to update your understanding of the usage and meaning of that word. [1] It's literally incorrect. ;-)

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...

More vacation is of course better, but you also have the opposite "problem" in Sweden, if you don't want to take 4 consecutive weeks, but prefer to spread it out, it also usually has to be negotiated and will be treated as an exception and possible denied.

Just curious, is it possible to take unpaid vacation in the US or is that also unheard of?

It's certainly possible at some companies. There generally aren't any laws about it. Usually it's left up to managers to approve or deny.

Usually possible, with stipulations such as, you are out of regular vacation, many mgmt approvals, and probably some kind of “risk assessment” saying the project you’re on will be fine without you… its rare and not usually part of the “culture” to do so, but ive seen it happen.

The only time I've ever seen that first-hand was a guy who was involved in a non-profit that did disaster relief in Haiti and was gone for a month and a half.

Only 2 weeks? I work on a program at a Fortune 500 that is VERY reliant on tribal knowledge. Critical people take 2 week vacations at least once a year, we just grit our teeth and do our best to fill the gaps until the given SME returns.

At the end of the day the company has to be willing to make the investment in adequate documentation and training backups. The only time I've ever seen that happen is when people leave permanently, and of course it only happens AFTER they leave permanently. Documentation and training are cost centers, after all /s

Why do they keep the tasks secret? I bet because they know they are important but they also know they are fragile in the sense no one else will care enough to do those things. And worse someone else will say don’t do them because they waste time.

It's probably not so much keeping it a secret, but just not broadcasting everything they do.

They don't do them in secret. Typically they just do them as part of their routine.

During a summer not long ago, a client called with an urgent issue. Some critical messages were not being passed on, leading to a full stop on their end.

However I couldn't make heads or tails of what systems this was or how it related to us.

After a bit of back and forth, the customer said "ask Glenn, he always fixes this for us".

Glenn was of course on vacation and didn't respond to messages...

A few hours pass while we make zero progress on this issue and customer increasingly annoyed, when Glenn finally responds to my messages.

Turns out that on a different server from where our software is installed, there was a Java-based message broker service running that needed occasional kick in the pants (IIRC stopping, deleting a file, restarting). We're not a Java shop, we don't use message brokers.

For years, Glenn had been keeping this service running and updated for our customer, as the customer didn't have any internal resources that was capable of handling this. And nobody else at our shop knew this. Why? Well, he just did what had to be done and moved on to the next issue at hand, as he always did...

Not everything that someone does has to be "a deliverable" on some project manager's radar. There's joy in doing work that's satisfying and beneficial but that doesn't necessarily align with the immediate stated objectives of the manager, project or organization.

There's a word for this kind of thing: "covert agency".

I don't remember where I first saw it, but looking back at my own career, being able to exercise some covert agency made miserable jobs worthwhile in some ways.

The folks in charge who don't want the foot soldiers to have any agency at all, they call it Shadow IT

The tasks are rarely secret, it's the other way round: things that nobody above them wants to bother seeing.

Yes, very true!

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