Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. In my view of the world is that there are no sick days, no personal days, no vacation days and no holidays. Fuck all that.

As long as you own and are responsible for what you are supposed to be doing and deliver on the commitments made you are free to manage your time as you see fit. In reality, it's a team decision and not the decision of the boss (me, in this case). If someone wants to go out of town to see a concert or take the kids to Disneyland for a few days, we talk about it. More often than not there are no issues and the answer is "send pictures". Sometimes the answer is "OK, but could you take the laptop and see if you can finish this little chunk of code". When it can't happen it is obvious to everyone.

Want to take a month off to go down to Argentina? Let's figure out how to do it. You might have to drag along the laptop and keep up with some stuff, but there are probably few reasons to say no. Can I come?

The same applies to sick days or "personal" days (who came up with that term?). You are sick? Please go to the doctor and stay home? Need to go take care of that speeding ticket? Take the day if you have to.

This also applies to work hours. Sometimes you have to put in the time to get something done. When discussed as a team these instanced become self-evident.

I said in another post that I am no stranger to 18 hour days. I hate doing it, but sometimes you have to. In all cases this kind of thing must be fully justified. It can't be the norm. If it is, something is seriously wrong or you need more people.

9 to 5 programmers have one guarantee: They will work 9 to 5 every day and will be held to strict rules when it comes to vacation, personal and sick days. If you want to work a strict 9 to 5 schedule I have to treat you differently. I have to treat you by the letter of the law. So, while the guy/gal in the other plan is in Argentina having fun and doing some coding, the 501'er will be clocking in and out and accounting for meal time and vacation days. Yuck!

I, personally, hate that kind of work accounting. Not for me. To each his/her own.

> If someone wants to go out of town to see a concert or take the kids to Disneyland for a few days, we talk about it.

I don't want to talk about it. If I'm going on vacation, I probably need that vacation. I would be pretty offended by coworkers (especially managers!) prying into the details of where I'm going, or trying to have a conversation about whether I should bring a laptop. Fuck that sincerely.

Personal time wins, and work can wait, always. I don't work at NASA. We're not going to miss a close approach of Mars if we ship a couple of days later.

Yeah I'm probably a 501 developer.

And that's just fine.

> I don't want to talk about it. If I'm going on vacation, I probably need that vacation.

You probably need it. You still need to talk about it unless you are the boss - and that's not unique to the IT industry. There's other employees that might need a vacation, that might have a sick child or other things to take care off and it's just a basic fact of corporate life that it's mostly impossible that the whole company goes on vacation at the same time. So the manager must balance on who needs the vacation most, who had the first pick last time etc. So you either talk about that and maybe accept a compromise or you don't go. It's as simple as that.

> Personal time wins, and work can wait, always.

Think: Small company, important Customer who already has TV adverts on air with the release date. Project hits a roadblock no one anticipated, is a couple of days late. You can still make it if you put in extra hours, but won't make it if you prefer your personal time. Customer threatens to sue for a sum that will make the company go bust. What are you going to do? Stick to "work can wait" and look for a new job, make all your colleagues look for a new job?

I also enjoy this environment, but it does have a big drawback.

I always felt like I was letting my team down when I was taking time off. So I took a lot less time off.

Ideally I'd prefer an environment that had an open schedule and also expected employees to take a certain amount of time off every year.

> expected

"required"

I don't think requiring employees to take time off is a bad thing.

If you really don't want to you don't have to.

But the point is to allow employees to take time off without feeling guilty, while still allowing them to control their own schedule.

How about incentivised? Months back there was an HN post about a company that gives bonuses to people who take off... I think it was at least 25 days per year to ensure that people understand that taking time off is not a bad thing.

Meanwhile, in Europe, it's common to have between 4-7 weeks vacation per year, and it's seen as a bit weird not to use all of it. The social pressure around vacation goes in the completely opposite direction compared to the US.

Funny. I wonder why.

No need to feel guilty. The power of making everything a group decision is that, if it works well balance and fairness is a natural result.

I grant you that this is a hard model to scale. Not sure how you'd do it with 1,000 employees. Thankfully I have never worked in the bowels of such monsters.

I like the idea, but how does this work with unreasonable work expectations? What stops your boss from assigning you an impossible task? Now if I have to fight for a few days to get the code to even start I get to leave at 5pm and forget about it, it's their problem when they assign something to me and I can't even start. In your world I get a deadline and some tasks and where is the work load balancing mechanism?

I think this only works when everyone involved is reasonably capable and experienced. Pure management numskulls that can't code themselves out of a while loop are never going to get it. No need for them in my little universe.

I've been in the game long enough to know just how funny it is to say "Here's the deadline for this project". Really? How in the world did you come up with that date? This isn't to say that one should not have a sense of how long something will take, but software projects are notoriously tough to estimate from just about every perspective.

I'm not sure what "load balancing" means. Are you asking about one person working more than another or the rate of code produced per unit time (say, per day)?

I mean "load balancing" in the sense of the amount of work that get assigned to an employee so that you don't get tasks like designing an ORM from scratch in less than week just because your PM heard bad things about Hibernate.

If the answer is don't work for assholes or retards, then that fails for everyone outside of a major tech centre where you take whatever jobs are available.

Well, all situations are not the same. Obviously things will be different when managers are knowledgeable. This doesn't mean that they have to know it all. I like people who come right out and say "I don't know much about this" because then everyone starts learning. It elevates the conversation from nonsense to something constructive.

My problem is that I see this used as way of forcing unpaid overtime on to workers by creating unreasonable release dates. In an agile environment where people are given lots of autonomy and can give accurate estimates I like your idea, but it seems for most it will be a disaster. We've recently had a client demand we deliver a month earlier on 6 month project in a 5 man shop with only two months left. If it wasn't for paid overtime I'd bail out of here.

I really like this, because it fits into how I work too. I'm much better with one 60 hour week and one 20 hour week (or an 80, 0) than I am with two 40 hour weeks.

Can I be in your world? It sounds like heaven.

Well hold on a damn moment. We all know what really happens. The 9-5'ers end up being made to work 50-60 hours/week anyway.

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