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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

Unless you are getting the economics of saving the day (you are a large equity holder / partner) then structuring your life completely around work is a fools errand.

Communicate your holiday plans, arrange coverage, put it team calendars, do hand-offs.. and then take it. Projects come & go, dates slip on their own. If you move holidays for project dates you will never take holidays.

The only exceptions would be if you are in a role with seasonality and its generally understood end of year / end of quarter / tax time / something is well known busy season and its in poor taste to disappear during it.

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> Unless you are getting the economics of saving the day (you are a large equity holder / partner) ...

Even if you are a large equity partner it's at best short-sighted. I have written about this before[1] but the gist of it is that even when individual heroics saves a project it has robbed the project manager of valuable feedback regarding how the planning was deficit.

[1]: https://two-wrongs.com/hidden-cost-of-heroics.html

>The only exceptions would be if you are in a role with seasonality and its generally understood end of year / end of quarter / tax time / something is well known busy season and its in poor taste to disappear during it.

This is exactly how you get guilted into working during vacation; everything is sold as an exception.

I think the point there is vacation schedules can differ wildly from the seeming social norm depending on the occupation.

Some lines of work simply require you to be working when everyone else is on vacation.

This is fine IMO if you get compensated. For example my old job I got double baseline pay for Sundays and holiday work. This was fair.

Nowadays working in software I sometimes do stuff on the weekend - but only because I know I can take longer breaks during the week since part of the work is already done.

“Good enough” is my goal and it should be generally. IMO Norway has the best working culture in that regard, although I only know if from the outside/stories.

Right it's not about moving holidays its about planning them for a reasonable time if you have strong seasonality to your job.

If your job is some giant e-commerce retailer and you probably shouldn't take Black Friday or the week before Christmas off. If you work in accounting or some operations role then quarter end is likely bad. If you work in tax, then late March thru April probably bad. Etc.

There's plenty of time in the year to take off around whatever your jobs regular busy season is. Don't set yourself up for failure.

The seasonality is not an exception. It's not a case of "just this once". It's a well understood thing of "every year, before the tax deadline we have crunch-time, so don't plan on going on holiday in that time". The repeated, unplanned, "just this once" exceptions are a whole different thing.

If your whole year depends on you having a product ready to sell on August 1 and you don’t finish it until the middle of July, then the company fucked up. If the whole enterprise depends on that date, then the thing should be done well ahead of that date. The remaining time is to handle training and documentation and shipping. Not still working on planned features, or doing bug fixes where the devs played chicken with the drop dead date.

These are all management failure, because nine times out of ten you ran out of time because some manager or exec had a great reason why his change was so important that we should break the rules to get it in. Or that what he said isn’t what he meant and now we need to fix it no matter what. This is the sort of exception that makes me upset.

The problem is these children in suits don’t understand that “we have 9 months” means you plan for six months of work. Tops. They can’t stand the “waste” because none of them have read a real management book since college, and they only skimmed it for the test.

I don't know if it's normal, but my sister is a CPA and while tax season is a thing, so is working 1-4 hours per day in the summer.

That's really the key. I don't resent working into the night if I'm a) engaged by an interesting an worthwhile problem and b) know that I can cut out early next week and go for a bike ride after school with my kids.

Endless crunch is a problem, and I don't crunch to meet made up internal deadlines or for work that is administrative nonsense.

We're talking about real seasonality, not "we have to launch this quarter" fake board room seasonality.

If you want to do people's taxes for a living you have to acknowledge that Feb/March/April are not times where it is appropriate or acceptable for you to schedule a 3-week vacation. This is not the same as "we do database updates in August so no summer holidays."

I thought we were talking about real seasonality? A tax deadline arbitrarily chosen in the legislative chamber is as much fake seasonality as summer database updates or product launches.

If that database update is well know to be every August or that product launch is something like Apple's WWDC then sure, that's the distinction people are making.

If it's just we want to launch our latest product in the second week of June, because that's the one-off date we came up with when we started the project, that's different. It's not seasonality it's just failing to account for staff availablity/unrealistic planning.

If you miss your database update or product launch deadline you can't get arrested for it (in the vast majority of cases). Yes, all deadlines are arbitrary, but the consequences for missing them are different for different deadlines!

Being arrested is still just the arbitrary choice of people. It's not real in the sense defined earlier. It is not like, say, needing to harvest food before winter sets in.

Stop being deliberately stupid

How is one of those more real? They are both actions that people undertake to accomplish an objective, but there is nothing tangible or factual about either, which appears to be your working definition.

What makes you think any are more real than any other? If you had taken the time to read the thread you would have learned that the whole idea of a fake deadline is nonsensical.

No, only your idea of it is.

Huh? I have no idea. If I had an idea, why would I spend my time on a message forum with it? You have clearly not thought this through.

You had the idea that "the whole idea of a fake deadline is nonsensical". That could only have come to you because your idea of what a fake deadline is is wrong.[1] Because they exist, so the idea of them is not "nonsensical". HTH!

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[1]: So that's at least two ideas that you obviously have; putting the lie to your "I have no idea".

The classical notion of "idea" would exclude the output of software, no? Perhaps you are redefining "idea" here?

Look, I love Baudrillard as much as anyone, and we can talk about simulacra all day, but it's simply not germane. We're not talking about whether these restrictions are societal constructs but rather whether they are predictable, reasonable, and controllable.

The tax deadline is predictable. A two-month restriction from holidays is relatively reasonable. The deadline is not realistically controllable. (Your employer cannot eliminate tax filing.)

"I thought we were talking about real seasonality? A climate deadline arbitrarily chosen by the Sun and Earth's orbit around it is as much fake seasonality as any whim by a corporate executive."

Yeah, that's idiotic. But only about as much as your version.

In fact if you are working on a sector with high seasonality nobody is going to have to skip vacation during holidays, because those days you are not going to have vacation to begin with

> structuring your life completely around work is a fools errand.

Structuring your life completely around anything is a fools errand — work, video games, family, food, etc.

Unless it’s not. Maybe the only thing you care about in the world is your family and you’ll ignore everything else. Maybe video games are your truest passion and you’ll do whatever it takes to play them 80 hours a week.

Maybe I love CRUD apps and Jira as much as my next door neighbor loves his wife. Who’s to say?

If you want to devote your entire life to one thing, go nuts. It’s probably going to have some consequences whether that thing is work or not.

I structure my life around my gym routine, my sleep schedule, and my main hobby/passion!

Its useful to do the math around what your equity would be worth, if you are the 50th hire you are probably getting less than .1%, so even a crazy moonshot billion dollar acquisition would leave you with a few 100k at most. Grinding yourself down for a slim chance at making that amount isn't worth it.

I have had managers say things like: "this could be the last job we ever work" as if none of us are capable of doing math.

That said we are all a bit prideful so exhausting yourself to get that fleeting feeling of having achieved something clever and good is definitely on the table.

This is why I said large equity holder.

Most startups unless you are founding team this is not the case.

Certainly sub-1% ownership is far from large.

A situation where you have sub-$1M equity that is illiquid for a decade until a hoped-for exit is not large equity.

> exhausting yourself ... is definitely on the table.

No. It's not.

> this could be the last job we ever work

I interpret that as "This is the job that kills you."

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