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Comment by patates | Hacker News Reader

For the people here who want to do the same when they are vacation (be completely detached from work): Make it impossible for you to work! Leave your work devices behind! Log out of all accounts, remove 2FA keys after backing them up on paper and tell your partner to not give them back to you for the duration of your vacation, etc. I actually went to a country from which I wasn't allowed to work remotely. Crazy but it was that bad for me.

Signed: Former workaholic.

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One of the reasons I left North America for Europe is that such things are normalised. The cultural difference is staggering.

In Germany, if you are on vacation, you are simply not available. You are dead to the world until you return. Emails do not get read, and devices get left at the office.

Another neat thing is that if you get sick on vacation, you get your vacation days back, because vacation days are for resting and recovering.

Thanks for the reminder that this shouldn't be taken for granted. I am a German and sometimes this privilege feels so normal that it's unthinkable that it could be different elsewhere in the world.

I help immigrants integrate for a living. Germany can be a frustrating country, but this is one of its best redeeming qualities.

I'd also add that the culture allows and encourages sick days. The average is 15 sick days per year IIRC.

Totally off-topic, but I read your profile to learn about this: https://allaboutberlin.com - you do awesome work, thank you!

Now I wonder if I could help the immigrants in my area (I'm in Hesse/Hessen), thanks for the inspiration too.

The average number of sick days used is 15 or the number of days offered?

In New Zealand we get a minimum of 10 sick working days per year but some companies offer more and allow unused sick leave to accumulate.

Sick days are not “offered” by employers. Sick days are prescribed by the doctors and there is no upper limit. After all, your sickness will not disappear just because it has been N days. That's at last how it is in Poland.

Sweden has 14 sick days no questions asked before you need a doctors note. The German way of having to call your doctor for a flu note is a little odd to me. You do loose the first day's pay (the meme is that too many people were off sick when there was a world cup finals or something), and then 80% pay.

This is not accurate. In Germany, you usually only have to get a doctor's note at 2 or 3 days, if youre only sick for a day or two you don't need one.

And there's an unlimited number of sick days. As long as you have a doctor's note, you still get paid, up to some ridiculous limit at which you might have to get government support instead.

It's up to the employer, they can ask for a doctor's note from day 1. Many employers have more lenient rules, though.

I think at some limit the health insurance pays back the employer, right?

> You do loose the first day's pay

Many countries have this system and the usual effect is that the duration people are sick for is magically never less than 2 days. It's dumb policy.

yeah, when denmark switched from loosing first days pay to the first day also being paid sick rates dropped more than enough to pay for it.

You don't have an offered number of sick days in Germany. If you're sick, your sick. At some points (after 6 weeks) the employer stops paying for it, and the payment switches to the health insurance and drops down to 70% of your usual gross salary (with some more specifics).

Even the concept that you need permission from your employer to take a sick day is crazy to me. After all, if you're sick, you're sick, not like a hard deadline of 15 days (or whatever) is going to make the sickness go away?

The point of the deadline is not that you can't be off work, but that you stop getting paid for not working.

For example, the way it works in Australia is that after you have used up your sick days, you have to take any further absences from work out of your annual leave balance, and once that is exhausted, you switch to leave without pay.

I had a downline team member who once needed to extend their time away from work for over 5 months due to illness. They had been with the company for several years at that point, so they had a reasonable sick leave balance, probably 10 weeks. When it became clear that they needed longer, they used their remaining 4 weeks of annual leave, then took a month of leave without pay, then another. They were still employed, I approved their leave requests each time they needed to extend, and we just used the most appropriate tool that was available at the time.

The thing you're getting permission for is not to be sick, it is to be considered still employed while not doing work, rather than being fired/disciplined for being AWOL.

And you'd think that it would be in the interest of the employer too to not have people come in with a flu and infect everyone in the office.

I wrote a primer about sick days here: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/sick-leave

15 is the average. I use it to reassure people that it's okay to take sick days, and not one of those rights that no one dares to use.

Usually, employers ask for a doctors' note after 3 consecutive sick days, but the reason for the sickness remains hidden from the employer. The note just gives a time range, nothing more.

It can honestly be annoying, if you're not privvy to it.

I remember years ago needing urgent support for some bespoke European hardware we were developing software for. When we called support, we were greeted with a phone message stating the company was closed for the entire month due to vacation. This was not a one-man operation; the whole office closed for a summer holiday. We thought it was a joke.

Needless to say we started to look for a new vendor shortly thereafter...

I'm surprised, typically we don't all take vacation at the same time, but stagger it.

It's not entirely uncommon, even companies like Volkswagen have 3 weeks of summer vacation. Strictly speaking, some people still work there for maintenance, etc. that can't be done while making cars, but the majority is on vacation.

I know a handful of companies with a week of mandatory Christmas vacation as well (but there's typically not too many working days between Christmas and New Years' either way).

In England, I had summer jobs in factories when I was a teenager, since they needed extra hands to help with cleaning / maintenance during the annual shutdown.

I don't know if this work would have been offered to staff who turned it down, or if they preferred to have their staff on holiday at the same time.

It really depends on the areas. On white collar jobs yes. It is more frequent in blue collars workers because it is easier to close completely or partially (several lines) in a factory than having to manage different vacations schedules. Constructions companies also do stop because you usually need most workers available + hot weather makes it harder anyway. Small/familiar companies also do it frequently because it doesn't make sense to work if you have dependencies on a number or unavailable persons.

I've seen construction companies use all their vacatiom in December in America (since it sucks to work in in the cold)

I mean, that's not usual at all in Europe either.

My advice is don’t ever buy anything that might need support from New Zealand between 24 Dec and 5 Jan. The entire country is just about closed (other than non-niche consumer stores).

Many companies force staff to take vacation days during this time, and there are four (yes four!) public holidays during this period.

Four? Poland has five! (Counting 6th Jan)

> if you are on vacation, you are simply not available. You are dead to the world until you return. Emails do not get read, and devices get left at the office.

It's funny because that's kind of the definition of a vacation in my book. I find it weird that some places in the world handle it differently.

Note that it's also much better for the company in the long run: It's a test of resilience and redundany, the famous bus factor. It simulates what happens if someone is not available, and forces the organization around to have a backup plan. Having those is important for cases where employees leave the company or team (switching jobs/teams, accidents, sickness, parental leave, death, burnout, layoffs etc.). It's mind-boggling how many leads at various levels just don't understand that.

I remember vaguely from interning at a bank that there you were actually obliged to be totally isolated from the company for a continuous period of time by policy.

The thinking was that if you were cooking the books of doing some dodgy dealing on the side it would come to light without you there to actively 'manage' it.

Not to forget that you get a minimum of four weeks of vacation per year with 30 days being offered most of the time.

This year I used my vacation time well and I already had 3 weeks off while I still have almost 4 weeks left.

This is how it should be though - nobody should be irreplaceable. Look up bus factor etc.

I'm a senior at a big tech company. You can do this in America too. Just communicate with your manager and set the boundary. "By the way, when I'm on vacation I'm away from devices, so let's coordinate beforehand if there's anything critical path."

100%, and it extends beyond vacations, too. Unless you have a formal on-call arrangement, then any time you spend doing work stuff outside of your work hours is time you are choosing to donate to your company. It's fine if you want to do that, but you don't have to. I work 8-4 every day. I am not contactable outside that window and definitely not contactable on my days off. I haven't worked at a ton of different places, but at the places & teams I have worked with, I've never had anyone object to this policy.

In the USA at least, I've found that this kind of "not working means not available" arrangement is easier or harder based on your seniority and the kind of company you work for. I am able to hold the line on this now, 25 years into my career, but it took a long time to get to this point, and I never would have been able to swing it when I was a junior programmer, and when I was working in a hyper-work-obsessed startup.

Back in the early 2000s when I was Junior Engineer Number 32204, and not particularly valuable to my medium sized company in a competitive industry, I could never have gotten away with "Oh, by the way, boss, I am totally unreachable nights and weekends, and don't bring work with me on vacation." But, now, quite a bit more senior in my career and working in a "comfortable" big tech role, it's possible.

This was mostly my experience. Once I was very Sr and reporting to the VP my solution was people could get in touch via the VP, his admin or my admin. Worked well (there were some things I really did need to be called for).

But not a general solution. But with a good manager can work more broadly. And I did see a couple managers do something similar for their teams, making it clear that if you need emergency attention contact the oncall, if for some reason that won’t do call the manager. This friction alone deals with most issues.

It's a small number of data points, but neither of my two early-career jobs had any expectations like that. I've never explicitly said "I'm not reachable," I just have never worked or responded to work communications outside of work hours, and no one has ever questioned me on it.

> Back in the early 2000s when I was Junior Engineer ...

I tried something like this over July 4th weekend last time I was full-time anywhere (startup; 2010) and it very quickly devolved into an i-quit-you-cant-quit-i-fired-you situation and the company withholding my final paycheck. (New York State employment law does not mess around and I was eventually paid after dragging the deadbeat through Small Claims.)

It traumatized me and is in large part why I've been a freelancer / running my own consultancy ever since. My self-employed situation is better in some way and worse in others but I can't even imagine what it's like to not have my back against the wall 24/7/365. :(

I've lived and worked in America my entire life, and in my approximately 40 years of working I've never had a job where I was expected or had to arrange to be available during a vacation. For the odd unplanned personal day maybe I'd try to check email and have my phone with me. But vacation, never.

It doesn't need to be arranged. Like you said, we would check email ourselves of our own volition.

> if you get sick on vacation, you get your vacation days back,

This slightly blew my American mind but it makes sense. What about getting sick on calendar holidays?

No, you don't get the holidays back -- nor do you get weekends, if you're sick.

On the other hand, I've been in a company where there were long discussions about whether the extra day on leap years is a working day or a vacation day...

I think my POV on this is a bit different than what others are expressing… I don’t mind answering the occasional email while on vacation, but I view it as a fair trade - as long as the company doesn’t mind me handling the occasional personal obligation during work hours I don’t mind handling the occasional work obligation during personal hours. If the company wants to be strict about clock in/out hours or taking PTO for every 30 minute errand or the work trends in a way that routinely exceeds 40 hours per week total then I’ll stop doing work “off the clock”, but so long as they’re willing to be reasonable I’m willing to be reasonable.

The idea with vacation is that you don't think about work. When I start vacation I disable all the channels that people usually use so that no one asks me even by accident. There needs to be a time when you are completely undisturbed and disconnected. If you are disturbed by work you will think about work while you answer and maybe even after that. That's not good.

I also think you should normalize for yourself and your workplace that there are times when you are not there. If only you can answer a question then there needs to be better documentation. See it as a trail run for when you get hit by a bus. If they will struggle without you then that is a problem that needs to be fixed. If you are always reachable these problems will never surface.

I generally work for small companies, and while I'll do something very similar when taking leave (or just at the weekend) I do also make sure someone has contact details for me in the case of anything that truly can't wait until I get back. My experience of doing this has been that people will be judicious about whether something actually warrants interrupting someone's holiday, and it also results in me being less inclined to check in on email/Slack now and again just in case something is up.

I was the only full time sysadmin of a 20 person company. I went on vacation for three whole weeks. I was half way around the globe and not reachable. The company still existed after I came back. They did have a problem. They tried to reach me. They couldn't. They figured it out by themselves.

I think we believe ourselves to be more irreplaceable than we are. And if you really think you are irreplaceable then the problem is not going on vacation but being irreplaceable. Because then if something were to happen to you they are screwed.

In one case I was the only full time technical person in the company. This was a very early stage startup that had literally nobody else who would know how to even start reading the code, never mind find the particularly gnarly bug that was causing paid for orders to disappear which surfaced while I was on holiday. (Because I was the only person capable of writing code I could also be pretty certain the bug was one I'd introduced and missed, so I wasn't too grumpy at debugging it from the back of a moving vehicle while on holiday).

Yes, ultimately the problem there is having a bus factor of one, and we resolved that in time but in those early days sometimes there really is nobody else who can fix things.

> There needs to be a time when you are completely undisturbed and disconnected. If you are disturbed by work you will think about work while you answer and maybe even after that. That's not good.

IMO this is not a universal truth - I’m sure some people need that level of disconnection, but I don't find I'm one of them. I generally like my job, and don't find that forcing myself to disconnect does me any particular mental good. But other people report needing that separation, and that's fine! I don't think there needs to be a one-size-fits-all answer here.

I do agree with your bus factor argument though.

I'm the same.

If I can answer a question with a 30-second response to a Slack message, I will, and I won't mind it as long as it's not frequent. I won't join a call, and I'm only logged into Slack and Outlook on my phone, so if answering requires checking something on Confluence or Jira, I can't help.

Maybe I feel this way because actually being asked something is exceptionally rare. I'll be gone for a week and MAYBE I'll get one message.

Lock-out vacations were one of my favorite things about being at a bank. Auditors cared about the ability for employees to keep a thumb on the scale, so it was a policy requirement that all workers with a certain amount of access needed to take an uninterrupted vacation of N days, with login ability disabled.

Fantastic tool for shaking out hidden bus factors.

As a manager, I will quite literally ding people for working when they are supposed to be off.

Work during work time, don't work during not-work time. Good practices mean that everyone is important, but nobody is irreplaceable, the team and the work will move along a little slower, but that's fine.

Quote from my partner's manager before a vacation:

"If I see you log on, I'll disable your account."

Humm he means figure out everything you’re signed in to before going on vacation and log off?

Personally I’m sure I’d forget to sign out of something.

Probably more Teams autostart and suddenly you appear in the online list when you are officially on vacation.

No, they don't mean "you should log off everywhere" literally; rather, "don't open Teams/Slack/${our_corporate_chat_software}".

Do these things even close on mobile? I'm pretty sure I'm always on on everything. I'm good at ignoring them though.

I had a colleague at my previous company where we had to log her out of everything and ask IT to keep her logged out until their vacation was done every single time. Her water broke during her pregnancy leave and she still replied to someone asking her a question in Slack near real-time, after which we made her uninstall Slack from her phone altogether lol

Some people are just workaholics and need interventions to actually take a proper holiday.

extremely relevant recent Kai Lentit skit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E7kBOH9owI

Being the only dev in a startup since 2 years without a single day off where I wasn't messaged by my employer I want this. At least I'll have a 3 week out of country trip where I do not bring my laptop later this year...

Honestly, that is just bad management. It can make sense if it's your company, but even then, the risk profile is just off the charts. What happens if your only developer leaves or gets sick?

Real engineers think about handling things when stuff goes wrong, not "everything will be on the happy path forever".

Yes, there are constraints, but to me this sounds like an unacceptable level of exposure.

You should really consider another place to work at, unless you own a massive, measurable chunk of the company in a legally binding way.

The only people who should suffer this much are the true busines owners.

I don't, but I enjoy a lot of perks that I would not get anywhere else. Thats why I stay. Basically work when I want, where I want. 100% remote if I choose to do so. Very flexible days off (maybe that's also why I am contacted a lot during those days). Almost no meetings, and relatively good pay.

>Very flexible days off (maybe that's also why I am contacted a lot during those days).

But... That's not how days off work.

That's exploitation, no? You're just scammed into it, because you let it slide.

You're a good person.

My manager doesn't stop overworking. When told on peer performance review that we have people who are consistently overwork because they are swamped, he played it down.

But hey, at least he doesn't encourage overworking either.

My company have accidentally forced this on me, and it is great.

I used to have a desktop that I could VPN+RDC into from my personal laptop or desktop to work away from the office¹. I've now got a laptop, that refuses to let me authenticate remotely and they have no interest in fixing that as there are other priorities, so I simply can't work if I don't have that laptop with me and I'm not carting it around when I'm already carting my own around (and if I'm not carrying my own, it is because it isn't a suitable situation to be bringing any laptop).

Not a workaholic, I don't think, but a 24/7 stress monkey when I think that I could be helping. Simply not being able to work away from the office actually helps with that: if there is literally nothing I can do, especially given it is work that has made that impossible, I don't stress the same way.

--------

[1] other than the VPN connector and the MFA doo-hicky on an old² phone, nothing work related, even Teams, even email, ever touches my personal devices

[2] a small old thing, factory reset with a dummy google account and just the MFA apps installed

I now want to seek an on site role and request a desktop computer.

> Not a workaholic, I don't think, but a 24/7 stress monkey when I think that I could be helping

I er... think you might be a workaholic.

But I'm glad for you that your current setup is helping :)

Does it count as being a workaholic when work is just one place it manifests? I class it more “being-useful-aholic”!

This seems like a lot of extra work. If at all possible, just keep your work stuff on your work laptop/computer. And then keep that at home/at work. No need to sign in and out of 20 different accounts.

> This seems like a lot of extra work

Music to the ears of a workaholic :)

Seriously, that'd be nice if everyone would do this (and I do it now, very strictly) but I also know how easy for one to start blurring the lines between work and personal lives.

> Leave your work devices behind!

Specifically, if your job offers (a) to pay for your personal phone line, or (b) a work mobile phone, choose (b).

We have the choice at $WORK, and many teammates chose (a) as it allows them to save some money each month on their phone bill, but now you're basically constantly tethered.

Kai Lentit just dropped a video on precisely this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E7kBOH9owI

Easy, that has always been my whole European life, want to reach me on vacations, pay for it.

This is one of the reasons I work in an office every single day. I leave my work laptop there. I don't have any work software on any of my personal devices, including my phone. If I had the ability to check in on work things while out of the office, I probably would, so I make it impossible.

This is exactly the move. Work and life should be separate. No work stuff on your personal devices; no personal stuff on your work devices. This way, you can be your best self in both worlds.

Or maybe don’t have devices doing double duty such that 2FA and work devices can be partitioned out from any incidental personal use. That way, even if you have one half of it, you still don’t have enough to attempt work.

> Log out of all accounts, remove 2FA keys after backing them up on paper

Seems like a lot of extra work, just to go on vacation :)

I would suggest another approach. Automate your work, that you can work from your phone. I go on multi day hiking trips, or a week long family beach holidays, without taking PTO...

Edit: I do not get negative reactions. Big part of my work is to monitor system, and answer questions. I spend less time on my phone than most social app users! I still do heavy coding in office a few times a month. And I am self employed for nit pickers.

Work does not have to be sufering, you can enjoy it!

This is the ideal, but in practice you need to own the business to live this way..

Also candy is enjoyable but 24/7 sucking on it is not.

Imagine some people sleep at work... I get paid for being available, not LARPing at desk!

Much better than 2 hour daily unpaid commute at old job.

Living your life = sucking on candy?

You're basically saying to get a different job.

That's going to work in some situations, but it's not broadly applicable for many reasons. In particular it's way more work than the act of backing up 2FA and logging out of everything. So yeah, it makes a lot of sense for people to think that's not good advice.

Regarding your edit, you might be ok with going on a multi-day hiking trip or family holiday while still doing some amount of work from your phone, but many of us think that's a bad idea.

Truly disconnecting from our work is necessary for our mental health. When I'm on vacation, I want to be on vacation, which means not working.

Again, maybe you don't want to actually fully be on vacation from work. I guess that's fine; you do you. But I don't think that's healthy for most people, and regardless of health, many people do just want to completely disconnect from work for some number of days.

>> Log out of all accounts, remove 2FA keys after backing them up on paper [...]

>> Signed: Former workaholic.

> Seems like a lot of extra work, just to go on vacation :)

That's the point, this person and plenty others, are NOT able to "just" go and disconnect. If you can do that, wonderful for you, but please don't assume others are like you precisely when they are humble enough to clarify that they do have a problem and try to help others to overcome it.

Just not bringing the devices should be enough.

I regularly advocate for offline moments so I definitely agree on the "how" ... but that's still not my point though.

What I was trying to highlight was that HOW depends on whom you are talking to. Here they just mentioned a deep behavior problem. Saying "just" or "simply" or "should" or "ought to" or anything implying it's really not that hard is probably not going to be encouraging to them.

yeah but I mean it is the same about logging out accounts or removing 2FA which is what I was really replying to.

If that person doesn't have the mental strength to do any action on their own, I totally agree that they probably need therapy first.

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