Why vacation at tech companies should be mandatory | Hacker News Reader

Why vacation at tech companies should be mandatory

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"If I had seven hours to cut down a tree, I would spend the first five sharpening my axe." - Abraham Lincoln

Many tech jobs are brain work. This is not like an assembly line. If you're not sharp, you're not very effective. Worse, you're making more mistakes, which are going to take time to find and fix. A tired engineer can be literally worse than useless.

So take vacation without feeling guilty. Encourage (force?) your employees to do so, too. But don't stop there. Go home at night when you're tired. Don't come in for the weekend. Come back with a brain that's ready to go.

I agree, the motto of 'we don't have a vacation policy, just take time off if you need it' creates usually the wrong sort of culture and dynamics, leading to guilt, etc. Lack of clarity around expectations is commonly a source of anxiety and stress. Whenever possible I encourage that people take 1 week off per quarter.

My employer does this, I don't mind it. I took a whole month off last year as a block.

As an employee, what you should do is actually take their statements at face-value, but I acknowledge that this may be harder for entry-level guys.

Yes, it depends people by people, it IS OK to take that amount of time off if the 'non policy' allows it, but most people don't do that out of fear / guilt.

My employer is currently transitioning from ~25 employees a year ago to ~50 now. When I was interviewed last year, the policy was that there was no vacation policy. By the time I was hired a few weeks later, that had changed to a maximum 10 days of vacation a year. They used the argument of 'it leads to people taking less vacation' to justify their new abysmally small policy. Of course, if that was their true intention, then they would implement a minimum vacation policy. But that obviously isn't the case.

One of the things I've seen looking at many companies is the mandatory shutdown. Key maintenance staff stays on, but the place is a ghost town for, say 2 weeks in the summer and the last 2 weeks of the year. (The maintenance guys have a similar system, though staggered)

That way there's no excuse of "I have to stay on because $BIGPROJECTX needs my help." There's literally nothing going on. Go home. Get a life.

Such drastic measures are necessary, unfortunately, because just a few folks working 1.5x hours can end up sucking everybody else in. If you make it mandatory and set a designated date, it's much harder to have the game-playing.

Note that this is also a good way for people who work together to do things together. After all, you're all off during the same times :)

After a startup I was working at was acquired, the company that bought us had a week-long mandatory shutdown in mid-January. This was horrible since many of us had already taken vacation a few weeks earlier for Christmas/New Years. Also, this time would have counted against our vacation days which meant that we would be less likely for us to be able to take time off during other times of the year.

I shut my company down every year between Christmas Eve and New Years. The first couple years we didn't, but we noticed no work got done, clients were out, projects were usually stalled anyways, so why be here. We do it in addition to each persons vacation time. I hope they appreciate it.

I've met a lot of people who are proud to be "the only one who knows how to do X" where X is something very important to the company or software product.

They seem to think this makes them extra-valuable to the company. But I think the common perception of others is that the "valuable" employee is actually always a constant bottleneck and thus a source of pain. "We can't do X because Timmy is at his kid's soccer game for another hour...ugh."

If you think that if you took time off "everything would fall apart", you might want to consider how others perceive that situation.

(Personally, I've always automated what I could and trained backup people in what I couldn't, and it''s worked out well for me. And I get to take guilt-free vacations. :)

"the only one who knows how to do X" implies a Bus Factor of 1 - which is a big weakness for the organization.

Even if some people may like being irreplaceable in this way, it's a failure of managers if they allow it to continue.

I always try to write up documentation and offload the crap I'm doing or at least teach it to someone else.

Doesn't work that well in practice but it helps to demonstrate that I am trying to get information out of my brain into others.

I hate being "that one guy" for anything to be honest. Means I get stuck with it forever. Like one linux kernel developer said, never be the last guy to update the floppy disk driver, you'll own that code forever.

Swede here. I got 27 days paid vacation, not counting Saturdays and Sundays, so five weeks plus two days. Plus all the national holidays. Am I right if I understand this post as two weeks is almost an exception for Americans? If that's the case it's really saddening.

I agree, if it's true is very sad

If you think that is saddening, compare your maternity/paternity leave to what workers in the United States get.

US workers have no nationwide guaranteed paid maternity or paternity leave, and 12 weeks of unpaid leave (and that only if they work at a company with 50 or more employees).

A couple states (including California) do require employers to provide 6 weeks paid leave).

Two weeks is pretty standard, three weeks is the top end of normal. Anything beyond that for a first year employee is considered generous. The no-policy thing doesn't seem to be the norm in my experience, but I've certainly seen it. I consider it to be a major red flag when interviewing with a company.

At my last employer (a small startup), we had very clear vacation rules:

- Every week, you track the hours you worked (honor system- we just filed out a spreadsheet). - You’re expected to work X - 4 hours a week on average (X being a normal work week, 4 being the number of vacation hours you accrue per week).

So, if you work X hours a week, you’ll find yourself with about 26 days of vacation at the end of the year. If you work long hours for a few spots and find you averaged X + 2 hours a week, you end up with 39 days of vacation. You could use your hours whenever you want (and even go negative if you didn’t get too crazy).

It set clear expectations, showed that people were expected to take vacation, and made everyone feel like they were entitled to their days off, rather than guilty. I thought it was pretty neat.

That said, we dismantled the system about 6 months after I joined because although most of us didn’t mind the hour tracking, a few people really disliked it.

Numbers like 26 and 39 vacation days tell me that you are not in North America.

Over here we are talking about 10-15 vacation days per year.

Well, in EU you have fixed vacation days _usually_ and you MUST take it, so it is possible that it is just a really good company in US

Well it depends. A lot of startups have very flexible vacation policies. At my current job I took a 2 week vacation for the christmas season within my first three months on the job. I have a coworker who goes on 3-4 10-14 day long snowboarding trips per year. Our lead developer just took a month long vacation to France. The vacation policy is essentially that there is no vacation policy. You can take quite a lot of time off if you want, as long as you've been handling all your responsibilities and you give enough of an advanced warning to your team members.

Why would a small American startup not give generous vacation to its employees?

No, this was in SF. I was just fudging the numbers a little: X was actually 50 hours (which I left out because it wasn’t particularly important to the story). So, if you work X hours a week, you get 4*52=208 hours of vacation. If X were 40, that’d be 208/8 = 26 days. Since it’s 50, it’s 208/10 = 21 days.

That said, I'm now at an "unlimited" vacation time place (still in SF), and I've had no problem asking for time off. I took 3.5 weeks around christmas for a trip to New Zealand, and I'll probably take a week this summer to visit family on the east coast (in addition to a day here and there for local trips).

Am I the only one who wasn't really aware of the fact that people feel guilty about taking their vaccation days? I am working in IT since 2007 and I always felt that I needed much more vaccation then I got and I never felt bad about taking my vaccation. But it is perhaps because I come from a workers family and worked as a heating engeneer and on an assembly line before my IT career?

While negotiating a higher salery my boss told me that he wasn't able to meet my expectation moneywise and asked what I would like to have instead, a new computer, phone, etc. I took a extra week of vaccation days instead.

Don't get me wrong, I liked the job, it was interesting and I made good friends there, etc. but nothing beats a week abroad meeting new people, partying and so on.

And btw. yesterday I started at a new company, and I'm going on a 2 weeks vaccation next month already, nobody seems to have a problem with it.

The companies are doing it to decrease liability on some accounting spreadsheets.

If you really care about staff you improve work life balance, pay competitive rates, spot and remove dumb managers and assholes.

Sorry but 2 weekss mandatory vacation is not going to help much, on the contrary it might make someone angry when forced to take time off when the company is slow, not when a poor dev wants to actually go somewhere for holidays.

I didn't see anything in article about forcing you to take time off when the company is slow. In fact this seems to contradict one of their goals, to make sure the systems are maintainable without you.

You are right, I was talking a company I worked at :)

I would love to hear if any other companies are doing the same thing or considering it, and from anyone who works in banking and has to take mandatory time off.

Reddit comments here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1zglqs/mandator....

Most companies in Europe will do this (although with 5+ weeks). They tend to be mostly competitive. It is a bit hard to understand why US tech workers put up with not having this.

People in the US may be paying more attention to cold hard cash and less to vacation promises.

It's not a promise when it's written in your contract.

But – in contrast to the US I guess – in the EU breaching this contract as am employer _will_ cost you dearly; there are even courts dedicated for employment disputes in some countries, resulting in timely rulings.

It's not a promise - the company owes you that vacation; and if you somehow don't use them, you still get paid for the unused days at end of employment no matter what. Even if the company goes bankrupt, as employee salary debt tends to outrank most other debtors.

To be honest, it's hard to understand why US tech workers put up with a lot of things.

It's not that developers don't have paid vacation. Most companies have at least 2 weeks, and a lot of tech companies give unlimited.

Rather, it's a culture of working which discourages you (but doesn't prevent you) from taking that vacation.

In EU, the implicit assumption is that if vacation isn't taken, then it's because of company pressure - so generally companies must ensure that their employees get vacation or they're in violation of labor laws. Saying "well, he could've taken the vacation and we promise that it would have no effect on raises/promotions/whatever" is not an excuse, the employee must have had X days of vacation, period.

From my brazilian perspective it's very strange to read this. In Brazil, vacation is mandatory by law. Any employee has 30 days of vacation by year. But the moment the employee goes on vacation and how he does it (30 days straight, 15-15 days, 20-10...) is still discussed previously with the employer.

I'm not judging which one is better, just acknowledging the culture difference.

Swiss here; having 25 days excluding local and national holidays.

It really is a strange sight, this theme popping up all the time on HN, with some author proclaiming "look guys this is a good thing because X,Y,Z", when it's an absolute no-brainer for oneself.

Mind you, 25 days is more or less a norm; the law requires only 20 days.

the intuition behind the OP seems valid, but i wonder if it would succeed given the American concept of 'vacation.'

Americans (compared with Europeans, for instance) view vacation quite differently--in the quantity available (2-3 weeks versus 4-5 weeks); in the amount they can afford to spend on a vacation (in Europe, disposable incomes are generally lower and must be spread over a longer vacation period); and perhaps most of all in the general perception of taking vacation (ie, in the US, i have noticed many people don't even take all of their vacation and brag about that fact). w/r/t the latter point, it almost seems to me as if vacation is viewed as a sort of convalescence--ie, well it's available if you need it, but if you are strong enough then of course there will be no need.

The fact is that our jobs are not physically demanding; we do need a 'rest' from physical activity, but rather we need to rest our minds. But how do you do that when you take your vacation consists of a few four-day weekends each year in which you fly to an oceanside resort, sit by the pool with your iphone, checking your email. You are still thinking about work because there the vacation consists of nothing to replace the work thoughts. What's worse, is that you are more stressed than ever because you are thinking about work, following email but you are not there in the office to personally ensure everyone is doing exactly what they should be.

When i lived and worked in Spain, i took two multi-week vacations, always of the active kind. I enjoy alpine climbing but hiking/trekking or cycling vacations embody the same idea. The level of mental and physical engagement required means that i'm not thinking about work even if i wanted to (and i don't).

I'm very curious how you'd enforce "no work email except customer facing stuff", is that just going to be self-enforced?

It'll be enforced by the team as well. After all, if the person continues to chime in on emails or commit code, then they're not upholding their end of the bargin with their team (that they'd build good enough systems and write good enough code so they don't have to always be present).

And by "enforce" I don't mean that we have some formal reprimand process or anything, obviously. But if it becomes an issue, we'll deal with it.

I was really impressed by my current company's 60 vacation days per year until I realized that included weekends.

I guess you enjoy some luxury vacations each night!

So if you work 7 days a week, you can take off two full months a year?

We have 25 days holiday per year for everyone. You are expected to take them and I will be following up on that too.

Are you able to put them between weekends?

Absolutely. We count days, not consecutive days. So five weeks holiday effectively, plus bank holidays.

My manager will chase me up if my vacation time is going unused (e.g. I get 1/2 way through the year with less than 1/4 of my vacation used) and ask me what my plans are for using it.

Getting to the end of the year without using it all up is considered poor planning by the employee and poor management by the manager.

I get 27 days (on top of the UK public holidays). So I try and have a week per quarter, plus an extra week around Christmas/New Year.

This is in the UK, but I had the same thing with an enlightened manager when I was US based.

I get the point that we need to take vacations. I really enjoy mine, and I try to take at least 3 small-ish vacations during the year, plus a big one.

Having said that... making them mandatory? We're adults, we should act like them.

Portuguese here: 25 days each year, more national holidays

At my current salt rationer, sorry salary slavemonger, sorry, employer of choice, they do give each employee a set number of days each year. The employee can request to use some/all of those days throughout the year, but, the manager has to approve, and can veto requests. Last year our team lost most of their holiday due to management ineptitude and gross fuckwittery in terms of project management and death-marched delivery plans.

This year, the team, collectively have told the dates and taken it, and basically told management to go swing. If they take action against us taking some holiday, we all resign. Has worked so far.

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