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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

We have a pretty flexible vacation policy and I've observed one person (no longer with the company) who was pretty abusive of that policy. That persons behavior definitely had a negative effect on other's perception of them.

There is a certain type of person who will push the limit for the limit's sake. And they will inspired others to push it. Have you sat in a line of cars with a shoulder open, when somebody decides "hey I'm just going to pass everyone on the shoulder" and once they decide that a bunch of other people jump out into the shoulder because they don't want to be "chumps" waiting while some "not chump" gets away with driving on the shoulder? Group dynamics can have a huge effect on these sorts of policies (for good and bad).

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We're essentially swapping simple guidelines for a test of people's ability to correctly judge social mores.

There's an ideal number of days of vacation per year.

We aren't going to tell you what that is, but if you guess incorrectly, everyone will hate you.

Good luck!

This is why I also prefer signs on the road saying either "stay in your lane" or "merge now." Why coordinate behavior by instinct when we have all these nice methods of communication?

Did anyone warn that employee that they were considered to be abusing the policy? If not, then that's horrible, and I won't blame that employee at all. If so, then why not count how many days of vacation that employee took before it was considered abuse, and just set that as the vacation policy?

Yes, agreed. If you have unlimited vacation it shouldn't really make sense to talk about someone "abusing" the policy. You might say that someone takes so much vacation that they don't actually contribute any value to the company, that would make sense to me. There are lots of ways of failing to contribute value, and that would be one of them.

No I haven't seen that while driving, because passing on the shoulder feels dangerous enough and you usually can't get ahead of the jam that way.

Before I moved to California, I lived in a state where passing in the breakdown lane (during certain hours) was permitted. I had coworkers who were unaware of this rule and felt those passing were "jerks". Even explaining that it wasn't illegal, they still felt they were "jerks" for not waiting with everyone else...

I guess it's similar to lane splitting by motorcycles. Moving from a state where this is illegal to one where it's legal was a shock (although I see a ton of people lane splitting at insanely dangerous speeds...)

I admit I've never heard of legal shoulder passing (other than obvious common-sense exceptions).

Beijing China speaking, ya it does work. The black Audi's use the breakdown lane often to get around traffic, it's dangerous and they don't get tickets.

That surprises me. I've seen it dozens of times, so much so that not really notable.

Hacker news has an American/west Europe bias. It is definitely common in many third world countries, especially by elites.

But I've seen it dozens of times in the USA.

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