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Ask HN: My boss ask I take my emails while on vacation

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Re: Ask HN: My boss ask I take my emails while on vacation

#81

Post by seasoup »

setr wrote: post #44

From the corporate perspective, the problem is that work should not, and cannot, shutdown, because you've gone on vacation. In a company of sufficient resource, you would normally be able to offload the management onto someone else for the duration (eg your #2, or a peer) But this is not your case -- you have only 6 people -- there's no one to offload onto. The size of your group is such that everyone is presumably v…

This is not quality thinking. Without adequate time to destress and unplug, employees are likely to leave and if an employee leaves, the company will lose far more than someone’s vacation time. Leave employees alone while on vacation unless absolutely necessary.

Re: Ask HN: My boss ask I take my emails while on vacation

#82

Post by austincheney »

chooseaname wrote: post #75
austincheney wrote: post #8

3 hours per week is not a big deal. The higher you go the more you should expect to live the job. If that’s a tough pill then don’t become a manager. But really you only have 2 guys. That’s piss in a pond. Surely somebody can account for your two people for a short time. Where I work managers have 40 people.

I'm sorry that you've been trained to think this way by current corporate culture, but this is not okay and it has nothing to do with choosing to swallow the manager pill or not or whatever that was supposed to mean. People should be allowed to have a vacation. Full stop. No conditions. It is a strength to want W/L separation, not a weakness.

> People should be allowed to have a vacation. Full stop. No conditions.

When you move up to Vice President levels of a large company and are responsible for hundreds of employees and a major product portfolio the company should have the ability to reach you in case of an emergency. If a product under your responsibility fails in production and critically damages the company’s reputation should the company be able to call you during a scheduled vacation day or should they respect that vacation day full stop?

At the same time, as a manager, you should be able to plan for contingencies so that you can have a vacation with minimal disruptions. If you cannot put actions into place to temporarily account for your non-emergency regular tasks you either need to have an honest discussion with your boss about that failure of leadership or re-examine your ability to plan.

Re: Ask HN: My boss ask I take my emails while on vacation

#83

Post by setr »

mikeg8 wrote: post #71
setr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, you're not a low-level resource; especially in a 6-man company. Being given responsibility for your team, you are responsible for it -- good or bad. It's your duty to ensure your team is capable of limited autonomy (if they were believed to be capable of full autonomy, your role as manager is redundant, and the hierarchy shouldn't have been created in the first place) If you haven't yet created the necessary…

Again, you continue to describe the role of a FOUNDER, not an employee. Your use of words like “blow up” and “duty” need some serious reflection. One of the biggest failures of or modern corporate culture is the mindset that we should live to work instead of work to live. A vacation requires disconnect to be truly valuable, if your brain is still in work mode, you may as well have stayed in the office.

I'm describing the role of a manager, versus a contractor/leaf-resource.

A vacation is valuable, I agree, but your position within a company is a reflection of our position within it's operation -- the higher you are within it, the more people you screw over when you say "it's 5pm goodbye" and don't have things setup to handle it. Your power, and pay, is a reflection of that: you have less and less leeway, as you have greater impact, to screw around.

It would be a very poorly run company that allows everything to shutdown because a VP (key: not founder) went on vacation -- the same is true of a department head, and his department, and a team lead, and his team. But it's also the CEO's job to make sure he picks VP's who ensure this not the case within his domain, and the VP must pick the department heads, and the department heads their team leads -- if you are willing to allow, or unable to prevent, such scenarios to bust forth, you really shouldn't be managing that particular domain.

The more important you are, the less freedom you have, because the greater the impact your choices will have.

And to be clear I'm not using duty as an implication of loyalty or whatever -- I mean that a manager, or manager of manager's job really boils down to one thing:

Ensure productivity within your domain

Not letting your team implode in two weeks of your absence is part of that

Re: Ask HN: My boss ask I take my emails while on vacation

#84

Post by chrislh »

As a manager for a small team myself, I think an important part of the job is to making sure that no one person on that team is irreplaceable -- including yourself.

Vacations are an incredible forcing function for proper documentation, backups, knowledge, whatever. If there's _anyone_ on the team who can't be 100% offline for a week, that's a problem.

Re: Ask HN: My boss ask I take my emails while on vacation

#85

Post by guitarbill »

setr wrote: post #83
mikeg8 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you continue to describe the role of a FOUNDER, not an employee. Your use of words like “blow up” and “duty” need some serious reflection. One of the biggest failures of or modern corporate culture is the mindset that we should live to work instead of work to live. A vacation requires disconnect to be truly valuable, if your brain is still in work mode, you may as well have stayed in the office.

I'm describing the role of a manager, versus a contractor/leaf-resource. A vacation is valuable, I agree, but your position within a company is a reflection of our position within it's operation -- the higher you are within it, the more people you screw over when you say "it's 5pm goodbye" and don't have things setup to handle it. Your power, and pay, is a reflection of that: you have less and less leeway, as you hav…

> the higher you are within it, the more people you screw over when you say "it's 5pm goodbye" and don't have things setup to handle it

disagree. in fact you should be doing this, especially if you're in a higher position in whatever hierarchy. because you then have more power to dictate culture, and properly set boundaries.

all these arguments have been mentioned before. it can be seen as a mini-drill/game day to see how the business copes when you're gone (for whatever reason). if you've set up/helped set up a robust business, nothing bad will happen. if not, you've already failed the business. i guess that requires trusting your employees though.

being liable to burn out is also a risk to the business, not an asset. if you are a knowledge worker, not unplugging and coming back refreshed is also a risk to the business, not an asset.

Re: Ask HN: My boss ask I take my emails while on vacation

#86

Post by mnm1 »

Compromise. Ask for an extra week of vacation. I got three days for the mere possibility that I would be around in case production went down. It didn't. I was the only engineer on the team at the time. Come to think of it, no different from you. Since you will definitely have to work, a whole week or even longer is completely appropriate. Ask for a bit more and compromise if you have to. But you must get compensated for this well. One day for every hour you need to work seems fair.

Re: Ask HN: My boss ask I take my emails while on vacation

#88

Post by setr »

guitarbill wrote: post #85
setr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm describing the role of a manager, versus a contractor/leaf-resource. A vacation is valuable, I agree, but your position within a company is a reflection of our position within it's operation -- the higher you are within it, the more people you screw over when you say "it's 5pm goodbye" and don't have things setup to handle it. Your power, and pay, is a reflection of that: you have less and less leeway, as you hav…

> the higher you are within it, the more people you screw over when you say "it's 5pm goodbye" and don't have things setup to handle it disagree. in fact you should be doing this, especially if you're in a higher position in whatever hierarchy. because you then have more power to dictate culture, and properly set boundaries. all these arguments have been mentioned before. it can be seen as a mini-drill/game day to se…

My key requirement is that you need to have things (processes, roles & responsibilities) setup to handle it.

I'm not arguing whether its good, or bad, to setup such a culture -- go ahead, I won't stop you; hell, I'll enjoy it. But things need to be setup to actually survive that model.

If things are not setup properly, and you try to enforce your hardline stance anyways, regardless of how it impacts your domain, then you are operating as very poor manager. You can't just randomly drop the ball like that -- if you want a strict 8-5 working culture, or a 100%-offline vacation culture, you need to do the preparation for it.

And if it can't be done, because of whatever local constraints, then it would be absurd to go forward with it anyways; then your goal should be to find some reasonable alignment with those constraints. The same way that a programmer can't simply decide that functional programming is THE ONE TRUE GOD, and inject haskell into everything when no one else knows it, and then rewrite everything, when no one else can participate.

You can't just go ahead with it randomly, and say it's not your responsibility (it's your domain: it is your responsibility), and really, its the FOUNDER's fault for allowing this situation to occur, I'm actually not involved anywhere in this -- because then the FOUNDER should, and hopefully will, execute according to his responsibility: replace you with someone who does realize he's responsible for his domain, and set things up to run efficiently/effectively within the culture he chooses to instantiate.

That is, from the corporate perspective, the culture really doesn't matter -- as long as it works. The criticized culture is simply the common, default, good-enough solution that works just about everywhere (and features the IBM property: no one gets fired for buying into it); another culture is fine, as long as you do the prep work for it.

But if you don't, and try to enforce it without preparing for the consequences (both to extract the good and mitigate the bad), then it's entirely your own failure.

Re: Ask HN: My boss ask I take my emails while on vacation

#89

Post by anoncake »

austincheney wrote: post #8

3 hours per week is not a big deal. The higher you go the more you should expect to live the job. If that’s a tough pill then don’t become a manager. But really you only have 2 guys. That’s piss in a pond. Surely somebody can account for your two people for a short time. Where I work managers have 40 people.

By definition, you get paid for 0 hours of work during a vacation. Working infinity times as much as you have to is a big deal.

Re: Ask HN: My boss ask I take my emails while on vacation

#90

Post by carlescere »

ozychhi wrote: post #70
bouchardm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha you almost got me, french yes, france no: Québec Canada :) I will look up the law to be sure !

In my opinion, law is a bit irrelevant here. You should know what you want to do, if you don't want to do it then decline and see how it goes; If you feel like doing it accept it. Do not let those small details alter your aspirations, in the end all it matters is what you want to do. You are obviously skilled enough to find another job, so do not be afraid to stand up for yourself.

I think this is a bit of a narrow view. Even if I probably do what you say and decline it myself, personal circumstances will vary. I think law here is relevant since it is the minimum that the company will have to uphold and your case to decline will be stronger. You are right in that each person should think about what they want, but they should also balance it with their circumstances.
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