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Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

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Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#61

Post by zz865 »

8ytecoder wrote: post #38
beerandt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlimited PTO is crazy to me. It takes the principles of spelled-out employment terms and throws them in the trash. The "flexible hours" policy was bad enough at my last job. Wildly varying interpretations between different managers and department heads under the same roof.

It's really great - when it works. I have worked at two companies with this policy - only in one of them I took (rather could take) 4-5weeks off every year.

Why not both? 4-5 weeks is pretty standard for a professional job in NY.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#63

Post by noirbot »

sjs7007 wrote: post #50
noirbot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the most important part of unlimited PTO isn't the "unlimitedness" but the fact that it's not something I'm having to log in a system. It's that usually I can just take off a Friday or a Monday here and there without any issue as long as I give a bit of notice. My company just got rid of unlimited PTO for all the reasons people say they hate it - they didn't think people were taking enough PTO for their health…

> It's that usually I can just take off a Friday or a Monday here and there without any issue as long as I give a bit of notice. I have fixed number of days but still can essentially do this. > Functionally now though, I have to file paperwork with 3 different groups to have someone approve even a single day off so they can make sure I'm not going over the number of days off that I have in accordance with my level an…

I'm sure it's possible to have a system where this is easy, but giving HR more things to track to prove their value to the company does tend to make no incentive for them to make it trivial. I'm sure systems exist for that that we could buy, but we didn't, so we don't, so someone's got some ad-hoc something in some Oracle DB somewhere, and now taking vacation is an added hassle for my already overworked manager.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#64

Post by trynewideas »

An extended leave did nothing but make burnout worse by coming back to the careful planning left behind to mitigate my absence being thrown out days in by a meddling manager from another team who saw the vacuum as an opportunity to take over the responsibilities permanently. Looking to exit.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#65

Post by Apocryphon »

xmprt wrote: post #49
Apocryphon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly, there’s a lot of old entrenched unions who have come to rest on their past laurels and are now mired in bureaucracy and self-satisfaction. One would easily imagine a software engineering union to be the complete opposite of that, as such a union would be completely new and hungry.

But a union will eventually slowly devolve into that example as more and more rules and restrictions are added. Unions have so many benefits but I feel like any time a union dictates how the work is supposed to be done I hate it. That's why I'm super conflicted. It feel like I'd lose a lot of flexibility afforded to me if I joined a union and had to start playing by their rules. At the same time, I think software eng…

You can say the same about any other human organization, though- a corporation, a government, a religious hierarchy. A nonprofit foundation. An open source project. What makes unions any more susceptibility to corruption or the problems of bureaucracy?

> I can see people leaving jobs in mass or starting a union quickly if industry conditions ever get worse.

There's some signs of that happening at some companies. Certainly it's a high time for video games tech companies to push for it, against the bad conditions unique to that industry.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#66

Post by ineedasername »

Waterluvian wrote: post #6
Animats wrote: post #2

"8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will!" - union slogan, 1920s. "Unions. The people who brought you the weekend".

I would be so miserable if it had to deal with a union. Though to be fair I am not overworked or undervalued. I imagine there’s a lot of engineers who large companies just grind through.

No need to be miserable in a union. If you don't like the union you just don't deal with it. Ignore their meetings & other communication. In the US at least, Per the SC's Janus ruling, public unions can no longer require fees at all, and the same goes for private unions in right-to-work states.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#67

Post by [deleted] »

karaterobot wrote: post #53

When I've been burned out or hated my job, I didn't take vacations, because the crushing realization that I'd have to return to work was almost worse than losing myself in the uninterrupted, repetitive, dead-eyed grind. While on vacation, I'd start thinking about the countdown to the end of the vacation. > Well, root out the real causes of burnout. I'll offer the definition that's made most sense to me. I didn't come…

[deleted]

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#68

Post by noirbot »

dwaltrip wrote: post #51
noirbot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the most important part of unlimited PTO isn't the "unlimitedness" but the fact that it's not something I'm having to log in a system. It's that usually I can just take off a Friday or a Monday here and there without any issue as long as I give a bit of notice. My company just got rid of unlimited PTO for all the reasons people say they hate it - they didn't think people were taking enough PTO for their health…

Why don’t they call it something else then? Maybe “Flexible PTO”? I really don’t like the “unlimited” part of the name. It feels confusing / misleading to me.

Probably because "unlimited" is the relevant part to the part of the company that cares - HR. If it was limited, it would need to be tracked. I get the objection to the fact that you can't literally take 200 days off or whatever, but that just feels like pedantry when at this point the colloquial meaning of "unlimited pto" is fairly clear.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#69

Post by Apocryphon »

Igelau wrote: post #45
Apocryphon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly, there’s a lot of old entrenched unions who have come to rest on their past laurels and are now mired in bureaucracy and self-satisfaction. One would easily imagine a software engineering union to be the complete opposite of that, as such a union would be completely new and hungry.

And it will never ever go astray.

It would certainly have a lower chance to, in the sense that it will have been founded in a time period after past generations' unions have gone astray, and so has the benefit of historical experience to work with and to improve, to innovate upon. Certainly tech is an industry that believes better futures are capable of being built, rather than expecting everything to always be the same level of mediocrity.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#70

Post by Igelau »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #18
thepasswordis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions end up punishing good workers and rewarding bad ones. Believe it or not, some people enjoy their job, and enjoy being able to excel at it.

You're not looking very hard for counter examples. Is the screen actors guild punishing Will Smith and rewarding struggling, untalented commercial actors? Is the NBA player's association punishing LeBron and rewarding D league players? Is there even such a thing a "superstar" plumber? I mean, I'm sure there are awful plumbers and amazing plumbers - but do how much can they scale, realistically?

The G League has its own union that isn't the NBPA.

SAG is a weird example. Hard to get in without doing union work. Hard to get union work without being in the union. Can't do non-union work after you're in. The structure reeks of being rigged to temper the rate of newcomers.

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