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Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

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Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#151

Post by mhurron »

zeidrich wrote: post #132
Arjuna wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link to that study. In "europe" a two week vacation (10 work days) is common/standard. As opposed to American's "long weekends." To that point, if you've ever wondered (as I have) about the differences in philosophy on the topic of vacation between America and Europe, you may enjoy this paper [1]. It attempts to examine those differences. It's entitled "Europeans Work To Live and Americans Live To Work…

I think for many Americans, work is life. You get up, you spend an hour in the commute to work, you spend your 9 hours at work, you spend some more because overtime is expected, you commute home, you watch some reality television and go to bed. At work you have made friends, you spend time browsing the internet, following up on your hobbies, etc. This is where life ends up happening. 8 hours consumed by sleep, or the…

> Contrast that to somewhere like Germany, which is where this article was written. Work days end early. The culture in Germany is not to live at work. Work is for working. You come to do a job, not to have interpersonal relationships with co-workers.

Apparently I need to move to Germany because this is exactly how I work and like to work.

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#152

Post by xfalcox »

robzyb wrote: post #46
stephen_g wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad that works in the US. Here in Australia you have to give a full time employee a minimum of four weeks (paid), which accrues if unused. So somebody at a company with unlimited vacation would be no worse off of they never took holidays than someone who worked at a company with the regular 4 weeks.

I'm an Australian living in Japan. I moved here 2 months ago. Most Japanese get around 3 weeks of annual leave per year - but each day expires after 24 months. It is quite common for leave to expire.

Here in Brazil, if the company let it expire, they have pay you the double.

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#153

Post by thirdtruck »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #114
vosper wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the most important points in the article is that forcing people to take vacation, and encouraging them to be completely unavailable, means that the company must learn how to survive the absence of a team member. It forces you to reduce the bus-factor, and this is critical. I ask my team members to take at least 20 days off per year (we also have an unlimited vacation policy) and I'll be using this argu…

How do you do this without creating a bloated organization? For example if you have 20 team members and expect for 2 to be gone for some kind of vacation at any point. When all are at work you have a 10% inefficiency. I wonder if it would be more effective to have have stretches of intense work (4-6 months) with long rest periods (1-3 months) between. This would minimize the operational switching frequency, though it…

Inefficiency in the short term, yes, but it still leaves you in a position where a single surprise (an accident, a firing) can erase _all_ the efficiency gains.

It's the same way that buying extra hard drives for backups is "inefficient," since you rarely use those drives, but still far more efficient than recreating all of your lost data from scratch.

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#154

Post by tdumitrescu »

I last moved from a shop with unlimited PTO (where in practice people settled around 4-5 weeks per year) to one with 15 days per year. Quality of life is noticeably worse with the limited PTO, and people tend to hoard their days because they're scarce. Travis's tracked minimum vacation sounds better than either of those policies.

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#155

Post by AndrewKemendo »

smackfu wrote: post #136
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do this without creating a bloated organization? For example if you have 20 team members and expect for 2 to be gone for some kind of vacation at any point. When all are at work you have a 10% inefficiency. I wonder if it would be more effective to have have stretches of intense work (4-6 months) with long rest periods (1-3 months) between. This would minimize the operational switching frequency, though it…

If a company only has 10% inefficiencies, they are doing a fabulous job. Most companies probably have 50% of their workforce surfing the web at any one time.

Well the former is structural, the latter is behavioral, so there is difference in kind. Said another way, you can't get work from a ghost, but you can find incentives/realign people so they are more productive.

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#156

Post by krschultz »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #114
vosper wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the most important points in the article is that forcing people to take vacation, and encouraging them to be completely unavailable, means that the company must learn how to survive the absence of a team member. It forces you to reduce the bus-factor, and this is critical. I ask my team members to take at least 20 days off per year (we also have an unlimited vacation policy) and I'll be using this argu…

How do you do this without creating a bloated organization? For example if you have 20 team members and expect for 2 to be gone for some kind of vacation at any point. When all are at work you have a 10% inefficiency. I wonder if it would be more effective to have have stretches of intense work (4-6 months) with long rest periods (1-3 months) between. This would minimize the operational switching frequency, though it…

You are conflating hours with productivity.

Let's assume that no engineer is getting less than 2 weeks of vacation off a year on paper. Most of these articles are written by people giving 4 weeks of vacation. So we're talking about the difference between a 'stingy' vacation policy and a generous vacation policy being 2/52 weeks in the year.

If people gain more than 4% productivity by avoiding burnout, you net win by giving people more vacation. I would argue that net productivity gain from letting people de-stress is way more than 4%, though I have no numbers to back that up.

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#157

Post by asafira »

As a graduate student, I feel that (at least within my research group) there is this "unlimited time off" policy, but in the end it's not really taken advantage of very much and it certainly doesn't take any stress away from work. Even this holiday season, I'll be taking a week off from work, and I always phrase it as "I promised my mother I'd be home for at least a week".

The minimum vacation policy sounds like an interesting alternative, but I'm not sure it could fit within the academic community. Any professor has the power to instate such a policy, but at any given moment there's an "important" project that rests on one or two people working hard to get results. Often, in academia, you have those people that are precisely the kind that will work hard and get shit done, and honestly I can't imagine there being an understanding of "minimum time off". It's more convenient to the professor and the ambitious PhD student/post-doc to have the "take time off when you want" policy, and let the unwritten rules and undertones dictate when you should take time off (e.g., when you just finish a project).

I know the article wasn't trying to apply things to academia, I just thought I would consider it in that light.

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#158

Post by krschultz »

sportanova wrote: post #88
debacle wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, the company doesn't have to pay you for unused vacation days even if you don't use them. It's pretty much at the discretion of the company.

I'm assuming that most of the companies offering this 'perk' are tech companies in CA

Nope. I was at a stodgy defense contractor in CT and they paid out vacation when I left. It's pretty standard at established companies. Small companies might skirt it, but it's definitely the right way to do things. In contrast I left a VC funded tech startup with "unlimited vacation" and we never even talked about paying for unused vacation.

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#159

Post by dasboth »

chton wrote: post #115
organsnyder wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're proposing is unlikely to work in many environments. Even in the best of environments, where trust and respect course through every coworker interaction, people will still be looking to their coworkers (especially their superiors) to get a feel for how much vacation time is acceptable. In fact, companies with exceptionally strong cultures may be worse, as people really won't want to be a burden on their co…

I definitely agree that people in any form of leadership role serve as an example. They do on many more things than just vacation time. In general, that's one of the ways to influence culture, by being the best example of it. Conversely, if you don't act as an exponent of your own culture, it breeds a "do as I say, not as I do" atmosphere, which is just as negative as not trying to fix your culture. I also agree that…

"Being forced to meet a quota just means it feels like I'm wasting days that I could be productive doing the things I'm actually being paid for."

But surely if you want to get your work/life balance right, you would naturally end up taking ~25 days off a year without feeling like you're forced to? I guess it varies from person to person.

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#160

Post by krschultz »

padobson wrote: post #27

If I worked somewhere that had an unlimited vacation policy, I think I'd probably stop working on Fridays all together. An unlimited vacation policy could be an open invitation for a 4-day work-week (or 3 day or 2 day...)

It never works out that way. I worked at a company with very limited fixed vacation. We got 10 days a year, but 4 were required to be taken between Christmas and New Years, which really meant you had 6 days to use at your discretion. There were ways to squeeze some extra, but at best you got 2 weeks.

My wife was in a similar boat and switched to a VC backed startup with 'unlimited vacation'. I remember high fiving about it and thinking THIS IS AMAZING.

Fast forward one year, she had taken 3 days off in the entire year. The next year when she actually went to take a vacation, her boss asked her "oh didn't you go to that island last year?". The fact that she took almost nil vacation the year before was not remembered. You can imagine she left very soon there after.

We have grown up a lot since then, and would never get suckered into that situation now. But it happens. When your boss never lets you take vacation, 'unlimited' vacation is 'no' vacation.

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