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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

#231

Post by evanpw »

jarek wrote: post #205
evanpw wrote: post #194

I don't think I see a single negative comment here about long vacations, so allow me to play devil's advocate. (These questions don't necessarily reflect my own opinions.) 1. If this is such a free lunch (employees are both happier and more productive overall), then why isn't lots of vacation offered everywhere (in the US)? Can it really be the case that the vast majority of US companies are too short-sighted to make…

> Can it really be the case that the vast majority of US companies are too short-sighted to make a policy change that would be in their own best interest? You can ask that about anything. Are the U.S. banks really so short-sighted to offer absolutely crap person-to-person transfers and get undercut by any number of hacky startups? Were the U.S. car manufacturers really so stupid? Are California taxpayers really too s…

I don't disagree that bad decisions are made all of the time, but the questions is how the same bad decision can be made everywhere in a competitive marketplace. You've given a couple of good examples where the answer is government: banking is highly regulated, so breaking into the industry is tough, and the big U.S. auto companies actually would have gone out of business and been replaced without a bailout.

But if increasing vacation time makes your employees happier and you also get more productive work out of them, why don't the companies that switch then get all of the best employees and eat the lunch of everyone else? I can't think of any regulations that make it more significantly more expensive to offer lots of vacation, so I don't think government is the answer in this case.

I think the biggest clue is given in the original post: people (Americans) won't take vacation even when you offer it to them! In that case, offering more vacation is doubly bad for the company: you still pay your employees for the vacation time, but they don't actually take it, and lose the productivity benefits. Either this is because Americans actually rationally prefer higher salaries to more vacation, and the system is working, or they systematically underestimate how much good a vacation would do them, in which case we need things like mandatory minimum vacation policies or laws.

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#232

Post by baddox »

butwhy wrote: post #12

Why do companies even try out these weird policies? They've gone from having unlimited days (then admitted it was a mistake for 2 whole years) and are now blindly trying out another unusual strategy. I don't see why they don't just offer a standard solution which seems to work for most companies, instead of trying to be extremely controlling of people.

I agree. This policy certainly sounds better than the unlimited policy, but it's still fairly silly. Will they actually fire or discipline someone if they take less than the minimum vacation days?

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#233

Post by byoung2 »

hedwall wrote: post #52
byoung2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of these "unlimited" places have a "as long as your work gets done" policy, meaning you can take tons of short days off or afternoons off, but almost no extended holidays (e.g. travel abroad, out of state, etc). My friend works at a company with unlimited vacation and they pay you $1000 for every full week you take off.

Your normal pay + $1000 or just $1000 ? In Sweden you actually get a ~12% higher pay during your vacation.

http://www.logicmonitor.com/about/jobs/

Paid, paid (paid2) vacations: We’re so serious about you being recharged that we go above and beyond your regular paid vacations; you’ll get an extra $1,000 when you take a week off of work and fully “unplug” (no work, no exceptions!).

Depending on your base pay, I guess it could be around 8-12% for most developers.

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#234

Post by michaelt »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #166
thirdtruck wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like the idea of personnel redundancy, but my guess is employees don't like that and it's not really best for tackling tough problems because you increase your workforce 2x.

Why would you need 2x redundancy?

Surely in a team of 10 developers working on the same thing, if one quits the others can take over the work, just with a schedule slip?

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#235

Post by vacationless »

Someone1234 wrote: post #30

I've said it before and I'll say it again, unlimited days off (or "open") and zero days off are identical. If you have unlimited vacation people are inclined to take less and people respect the vacation you take less ("as you can always take more!"). Here's a study[0] (PDF) called "Overwhelmed America: Why Don’t We Use Our Earned Leave?" It is biased (travel association) but interesting nonetheless. According to this…

Unlimited vacation doesn't work. Where I work, all it resulted in was our project manager taking a week off at the same time that us developers were pulling 10pm nights and coming in on that weekend to get a feature done that he had promised an unrealistic deadline for. God help us if one of the people who actually builds things had wanted a vacation during crunch time. In 14 months of working there full time, I've managed to take 6 vacation days, and that's more than what most of the dev team got.

Then again, that's what you sign up for when you work for a startup with a culture that values time at work above pretty much everything else. The only dev who got a real promotion in that time was the guy who pulls 10 or 11-hour days every day, to prove his 'dedication' to the company. And no, he hasn't taken any vacation either.

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#236

Post by geofft »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #163
krschultz wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agree 100%. I am talking about giving people 1 month off per year. In those cases, how do you maintain efficiency without bloat?

What's wrong with bloat? Isn't profitability the goal, not efficiency? If it's best achieved by having more resources so you continue to be profitable when one resource is unavailable, then have more resources. This is as true of hard drives and fire exits as it is of employees.

Expanding on a point by brational, see Tom Demarco's book Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency. It makes the argument that if your goal is long-term profitability, you must have some excess capacity in human resources at all times. http://amzn.com/B004SOVC2Y

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#237

Post by spydum »

nekopa wrote: post #167
mackey wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who works for a company that offers unlimited vacation, I don't think its as cut and dry as you make it, although I see where you are coming from. I think the success of unlimited vacation really depends on the company, your manager, your peers, and you. That is a lot of things to get right, but if everything works out, I think unlimited vacation is really great. At least for my team, I think everyone shar…

An idea might be to track until the minimum has been met, then no more tracking after that.

problem with minimums is people like myself and certainly countless others will forget about it till end of year, then take off the entire month of december because they "must".

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#238

Post by didibus »

mackey wrote: post #128
Someone1234 wrote: post #30

I've said it before and I'll say it again, unlimited days off (or "open") and zero days off are identical. If you have unlimited vacation people are inclined to take less and people respect the vacation you take less ("as you can always take more!"). Here's a study[0] (PDF) called "Overwhelmed America: Why Don’t We Use Our Earned Leave?" It is biased (travel association) but interesting nonetheless. According to this…

As someone who works for a company that offers unlimited vacation, I don't think its as cut and dry as you make it, although I see where you are coming from. I think the success of unlimited vacation really depends on the company, your manager, your peers, and you. That is a lot of things to get right, but if everything works out, I think unlimited vacation is really great. At least for my team, I think everyone shar…

Did you ever counted how many days off you do end up taking, and how many consecutive days off?

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#239

Post by DanBC »

spydum wrote: post #237
nekopa wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An idea might be to track until the minimum has been met, then no more tracking after that.

problem with minimums is people like myself and certainly countless others will forget about it till end of year, then take off the entire month of december because they "must".

That's a problem with management, not with minimums.

Re: Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

#240

Post by evanpw »

eru wrote: post #223
evanpw wrote: post #194

I don't think I see a single negative comment here about long vacations, so allow me to play devil's advocate. (These questions don't necessarily reflect my own opinions.) 1. If this is such a free lunch (employees are both happier and more productive overall), then why isn't lots of vacation offered everywhere (in the US)? Can it really be the case that the vast majority of US companies are too short-sighted to make…

Those are good questions. I suspect the answer to two has to do with signalling.

True. If you can't tell how "hard-working" someone is from an interview, you might end up using "willing to work with less vacation" as a crude filter.

This is probably part of the answer to the whole question. In a world where you could measure every employee's productivity accurately, there's no need to keep track of how much vacation someone takes. In the real world, people end up using "time spent in the office" as a proxy, however weakly that might be correlated with actual productivity.

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