81–90 of 120 posts
Incidentally, we're hiring if you want to try it out yourself ;)
The company I work for recently adopted a NetFlix style "we don't track vacation" policy. It's been about nine months, and anecdotes (no data available - we don't track!) suggest total vacation time taken is less than half of last year. I suppose that whether that's good or bad is pretty subjective.
Right. Unless you literally mean take as much vacation as you feel is right and no matter how much you take (even 4 weeks straight), we won't ask questions, then I'd rather have a specific number. For sick time, I think this is a great idea. I have unlimited sick time where I work, so I only take it when I'm really sick. It's like the saying that what gets measured gets done. The measure of legitimate sick time is no…
After a lot of hand waving "don't worry about it" answers to preliminary queries about sick time logistics, I was told (after the fact) I had to take open-heart surgery as a vacation day.
15 years ago, the company I worked for, piloted no limit on sick leave policy. The average number of sick leave taken fell from 12 days to 9 days. Company publised the statistics to employees and Only people whose sick leave exceeded 2 standard deviation were notified. We also piloted alternate Friday off, the absenteeism due to doctor, dentist, car service appointments fell off to negligible.
I don't understand what notified means? Notified of termination? So each year the company measured which people had the most sick days, which would of course be those dealing with cancer treatments as such, and fired them? IF so, it is reminiscent of Jack Welch's notorious dictat to fire the 10% "at the bottom" each year.
No doubt I am misunderstanding the policy you are describing, which is why I am asking for clarification.
"We don't have deadlines" What? How is this even possible? Even if one doesn't set internal deadlines, I can't imagine avoiding integration commitments with any number of third parties, whether they be strategic partners, clients/customers, api/feed integrators, etc.
We're lucky that we're very self-contained (little product), and when things break we're usually able to fix them quickly (again, small team and little product). :)
Slavery started when slave drivers realized that they could take everything, then give a little back, reluctantly, infrequently, and unpredictably, and engender gratitude instead of anger in their slaves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yeah, that's something you in the US really need to fix. Perhaps. It'd be tough to swallow the hit in productivity though.
Well, maybe. But a happy and adequately-vacationed workforce is surely going to be more productive, so the loss might be less than it seems (citation needed here, admittedly). And I guess it might mean a few extra jobs, which surely can't be a bad thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yeah, that's something you in the US really need to fix. Perhaps. It'd be tough to swallow the hit in productivity though.
Would it? With the current level of unemployment, having companies forced to hire more people might be a good thing.
Healthy quantities of vacation time is one of the reasons I'm still in public education after 15 years. Teaching in a public school isn't the easiest job in the world (nor the hardest, probably), and not everyone has the personality for it, but I really believe that having a lot of time off contributes to my mental / emotional / physical health and helps me to be an excellent teacher when I am working. In my district…
I thought that the year-round model wasn't to increase the days in the classroom so much as get rid of the three-month gap(replacing it with several shorter ones) because students tend to lose so much knowledge during summer vacation.
Hi all, Peldi here. Thanks for the feedback. I don't know how much vacation everyone here is taking (I could look in the shared vacation calendar we have), but I'd say everyone is taking 3-4 weeks a year, plus some more time when they take their laptop to the beach and work half-days from there. This is one of the policies that I fear might not work if we ever reach a certain size, but so far we're all happy with it.…
I just want to comment that policy like this will cause you problems in recruiting a certain type of talent. Of course, that will be imposible to measure, but I can tell you none of my friends (we are little older but not so much) will not work for a company which has a policy like that. We just had a beer talk last Friday about that.
Healthy quantities of vacation time is one of the reasons I'm still in public education after 15 years. Teaching in a public school isn't the easiest job in the world (nor the hardest, probably), and not everyone has the personality for it, but I really believe that having a lot of time off contributes to my mental / emotional / physical health and helps me to be an excellent teacher when I am working. In my district…
I am a designer, engineer and entrepreneur, but I have also taught high school in the past. As an engineer, I would not consider working for a place that had a problem with less than 4 weeks vacation. It is absolutely necessary to have that as a minimum to recharge and do a great job. If I'm not allowed to do what I need to to do a great job, I don't want the job, I tell people to give it to some lackey instead and j…
I do agree that time off should be considered when talking about teacher salaries. I know other states are different, but in Texas I feel like teacher salaries are mostly pretty good now, but they weren't for a long time.
In 1997, when I started teaching, my salary was $24,000 per year. That was about 43% below the median household salary in the Austin area at the time.
A teacher starting this year would make $42,000 per year, which is only 15% below the median household salary.
The median salary for the Austin area has only increased ~20% in the past 15 years, but the starting teacher salary (in my district, anyway) has gone up 75% in that same time period.
So, in my opinion, a lot of the "teachers are underpaid" rhetoric comes from folks who haven't run the numbers recently.