Testing people outages is a good thing for any team or organization. I always look at multi-week holidays as an opportunity to identify knowledge / skills / activities that I (or another person) provide(s) cover for.
None of us will be around forever. Some of our software might be...
Not the same, a vacation is a vacation, most people don't think of it as people outages. Most work will just be queued up until the person comes back or worse the person will be contacted during vacation to answer questions, provide information or do some work. Being hyper aware of this means no contact for the individual while on vacation and watching that work is not being queued up for them. They should not have to catch up to emails and catch up to slack conversations when they get back. A return from vacation should be truly refreshing not overwhelming.
Man, I hope that position pay really well for that kind of commitment. If anyone tries to reach me while I'm on vacation I will not even realize it, and I won't be bothering to "catch up" when I return.
Then you must not have a very important job. The hypothetical person being discussed here is someone who multiple people depend on. Their work is critical to other processes and blocks other work from happening. They own a lot of institutional knowledge that may not be shared evenly among other employees.
That's the point of the exercise: to identify mission critical people and make them not critical to the entire business. If your business hinges on one person who knows everything and works on everything, you're fucked if they disappear and you haven't ensured at least some redundancy.
The way the other person phrased it made it seem like that kind of fake vacations are the norm, which is what I was replying to.
>Most work [during someone's vacation] will just be queued up until the person comes back or worse the person will be contacted during vacation to answer questions, provide information or do some work.
Nothing in that sentence implies that the person is referring exclusively to an especially important position.
You must be lucky, but most people I know and from my own experience end up replying to email, slack or phone calls while on vacation and work piles up for them relative to how long they have been away.
Like I said, I hope you're compensated accordingly. Off time is off time, and being on call has a price attached to it. If you're being treated like you're on call but without the corresponding pay rise, that's called wage theft.
Well yeah, that's why a vacation is a good test, "important job" or not. If the person needs to respond or even check in during vacation, the team needs to fix their process.
My favorite part of working in banking. Minimum week no contact per year. All these other industries would call me about (trivial) things when I was "off". Regulations forced people to respect (some) time off
I've never been a manager, but my favorite managers always lead by example - they would take arbitrary time off, and would be completely unreachable during that time.
As a senior eng, I try to do the same when I have time off - work notifications are muted, and my away message is typically set to "I'm away for X days. If you to reach me, no, you don't."
Wow. Good insight! I have never viewed vacation this way. I always thought the only reason vacation exists is because companies have to give vacation due to laws and well being of their employee. So when I get some days off, I always feel a bit guilty because the company is losing out something.
You feel guilty that the law doesn’t allow you to give your entire time to a corporation? I can ease your conscience, the law is simply an equilibrium where capitals long term exploitation of labor and the risk of violent revolution are carefully balanced.
> So when I get some days off, I always feel a bit guilty because the company is losing out something.
Do you feel guilty when they pay you too? Paid vacation is a form of compensation.
Every day of your ~30 days of vacation which you do not use, they likely have to pay you out as a full day's worth of wages anyways.
Most will prefer you take a month or two each year off, recuperate, and come back refreshed and productive, rather than having to deal with the bookkeeping and tax hassle of paying you extra.
None of us will be around forever. Some of our software might be...