Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by BadBadJellyBean 47 days ago
The idea with vacation is that you don't think about work. When I start vacation I disable all the channels that people usually use so that no one asks me even by accident. There needs to be a time when you are completely undisturbed and disconnected. If you are disturbed by work you will think about work while you answer and maybe even after that. That's not good.

I also think you should normalize for yourself and your workplace that there are times when you are not there. If only you can answer a question then there needs to be better documentation. See it as a trail run for when you get hit by a bus. If they will struggle without you then that is a problem that needs to be fixed. If you are always reachable these problems will never surface.
2 comments
542458 47 days ago
> There needs to be a time when you are completely undisturbed and disconnected. If you are disturbed by work you will think about work while you answer and maybe even after that. That's not good.

IMO this is not a universal truth - I’m sure some people need that level of disconnection, but I don't find I'm one of them. I generally like my job, and don't find that forcing myself to disconnect does me any particular mental good. But other people report needing that separation, and that's fine! I don't think there needs to be a one-size-fits-all answer here.

I do agree with your bus factor argument though.

link
jon-wood 47 days ago
I generally work for small companies, and while I'll do something very similar when taking leave (or just at the weekend) I do also make sure someone has contact details for me in the case of anything that truly can't wait until I get back. My experience of doing this has been that people will be judicious about whether something actually warrants interrupting someone's holiday, and it also results in me being less inclined to check in on email/Slack now and again just in case something is up.
link
BadBadJellyBean 47 days ago
I was the only full time sysadmin of a 20 person company. I went on vacation for three whole weeks. I was half way around the globe and not reachable. The company still existed after I came back. They did have a problem. They tried to reach me. They couldn't. They figured it out by themselves.

I think we believe ourselves to be more irreplaceable than we are. And if you really think you are irreplaceable then the problem is not going on vacation but being irreplaceable. Because then if something were to happen to you they are screwed.

link
jon-wood 45 days ago
In one case I was the only full time technical person in the company. This was a very early stage startup that had literally nobody else who would know how to even start reading the code, never mind find the particularly gnarly bug that was causing paid for orders to disappear which surfaced while I was on holiday. (Because I was the only person capable of writing code I could also be pretty certain the bug was one I'd introduced and missed, so I wasn't too grumpy at debugging it from the back of a moving vehicle while on holiday).

Yes, ultimately the problem there is having a bus factor of one, and we resolved that in time but in those early days sometimes there really is nobody else who can fix things.

link