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> when someone pays you more, they respect you more The counter-example to that could be that once you're senior enough, you are never 100% on vacation. If e

• mattwad 7y ago
  > If enough goes wrong, you will get called back to work. True, but if you're good at your job, then this should be a very rare occurrence! It's still well worth the trade-off.
• natefox 7y ago
  I give my boss/coworkers my wife's phone number when I go on vacation. I tell them you have to talk to her to get to me. I then put my phone in airplane mode 95% of the time and use it as a camera. I'll occasionally undo airplane mode to upload photos or check the internets for something, but vacation for me is usually unplugging as well. I've yet to be called with this strategy.
  • RussianCow 7y ago
    Funny, I tried this once when I was on call and I still got called. And for a while after that, whenever someone couldn't reach me on my phone, they would call my wife. So really, it was a lose-lose.
    • chucksmash 7y ago
      That strikes me as wildly out of bounds. I imagine your wife has a job too, and her own work issues to deal with. I'd be very upset with the individual bothering my spouse because I hadn't returned their call fast enough for their tastes.
      • RussianCow 7y ago
        People in desperation tend not to think things through, especially when customers are the ones telling them that there's an issue. After the second occurrence, I explained to the relevant parties that my wife's phone cannot be used as a secondary contact for myself, and it didn't happen again after that, so I chalked it up to a misunderstanding. It was annoying, yes, but no one was pestering my wife on purpose.
        • bigiain 7y ago
          You're somewhat more generous than I am. I'd have told my wife to just block that number, and waited until I got back from vacation to explain that it'll happen to anyone else who calls my wife for anything other than an existential emergency as well.
          • viscanti 7y ago
            He also knew he was on-call and went somewhere where he didn't have reception. It sounds like he knew that might be an issue so gave his wife's number as a backup. That's basically training the person who has to escalate to use his wife's number as it's the one he responded on. I don't think he's being generous at all, it seems like an obvious outcome of being on call and not responding on his own phone.
            • RussianCow 7y ago
              This is accurate, although to be fair to myself, I didn't know I would be on call until after the plans were made. With that said, I take issue with this being an "obvious outcome" and the notion that I was "training" our staff to use my wife's number. I was explicit with the company (at least I thought) about the need to use her number only being applicable for that weekend; the fact that some people tried to use it when I was on call again in the future is on them. Mistakes happen, and everything worked out just fine, but I don't see how that part was my fault.
              • pure-awesome 7y ago
    • rcfox 7y ago
      Maybe I don't understand your situation, but screening your calls and staying in airplane mode while you're on-call doesn't seem to be appropriate.
      • RussianCow 7y ago
        It wasn't on purpose; that particular weekend we were going somewhere my phone didn't get any reception, but my wife's did. So, not exactly the same situation as OP.
  • sq_ 7y ago
    That's honestly an amazing strategy. Adds a pretty big extra layer of thought about whether the decision to call you would be worth it.
    • logifail 7y ago
      > Adds a pretty big extra layer of thought [..] I don't think the average <employer/line manager/assistant actually making the phone call> cares about it nearly as much as one might think they would: Boss: "we need to reach $person urgently, get them on the line for me..." <walks back into office> Assistant: "Sir, yes, sir"* <looks up numbers, calls $person's wife> * or local equivalent
      • hanniabu 7y ago
        Not just that, but they also need to convince your wife that you're needed
  • bradenb 7y ago
    Is giving them your wife's phone simply to discourage them from calling for non-emergency situations? Because in an emergency I highly doubt it would prevent my employer from getting in contact. I do agree about unplugging, but I've never had a vacation ruined by having a work-related text or call steal my attention for 5 minutes. If me being reachable (not necessarily _available_) puts my employer at ease then it makes it easier for me to take the vacations I want to take because they're more likely to be flexible with my schedule during busy times.
• hoov 7y ago
  Or even nothing goes wrong suddenly. Once, I had a vacation planned for six months and had to spend the long weekend cooped up in my hotel room overseeing a complicated migration.
  • komali2 7y ago
    To play devil's advocate, why was a migration so complicated that your engineers couldn't do it without you if it failed, being done on a vacation that everyone knew about for six months?
    • Ma8ee 7y ago
      I won’t say anything the planning, but I’ve learned that migrations are usually hard, in the sense that you have to deal with poorly understood, seldom documented and, almost always inconsistent data. And at the same time critical since you usually can’t afford much downtime between the shutting down the old system and start using the new.
  • asark 7y ago
    Planning something over your vacation and expecting you to work on it is just your manager being a dick. If they can do it without you, they should. If they can't do it without you, guess it can wait 'till you get back. Not like you dropped it on them last minute.
• bcyn 7y ago
  That has nothing to do with seniority, it's 100% about how you draw personal boundaries between work hours and personal hours. You can make it clear that you will be completely unplugged during vacation.
  • joshuamorton 7y ago
    Once you are an executive, you often have contractual obligations. You are the key decision maker people escalate to. If time sensitive things that need a decision to be made the buck stops with you, no matter where you are. To give an extreme example, the President (of the US) is never truly unplugged. In the cases where the president is truly unplugged, SoP is for that person to temporarily stop being the President.
    • taurath 7y ago
      Delegation of authority is key here. If not for the commander in chief role of the president it’s conceivable they could just delegate decision making to the cabinet.
  • Bootvis 7y ago
    That depends on the position, I believe it is easy for a software engineer in a big corp. For senior management or an engineer in a small corp with lots of domain knowledge: a lot harder. The second set of people can try but when shit hits the fan they will have to explain what happened and why it couldn’t be prevented.
  • opportune 7y ago
    You can absolutely do that, but then you will not get promoted past a certain stage at most companies. I do this because I'm not yet in a very senior position but if I were managing 100 people and in charge of an entire product I doubt I could do that
    • wolco 7y ago
      This makes a lot of sense but goes against the article. Making more doesn't always give you more freedom. If you want power you have to pay for it. In your case why would you push for a higher role knowing the tradeoffs?
• watwut 7y ago
  That is more of mark of desorganized workplace then something inherent to senior role.
  • nsxwolf 7y ago
    I don't know anyone that hasn't worked in a disorganized workplace then.
    • watwut 7y ago
      I definitely did. Once in three years project senior being acutely needed during his vacation? Sure. Every time senior is in vacation? No. There being once a week release that needs senior involvement each time it happens so it surely hits also vacation? Badly organized.
  • yazan94 7y ago
    I disagree. For reference, I work in a big bank and all the high level people are always on call when fecal matter hits the rotating turbines. Often times, theres an issue with this or that feature in production or we are having an issue with a release and we need an emergency signoff. The process stipulates that a high level person is required to give this emergency signoff, and they often want to know what happened, what are our options, which one we chose so there's usually a lot of time spent chasing down answers or people who can answer those questions.
    • Jach 7y ago
      This sounds like a disorganized workplace to me. The standard thought experiment is: what happens if <supposedly important person> gets hit by a bus and dies? What if they're just in a coma for a few weeks? The response to the first satisfies a sudden "I'm quitting" and the response to the second satisfies a sudden "I'm going on vacation". Business is more forgiving of course, since both quitting and vacation planning typically have a time delay. The simplest response for both is to delegate: "<person y> now has temporary or permanent authority in the decisions <person x> used to have". That means you need to have a person y for each person x and there needs to be enough trust that person y will make decisions that x would approve of (even if sometimes different). If you're a single-person startup, there is no person y, but then these questions aren't really relevant. As the Pinboard FAQ says, the answer to what happens is the bus will be fine.
• tracker1 7y ago
  I go on road trips... I'm largely out of range of decent reception on the road.
• deleted 7y ago
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• Tsagadai 7y ago
  Only if you are not good at process. If you have solid practices, documentation and system design skills you can make yourself removable, then you can go on leave whenever and things will be fine. A good way to measure this is look at how long it takes to do handover when someone leaves a project. If it is more than half an hour of showing someone where the repo is and a brief explanation then you have a problem that can be fixed with better processes. Ideally, someone should be able to pick up a project or a product very quickly as all the information they need should be in a simple, easily navigable format that they can consume and understand. I realise that is an ideal case but if you are senior enough to lead you can be senior enough to never make yourself a dependency and that callback never comes because it is never required. Ensuring management above you understands your value is another problem (anyone who can code themselves out of a job is worth keeping around and giving harder jobs to and good managers will understand that).
• distantaidenn 7y ago
  Definitely. Called back to work from a holiday on a Thai island. CEO was near frothing at the mouth over my absence when shit hit the fan.
  • selestify 7y ago
    What the hell? Did you accept the call back to work? > CEO was near frothing at the mouth over my absence when shit hit the fan. I'd be the one offended for having my vacation interrupted.
  • bigred100 7y ago
    Sometimes I wonder how such emotionally immature people become so successful. I know it’s common, but if I knew someone who started throwing a fit over something incredibly minor and predictable (an employee took a vacation) I’d think they were unfit for any leadership role.
• sagichmal 7y ago
  > once you're senior enough, you are never 100% on vacation This has not been my experience either personally or by proxy to my more-senior colleagues. But it may be I have found myself in a particular niche which is non-representative.
• chadash 7y ago
  I agree with your sentiment, but I don't think this is quite a "counter-example". The fact that someone gives you a lot of responsibility is definitely a sign that they respect you more. But yeah, along with more pay and responsibility comes the expectation that you take the blame when things go wrong. And if they go wrong during your vacation, it's up to you to fix them. This can definitely be true in lower level positions as well, but I agree with the sentiment that this tends to be _more_ true with upper level management.