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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 wi

by 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?
  - opportune 7y ago
    Because the money is worth the loss of flexibility, for me, under certain circumstances (envision a yield curve of salary vs. some proxy of work-life balance). Specifically I think the tradeoffs are worth it up to staff/senior staff and first rung of management, depending on the team.
goatinaboat 7y ago
You can make it clear that you will be completely unplugged during vacation. To get to that level you will need to go through levels where you can’t do that without jeopardising further promotions.

by bcyn 7y ago

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?
- opportune 7y ago
  Because the money is worth the loss of flexibility, for me, under certain circumstances (envision a yield curve of salary vs. some proxy of work-life balance). Specifically I think the tradeoffs are worth it up to staff/senior staff and first rung of management, depending on the team.

goatinaboat 7y ago

You can make it clear that you will be completely unplugged during vacation. To get to that level you will need to go through levels where you can’t do that without jeopardising further promotions.