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It cuts both ways. I love WFH and would love to do it indefinitely. Used to do it 1-2 days/week at prior job. My wife and I are both ICs and introverts, and ha

It cuts both ways. I love WFH and would love to do it indefinitely. Used to do it 1-2 days/week at prior job. My wife and I are both ICs and introverts, and happy to have the space/privacy/quiet. However, my firm especially is really taking advantage of it. They are getting far more work out of us while acting like they are doing us a favor by not dragging us back yet. Meeting load is up 25-50%, but story points per sprint are still way up. Major strategic projects are progressing, profit is high and customer feedback is positive. Firm is in crazy growth mode. People aren't really using their "unlimited" vacation time. Managers feel welcome to send emails/slacks out of hours and not even ack responses during business hours. Getting hold of them during 9a-6p can take hours, and if you want to have a quick chat put something on their calendar .. good luck finding a slot any sooner than 2 days out. None of this is sustainable after even a hybrid return to the office, and its accompanying time sucks of commuting/lunch pickup/childcare arrangements and people actually having social lives and things to do after work again.

ckdarby 5y ago
This sounds like poor expectation setting and more poor management. Use your 1:1 time to set reachable hour expectations with your manager. Switch your "quick chats" to Slack messages and /reminds to get your answers in timely fashion.
anyfoo 5y ago
"Unlimited" vacation time is so bizarre to me, it almost seems like a scam to me. Obviously it's not legally binding, otherwise a malicious employee could not work a single day and legally not face repercussions. But in Germany at least, vacation days are a matter of law. The number of days per year is part of the contract, and there is a strict minimum of 24 days (at least in Bavaria). It is as far as I know not legal to prevent people from exhausting their allocated vacation days within the full year, a couple of years ago a court decided that employers have to remind employees when they risk expiring their vacation days after a year. So I guess anyone who has "unlimited" vacation time does not actually have unlimited vacation time, but the opposite: The legal minimum of mandated vacation time, with the option to get additional time on top if the employer agrees. Effectively, any person who even just has one day more than the legal minimum, but fixed, has more right to take time off than someone with "unlimited" vacation!
- bradlys 5y ago
  Unlimited vacation time can be better than what some companies offer as standard. In the US, two weeks (or none) is the norm. 3 weeks is decent. 4 weeks is considered exceptional. (You might even get some holidays too) The standard amount in the US basically just sucks and there’s almost no employer offering European levels of time off as a standard. Unlimited is where you suddenly can hit 5+ weeks if you get the right manager. But - again - depends on your manager and your relationship with them. I’ve personally never had much of an issue taking 5+ weeks every year at my places of employment but I use whatever position I have to the best of my abilities. (And sometimes I get 6+ weeks in a year, very uncommon)
  - steveBK123 5y ago
    I work in an industry where 4-5 weeks off plus federal holidays and sick days is not uncommon for senior engineers. What I have found is that "unlimited" actually works the opposite as it's more of a thing you have to ask for. With an amount spelled out it feels more like a fixed allocation you are entitled to and that you are deducting from. If you have the wrong manager (and good luck sniffing this out in interviews), it turns into a competition of who can use the least.
- biztos 5y ago
  I agree, and I also found the "no rollover" rule in Germany quite helpful. You have your very nice vacation allotment and you must take it or you will lose it and your manager may get a talking-to. In many companies you are even required to take at least two vacations of at least one week each in any given year: the whole point of the vacation is to prevent you burning out.
thegginthesky 5y ago
About the meeting load proble, this was actually happening with me a bit before 2021 so I did the most sane thing: I talked with my manager and my manager's boss about it in a non-confrotarional way. Turns out both of them and 80% of my coworkers felt the same way, so we decided to trim down meetings to the bare minimum,arrange them so they are close to each other, and the company had to instate that meetings need a clear description and goal before setting them up. I still get the odd day where my afternoon is completely booked, but I now have about 30 hours of uninterrupted work where I can program, trouble shoot, analyse data or pair program with junior people. I believe we have to be constantly watchful "meeting creep" and always question stuff such as ritual meetings. If an IC is swamped by meetings, things are very wrong indeed. And about the communication after work hours, unless it's an outage, I reply when I get back at work and so does everyone in my team. Maybe having this arrangement with your boss and setting boundaries is a good idea? You can't forbid them from communicating asynchronously whenever they want, but they need to respect that you won't reply to them right away.
- steveBK123 5y ago
  Agreed, the meeting load waxes&wanes.. we at one point had mandatory team-wide agile meetings of one form of another for about 9 hours/week. I managed to push that down to 5 hours/week, but other stuff creeps in. We all feel the same way, and management is aware but it's hard to get meetings removed until it becomes bosses idea, so it is often 6 months of suggestion before reality. Often the response to high meeting load for ICs is management telling us how many more hours of meetings they have! Agreed about after-hours comms, though sometimes it then becomes a Friday 5pm or Thursday 6:45pm call to the cell instead, which never happened in the before times.

ckdarby 5y ago

This sounds like poor expectation setting and more poor management. Use your 1:1 time to set reachable hour expectations with your manager. Switch your "quick chats" to Slack messages and /reminds to get your answers in timely fashion.

anyfoo 5y ago

"Unlimited" vacation time is so bizarre to me, it almost seems like a scam to me. Obviously it's not legally binding, otherwise a malicious employee could not work a single day and legally not face repercussions. But in Germany at least, vacation days are a matter of law. The number of days per year is part of the contract, and there is a strict minimum of 24 days (at least in Bavaria). It is as far as I know not legal to prevent people from exhausting their allocated vacation days within the full year, a couple of years ago a court decided that employers have to remind employees when they risk expiring their vacation days after a year. So I guess anyone who has "unlimited" vacation time does not actually have unlimited vacation time, but the opposite: The legal minimum of mandated vacation time, with the option to get additional time on top if the employer agrees. Effectively, any person who even just has one day more than the legal minimum, but fixed, has more right to take time off than someone with "unlimited" vacation!

bradlys 5y ago
Unlimited vacation time can be better than what some companies offer as standard. In the US, two weeks (or none) is the norm. 3 weeks is decent. 4 weeks is considered exceptional. (You might even get some holidays too) The standard amount in the US basically just sucks and there’s almost no employer offering European levels of time off as a standard. Unlimited is where you suddenly can hit 5+ weeks if you get the right manager. But - again - depends on your manager and your relationship with them. I’ve personally never had much of an issue taking 5+ weeks every year at my places of employment but I use whatever position I have to the best of my abilities. (And sometimes I get 6+ weeks in a year, very uncommon)
- steveBK123 5y ago
  I work in an industry where 4-5 weeks off plus federal holidays and sick days is not uncommon for senior engineers. What I have found is that "unlimited" actually works the opposite as it's more of a thing you have to ask for. With an amount spelled out it feels more like a fixed allocation you are entitled to and that you are deducting from. If you have the wrong manager (and good luck sniffing this out in interviews), it turns into a competition of who can use the least.
biztos 5y ago
I agree, and I also found the "no rollover" rule in Germany quite helpful. You have your very nice vacation allotment and you must take it or you will lose it and your manager may get a talking-to. In many companies you are even required to take at least two vacations of at least one week each in any given year: the whole point of the vacation is to prevent you burning out.

thegginthesky 5y ago

About the meeting load proble, this was actually happening with me a bit before 2021 so I did the most sane thing: I talked with my manager and my manager's boss about it in a non-confrotarional way. Turns out both of them and 80% of my coworkers felt the same way, so we decided to trim down meetings to the bare minimum,arrange them so they are close to each other, and the company had to instate that meetings need a clear description and goal before setting them up. I still get the odd day where my afternoon is completely booked, but I now have about 30 hours of uninterrupted work where I can program, trouble shoot, analyse data or pair program with junior people. I believe we have to be constantly watchful "meeting creep" and always question stuff such as ritual meetings. If an IC is swamped by meetings, things are very wrong indeed. And about the communication after work hours, unless it's an outage, I reply when I get back at work and so does everyone in my team. Maybe having this arrangement with your boss and setting boundaries is a good idea? You can't forbid them from communicating asynchronously whenever they want, but they need to respect that you won't reply to them right away.

steveBK123 5y ago
Agreed, the meeting load waxes&wanes.. we at one point had mandatory team-wide agile meetings of one form of another for about 9 hours/week. I managed to push that down to 5 hours/week, but other stuff creeps in. We all feel the same way, and management is aware but it's hard to get meetings removed until it becomes bosses idea, so it is often 6 months of suggestion before reality. Often the response to high meeting load for ICs is management telling us how many more hours of meetings they have! Agreed about after-hours comms, though sometimes it then becomes a Friday 5pm or Thursday 6:45pm call to the cell instead, which never happened in the before times.