7 ms·

My strange aversion to vacations

46 points by jaf12duke 13y ago

superkvn 13y ago
As a fellow entrepreneur, your challenges with vacation resonates with me. We offer hefty vacation plans in our company but no one actually takes advantage of them because they're motivated, self starters that love to work. The precation concept is interesting.
- jwoah12 13y ago
  Or, many of them do want to take advantage of their vacation, but the culture is such that they feel like they shouldn't take vacation because nobody else does.
bluedino 13y ago
I end up only using about 5 days for a week-long trip each year. Then November rolls around, and I try to schedule all my remaining days before I lose them at the end of the year. I can't get anything done at the office because nobody else is there. Sure I can work on things and enjoy peace but without graphic artists or designers there I can only go so far, I'll end up throwing stuff out because it's not what they wanted. But if I stay home, I'm stuck doing holiday stuff or running around to the homes of friends and family. When I get back to work after New Years I need a vacation.
- pc86 13y ago
  My fiance and I have taken to using our vacation when others generally don't. She has an unlimited vacation policy while mine is very strict (n hours per pay period) but generous. Taking vacation at odd times means it's less crowded where ever we go (if we go anywhere) as well as if there is a large absence of employees from her firm or mine, it's almost like a second vacation where we can concentrate on getting our individual tasks completed. There is less of a pronounced absence at the end of the year for my company because hours roll over and the cap is somewhere around 2.5 years of time.
larsberg 13y ago
People mimic their management chain. If the CEO/managers don't take vacations, neither will their directs. One of the most balanced (and productive) teams I've worked on was under a general manager who had 8 kids and made it a point to attend _every_ event they had and go on regular vacations. Since everybody ran into his policy at some point (reviews scheduled at 5pm canceled or him out of town for a week or two), the whole org was pretty good about doing the same. And it was very different from other orgs in the company, many of which had the usual long hours + weekends culture.
- onemorepassword 13y ago
  I have to disagree with that premise. Our two founders are around 4 days per week, usually go home around five and tend to take long vacations. The rest of us have to be encouraged to take our vacation days. There's a culture of everyone taking days off on a regular basis without too much formality ("won't be in this friday, see ya"), but long vacations are rare.
  - larsberg 13y ago
    Do you think everyone would take those random days off on a regular basis if your founders instead worked 6 days a week and never took vacations? (honest question based on your situation, not rhetorical/sarcastic) Sometimes, particularly with young people (no family and no college buddies around), I had trouble getting them to take vacations because frankly they just had nobody to hang out with for a long period of time. You can only sit at home (or on the beach) and play WoW for so long, so it didn't really bother me much when they didn't, as long as they were taking enough random days off to stay fresh and motivated at work.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Yeah, my boss takes days off all the time (and deservedly so), but I'm accruing "use or lose" days at a scary rate now and I have no vacation plan in sight other than a few days in May for family and a week in July for family. Edit: And to be clear, I think this has been and will continue to be detrimental to my work product overall, the only reason I haven't taken a break yet is being I'm triple-hatted for now until July or so. By then I'll have a chance to think about what I want to do with my break, I hope.
anonu 13y ago
whats the point of life if you are working all the time? Life is about balance and not taking a vacation - ever - sounds like your balance is off kilter.
- recursive 13y ago
  Could it not be possible that you can feel balanced without vacation? Perhaps some people experience some of what you experience in a vacation every day.
- randomdata 13y ago
  I'm not really sure what I would do with a vacation. Travelling doesn't particularly interest me, and I would get bored fast if I stayed at home to watch TV all day long. I get paid to do my hobbies, so that would technically qualify as work.
jonathanjaeger 13y ago
I feel like startups that have no vacation policy at all (as in, take as much as you want) run into the problem where employees might feel guilty about taking vacation or forget to take all their days because they're busy. However if the norm is 7 days or 10 days or 14 days per year, it's more concrete and you don't feel guilty for taking them. I think it's psychological. Personally I don't really ever feel the need for a vacation more than one day every few months, but that's just me now in a particular time and place. I think that'll change as the demands on my life change.
- onemorepassword 13y ago
  It works both ways, the other problem with "take as much as you want" is that it makes it more difficult to call people on not taking enough time off. You may not think you need a vacation, but others may feel your work is getting sloppier and you're more easily irritated. Most human beings are usually the last to notice these things about themselves.
  - jonathanjaeger 13y ago
    I also think it can be job-specific. For example, I'm working on a website on the side which requires both more administrative work and more product/creative work than my day job. My day job is in marketing, and the more time I take off the more time I'm not running performance marketing campaigns that generate revenue every day. I think vacation is very specific to job function in many cases -- in one I would definitely reach burn out and in another I wouldn't. In creative work, like if you're a graphic designer, I can imagine not taking a break would have greater repercussions on the creative process than in my job.
hai2ashwin 13y ago
In India, the concept of a long vacation is still alien. This year we are going to experiment with 5 day shutdown during xmas. Most people here don't have a sense of holidaying. So they end up too bored that they turn back to work!
- lutusp 13y ago
  > In India, the concept of a long vacation is still alien ... Most people here don't have a sense of holidaying. I think this is a holdover from the colonial era, when the British, before embarking on a fox hunt, expressed the view that the natives shouldn't be wasting their time holidaying.
  - hai2ashwin 13y ago
    Perhaps. Also the economic momentum has made people more driven and those who are not that driven, would still get to work due to peer pressure. We need a 'slowdown movement' of our own!
purplelobster 13y ago
My wife and I come from two different continents and live in a third. That results in a whole lot of traveling just to visit family, and basically no time left for "vacations". It feels rather unsustainable. Would love an unlimited vacation policy, but in the end probably feel guilty to be taking way more than the average person at the company. In less than a year though, we'll move to my home country which has minimum 5 weeks vacation, with many people having 6-7 weeks. Not only does that mean we can cut our "family visit" traveling in half, but also increase vacation by roughly 70%. It'll mean taking a pay cut, but honestly it's worth it.
jlarocco 13y ago
I have to say this article really annoyed me. Maybe I read too much into it, but he seems to be snubbing people who take vacation. I'm glad not vacationing works for him, and it's his life to live, but that's not for everybody. I wouldn't write an article snubbing people who work all the time, and I don't see why he needs to snub people who take vacation. Second, he seems incredibly proud to be working all the time. A good portion of the article is basically, "Hey, check me out! I'm working all the time! How cool am I?". Get over it. Third, the author has a hugely exaggerated sense of self-importance. Reading the article, you'd think he's curing cancer and AIDs and cleaning up the environment all at once. Take this, for example: "But startups are different. Startups are a mission; a belief that something impossible is actually possible. It’s being part of a team that is working toward some distant horizon. It’s this competing against the impossible that makes it so much fun." And what is the distant horizon he's working toward? From the 42 Floors home page, it's "The best place to find office space." That's the impossible he's making possible? That's why he's working 100% of the time? What a joke.
- pc86 13y ago
  I've noticed this about a lot of startups. Even more so than everyone thinks they're The Next Big Thing, everyone thinks their mission is Incredibly Important and whatever Capitalized Buzzword is in at the moment. It's important to have passion, and to believe in your product. Your product doesn't need to feed the poor or clothe the needy for you to be passionate about it, but my word there is nothing revolutionary about commercial real estate (to use 42Floors as an (unfair?) example).
- aashaykumar92 13y ago
  "And what is the distant horizon he's working toward? From the 42 Floors home page, it's 'The best place to find office space.' That's the impossible he's making possible? That's why he's working 100% of the time? What a joke." I respect all your prior annoyances, and don't care to comment on them, but this one pissed me off. 42Floors seems to be doing a fucking awesome job in helping startups, even well established companies, find office space. Pissing on their efforts by making some snide remark ('what a joke') is completely uncalled for. Finding office space IS a huge problem for companies, especially startups who don't have much money but still need some space...42Floors is making that process (which I'm sure can sometimes be seemingly impossible) far simpler by providing the service that they are.
nicholassmith 13y ago
As an effective manager you should make sure you're leaving your developers time to go do something. Makes them better developers and keeps burnout at bay.
scrabble 13y ago
I've never worked for a startup, but I've always had an aversion to vacation. It's not that I don't like going places or enjoying myself, but I hate being away and I hate not being involved and getting things done. A good vacation for me is a day off to relax here and there, or a weekend away. Taking more than 3 days at a time always seems like too much and I end up wanting to get back. I still need to take that week long vacation every year for the enjoyment of my wife and kids, but it seems too long.
helloburin 13y ago
I've felt the same way for my whole life, and the idea of a pre-cation is how I have to trick myself into taking time off too. My first jobs were "in my spare time", and instead of taking a vacation from school to go party in Cancun for Spring Break (spend time AND money), I'd work. Mostly to pay for more school OR for that sweet computer I wanted. Since having a "real job", my brain still considers vacation as "time I'm not earning money", even though it's Paid Time Off. Even when I do manage to trick myself into vacation, they're usually "active" trips, where I feel like every minute needs to be spent doing something "productive" like snorkeling or feeding sharks. You won't find me laying out on the beach anywhere! The ironic thing is that I work in the travel industry and I know how important this stuff is! I think our problem is that we want to create value with our limited time on this planet, so maybe we need to consider it to be an investment that will pay us back in inspiration later down the road.
minimax 13y ago
"Your coworkers are your friends. It’s so much closer to a life style than a job that taking a vacation from your startup doesn’t have the same connotation." This guy does not get what vacations are about. I know what it feels like to work hard with people you like at a job you enjoy, but I also know what it's like to kill two weeks lounging around southern Europe and swimming in the Mediterranean Sea every day. Both things are good but they are not the same thing. If you think satisfying work is a substitute for a good vacation you are doing it wrong.
- jaf12duke 13y ago
  Hmmm...maybe the fault is in my writing. I think vacations are incredibly important. And I've now learned to take them (just spent 8 days in the BVIs...it was awesome). And I want everyone in our company to take more of them. I thought that was clear in the post.
- Dewie 13y ago
  My mother once said to me that vacations aren't as much about relaxation as they are about doing different things than what you usually do. I've come to believe the same thing, and in that regard going to a different country is definitely an effective way to take a vacation from your normal life.
  - randomdata 13y ago
    While I like that definition, it perhaps makes it difficult to draw a distinction between work and vacation. For instance, I spend a few weeks each year tending to my farm. Its an enjoyable break from routine, but it is still technically work. That is vacation to me, but to an outsider it looks like I don't take vacations.
rdouble 13y ago
Unlimited vacation policies are mainly a way for the employer to avoid the accounting and financial burden that occurs when providing defined vacation benefits. Vacation benefits are not required, but if a company offers them, most states require the employer to track employee absences and leave accrual. Unused vacation must be paid out when the employee leaves the company. Unlimited vacation policies remove the need for tracking and payouts for unused vacation time.
- jaf12duke 13y ago
  That's not the case for us. The administrative burden is not heavy. Most payroll solutions include this out of the box. The much bigger issue for us is that we don't like rules and policies. We try to take 'do what you think is right' to the nth degree.
greenyoda 13y ago
I really liked their idea of a "precation", two weeks of paid vacation before you start: "At 42floors, we heavily, heavily recommend that all new people take two weeks of vacation starting exactly on their first official day. What this means is that when you get a job offer from us, you’ll pick a start date. And that’s the day we start your payroll. And that’s the day you leave for vacation. And you get to take that time to transition from one chapter of your life to the next. If your startup just failed or you hated your last job, you get a couple weeks of mental and physical recovery. If you have a significant other that’s been dying to get away with you, you can go away someplace nice knowing that your first paycheck will be waiting for you when you return."
xradionut 13y ago
I understand the precation. One of the best trips I had was after getting laid off from a large dysfunctional corporation that was under going a re-org and having few years of accumulated salary in the bank due to never having a chance to take a "real" break from work in several years. HR was shocked when they realized that I hadn't taken more than few days off in my tenure. I had over 6 months of "combined" time that had rolled over year after year. But I was the chump that got things done, covered during the holidays, for installs, moves, covered Y2K, and when everyone else had a life and babies. Never again.
addlepate 13y ago
I work for a company that offers unlimited vacation. It works, and I think it's great, and it's a major hurdle for me leaving to work somewhere else. It seems that even top companies offer maybe 3 weeks vacation, which just seems pitifully small to me these days. I don't wanna sit around trying to figure out how to optimally use my remaining 1.79 weeks of vacation time, I just wanna do a good job and take time off when I need or want to. I see this argument about unlimited vacation pretty often, and I think the people making this argument think they are out-clevering a clever idea. But it comes down to the organization's culture -- if you work for a place where taking time off is encouraged, then you feel free to take vacations and others do too. If you don't work in that sort of place, it doesn't matter what your allotted vacation time is because you won't use it anyway. Or if you do, you won't enjoy it. Here's the real problem in a tech context, though -- conferences. If you can't get away, you can't go to conferences, and you'll end up forfeiting the knowledge and outside perspectives you get from going to conferences. It's just not the same thing at all as learning on your own. I mean, I'm not in a situation where I think my tiny company will one day be worth untold billions. Maybe in that situation you need to keep your nose to the grindstone. But I think that sounds like kind of a grim existence. I will say this, though: if you have a balanced life to begin with, the idea of laying on a beach somewhere kinda loses its urgency. Vacations become less necessary to keep your sanity or whatever, which is great. But there still is the need to step away and see something different for a while. There is value in that, believe it.
d4vlx 13y ago
This post makes me want to work at 42floors. Mission accomplished Jason ;)
eCa 13y ago
As a european it feels equally strange every time I read about "unlimited" vacation. IMHO, it's just as bad as unlimited bandwidth, or whatever. It's just not unlimited. Where I work I have 30 days paid vacation (in adition to big holidays). If I don't use them, I get to push 5-10 of the unused days to the next year (and can save them for up to five years, after which I get their worth in salary; I guess about $150-200 per day). Currently I have ~20 days saved, so theoretically I could take 50 days vacation this year (work permitting). This system sets both a lower and upper limit to how much vacation is expected. Much fairer for the employee - no more guessing when it becomes too much vacation. I'm guessing most employers in USA would consider 30 days to be too many? And yes, even though I don't work for a startup I still consider my team mates my friends.
supreeth 13y ago
Have you tried work holidays, where the team takes off to work for a couple of weeks at a vacation spot? Works like a charm.

46 points by jaf12duke 13y ago

As a fellow entrepreneur, your challenges with vacation resonates with me. We offer hefty vacation plans in our company but no one actually takes advantage of them because they're motivated, self starters that love to work. The precation concept is interesting.

jwoah12 13y ago
Or, many of them do want to take advantage of their vacation, but the culture is such that they feel like they shouldn't take vacation because nobody else does.

bluedino 13y ago

I end up only using about 5 days for a week-long trip each year. Then November rolls around, and I try to schedule all my remaining days before I lose them at the end of the year. I can't get anything done at the office because nobody else is there. Sure I can work on things and enjoy peace but without graphic artists or designers there I can only go so far, I'll end up throwing stuff out because it's not what they wanted. But if I stay home, I'm stuck doing holiday stuff or running around to the homes of friends and family. When I get back to work after New Years I need a vacation.

pc86 13y ago
My fiance and I have taken to using our vacation when others generally don't. She has an unlimited vacation policy while mine is very strict (n hours per pay period) but generous. Taking vacation at odd times means it's less crowded where ever we go (if we go anywhere) as well as if there is a large absence of employees from her firm or mine, it's almost like a second vacation where we can concentrate on getting our individual tasks completed. There is less of a pronounced absence at the end of the year for my company because hours roll over and the cap is somewhere around 2.5 years of time.

larsberg 13y ago

People mimic their management chain. If the CEO/managers don't take vacations, neither will their directs. One of the most balanced (and productive) teams I've worked on was under a general manager who had 8 kids and made it a point to attend _every_ event they had and go on regular vacations. Since everybody ran into his policy at some point (reviews scheduled at 5pm canceled or him out of town for a week or two), the whole org was pretty good about doing the same. And it was very different from other orgs in the company, many of which had the usual long hours + weekends culture.

onemorepassword 13y ago
I have to disagree with that premise. Our two founders are around 4 days per week, usually go home around five and tend to take long vacations. The rest of us have to be encouraged to take our vacation days. There's a culture of everyone taking days off on a regular basis without too much formality ("won't be in this friday, see ya"), but long vacations are rare.
- larsberg 13y ago
  Do you think everyone would take those random days off on a regular basis if your founders instead worked 6 days a week and never took vacations? (honest question based on your situation, not rhetorical/sarcastic) Sometimes, particularly with young people (no family and no college buddies around), I had trouble getting them to take vacations because frankly they just had nobody to hang out with for a long period of time. You can only sit at home (or on the beach) and play WoW for so long, so it didn't really bother me much when they didn't, as long as they were taking enough random days off to stay fresh and motivated at work.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Yeah, my boss takes days off all the time (and deservedly so), but I'm accruing "use or lose" days at a scary rate now and I have no vacation plan in sight other than a few days in May for family and a week in July for family. Edit: And to be clear, I think this has been and will continue to be detrimental to my work product overall, the only reason I haven't taken a break yet is being I'm triple-hatted for now until July or so. By then I'll have a chance to think about what I want to do with my break, I hope.

anonu 13y ago

whats the point of life if you are working all the time? Life is about balance and not taking a vacation - ever - sounds like your balance is off kilter.

recursive 13y ago
Could it not be possible that you can feel balanced without vacation? Perhaps some people experience some of what you experience in a vacation every day.
randomdata 13y ago
I'm not really sure what I would do with a vacation. Travelling doesn't particularly interest me, and I would get bored fast if I stayed at home to watch TV all day long. I get paid to do my hobbies, so that would technically qualify as work.

jonathanjaeger 13y ago

I feel like startups that have no vacation policy at all (as in, take as much as you want) run into the problem where employees might feel guilty about taking vacation or forget to take all their days because they're busy. However if the norm is 7 days or 10 days or 14 days per year, it's more concrete and you don't feel guilty for taking them. I think it's psychological. Personally I don't really ever feel the need for a vacation more than one day every few months, but that's just me now in a particular time and place. I think that'll change as the demands on my life change.

onemorepassword 13y ago
It works both ways, the other problem with "take as much as you want" is that it makes it more difficult to call people on not taking enough time off. You may not think you need a vacation, but others may feel your work is getting sloppier and you're more easily irritated. Most human beings are usually the last to notice these things about themselves.
- jonathanjaeger 13y ago
  I also think it can be job-specific. For example, I'm working on a website on the side which requires both more administrative work and more product/creative work than my day job. My day job is in marketing, and the more time I take off the more time I'm not running performance marketing campaigns that generate revenue every day. I think vacation is very specific to job function in many cases -- in one I would definitely reach burn out and in another I wouldn't. In creative work, like if you're a graphic designer, I can imagine not taking a break would have greater repercussions on the creative process than in my job.

hai2ashwin 13y ago

In India, the concept of a long vacation is still alien. This year we are going to experiment with 5 day shutdown during xmas. Most people here don't have a sense of holidaying. So they end up too bored that they turn back to work!

lutusp 13y ago
> In India, the concept of a long vacation is still alien ... Most people here don't have a sense of holidaying. I think this is a holdover from the colonial era, when the British, before embarking on a fox hunt, expressed the view that the natives shouldn't be wasting their time holidaying.
- hai2ashwin 13y ago
  Perhaps. Also the economic momentum has made people more driven and those who are not that driven, would still get to work due to peer pressure. We need a 'slowdown movement' of our own!

purplelobster 13y ago

My wife and I come from two different continents and live in a third. That results in a whole lot of traveling just to visit family, and basically no time left for "vacations". It feels rather unsustainable. Would love an unlimited vacation policy, but in the end probably feel guilty to be taking way more than the average person at the company. In less than a year though, we'll move to my home country which has minimum 5 weeks vacation, with many people having 6-7 weeks. Not only does that mean we can cut our "family visit" traveling in half, but also increase vacation by roughly 70%. It'll mean taking a pay cut, but honestly it's worth it.

jlarocco 13y ago

I have to say this article really annoyed me. Maybe I read too much into it, but he seems to be snubbing people who take vacation. I'm glad not vacationing works for him, and it's his life to live, but that's not for everybody. I wouldn't write an article snubbing people who work all the time, and I don't see why he needs to snub people who take vacation. Second, he seems incredibly proud to be working all the time. A good portion of the article is basically, "Hey, check me out! I'm working all the time! How cool am I?". Get over it. Third, the author has a hugely exaggerated sense of self-importance. Reading the article, you'd think he's curing cancer and AIDs and cleaning up the environment all at once. Take this, for example: "But startups are different. Startups are a mission; a belief that something impossible is actually possible. It’s being part of a team that is working toward some distant horizon. It’s this competing against the impossible that makes it so much fun." And what is the distant horizon he's working toward? From the 42 Floors home page, it's "The best place to find office space." That's the impossible he's making possible? That's why he's working 100% of the time? What a joke.

pc86 13y ago
I've noticed this about a lot of startups. Even more so than everyone thinks they're The Next Big Thing, everyone thinks their mission is Incredibly Important and whatever Capitalized Buzzword is in at the moment. It's important to have passion, and to believe in your product. Your product doesn't need to feed the poor or clothe the needy for you to be passionate about it, but my word there is nothing revolutionary about commercial real estate (to use 42Floors as an (unfair?) example).
aashaykumar92 13y ago
"And what is the distant horizon he's working toward? From the 42 Floors home page, it's 'The best place to find office space.' That's the impossible he's making possible? That's why he's working 100% of the time? What a joke." I respect all your prior annoyances, and don't care to comment on them, but this one pissed me off. 42Floors seems to be doing a fucking awesome job in helping startups, even well established companies, find office space. Pissing on their efforts by making some snide remark ('what a joke') is completely uncalled for. Finding office space IS a huge problem for companies, especially startups who don't have much money but still need some space...42Floors is making that process (which I'm sure can sometimes be seemingly impossible) far simpler by providing the service that they are.

nicholassmith 13y ago

As an effective manager you should make sure you're leaving your developers time to go do something. Makes them better developers and keeps burnout at bay.

scrabble 13y ago

I've never worked for a startup, but I've always had an aversion to vacation. It's not that I don't like going places or enjoying myself, but I hate being away and I hate not being involved and getting things done. A good vacation for me is a day off to relax here and there, or a weekend away. Taking more than 3 days at a time always seems like too much and I end up wanting to get back. I still need to take that week long vacation every year for the enjoyment of my wife and kids, but it seems too long.

helloburin 13y ago

I've felt the same way for my whole life, and the idea of a pre-cation is how I have to trick myself into taking time off too. My first jobs were "in my spare time", and instead of taking a vacation from school to go party in Cancun for Spring Break (spend time AND money), I'd work. Mostly to pay for more school OR for that sweet computer I wanted. Since having a "real job", my brain still considers vacation as "time I'm not earning money", even though it's Paid Time Off. Even when I do manage to trick myself into vacation, they're usually "active" trips, where I feel like every minute needs to be spent doing something "productive" like snorkeling or feeding sharks. You won't find me laying out on the beach anywhere! The ironic thing is that I work in the travel industry and I know how important this stuff is! I think our problem is that we want to create value with our limited time on this planet, so maybe we need to consider it to be an investment that will pay us back in inspiration later down the road.

minimax 13y ago

"Your coworkers are your friends. It’s so much closer to a life style than a job that taking a vacation from your startup doesn’t have the same connotation." This guy does not get what vacations are about. I know what it feels like to work hard with people you like at a job you enjoy, but I also know what it's like to kill two weeks lounging around southern Europe and swimming in the Mediterranean Sea every day. Both things are good but they are not the same thing. If you think satisfying work is a substitute for a good vacation you are doing it wrong.

jaf12duke 13y ago
Hmmm...maybe the fault is in my writing. I think vacations are incredibly important. And I've now learned to take them (just spent 8 days in the BVIs...it was awesome). And I want everyone in our company to take more of them. I thought that was clear in the post.
Dewie 13y ago
My mother once said to me that vacations aren't as much about relaxation as they are about doing different things than what you usually do. I've come to believe the same thing, and in that regard going to a different country is definitely an effective way to take a vacation from your normal life.
- randomdata 13y ago
  While I like that definition, it perhaps makes it difficult to draw a distinction between work and vacation. For instance, I spend a few weeks each year tending to my farm. Its an enjoyable break from routine, but it is still technically work. That is vacation to me, but to an outsider it looks like I don't take vacations.

rdouble 13y ago

Unlimited vacation policies are mainly a way for the employer to avoid the accounting and financial burden that occurs when providing defined vacation benefits. Vacation benefits are not required, but if a company offers them, most states require the employer to track employee absences and leave accrual. Unused vacation must be paid out when the employee leaves the company. Unlimited vacation policies remove the need for tracking and payouts for unused vacation time.

jaf12duke 13y ago
That's not the case for us. The administrative burden is not heavy. Most payroll solutions include this out of the box. The much bigger issue for us is that we don't like rules and policies. We try to take 'do what you think is right' to the nth degree.

greenyoda 13y ago

I really liked their idea of a "precation", two weeks of paid vacation before you start: "At 42floors, we heavily, heavily recommend that all new people take two weeks of vacation starting exactly on their first official day. What this means is that when you get a job offer from us, you’ll pick a start date. And that’s the day we start your payroll. And that’s the day you leave for vacation. And you get to take that time to transition from one chapter of your life to the next. If your startup just failed or you hated your last job, you get a couple weeks of mental and physical recovery. If you have a significant other that’s been dying to get away with you, you can go away someplace nice knowing that your first paycheck will be waiting for you when you return."

xradionut 13y ago

I understand the precation. One of the best trips I had was after getting laid off from a large dysfunctional corporation that was under going a re-org and having few years of accumulated salary in the bank due to never having a chance to take a "real" break from work in several years. HR was shocked when they realized that I hadn't taken more than few days off in my tenure. I had over 6 months of "combined" time that had rolled over year after year. But I was the chump that got things done, covered during the holidays, for installs, moves, covered Y2K, and when everyone else had a life and babies. Never again.

addlepate 13y ago

I work for a company that offers unlimited vacation. It works, and I think it's great, and it's a major hurdle for me leaving to work somewhere else. It seems that even top companies offer maybe 3 weeks vacation, which just seems pitifully small to me these days. I don't wanna sit around trying to figure out how to optimally use my remaining 1.79 weeks of vacation time, I just wanna do a good job and take time off when I need or want to. I see this argument about unlimited vacation pretty often, and I think the people making this argument think they are out-clevering a clever idea. But it comes down to the organization's culture -- if you work for a place where taking time off is encouraged, then you feel free to take vacations and others do too. If you don't work in that sort of place, it doesn't matter what your allotted vacation time is because you won't use it anyway. Or if you do, you won't enjoy it. Here's the real problem in a tech context, though -- conferences. If you can't get away, you can't go to conferences, and you'll end up forfeiting the knowledge and outside perspectives you get from going to conferences. It's just not the same thing at all as learning on your own. I mean, I'm not in a situation where I think my tiny company will one day be worth untold billions. Maybe in that situation you need to keep your nose to the grindstone. But I think that sounds like kind of a grim existence. I will say this, though: if you have a balanced life to begin with, the idea of laying on a beach somewhere kinda loses its urgency. Vacations become less necessary to keep your sanity or whatever, which is great. But there still is the need to step away and see something different for a while. There is value in that, believe it.

d4vlx 13y ago

This post makes me want to work at 42floors. Mission accomplished Jason ;)

eCa 13y ago

As a european it feels equally strange every time I read about "unlimited" vacation. IMHO, it's just as bad as unlimited bandwidth, or whatever. It's just not unlimited. Where I work I have 30 days paid vacation (in adition to big holidays). If I don't use them, I get to push 5-10 of the unused days to the next year (and can save them for up to five years, after which I get their worth in salary; I guess about $150-200 per day). Currently I have ~20 days saved, so theoretically I could take 50 days vacation this year (work permitting). This system sets both a lower and upper limit to how much vacation is expected. Much fairer for the employee - no more guessing when it becomes too much vacation. I'm guessing most employers in USA would consider 30 days to be too many? And yes, even though I don't work for a startup I still consider my team mates my friends.

supreeth 13y ago

Have you tried work holidays, where the team takes off to work for a couple of weeks at a vacation spot? Works like a charm.