Great question @trappology:

❓👉🏻
Do I recommend unlimited vacation days?

Here's my take. Thread 🧵 ⬇️

I do not recommend unlimited vacation. There are problems with it. The most clear, for us, was that with unlimited vacation, the team did not take enough vacation.
When you have an Unlimited Vacation policy, you introduce a significant amount of decision fatigue with taking vacation. When you don't clearly state the amount of vacation, you put that burden on individuals.
With Unlimited Vacation, a strange side effect is that people start to really think about how taking vacation could reflect on them negatively. When you have to choose every time, and how much, vacation to take, you might just end up taking nothing.
So, I do not recommend Unlimited Vacation.

With that said, I believe Unlimited Vacation gets more criticism than it deserves. Some even go as far as to say that Unlimited Vacation is unethical and a way to stop employees taking vacation.
The thing is, in almost all cases, I really believe Unlimited Vacation comes from a good place. Many people had the same idea at the same time, and it was people with a good heart and the right mindset.
The promise and the origin of Unlimited Vacation, in my mind, is the following:

We're all adults, and when we're part of something we really believe in, we should be trusted to manage our energy and our time.
To do our best work, we need to balance work and rest. Sometimes, the most effective thing to do is to take a break. You can come back energized and having solved problems you couldn't solve by working through them.
We should trust our team to know which choice is right. Will you be most effective in the next quarter if you take some time off, recharge, avoid burnout and allow for space for creative thinking? Or, are you energized and enjoying the work, and the best thing is to keep going?
Often, as employers, we don't truly know where people are in life. People come into a new role in totally different places. Some might be burned out already, some may have had a sabbatical and be raring to go. Some might have gone through a tough personal situation.
I believe many approaches to business today place far too much control with the employer, and not enough with employees.

If you create an environment where team members self-directed, motivated, and bought into the mission, then you can benefit by giving them far more freedom.
Unlimited Vacation was founded on the idea that we should take as much vacation as we feel will give us the best results and make us most energized and effective in our jobs (which we are excited about). If you're at a company you believe in and care about, this makes sense.
When we realized that Unlimited Vacation wasn't working, when we observed that people weren't taking enough time off and we acknowledged the psychological burden it put on teammates, we had a very important decision to make:
Rather than Unlimited Vacation:

- Do we scrap it and go back to the status quo? That means quotas for time off.
- Or, do we push on and find a better solution? One that captures the very positive intentions of Unlimited Vacation, and avoids the downsides.
At Buffer, I strongly pushed for us to get creative and think of new ideas instead of Unlimited Vacation.

The result was Minimum Vacation. It seems almost obvious now, but at the time, we could have easily reverted to the status quo. I'm so glad we didn't.
So. I don't believe in Unlimited Vacation. But, I also believe vacation policies are broken in most workplaces.

I think the best option we have right now, is Minimum Vacation.
Here's Buffer's Minimum Vacation approach:

Our vacation minimum is at least 3 weeks (15 work days) of time off throughout the year, in addition to the public and religious holidays you observe.
Minimum Vacation has worked much better for us than both Unlimited Vacation and Traditional Vacation Policies, and I can't recommend it enough.
And with all of that, I'd like to say:

Try those wild ideas. Question the status quo and try improved approaches.

Test whether those new ideas work, and adapt when they don't.

But fight for a new idea, that still improves the status quo. The world needs that innovation.
Further reading from the Buffer blog on our experimentation with Unlimited Vacation and journey to Minimum Vacation:

- https://t.co/o1fDircRVf
- https://t.co/pbvY6UZ95w
- https://t.co/DXA86logPk

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I think about this a lot, both in IT and civil infrastructure. It looks so trivial to “fix” from the outside. In fact, it is incredibly draining to do the entirely crushing work of real policy changes internally. It’s harder than drafting a blank page of how the world should be.


I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.

Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.

And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.

God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.

For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.

That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.
After getting good feedback on yesterday's thread on #routemobile I think it is logical to do a bit in-depth technical study. Place #twilio at center, keep #routemobile & #tanla at the periphery & see who is each placed.


This thread is inspired by one of the articles I read on the-ken about #postman API & how they are transforming & expediting software product delivery & consumption, leading to enhanced developer productivity.

We all know that #Twilio offers host of APIs that can be readily used for faster integration by anyone who wants to have communication capabilities. Before we move ahead, let's get a few things cleared out.

Can anyone build the programming capability to process payments or communication capabilities? Yes, but will they, the answer is NO. Companies prefer to consume APIs offered by likes of #Stripe #twilio #Shopify #razorpay etc.

This offers two benefits - faster time to market, of course that means no need to re-invent the wheel + not worrying of compliance around payment process or communication regulations. This makes entire ecosystem extremely agile
1. One of the best changes in recent years is the GOP abandoning libertarianism. Here's GOP Rep. Greg Steube: “I do think there is an appetite amongst Republicans, if the Dems wanted to try to break up Big Tech, I think there is support for that."

2. And @RepKenBuck, who offered a thoughtful Third Way report on antitrust law in 2020, weighed in quite reasonably on Biden antitrust frameworks.

3. I believe this change is sincere because it's so pervasive and beginning to result in real policy changes. Example: The North Dakota GOP is taking on Apple's app store.


4. And yet there's a problem. The GOP establishment is still pro-big tech. Trump, despite some of his instincts, appointed pro-monopoly antitrust enforcers. Antitrust chief Makan Delrahim helped big tech, and the antitrust case happened bc he was recused.

5. At the other sleepy antitrust agency, the Federal Trade Commission, Trump appointed commissioners
@FTCPhillips and @CSWilsonFTC are both pro-monopoly. Both voted *against* the antitrust case on FB. That case was 3-2, with a GOP Chair and 2 Dems teaming up against 2 Rs.

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“We don’t negotiate salaries” is a negotiation tactic.

Always. No, your company is not an exception.

A tactic I don’t appreciate at all because of how unfairly it penalizes low-leverage, junior employees, and those loyal enough not to question it, but that’s negotiation for you after all. Weaponized information asymmetry.

Listen to Aditya


And by the way, you should never be worried that an offer would be withdrawn if you politely negotiate.

I have seen this happen *extremely* rarely, mostly to women, and anyway is a giant red flag. It suggests you probably didn’t want to work there.

You wish there was no negotiating so it would all be more fair? I feel you, but it’s not happening.

Instead, negotiate hard, use your privilege, and then go and share numbers with your underrepresented and underpaid colleagues. […]
So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.