Great question @trappology:
❓👉🏻 Do I recommend unlimited vacation days?
Here's my take. Thread 🧵 ⬇️
Hey @joelgascoigne do you recommend unlimited vacation days \U0001f44d or \U0001f44e for startups?
— Will Trapp (@trappology) December 19, 2020
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
I think the best option we have right now, is Minimum Vacation.
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.
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.
- 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.
The tragedy of revolutionaries is they design a utopia by a river but discover the impure city they razed was on stilts for a reason.
— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) June 19, 2016
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.
