The latter half of October, the maintainer goes offline

58 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by keybored
(lore.kernel.org)

31 Comments

donalhunt

9 hours ago

Testing people outages is a good thing for any team or organization. I always look at multi-week holidays as an opportunity to identify knowledge / skills / activities that I (or another person) provide(s) cover for.

None of us will be around forever. Some of our software might be...

drzzhan

20 minutes ago

Wow. Good insight! I have never viewed vacation this way. I always thought the only reason vacation exists is because companies have to give vacation due to laws and well being of their employee. So when I get some days off, I always feel a bit guilty because the company is losing out something.

TZubiri

9 hours ago

Alternative organization discovers basic organizational concept: vacations.

segmondy

9 hours ago

Not the same, a vacation is a vacation, most people don't think of it as people outages. Most work will just be queued up until the person comes back or worse the person will be contacted during vacation to answer questions, provide information or do some work. Being hyper aware of this means no contact for the individual while on vacation and watching that work is not being queued up for them. They should not have to catch up to emails and catch up to slack conversations when they get back. A return from vacation should be truly refreshing not overwhelming.

fluoridation

6 hours ago

Man, I hope that position pay really well for that kind of commitment. If anyone tries to reach me while I'm on vacation I will not even realize it, and I won't be bothering to "catch up" when I return.

mystified5016

6 hours ago

Then you must not have a very important job. The hypothetical person being discussed here is someone who multiple people depend on. Their work is critical to other processes and blocks other work from happening. They own a lot of institutional knowledge that may not be shared evenly among other employees.

That's the point of the exercise: to identify mission critical people and make them not critical to the entire business. If your business hinges on one person who knows everything and works on everything, you're fucked if they disappear and you haven't ensured at least some redundancy.

fluoridation

6 hours ago

The way the other person phrased it made it seem like that kind of fake vacations are the norm, which is what I was replying to.

>Most work [during someone's vacation] will just be queued up until the person comes back or worse the person will be contacted during vacation to answer questions, provide information or do some work.

Nothing in that sentence implies that the person is referring exclusively to an especially important position.

nonameiguess

9 hours ago

This and insider threat mitigation is exactly why audit standards in regulated industries include mandatory vacations.

djbusby

9 hours ago

My favorite part of working in banking. Minimum week no contact per year. All these other industries would call me about (trivial) things when I was "off". Regulations forced people to respect (some) time off

pavel_lishin

7 hours ago

I've never been a manager, but my favorite managers always lead by example - they would take arbitrary time off, and would be completely unreachable during that time.

As a senior eng, I try to do the same when I have time off - work notifications are muted, and my away message is typically set to "I'm away for X days. If you to reach me, no, you don't."

Lerc

7 hours ago

It's nice to see this happen, Being a good maintainer requires a particular mindset.

I do not have this mindset.

I am a maintainer.

I have been absent from one of my projects for 9 months. People actually use this thing. That eats me up inside. That anxiety is partially why it's difficult to start up again.

I am the kind of person who makes things, unfortunately when you make things you become the maintainer by default. It's not easy to hand over maintainership either though, you want to ensure the project is in good hands. One of my old projects has been absorbed into Linux Mint and that's quite gratifying to see that a project I made maybe a decade ago get a Catalan translation in just the last few months.

rtpg

7 hours ago

I do maintenance on a library and while often I feel bad about not looking at it for months at a time, I’ll try to counterbalance it by just sitting down one evening , swallowing my pride, and just chew through some of the issues.

In the end, it’s always a bit satisfying to do. Still not a great situation but I’m trying at least.

keybored

6 hours ago

This is their dayjob.

loa_in_

9 hours ago

Top notch communication skills on display.

therealmarv

9 hours ago

Not familiar with Kernel maintainers but do some never take full 2-week long holidays??

0cf8612b2e1e

9 hours ago

In the US, a decent company will give you three weeks total vacation. To get more than that can require decades of service (eg four weeks after 10 years with the company).

To “squander” two thirds of the allotment in one go is rare.

closeparen

9 minutes ago

It's pretty common for a white-collar worker to take the weeks of Christmas and New Year's off. If you're at an "unlimited vacation" place these weeks don't even really count against the social / implicit "be reasonable" limits.

People with quotas sometimes choose to work more during the winter holidays to preserve PTO for the rest of the year. But those workdays tend to be, shall we say, pro forma. You're not going to have a deadline or a big meeting or a lot of people pinging you for stuff in the second half of December.

macintux

7 hours ago

I tried to negotiate 4 weeks when I joined my current company, but the hiring process went dead. My inside contact told me that as far as he could tell, they simply did not have a mechanism to handle someone asking for more than 3 weeks.

c0wb0yc0d3r

5 hours ago

I usually do the same. It seems to blow many minds.

ctm92

8 hours ago

Crazy how this is normal, in Germany you won't even find anybody to work for you if you offered less than 30 days of vacation

ensignavenger

8 hours ago

How many holidays do you get in addition to that? Is that in any industry, such as fast food service or grocery store clerks, or just professional jobs, or only your own industry? I know time off isn't the best in the US, but a good comparison requires a bit more info.

keybored

7 hours ago

When people generalize across Jobs they often really do mean All Jobs.

https://www.statista.com/chart/15005/statutory-minimum-paid-...

Generalizing a bit but there is less of a divide between “fast food service and grocery store clerks” and professionals in Western Europe compared to some other places. Workers are workers and they have certain rights as that.

rafabulsing

8 hours ago

Brazilian here. We get a minimum of 30 days/year by law, across every industry, plus a handful of holidays.

mimotomo2009

7 hours ago

Better: in Germany you have the legal right to have a minimum of 24 days of vacation in the year (§3 Bundesurlaubsgesetz).

heffer

7 hours ago

If you work Monday to Saturday. The law requires 20 days for people that work Monday to Friday. The effect is the same though: In both cases you get 4 weeks off.

trueismywork

8 hours ago

Offer 300k Euros for 6 year experience and see if that still holds.

keybored

6 hours ago

I didn’t expect the most discussed part on this submission would be about people who don’t take vacation when this one[1] is (whatever absence is about).

[1] The Git maintainer. Not a kernel maintainer.

playingalong

9 hours ago

If in US, that'd be once in a lifetime - e.g. for your honey (half) moon.

teekert

7 hours ago

Here in the Netherlands most people take 3 weeks in the summer. Then a week in fall, one around Christmas and then perhaps you just buy some extra days (meaning it’s unpaid time off) for a skiing trip in February.

And then we have Easter, Pentecost, ascension day, Christmas, New Year’s Day. All public days off.

Personally for a long time my contract was 36 hours, get you 1 more day off every 2 weeks.

That American system sounds so depressing, but I guess you get used to anything.