[HN Gopher] The latter half of October, the maintainer goes offline
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The latter half of October, the maintainer goes offline
Author : keybored
Score : 53 points
Date : 2024-10-03 17:29 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lore.kernel.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lore.kernel.org)
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Top notch communication skills on display.
| donalhunt wrote:
| 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...
| TZubiri wrote:
| Alternative organization discovers basic organizational
| concept: vacations.
| segmondy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This and insider threat mitigation is exactly why audit
| standards in regulated industries include mandatory vacations.
| djbusby wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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."
| therealmarv wrote:
| Not familiar with Kernel maintainers but do some never take full
| 2-week long holidays??
| playingalong wrote:
| If in US, that'd be once in a lifetime - e.g. for your honey
| (half) moon.
| teekert wrote:
| 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.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| 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.
| ctm92 wrote:
| 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
| trueismywork wrote:
| Offer 300k Euros for 6 year experience and see if that
| still holds.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| 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.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| 10-12 [0]
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_holidays_in_Germany
| rafabulsing wrote:
| Brazilian here. We get a minimum of 30 days/year by law,
| across every industry, plus a handful of holidays.
| keybored wrote:
| 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.
| vq wrote:
| I live in Sweden where we have minimum 25 paid vacation
| days (I have 28) and 9 paid holidays.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leav
| e_b...
| mimotomo2009 wrote:
| Better: in Germany you have the legal right to have a
| minimum of 24 days of vacation in the year (SS3
| Bundesurlaubsgesetz).
| heffer wrote:
| 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.
| macintux wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I usually do the same. It seems to blow many minds.
| keybored wrote:
| 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.
| Lerc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is their dayjob.
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(page generated 2024-10-03 23:01 UTC)