PTO and Taking Time Off

Colin: Welcome to build and learn. My name is Colin. CJ

Avilla: and I'm CJ. And today we're talking about PTO taking time off and trying to relax. I don't know, vacation a little bit, so yeah, it'll be, this is, this is an interesting topic because I think especially in tech and especially as software engineers, We're we're bad at taking time off. I don't know. At least I am. What about you?

Colin: Yeah, this is a double edged sword one because you know, tech workers, you hear that have these amazing benefits. But I think it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy where it's like, we're gonna give you in some cases, unlimited PTO or more PTO than most jobs have even, you know, four, six weeks, something like that. And yet people still don't take it. So, you know, or if they do, they're like still on slack and still checking in cuz they feel like they're the lifeblood of either a project or a team. And we're gonna break down a little bit about how to avoid that because I think you should take some time off. And I think you're taking some time off, which is a good segue into this. CJ

Avilla: Yeah. So today I'm technically off

Colin: Well, we don't get paid for this. Right? So this isn't work. CJ

Avilla: Yeah. So it's a, it's a Thursday. So I'm taking Thursday, Friday off this week. We're if you're listening in the future right now, it is the middle of July and our kids are having their last few days of summer camp. This week, and then they're gonna be sort of at home until school starts in late August. So I'm taking today and tomorrow and hanging out with Nicole. So we're, we're kind of just like gonna spend some time with like free daycare. I So that's yeah, that's the how I'm wrapping up this this week and having a long weekend, but,

Colin: Nice. Do you, do you usually do like long weekends when you take time off have, or do you like to take like a week off all at once? We have a lot of Europeans in our company that take off like three weeks to a month. It's, you know, in some cities. August is when the city shuts down. you're a local and it's just, you know, cultural and you see the jokes about how, like, you know, someone's taking time off to go get a suntan. And then in America they're taking time off to go get a surgery or something like that. And it's, it's a stark reality that people are using that, you know, instead of sick days and things like that. But yeah. What does that look like for you? Do you prefer to like use 'em for lots of long weekends? Or do you end up taking like a long week when you need to longer? If, if necess. CJ

Avilla: So I think for most of my career, I've done the long weekend. . And also maybe we should like sort of Pret preface or like prefix all of this entire discussion with like, we are incredibly privileged to have any paid time off. like the fact that we work jobs, where we get paid money to like, not go to work for some set of time, as a benefit of tech is like incredibly awesome. But yeah. So back back, back back to the main question, right? Like, yeah. I take time. Either in the form of a long weekend. Recently I guess in June I took, I did take a full week off, which was amazing. And so yeah. I don't know,

Colin: More of that, more of that CJ CJ

Avilla: yes, I know. I know I've got at one week coming in, in October, we're gonna go to Dominican Republic. Never been I'm super, super excited. And I think I'm actually gonna take a week plus like a couple of days,

Colin: Yeah, you're gonna need to, well, I guess it's closer for you to fly to now, but for me it was a gnarly flight. We went literally a week before the pandemic happened, so you're gonna like it. I think it's a fun CJ

Avilla: Yeah, it's we're super excited to go. We planned it months and months ago. But what was, what I was thinking of was like, okay. One of the main reasons for PTO in general is to like avoid burning out right into like actually recharge and whatever. And. I am kind of like questioning how long is the minimum amount of time that you need to be out of the office or offline or unplugged or off the grid in order to actually feel recharged and to avoid burnout successfully. And so I think a week is great, but also it seems like burnout is one of those things that sort of just accumulates, right. It kind of just builds up and has this residual effect where, you know, for a long time, There were years where I went without taking any significant time off, like maybe long weekend, but no, there was no way that I took an entire week off.

Colin: Why was that? CJ

Avilla: yeah. So I guess if we we could talk

Colin: gonna have a little therapy session here. CJ

Avilla: Yeah, we're gonna have a little bit of, we're gonna have a little bit of a conversation here about unlimited time off. Right. And so in my experience, the companies that I have worked for that had an unlimited time off policy, I never took any time off ever. So this

Colin: And the statistics would back you up on that. Like there's been a lot of reports that prove that, and there's a lot of debating about whether it's good or bad to have unlimited time off. There's a little bit of a weird nuance here where. I don't think it's being done in a mischievous way, but there's this thing in the United States where if you don't accrue PTO like a normal, like you get a certain number of hours per pay period, then the company doesn't have to pay you back for unused time when you leave. A little, I don't think that companies are like being that nefarious about this. It's more of, they wanna just not have to worry about it. Like I still have to record when I'm going to just so we have a record of it, but it's more of like, we have a minimum, not a maximum And that might be a perk for a company that they don't have to pay it off back. I'm not sure, but the problem there is, then you need to make sure you use it. And so if you were going and not using your PTO, like, I guess what were the reasons why you didn't do it then if you technically had it, the whole team had it, but then no one was taking time off. CJ

Avilla: So it also like, it, it wasn't, there were some people on the team that did take time off, but I was absolutely like, I felt, I, I think I felt a lot of guilt around like leaving the team kind of, you know, shorthanded and short staffed. I would feel guilty about taking a significant chunk. So I felt more comfortable being like, oh yeah, we have an unlimited time off policy. Let me take three long weekends this year. , you know, like that felt

Colin: generous, how generous of you yourself? CJ

Avilla: Yeah. And so there were several companies that I worked for all startups too, where it was kind of like everyone was working way more than 40 hours. Everyone was just kind of like working super, super hard to try to make this company a success and in order to do so, we were all hustling and it felt, yeah, it felt like you were leaving the team. Letting the team down, if you took time off, which was just it's, it's horrible. And I don't recommend it.

Colin: Yeah. CJ

Avilla: yeah, I mean, if you

Colin: that's a cultural problem. I think like startups need a sense of urgency for sure. But you need to be rest like a rested racehorse. Like you need to be able to go, but then you need to rest, like you're not running the racehorse into the ground. And I know we can get into like, there's a lot of privilege, like you mentioned here of being able to race in the first place. Right. But if we keep the race metaphor up, like it's a marathon, not a sprint. And you need to be able to take time off so that when you are on work, you're not completely undone by small inconvenience that you're stressed. And so some small thing happens in your life that then, or maybe lots of big things happen in your life. And it completely, you know, GLS you, which I has happened to me when I've been a freelancer, cuz time off in a Lance world is like a whole nother. Thing, because you get paid by the time that you work and worse is a salaried job where PTO is an amazing convenience, because you're still paid to take that time off and you don't have to be doing the work during that time. So like when some of your teammates would take off, was there anything that you guys had to do? Like, were there repercussions of like, did you feel it, that they were taking time off? And so then you didn't want to do that to somebody else or was it in your head? And, you know, the company was fine when those people took. CJ

Avilla: I think part of it was in my head. A lot of it was in my head and. One of the things that I think we'll get into is that when you actually take time off, it is a good forcing function to have really great things that are in place so that you can safely take time off. So that your team can do all of the things that you were doing without you. There. I know there's like the, the bus factor, right? Like if you're the only who knows how to do X, Y, or Z, like that's a bad thing because maybe on your one day of PTO that year you get hit by a bus and then no one knows how to restart some weird service or something, you know or

Colin: Even if you don't get hit by a bus, right. You might be completely off grid and the server's down and no one knows how to restart it by you. Right. That, that, that would be a problem. And so I even say like, what happens if this employee leaves, right? It's more of it. It's gonna shine a light on all the things that whether culturally, or even literally technically like better docs, better socializing of concepts. I am guilty of this too. Like I would do the long weekend thing and. Just, you know, make sure that every, like I might even stay up late the night before I leave, which is like the worst thing. And I will even say like, usually I used to do PTO for trips. I'm now all about the PTO where I stay home and just take care of life. CJ

Avilla: Totally. Yeah. I think like my manager has been really good at kind of mentoring and advising in terms of taking time off to, for a family, like for your family. And so self-care is super important, right? You want to be firing on all cylinders, but also. Especially when you're in this startup, like really scrappy mode, it can be easy to let your relationships maybe like, yeah, like your, with your spouse or maybe your relationships with your children kind of go on the back burner a little bit. And so taking pay time off where they are, the focus can be really valuable in terms of just like maintaining your own sort of family life and parental and marriage and all of those things. So like there's definitely benefits to. Yeah, like just taking time off. Where you don't go somewhere fancy, like you said, but like instead, just hanging out at home and playing games with the kids and, you know, going out on dates with your spouse or whatever, like those kinds of things can also be really, really valuable and also recharging because spending time with your loved ones is definitely shown to like, increase your, your gratitude, increase, your positivity increase like your overall happiness. And that is like a really important, like part of being a whole person too.

Colin: Totally. Yeah. And we're going a little outta order and kind of touching on things as they come up here. But I think we should definitely come back to making sure that you're not the blocker for things like things you can do to make sure you take time off. I think there's a way to celebrate people taking time off instead of dreading it. we have a slack channel where when people either are come back or are taking time off, it's almost like a, you know, a celebration that they were gone. And what did they do? And it's like pictures of their trip or. Pictures of their garden. They worked on whatever it might be. But I really liked this and I can't remember what if it was a book or a talk that he gave, but Brad Feld, who's been in startup land and investing for a long time. He does this thing. That's like essential for his mental health and work life balance, which is, he works super hard all the time. And then he takes off a week, a quarter, which in the grand scheme of things is four weeks. CJ

Avilla: Mm.

Colin: And he goes completely off grid. Only his assistant knows where he is only that they can reach out to him if there's like a true fire, no work and one week. And you brought this up, like is a week enough? I think if you can go completely off grid, you're literally, you know, can't go into slack, can't go into GitHub. Can't do all that stuff. It feels good around the, for me, the four, five day mark is when you're like start to like relax. And if you're not again, doing like full combat travel in Europe or something like that. Where you actually can relax you're at home. It does take that many days. So like, what does it look like to take two weeks off? I don't know, what's better here. Is it better to take, you know, lots of long weekends, if that fits your lifestyle and you're doing lots of like camping and backpacking trips or something, it better to take four, one weeks? Is it better to take two two-weeks and like have more longer lasting type of thing? And again, if you have the ability to have unlimited time off. What is that, I guess, at what point do, does it not feel unlimited anymore? Like you're starting to use up a culturally acceptable upper bound. CJ

Avilla: Yeah. Those are all like, really important habits too. I think. And the other, another thing that you can do as a team and as a company is making sure that leadership is visibly out of office for like a similar amount of time, at least, right. If leadership is always on and never takes time off, then like that's setting the wrong message too. Totally. Yeah, visibility celebration of it. I'd be curious for us to do this as a little experiment. I'm happy to volunteer.

Colin: You know, I've never to my knowledge taken two weeks off, so that's CJ

Avilla: was gonna ask what's

Colin: yeah. CJ

Avilla: taken off.

Colin: Yeah, like intentionally, right. We haven't took it on the show, but when I got COVID, that was not intentional taking time off. That was sick days. Plus a work trip. So it felt like a vacation, but it ended up being a lot more. Extended than I thought it was gonna be. So like intentional PTO, probably a week in a, in a weekend. Right? Like the weekend on either end of that week. I think doing it two weeks would be pretty amazing. So I guess that puts me in that mindset of okay, if I'm gonna be gone for two weeks, what can I do to set up my team now that they don't feel bad? We, we men or not feel bad, but like they're set up for success. They don't need to come ask me for things or if they do, they're gonna re like hold onto them until I get back. CJ

Avilla: Yeah. Is it, is there, are there things that you intentionally hand off or make sure that other people are involved? Before you leave for a week. I mean, the other thing is like a week is just a week, right? yeah. Maybe if a server goes down or whatever, like some servers, it doesn't matter if they're down for a week. And like when you get back, you can just kick it and, you know, whatever background jobs will catch back up. But like, yeah.

Colin: Thankfully, I'm not worried. I'm not, I don't have to touch the servers. Like I do deploys. So it's like more. This is a good lesson of, is there something that's actively being worked on? And I think maybe leading up to you going on, on vacation, talking to your manager, talking to your team and figuring out if you're gonna be a blocker before you leave and not doing this outside of your working hours, but part of your job before you leave during your working day, not an additional amount of work or labor is to like, just look ahead, work with engineering manager. If you have one. To see how to pull things off your plate. Maybe even a few days before you leave can use those days to socialize concepts or ownership of the code, if it needs to happen. I've taken to starting a list of things that I'm like if this like, okay, I'm the only one who knows how this works. Why is that the case? How do we fix that? And also, do I need to be the one who now needs to do that work? Not before I leave, but like, Why is it? Why do I have that thought that I'm the only one who can do that work? And I think this probably resonates with a lot of developers you might be the only one who knows how it works. CJ

Avilla: Yeah. Yeah. I think that also, so we're starting to head into territory around just good habits and best practices for when you take time off. So it sounds like as you're heading into time off, making sure that you have good docs. Some really clear ownership of who's going to take over while you're away. Yeah. What I guess, going back to the, the idea of having a list of the stuff that you're doing, one of the cultural norms that I've seen work really successfully is having a doc. That is just a list of all the stuff you're working on and who is going to cover that while you're out. So that's been kind of like a cool thing. Are there other, yeah. What are the other sort of best practices you've seen or like tools and tips and technology you can use to make sure that you have a successful out of office.

Colin: Yeah. I mean, I think the, if you're not truly off grid, the thing that is hard to Dodge is the slack notifications and things like that. So setting in away message is great, going away, going in and turning off all the notifications on all your devices is, is necessary. We teased this on a past episode when I was going outta town, but the GitHub away feature is amazing because with slack, if you message me it doesn't, I mean, it has a status, but it doesn't say anything to you. It's just like, You have to go hover over my status to see that I'm out. I gotta pick an emoji that I think is gonna be either, you know, Palm trees or something like an X or something that makes it evocative. So people know if you mention me in an issue, a PR or commit any of these things, GitHub will tell you that I am out. CJ

Avilla: mm-hmm

Colin: And it's act proactive. They're like, you get to set what the message is. You can set a status down GitHub. I don't know that many people do that, but there's setting a status and then there's this like full on I am away. And I think it was maybe designed for like open source contributors and things like that. CJ

Avilla: I mean, it's funny that we're talking about this again. I am away and right now, like since we started this call, I have four new unreads in slack. which I should not even have opened right now, but like

Colin: Yeah. So do you set your away CJ

Avilla: I set it. Yeah. It says out of office and still I have four unreads

Colin: do, but is your.off, I guess, cuz there's the setting of and then there's set away or active? Yeah. CJ

Avilla: Yeah. My dot shows active. I would send that to a way still doesn't help. So now let's just say it's been a week and you've been gone. What is your process for when you come back for triaging? What is likely to be a million messages in email, slack, whatever internal tools that you have. 2022-07-28--t04-20-48pm--guest644854--cj-

avilla: I always start with slack because I assume that the real time communication is gonna be something that's someone needed more urgently. Then I go to email and if you don't already have this turned on, you can go into the E like the Gmail labs feature and enable keyboard shortcuts, which I think is a killer feature. So you can kind of just use. you know, J K to move up and down and then you can mark things. I don't even remember. I just like have the muscle memory right. But the key there's keyboard shortcuts to just like plow through your email super quickly finding all the ones that don't matter, deleting those and then replying quickly to others. But yeah, I think I took, when I took a week in June, it took me at least a week to catch back up from. Email notifications, slack notifications, GitHub notifications, et cetera. Track

1: I'm curious about is whether or not those were even important, right? Cause I'm in a lot of slack channels. And so they're all lit up when I come back. So now it's up to me to triage what was important and that's, that's where I think the GitHub away feature thing would be kind of interesting.

Colin: And again, I'm free idea for an app here, right? CJ

Avilla: Mm.

Colin: imagine if you had a true away status in slack, every message that's sent to you get. maybe they even say like, Hey, CJ's out. Do you want me to remind him when he comes back or something? Cause I don't love this. Like, was this important, let me build context for all these things that there's, there's a meme out there about PTO, you pay for taking time off when you come back. I don't know if GitHub does like a little, like here's everything you missed since you were out type thing, but that's for you. How you can have that one for free too. CJ

Avilla: The one feature I would call out in slack is that if I am, if I'm supposed to be away, but I'm actually online, whether that's in slack, on my phone, or I'm just doing other things on my computer, then. I, if something is sort of on fire, then I'll probably respond to the slack message. But if it's not urgent and it can be dealt with, when I get back, then I'll right. Click on the message and say, remind me next week. And then I'll get like a slack bot reminder next week. And then try to plow through all of those. I think the other thing is it's probably good hygiene to actually just delete the slack app from your phone while you're out. And then you won't see that badge counting up as your yeah. My manager's like really adamant. He's like delete slack and. Then if something urgent comes up, he'll just text me. Which is I mean, that's like fine, right? Like having an emergency way to go around.

Colin: Like your pager PagerDuty. yeah, CJ

Avilla: exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. So I, I added the topic paternity maternity leave that I think we can just spend a, a short amount of time on. The reason why I wanted to talk about this was because when I was thinking about what is the longest time I've taken off, it was when my second son was born and that was, I took one month off and that was paid. But for my first child, I had just started a job and I didn't have any. Paid time off accrued. And so I took seven days unpaid leave for like, that was my whole paternity leave for,

Colin: they assume they didn't have paternity leave. CJ

Avilla: no. Yeah, it was like, I don't, I don't even remember if they had paternity leave, but if they did, it was just, it was atrocious. So yeah, I think. The bigger tech companies, you will find pretty generous paternity and maternity leave situation. Sometimes you can split it up and take part of it when the baby's first born and then take another part of it later when one of the partners goes back to work or whatever like that is. Yeah. So that's, that's definitely something like that feels like a benefit that more people take advantage of at bigger companies than at startups, just in my experience.

Colin: Yeah. And it's unfortunate that people have to make that like calculus of am I gonna go unpaid for a week to even a week is not enough time. Right? When you're talking about adding to your family and all the things that come up with that, and you shouldn't have to use traditional PTO for that either. But we we li at least we live in America and that's what it is. So. Good call out. You know, it is part of, I guess, of all the things that you could take time off, you have usually paid time off. You might have paternity or maternity leave, parental leave. 2022-07-28--t04-20-48pm--guest644854--cj-

avilla: Yes.. When I broke my ankle in January I remember. Feeling well, after I had sort of pain meds and whatever I was, I was just laying in bed, like doing literally nothing. And I felt so like, yeah. So useless and I was like, I need to be useful somehow. And I can be useful if I have my computer and I'm just like doing stuff. CJ

Avilla: But then I had like one call with my manager and he was like, dude, you, there's no way that you should be at work right now. Like,

Colin: right? Yeah. Like how many pain drugs have you CJ

Avilla: Exactly. Yeah. Pain medication and whatever he is like, no, just shut it down and like, or like watch a movie or something. And so, yeah. It's gosh. Yeah. I think it's, it's so hard.

Colin: Yeah. So in addition to sick leave we have this thing and some others might, but right. You've got holidays in addition to those days off. And then we. At orbit, we had a summer and a winter, what we call Refuel week, which was a week off in the summer, a week off between Christmas and new year's. You know, that kind of lull period of people aren't really getting a lot done anyway. So let's just give it off. We've also experimented with something called like Rocket Days, which was more of we're still working, but we're working on all the process and stuff that you know, you should incrementally improve every day, but we don't always get to those things. It's some tech debt pay downs, some process development, some reflection, and like retro it's like a retro week or a process improvement type week. And so refuel is like truly refuel rest, you know, reenergized come back, you know, strong. Hard to do with support and uptime and stuff like that. So we tend to try to like, have some sort of like you're off, but this person's watching the queue this day, this day, this day, so forth. . CJ

Avilla: Yeah. When I. First joined this company, I was in the support function and during the sort of holiday shutdown where many people were out of office, we did that thing where it was kind of just like on a volunteer basis. Get coverage to make sure that we could still have people online to meet our SLAs for anyone who might be writing into support or chatting with us on IRC or discord. And then when I transitioned from support into developer advocacy, I remember being like, oh, this is like, no one has to be around technically during this short period. And so it's nice that everyone can go and recharge at the same time. So.

Colin: Yeah. If you're in that boat and you can volunteer even a few hours to relieve a support, you know, function, I think that's helpful cuz unfortunately if you're full-time support. You, it feels like another day sometimes like hopefully ticket volume's gonna be lower, but it'll also just be great to have a buddy during that time. And ideally, you know, we've done things where we, we explicitly post on our blog and in communities that we have Refuel week, there'll be a little bit of a longer response time go, please enjoy the time off as well, type of thing. Like let's put it back on you. Like, why why are you working this week? CJ

Avilla: I mean, like back to your point earlier about like, okay, you know, leading up to taking time off, you shouldn't work extra. I think this is another bad habit that I've had that people might also have where, you know, okay. Yes. I know that I'm taking Thursday, Friday off, so let me work three extra hours on Monday and and Wednesday. So that like.

Colin: toxic personality trait. CJ

Avilla: Exactly. well, I mean, yeah, like it's, but if someone, maybe it's possible in that unlimited scenario that someone just works like insane amounts. They're doing 90 hour weeks for three weeks a month, and then they do take a week off and maybe that's okay. But maybe it's not like, I don't know.

Colin: I think some companies even go as far as you have to take this much time off and we're gonna pay for your vacation up to a certain CJ

Avilla: Oh, wow. never heard of that. That's that's super cool.

Colin: think Zapier does this. CJ

Avilla: Oh, wow. That's that is a great, that is a great perk right there. I like

Colin: Yeah. Cuz when I think about it, you're gonna go to the Dominican, right? So you're like, okay, I'm taking time off. I'm getting paid. I'm basically using a good amount of that money to go there. CJ

Avilla: Yes.

Colin: so you're probably not using all of your salary for that time to go there, but it depends on what you're getting paid and it depends on how baller of a room you're gonna get when you go to the Dominicans. So CJ

Avilla: Yeah, sidebar. Did you see the I'm gonna call it a marketing stunt, cuz that's what it is that topple is doing right now. Track

1: Yes. CJ

Avilla: So you like nominate an open source developer. It might be closed. I don't know when it ends, So yeah. tuple.app, or app, whatever is it, is it tuple? They're doing this marketing stunt where you can nominate your favorite open source dev and whoever wins. They're paying for like an all inclusive vacation.

Colin: So this is that idea that, you know, open source is hard. There is no unlimited paid time off in open source. CJ

Avilla: mm.

Colin: We're not talking any vacation. We're talking serious vacations. Here are actual pictures from actual destinations. We'll book, the hotel we'll buy the flights. We'll give them a prepaid card for meals, adventures, and daquiris by the pool. They will get up to $10,000 to spend on their vacation. Plus ones are welcome or you can spend the whole thing on yourself. So, yeah. And they dive into why, I think we'll put this in the show, cuz they're talking about all the things that we just did right on. How do you give these open source contributors, a break? How do you reward them for their service in a way, right? Or honor them for that service because you probably rely on their gems, their libraries, their tools, and. You can go and vote. There's 437 people that have been nominated. And so you can go vote on 'em, maybe even nominate somebody or yourself, if you aren't on the list, CJ

Avilla: yep. Go for it is. So it's still open. When does

Colin: like it. CJ

Avilla: close?

Colin: That's a good question. CJ

Avilla: It might be closed by the time this episode

Colin: It might, but if not keep an eye out on this, I think it'll be fun to mostly see the end of this, cool. I think that is probably all the different avenues of this that we could beat. I'd love to hear, like, if you have a really good tactic at like how to turn off and how to take good PTO, whether it's at home or a vacation, definitely send us your tips. We're Recovering workaholics ourselves. And this topic came up because we know we're not always good at it, and we want to get better at it. I want my team to feel like they can do it. I want them to take time off without worrying about putting me an lurch. All right. Where can people find notes for the show? CJ

Avilla: You can find the show notes at buildandlearn.dev

Colin: Awesome. And you can find us online. I am at @colinloretz on twitter CJ

Avilla: I'm at @cjav_dev 2022-07-28--t04-20-48pm--guest644854--cj-

avilla: on Twitter. Track

1: we will see you in two weeks. Thanks everybody. 2022-07-28--t04-20-48pm--guest644854--cj-

avilla: Bye friends.