Yeah, I came to tech from a union job in a warehouse and thought the whole “oh, we don’t need unions, we’re valued skilled workers” thing… for about eighteen months and then I tried to start a union in the job.
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Beyond the fun perks designed to keep them at the office all the time, young tech workers are enticed by salaries that seem enormous to a recent college graduate. I always advise the ones I meet to keep a record of their daily arrival and departure times at work for their first 9 months, do the math on their effective hourly rate, and then compare to the hourly rates for other jobs (including service industry ones). If they do it, it’s usually an eye-opener for them.
If they come back to me, it’s time for an introduction to the core concepts of The Mythical Man Month and a discussion of exactly why they’re working those 60+ hour weeks (short answer: chronically bad management culture). I’ve been having these conversations since the 1990s, so while I may have woken up individuals the industry culture hasn’t changed all that much.
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I am surprised that Musk didn’t raise the Twitter post limit to 420 characters.
That would be more on-brand for him.
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Perhaps he’ll raise it to 1488 characters.
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If only new features could be tested before rolling them out to millions of users…
I’ve never seem a company owner that enjoys insulting his own company as much as he does. H seems to have built up this idea (or delusion) that Twitter is the enemy and he is heroically fighting it from within.
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The latest scam sweeping tech is the concept of “unlimited vacation”. I mean, wow, what’s not to love, right? Take as much time off as you want! Not realizing what a worker-hostile psychological trick it is.
Never mind that traditional paid time off is something you earn and are entitled to. If you quit or are laid off, that comes to you as unpaid wages. You can’t be penalized for using it because it’s part of your wages package.
With “unlimited” vacation it becomes discretionary to your employer whether you can use it or not. “Oh, sorry, it’s crunch time, you can’t take a week off to recharge. Get back to work.” or “you took a week off, now that’s no longer time that gets calculated into any bonus”, or “because you took a week off and the shit hit the fan, you are a now considered a low performer.” People who use more are resented by those who use less. People who are scared of losing their job will use less because they don’t want to be seen as lazy.
With “unlimited” vacation, people often use it less because ironically there’s less incentive to use it. It’s no longer this metered bucket of days/hours you’re entitled to, it’s this nebulous pool of time you need to carefully consider whether or not you can afford the risk of using it.
It’s great for companies, though. You go from being entitled to x hours of vacation and telling, to being entitled to 0 hours of vacation and asking.
So much #innovation.
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So glad you mentioned this because I meant to and forgot. The final tech company that I worked at had this and it was a perpetual source of confusion and anxiety for people. Most interpreted it as “no vacation” because everyone was scared to take advantage of it.
The companies are doing it mainly for tax and bookkeeping reasons (there are some subtleties of payroll management here that allow them to lower costs by not officially tracking PTO at all). Personally, I took pretty heavy advantage of it because I was old and grizzled enough by then to be immune to passive aggressive management environments. They can glare at me all they want, but I took a European-number of weeks off every year and it was great.
The one big disadvantage to traditional PTO systems is that they incentivize people to come to work sick (and get everyone else sick). I did really appreciate that part of the unlimited vacation policy. People would stay home and not try to be a hero so they could cash out in a year.
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We used so little vacation while working through pandemic that work offered to buy back some of our unused vacation days. Being in the UK and still having that inherited EU reg on the lawbooks, we had to make sure we wouldn’t go under having taken 28 holiday days in the last year.
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I saw this was in reply to @edgore, so assumed it was the post just above yours.
I mean, it’s a fine comment, but…
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re: 32 bit hardware - No, it might some hardcoded value buried in the software, and the person who maintained it either is long gone, or left after shitweasel took over.
re: Unions / Vacation / PTO - When I worked for [ISP], our benefits plan was one that was negotiated by the CWA (Communications Workers of America, which is the union most telecomms employees are members of), which was pretty decent. That included a singular pool of PTO, and it was a “use it or lose it” proposition on a yearly basis- both myself and my manager had the last two weeks of the year off because we didn’t use enough of it, and the department manager was very much a “you are on PTO from X to Y, period end of discussion” person.
My current job also has a pool of PTO that you accrue, but there’s a cap on it after which you don’t accrue any more, so we are encouraged to use it, or sell a portion of it back twice a year. (Being salaried, I end up selling back as much as possible during both times, mostly because my boss ‘forgets’ to approve time off that I’ve put in for half the time, even though I take that time off in reality; I don’t mind this a whole lot, so I don’t generally raise a stink about it. Makes up for being in the on-call rotation.)
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