Pro Tip to youngesters just getting into corporate.
Don’t let the company think they actually care about you. They don’t. HR doesn’t care. Executives doesn’t. Nobody doesn’t. You’re the only person that cares about you.
Also, work is just a business transaction. They need your service. You need their money. Do make friends, but not at your expense.
Americans and their attitude to their holiday allowance will never cease to amaze me.
Literally the only consideration I need to make on behalf of my employer is whether my days off will leave less than 75% of my department out. And as that never happens then I never have to think about it.
If you have holiday available to you, take it.
“Hard work” is one of the cultural norms that the Puritans instilled in our society. Our ancestors fought hard to form labor unions and to guarantee that we wouldn’t have to work 80-hour weeks, and yet here we are.
Not to say that people in other countries don’t work hard. They do. Many work harder than their counterparts in the US. But their governments have (very reasonable) limits on the amount of time their employers can expect them to work. (As well as minimums for time off, sick leave, etc.)
It’s a weird holdover of American culture that spending too much time at work and putting the company’s needs before your own is somehow virtuous.
It’s capitalist propaganda pushed across our media and culture. The whole bootstraps myth is tied up in all of American culture. It’s always been bull shit propagated by the owner class.
Tip for managers: anticipate how your staff taking PTO will impact your team and try as hard as possible to minimize any disruption. And realize that there are times when their PTO is going to be inconvenient and you’re going to have to deal with that.
If I am the whole team, does the last bit still apply?
Typically you still have a manager that may not be on your team directly but they may manage you. I was an IT team of one at one point but the lead programmer to the company was the manager of my department " "
Sounds like a job I had once. Left that job after not even a year. Was not worth it for me especially since I was still early in career and was very obviously in over my head with little proper direction/leadership.
Well for me it was actually one of those jobs that helped me grow in my career. It was my first system administration job. And more important than that it was a Linux system administrator job so I learned a ton and grew a ton. It was one of the few jobs that I stayed at for as long as I did. The only reason I left was when they denied my raise to a decent pay rate. The next job I stepped into was the manager of a network operations center so it helped me grow all the way to that point.
I think for me, while I was definitely exposed to a lot of things I never touched in college, I don’t think I ever really got what I needed for me in my career. I really want to avoid any manager type role as much as possible and large part of that is I’m bad at being accountable for things. I don’t have good foresight and was never shown what to expect, for what to many, seems like normal things but I just take things as I get them. I work best when I’m told what to do and if I can do that as a SME who earns the dough, that’s enough for me. After my (so far) one gov job, absolutely do not want any part of being in management or manager/lead type role.
I am lucky to get the time I do (It’s more than most people I know) but I recently too two full weeks off to spend with my wife for our 20th anniversary, it was amazing. After I got back to work I had hundreds of emails to catch up on and so much extra work that had piled up I started thinking about all the extra work I had taken on over the years to “cover down” for people and then realized that was the most consecutive time I’ve taken off in the past 9 years.
I think it’s time for a change. Not a job change per-se, but time to start taking time for me, my family, and my health.
“timeless advice” motherfuckers when PTO stops existing 😯
If your employer doesn’t hire enough bodies to make sure the work gets done when people call in sick or take PTO, that’s on them. Absenteeism can range between 3-5% on any given day, and can be industry dependent. This is something that should be factored into the amount of work that needs to get done per day on average when deciding on appropriate headcount. Companies that want to run skeleton crews because, “muh profits,” can find out when they fuck around. I was always taught that when it comes to things critical for your survival, you should always have them in triplicate. This is why I have an E-bike, analog bike, and bus pass; if one stops working, I have backups. Employers should have this mindset with critical tasks and headcount.
I think both stances need more nuance. Yeah - if your company doesn’t hire someone that can fulfill your essential duties while you’re gone, that’s on them.
But when you do have someone who can cover your duties while you’re gone, it makes sense that you can’t all take off the same day. I work in municipal government for a small city, and my boss and I are each other’s backups. We’ve worked together for years, and we haven’t taken the same day off yet, but both take several weeks a year. Heck - tomorrow there’s an annual conference we both should attend, and we alternate each year who goes because someone has to hold down the fort.
If your company takes care of you and treats you with respect, most people will think of this sort of stuff and reasonably accommodate. Most businesses with this mindset of don’t take PTO are just running skeleton crews to boost profits at the expense of work life balance. They are typically the ones always guilting people about taking the very sparse amount of PTO offered in the US. I am union and my company treats us well, so I always think about my team without being asked. I didn’t when I worked for shitty big chains who took advantage of workers when I was younger.
Any company that can’t function without a team member to this degree is under staffed and poorly ran. You can’t hinge operations on any one talent. This Priv person has real work / life issues or is just a greedy boss.
If your company can’t function without you, it’s time for a pay rise.
Also stop using the acronym, because it’s too easy to forget what those letters mean when just the acronym is being used. Call it “Paid Time Off”.
We call it vacation in the rest of the English speaking world.
Vacation ≠ pto and it’s strange to equate them. There’s various non paid ways to take a vacation, such as a(n intended) gap between jobs, unpaid additional leave, or on a 3 day weekend. There’s people working in my job with 6 and 7 weeks of pto that still take unpaid additional vacations.
Where do you live? Where I live, we call it Semester…
Literally, the only place I have ever heard PTO used is in the US.
How are they taking unpaid vacations when they could be using PTO?
They use all of their pto, as well as taking more. Also, management allows people to choose if they want to use pto when taking a day off. All unused pto pays out at the end of the year and raises are in October – wait to use it and it adds a dollar per pto hour
I know people who are off even up to a third of the year
Power Take Off?
If you do it strategic like.
Or ask for a massive raise, and take the PTO anyway.
Ugh, soon…once things stop exploding in infascinating ways my coworkers aren’t equipped to handle without leaving a bonfire for my return. Not their fault, I’m just the guy tasked with the oddball stuff that looks nothing like their day-to-day. Fine when things are the normal amount of on fire, less so when actively erupting and (recently) literally on fire.
Take some time off my dude, it’s not worth your health and being that guy will get in the cracks before you realize something is off. After taking two weeks off recently I came back to the world on fire and have started to realize I don’t care that much!
The Scrooge McDuck avatar lighting a cigar with a dollar note makes me think this was either satire to begin with, or the original poster has lost any and all contact with reality.
Personally, I’m so sick of people saying “it’s parody/satire!” That’s on the same level as fucking with people, then laughing “it’s just a prank, bro!”
There’s so many garbage takes and smooth-brained people believing the dumbest shit now, despite having all collective human knowledge at our fingertips… If your super funny satire is indistinguishable from these, it adds absolutely nothing.
I have literally been given a nearly identical speech about taking PTO, more than once…
This is why I use /s .
The internet has weirdly forgotten about Poe’s Law. There are enough fucked up people in the world that you just can’t reliably determine if an outlandish opinion is satire or not.
Even when they are obviously satire, some idiots will take them to heart and repeat them everywhere as gospel.
Business Bros love to run a boiler room enterprise that prints decals for the local dollar store and pretend they’re going to be the next Steve Jobs.
Also the name “privilege log”
I get both sides of this argument. Some businesses have certain periods where it’s extremely busy followed by an ebb in work. Accountants for example may be balls-to-the-wall at year end, but that period doesn’t justify hiring somebody who might otherwise have their thumb up their ass and nothing to do most of the rest of the year. I’ve also had IT jobs that resolved around projects in this way., and there are always a certain number of SME’s that you kinda need at launch.
At the other side, I’ve known employers who basically ran the bare-minimum amount of staff for a team/project (or less and worked the rest to the bone) and getting them to sign off on holidays for any reasonable length of time was near impossible. Those are the types that would try to call you from the middle of open-heart-surgery if they could, and yeah anyone in this situations should be looking for a new job. The hard part being that getting the time to do proper job hunting was often also similarly difficult because of work, and bills still needed to be paid.
