Why I cannot take a holiday... Work!
I have a very senior role inside of a 450 person company, in IT. I'm not going to be too specific but it's in the TV industry. I state this because anyone that works in TV probably knows it's full of hot heads and technically inept people. I have a very small team of two in the UK looking after four sites, a couple of guys in the US too, looking after almost pure remote folks, they're mostly cloud.
Every time I go on holiday and as the most technical and senior person, some shit happens that ruins my break. I've had everything from ISP issues caused by finance not paying the bill so we had a site cut off, through to a show not being able to be delivered to channel on a deadline of hours which meant I had to step in, no matter where in the world I am and on what vacation.
I'm away again. Today, 10am, ping after ping about a site outage. Servers unavailable. Telephones not working. IT have failed again. The usual email chains and Teams/Slack chats that start pointing and poking. Absolutely furious and away on a family break I ignored it for the youngsters to solve, it should have been an easy fix. But no, the information given to them was wrong. The diagnosis handed to me incorrect. A cancelled ISP contract kicked in but we have multiple site outbound connections so that should not effect us. The site to site link goes dark for this particular site. I finally get THE CALL. I'm not going to rant too much as it gets technical but there's only so much that can be done from a phone VPN over a poor quality cell connection when you're somewhere between a wooded area a beach, and all you have on you is a 6" android device. I eventually got hold of my US senior tech who spent a four hours trying to direct the UK youngsters on what to touch, where to look. Turns out, some people randomly plugged in a switch, a NAS with DHCP server on and then managed to loopback the network using two ports of a SIP phone over the weekend as they had no clue what they were doing and eventually the network gave out. Spanning tree is not as good as it should be. We're a small team and due to always being overridden in protocol I've never been allowed to MAC address deny by default even though we're often a hacker target. BYOD is rife and it's getting harder to not lose data.
Anyway. Another day of my vacation ruined, time I should have spent concentrating on my family and having fun, building memories. The seething email I have sent to the board will go down like a lead balloon, I cannot wait to read the responses on Monday! Deny is going to get enabled by default or I'm going to resign.
So I ask you, how many others like me are there in here that work pushes in to your personal time, every time you try to get away from it?
I think if you cannot go on vacation without being pulled into these things, then there are not enough senior people on your team. There should be someone you can delegate responsibility to that is capable of managing things in your absence. Maybe it can be solved by splitting your responsibility up between several more junior people, with your US counterpart being in call as a measure of last resort.
This is something that has to be planned ahead of time. You go to your boss and say, "Boss, I need to really get away when I go on vacation. What can we do to make that happen? The company should care about this because what happens if you get hit by a bus tomorrow?
if you are very good at your job and too willing to step in when something breaks, then that may be part of the problem. If you don't let them feel any pain, they will never feel like anything needs to change. So you could tell them you are going to be unreachable in vacation then ... be unreachable. They will figure it out. My experience with this is that sometimes you have to leave to get people to understand the value you bring to an organization.
In the end, you have to be the one to set and enforce boundaries with work. They will almost always try to take as much as they can. But you don't have to let them. And just because you used to let them doesn't mean you have to keep doing so.
And if the answer is anything less than supportive. It's time to find a new job.
Jobs in Tech are a little slower at the moment. But as Senior Leadership in Data... Even I get full downtime.
I don't have Teams, Outlook, Slack or anything work related on my phone when I'm not on leave... Let alone when I am.
I completely agree with this. My contract says 9-6 Monday to Friday, and 9-6 Monday to Friday is what my company get. No one (well, one person) as my number, I don’t have anything work related on my phone. If someone needs me, it can damn well wait, they don’t pay me enough to work outside of contractual hours
As a guy who worked upwards of 3500 hours a year for a few years straight.....
Learning the art of, "not giving a fuck" was a very important turn in my career.
There are very few things that if it didn't get done today, can't wait for tomorrow.
If I'm on vacation.... I'm on vacation. If I'm the only one that can fix it, it stays broken until I get back. That's an organizational problem, not a me problem.
There is nothing so important that I have to be at work more that 10 hours. If there is, the company didn't hire appropriately.
Sounds like the bus factor. There's nothing worse for ones own work life balance than being the only cog in the machine. In my last role I was the only one working on a particular project (I'm a software engineer) such that if I took any time off, all that guaranteed was that there'd be a mountain of work waiting upon my return. As you can imagine, keeping that fact alone out of the back of your mind is quite the task. Eventually it got to a point where I wasn't learning anything either, because there was essentially no peer review on anything I was doing. Any PR I'd put up was Hail Mary approved nigh immediately.
When I handed in my notice, suddenly it was panic stations, and I spent the remainder of my time there onboarding two contractors. I hadn't actually planned on leaving, my state of mind at the time was that I had resigned myself to the "comfort of familiarity" and inherent job security I was afforded by virtue of being that lone cog. That is, until a former colleague reached out with an opportunity and I just went for it. Thankfully I can say it's been a very positive change, and my work life balance is much improved. Plus, my previous company isn't looking too hot at the moment. If it says anything, there's two other alumni in my current place.
Anyway, that story is not to tell you to quit your job or anything, but for the sake of my own mental health it was the right call for me at that stage.
@g33kphr33k First of all, i'm very sorry for your situation! As a fellow technologist, i get it! Secondly, i apologize for the length of my post here...but i sure hope it helps; you are not alone!
The following suggestions that i submit to you might be risky, so the VERY FIRST THING you need to do next is to: organize yourself for a possible or eventual jump to another job - and either to another company or as a consultant. By this i mean:
Ok, now, once you are on a path for being primed to jump - if necessary - then consider the following suggestions...
There are many other things that you can also do - in tandem and/or as alternatives - but i will stop here because i've rambled on far too long already. Again, i'm sorry you're going through this, and i wish you the best of luck! Feel free to ask any question if you have any. Cheers!
This sounds like my friend RJ who I haven't seen in a long time because of what I assume is this.
They need to hire more senior personnel, and this is one thing I've noticed too. When you build a team you build it big so someone can take stuff and be delegated to when you're off.
I work for a small company, with fewer than 30 employees. I have no back-up. There's only me and my manager in our department. While we know in broad brushstrokes what each other do, the specific tasks and the skill-sets required for those tasks don't have a lot of overlap, so it's very hard for me to backfill when she goes on holiday, and vice versa. Also, we've each still got our own jobs to do, which makes it difficult to take on the extra work required to backfill when either of us is away.
She's currently on a 6-week holiday. While a couple of time-critical tasks are being handled while she's away, there's a shitload of work piling up in her absence, waiting for her to return. I would face pretty much the same thing if I took a long holiday (although it might be easier to hire a temp-worker to sit in for me if I were to take prolonged leave like that). On some previous, shorter holidays, she had to take her laptop with her to deal with those time-critical tasks (just a couple of hours per week). This time, she made the deliberate decision to cut herself off for 6 weeks, and I say more power to her for doing so. We need to switch off when we're not at work, whether that's on a weeks-long holiday, a weekend, or even just overnight. We should not be on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The French have it right with their "right to disconnect" law.
My manager and I have openly discussed the fact that working for a small company comes with this trade-off: while the culture is good, and the conditions are great, and the management are flexible... there's just no back-up for me or for her. There's no need to hire more people in our department; they would just sit around and wait for us to take holidays. So we just have to live with a lack of back-up when we go on holiday, and a pile of work when we get back.
Luckily, I don't take many holidays!
Why not?
I'm sorry, but this doesn't seem like something to brag about.
Who was bragging?
My first vacation in 5 years, a client texts me in the middle of the week to ask me to pay a single bill. This isn't an emergency, the bill isn't overdue, no one will die, but it was still important somehow to reach out to me on vacation to ask me to deal with it. They knew I was on vacation, but they've gotten so used to me being available they just didn't think about it.
But at least I'm my own boss. If there's no backup for when I go on vacation it's my own fault. What's your employer's excuse for not having a backup plan when people take their vacation time?
"We don't have the budget."
Sigh.
If it's a 450 person company, my immediate reaction is that they have the budget or can find it by shifting priorities.
I'm in the US so your culture may not support this but in your shoes I would consult an employment attorney. Failing that, I would seek a different job as quickly as practicable.
This is always the excuse.
But then I find that execs are overpaying themselves, with big ol bonus'.
Story of my life, even in tech leadership.
OP, I don't know if you can swing this with the other people in your household but, if you are expected to be interrupted by work while away, and if you can handle most tasks via text, email or phone (meaning, not always seated in front of a computer), maybe you can travel someplace for a longer stay (say, two months in a rented house) and work remotely. They can call you while you are at the beach, on a hike, on a boat. You would be able to relax more because of the nice surroundings and still get a vacation vibe and not feel like you are being robbed of a vacation because technically you aren't on vacation. You could slot in literal vacation days so that you're actually only working 3 or 4 days a week (and don't respond on the days off, knowing you can address the issue the following day). Or... look for another job. Im sure you can find one that will actually honor your time off.
Recently I've been starting to get sick to my stomach thinking about how many people tend to spend their own time putting work in for a company.
At my last job, I was the only person who knew how to do my job, so I would consistently work while on vacation. Yes, it was partially my fault for working and not setting boundaries, but the pile of work I would come back to after a true week-long vacation felt more unbearable. After 7 years of that, I got incredibly burnt out, resigned, and took 8 months off from working last year. Somehow I still don't feel like I've recovered, partially because the new job I found (that I chose specifically hoping for more work/life balance) has asked me multiple times to work while on vacation, the team is understaffed as always, and there's a toxic work culture with the leadership on the team who work on vacation as well. So I feel like I'm right back where I started and feeling hopeless about it. I should find another job, but this one just extended my contract and it feels more appealing than searching for another job, especially since the "work/life balance" has seemed sketchy at recent companies I've interviewed with.
I'm at a point where I'm going to start planning my vacations in between short-term contract work, so I can just ...be on vacation.
That sounds incredibly stressful and you have my sympathy if nothing else. Im at the opposite end of the supervisory scale, I am a one man company and the closest Ive come to vacation ruining emergency calls was a panicking and upset tenant reporting a sewage system that was backing up and flooding the house for the second time while I was trying to have a romantic moonlight supper with my wife 3000 miles away in Hawaii. It did get solved over the phone but not without a significant amount of hair pulling stress and one helluva plumber's bill. Nothing gets my blood pressure rising like a tradesmen who knows he has you by the short and curlies saying, 'Well, we can do an emergency callout, yes, but it's going to cost you..." Ug, sure, take my firstborn, what else am I going to do this far away?