June 13, 2008 at 8:09 am
One more reason for a real vacation, with no extra work prior or after, is to check your company failover plans. What if you suddenly died in some freak accident? Do your co-workers, or even your boss, know enough to take over from where you abruptly stopped? You will do the company a favor by just dropping your tasks and going on vacation.
J :smooooth:
June 13, 2008 at 8:15 am
Sadly enough this is true. It's when you get back that cross training and documentation all of a sudden become priorities to management. At my company they are including documentation and testing on all new labor estimates to help mitigate these issues. It has just taken a lot of failures and freak-outs for this to happen.
June 13, 2008 at 8:24 am
I agree with a lot that has already been said - we're not indispensable, but if management thinks we are then there is a problem - either with staffing or with our salary! Yes, I do pre-work when I go - it's called documenting the current open issues and their status, and training someone to cover while I'm gone. Then I take off - usually across the country; definintely out of state. The cell phone is for emergencies, but since I'm on a motorcycle I can't hear it ring (heck, it's turned off!) so the response is under my control. One year I took a month's vacation, notified the company almost a year in advance that I was going to do so, and they still wouldn't give me anyone to train as backup until one week before I left. I did check in once during the first week, since I was visiting a co-worker in Anchorage, AK. But after that, no contact - cell phones from the lower 48 don't work on the North Slope! 😀
As for when I get back from vacation - is it "extra work" if you don't work overtime to do it? There is always something left over to do if I take a long vacation (more than a week), but I'm not going to mess up the results of my R&R by working an 80 hour week when I get back!
I've noticed that every time I go on vacation, something "bad" happens - disk drives fail and data is lost during the backup, a web server crashes and is down for hours, something like that. But it's at the site that hosts our servers - nothing I can impact or control. And oddly enough, no one dies from it. My philosophy (and this works with kids too) is that if there isn't blood on the floor, it's not an emergency. It's amazing how many "emergencies" go down in priority when you ask what the consequences of it are!
Steph Brown
June 13, 2008 at 8:39 am
I had worked at a company where they developed the project plans with NO consideration for people's vacation time. Meaning, if you had 3 weeks worth of tasks to complete, and had a week's vacation planned after the 2nd week, you were still expected to complete the tasks by the end date of that third week. The last week's tasks were not pushed back another week in the plan to allow for your vacation. So consequently, as Steve points out, people had to work overtime to complete their tasks by the deadline before they went on vacation. Kind of defeats the purpose of taking time off - work 80 hrs. 1 week so you can have off the next.
June 13, 2008 at 8:39 am
When I take vacation, the laptop does go with me but ONLY for emergencies. I am always able to rest on vacation but since I'm the only DBA, I have to be available 24x7. So, we use the laptop for movies, playing games, browsing the Internet, etc. I do NOT check email. The only time I connect to the corporate network is in the event I receive a call and determine that it truly cannot wait until I return. Otherwise, my boss is happy to make a list for me to catch up on when I return.
June 13, 2008 at 8:47 am
Vacation to me is vacation. There is no cell phone, no laptop, no checking in, and no email. I am out and unavailable.
But what do I have to do to get there? Well this year I have been working the schedule for over four months to make certain that the time off is there. I have scheduled projects and been pressing work deliverables as early as last month to get out in October for between two and three weeks.
Will I do extra work? Some but not enough to ruin the real vacation. Will there be a ton of work for me to do when I get back? Probably, there usually is.
But vacation is still going to be a vacation.
Miles...
Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!
June 13, 2008 at 8:51 am
Though I don't aim for them, I seem to end up in positions where I'm the only one in the DBA position. I ALWAYS take vacations, usually in the spring to do a weekend at a renaissance festival with friends, we go to my parent's for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and generally a few days here and there in between. It's not often that I'll take a full week off, though I LOVE the idea of being required to take off five days in a row!
Before I go on vacations, I make sure everything is stable and there are no lurking server issues sitting out there. All of my backups are running, all of my DBCCs are clean. There are no upgrades planned while I'm gone, all is as well as it can be. Usually there's nothing hideous waiting for me when I return, though frequently there's a new project waiting for me. (I wonder if it's part of the "he's not here, assign it to him" thing?)
I try to make sure that I'm available, just in case. I've yet to be called, but there is one time I should have been. I was on vacation, I was accessible, and a "consultant" made a change to the payroll database, a stable system, on a day that we extract our data and take it over to the City (we actually sneaker-netted it over on a floppy disk!) for it to be sucked into their mainframe and spit out checks (I also had not been previously informed that such a change was coming down the line). The change totally broke the system. The consultant didn't know anything about DBA tasks or scheduled jobs, and spent 4 hours manually undoing his change, holding up central payroll's processing schedule. Had I been called, I could have told them to restore the previous night's backup, the noon backup, and they would have been good. They would have lost half an hour or so, instead they lost an afternoon and screwed up two other departments.
*sigh*
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
June 13, 2008 at 8:55 am
I used to be someone who took vacations, but worked or worried about work most of the time that I was on them. However, I just got back into the office after three months maternity leave. With three months, you can't really do extra work for everything that might come up while you are gone. I just tried to make sure that all of my responsibilities were delegated and properly documented before I left. And you know what - they did just fine without me. I will never do extra work before/after vacation again.
June 13, 2008 at 8:56 am
I would join the chorus and agree with most of the comments proritizing family needs over company needs. I'll add the comment that if your department has been constructed with adequate succession planning( protecting the company) , taking a vacation without "special " preparation is just the equivalent of a DRP test. If there's continuity/ documentation problems they should be addressed before the next illness, vacation etc. None of us are nor should be indispensable.
June 13, 2008 at 8:59 am
For 7 years I was a salaried employee, I worked no less than 9-10 hours a day for a small company that was growing. During the birth of my third child my cell phone was ringing off the hook. I ignored it for a day until I was compelled to answer to and try and solve the problem.
For the last year I have been a contractor, paid hourly plus straight overtime. I get no after hours phone calls and don't even take a laptop with me on vacation - heck, I don't even have a way to connect to the office from home! I don't get to work from home any more (much to the dispair of my wife), but when I'm home I'm there - physically and mentally. It has been great!
Lesson learned, when they have to pay for those after hours phone calls they will try and find another way.:cool:
June 13, 2008 at 9:29 am
I not only think a vacation should be a real break from work, but I'm a big believer in not taking work home. When I leave the office, everything I'm doing there stays there. No pager, no Blackberry, no phone calls. There are four DBAs in our group and between us, we all manage to get some time off when we need it.
Greg
June 13, 2008 at 9:39 am
A former manager used to say - "there really are only two kinds of names for jobs that don't allow you to really take time off: one is jail, and the other, slavery. And you don't want either".
Never mind not being indispensable (I keep reminding myself daily - noone is indispensable / irreplaceable, some are just a little harder to replace than others). The big thing that has helped me detach more during vacations is to remember that I'm not doing anyone any favors by not taking advantage of the "veg time" to decompress.
Tunnel vision is hard to shake and easy to set in, and unless you can truly walk away and start fresh when you get back, you just wasted your time. Companies that mess with you on vacation are essentially screwing themselves, because you won't be as fresh when you get back.
We all do important things for our respective orgs, but the org has to be mature enough to live/survive/limp along without you for some time. Don't take it as devaluing your role - you're still as important to it as you were before the vacation, and hey - if you DID take the vacation in the way you should, you might even be missed appropriately upon your return.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
June 13, 2008 at 10:23 am
"When properly administered, vacations do not diminish productivity: for every week you’re away and get nothing done, there’s another week when your boss is away and you get twice as much done. " –Daniel B. Luten
RBR
June 13, 2008 at 11:01 am
If I was ever caught up in the first place, I might notice if extra work accompanied time OOF (before or after). Maybe next year... Heh.
June 13, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Although we have lots of vacation time, we're only allowed to take it in 1 week increments and then only one person can take off at a time. When you get 4 weeks vacation a year that you lose if you don't take it, it's big fun trying to work around the days.
Oh, and although I try to leave nothing on my desk before I leave, there are lots of messages and work for me when I get back. Yes, the world does go on, but apparently, not without me.
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