lots of professions face this kind of stress. it's a big part of why the pay is high. for whatever reason the majority of people almost always choose more work and more money over other options (there are several studies backing this). the general rule is that people say they would be happy if they made 50% more money than they do now, regardless of how much they make now.
my advice: recognize the marginal utility of money and plan accordingly. recognize your frivolous "needs" for what they are. I realize this is a lot harder for people with, say, a family living in san francisco with very high living expenses and you are the primary bread winner. my advice for that is....don't be the primary breadwinner with a family in a high cost of living area? sorry but you made choices without realizing what you were getting yourself into.
Can someone from a country which has vacation time clarify this for me: how exactly does four weeks of vacation work? Assume that I'm from a planet of weird space-aliens where by default you're expected to work every day the company is open. Do you have to take vacation time consecutively? Do you have to take it at a particular time of the year? Is it subject to some sort of approval process?
Here in Australia a "permanent" position typically includes around 4 weeks of paid vacation ("annual leave"). The vacation time is accumulated week by week so that if you want to take a long break you need to "save up" the time. Vacations can be anything from a single Monday through to months.
How this is arranged depends on the company (e.g. large corporations tend towards lots of paperwork) but they all demand a reasonable amount of notice (i.e. more notice for longer vacation periods) as well as some awareness of deadlines and upcoming work.
Different companies do have different policies though. For example, that employees use their vacation time within a certain period or lose it. And yes, some have certain times that are set vacations. My company shuts down between Christmas and New Year, and the non-public holidays count as annual leave.
In the last six months I have: taken Monday/Friday leave to visit family for an extra long weekend, a two week break to do a course (latin :), and a morning in the middle of the week (with no notice) to wait for a delivery.
For contrast: a "casual" job has no paid leave. I believe it is also much easier legally for employers to fire casual employees.
My previous employer used to give us 30 days of vacation a year.
You don't have to take it consecutively, but many people often do take it in chunks. The most common pattern is to take 1 or 2 weeks off at a time. You could also take it one day at a time, say take a few Mondays off. However, taking every Monday off is generally frowned upon.
You can take it whenever you want, so long as you announce it early enough in advance and there is nothing planned at that time that requires you to be there (e.g. "the product is being launched that week").
Normally, the process is that you check your calendar and check with your boss. Once the vacation is approved, you book your flights, etc. Typically, it is extremely unlikely for someone to cancel your vacation after you've booked it. The general consensus is that once the vacation is approved, the manager just has to accept that it will happen.
Basically, it's common sense - don't disrupt the company's work with your vacation, be sensible, announce it early enough in advance.
Anywhere I've worked (UK) there's been a limit to the number of sick days you can take and restrictions on having to have a doctors note depending how long you were off. Currently I think I'm allowed 5 in a year off and after 3 within a week I need a note from a doctor.
Take more than 5 days off and you're relying on good will and have to attend meetings to explain it, in theory you might get dumped to statutory pay.
In terms of family emergencies you either take them as annual leave or you rely on goodwill. Normally I've been able to get half days for funerals but that's based on the IT world where they know I'm making up time for them regularly.
If you take time off long-term due to illness, you will get paid either the amount of sick pay that's listed in your employment contract, or Statutory Sick Pay, which is about £80 per week, whichever is higher. You might also qualify for state benefits – housing allowance etc.
You can claim statutory for 28 weeks, but your contract might allow more than this. After the 28 weeks, you switch entirely to the benefits system until you are fit enough to work again, but your employer doesn't have to take you on again after this.
My father was long-term sick, and was paid at 100% pay for 6 months, then 50% pay for a further 6 months, which was part of his contract. His employer extended the 50% pay to a total of a year out of goodwill.
Rob covers the basics below but bear in mind you can take out insurance policies that pay out if you have to take long-term sick absence.
Obviously these thing vary depending on age etc but my girlfriend has a policy like this and one for unemployment any they aren't preclusively expensive.
So it depends on the employer. I think there is a mandated 8 days of sick/carers leave per year - on top of the Annual Leave entitlements. Some places (think Retail) are going to insist upon a Doctors Certificate to prove you were ill (especiallly on Monday/Friday). I work for a large 3 letter IT multinational and we have some incredible amount of sick-leave available if we need it. (I've used 2 days in 5 years though - sometimes I feel I should get sick more often.).
I don't believe that any of these leave dates are paid for by the government - but they are specifies as conditions of employment through Government legislation. It basically becomes a cost of hiring a permanent employee (vs a contractor). An employee will be absent approx 6-7 weeks of the year - 4 weeks annual leave, 1 week sick, 2 weeks public holidays (Christmas, Easter, Melbourne Cup)
Yes - In Melbourne, we have a mandated Public Holiday for a horse race.
More Swedish info: you call in sick, then stay in bed and try to get well. You don't get paid the first day (or maybe two days, not sure...), but after that you get 80% of your normal pay from your employer the following two weeks. If you're sick for more than two weeks, you no longer get paid by your employer - instead you get the same 80% from the State(tm). You might have to provide a statement from a doctor supporting your claim of sickness.
If you're unable to continue doing your normal work due to some injury, you employer is expected to try to find other tasks for you that you can do despite your injury. If they cannot, you're expected to find a new job that you can perform. During this time you get 80% from the state.
There are exceptions and lots and lots of rules about all of this, but the general principles should be fairly correct.
In general it seems to work fairly well, but as with any system there are both people who abuse it /fraud)and people who get abused by it (get defined out of the system because they're "not sick enough" - they're treated as unemployed instead).
There was a study recently with the conclusion that there is 5-10% over spending in the system (e.g. people get more than they were supposed to if everyone filled in every form correctly), including both mistakes and fraud. In my opinion that's pretty good.
Depending on the country (I believe this applies to most of Western Europe), if you or anyone in your family is sick then you call in sick. It doesn't count against your holidays. And you can be out sick as long as necessary. I've heard some being out sick for a 2 months. Reason is the government covers sick days (they reimburse the employer 80%). You will need to see a doctor who will put down how many days you need to recover.
So no their isn't a "pile" of bankable sick days. Just know if you are sick for too long you go on disability which is a separate matter I'm not familiar with.
France here as well, here's what applies for employees: if you're sick you go to the doctor, and he's the one who decides if you must get an "arrêt de travail" for X days which is an official paper stating you shouldn't work, based on your medical condition.
Then there's the question of will you get paid or not - under a certain amount of days you won't be paid (I think it's 3). After that other mechanisms kick in.
Family emergency is usually in the holidays pile. Some companies allow 1 day off per year if someone dies.
You can also (based on company agreement) take a day off and just decide not to get paid.
We don't have an allocation for sick/emergency days (for salaried workers) so there are essentially infinite sick days. It's assumed that you won't abuse the "privilege" since it would be hard to make your deadlines if you did so.
I've actually been (gently) scolded for using a vacation day instead of a sick day to take care of my wife when she was ill.
In Sweden you by law have at least five weeks of paid vacation per year. You're guaranteed to be allowed four consecutive weeks in the summer, but other than that it's up to you and your employer to decide when you take the rest of the days. The employer has final say, but that power is rarely used.
You can save a number of vacation days from year to the next, but there's a limit to how many. Unused days are exchanged for extra pay.
If you're employed on a per-hour basis you don't get paid during your vacation (but you're still allowed five weeks), but you get an extra 12.5% pay per hour to compensate this (which over a year of full-time work should be more or less the same as having paid vacation).
France here (although I'm not an employee anymore so these rules don't apply to me).
> Do you have to take vacation time consecutively?
No in general, although some companies will try to push out every one 3 weeks in a row in the summer, when activity goes down a bit.
> Do you have to take it at a particular time of the year?
For the 5 mandatory weeks of holidays, no, unless specific situations. What happens in reality is quite often you have to do trade-offs with other people going in vacation, to ensure the service can still run properly.
> Is it subject to some sort of approval process?
Typical process: your direct boss signs off your holidays request and ensure the team is not going off at the same time, then you go to HR for the final approval.
Honestly, in my experience the US hasn't been much better. There's still no federal law that mandates holiday time, although may employers offer some to appear more competitive in the labor pool. I'm not speaking of unskilled positions either -- I've worked as a DBA in billion-dollar companies and told I should be grateful for my 5 days off a year (which accrue over time, not provided at the beginning of the fiscal year). Then there's watching co-workers be terminated for being gravely ill. Again, I'm talking software developers, network admins, etc.
Now that I have 25 PTO days plus the 10 NYSE trading holidays I feel spoiled -- has anyone here ever gone into work while passing kidney stones? Ever go in for work for a week, not noticing your weight has dropped from 150 to 105lbs in 5 days because Type II diabetes has onset and you're not aware what's wrong with yourself? How about having two days off in a row denied, and being told they need to be taken on separate weeks?
As someone who mostly went without them for the first 10 years of his career (I think one employer over 2 years offered 10 days and didn't place ridiculous restrictions) I can say that the mental and physical health benefits of time off are enormous -- though this is probably obvious to most.
I work at a medium-sized company in the Netherlands and I get about 25 days of vacation per year (I can't recall the exact number). I think it's somewhere in the contract that they expect me to take at least two or three consecutive weeks of holiday each year but I generally just announce my longer holidays a couple of weeks in advance and if I can't or don't feel like working for a day I announce it the day before or in the morning of that day (better than calling in 'sick'!).
Due to circumstances I hadn't taken a lot of days off the last two years which meant I had quite a few vacation days saved up so I could take about four-and-a-half weeks off last December and January to help my girlfriend who was about to give birth to our second child.
There's usually a maximum to the amount of days one can save up over the years and a colleague of mine had to take a couple of weeks off last year otherwise he would lose the days.
In South Africa you are legally entitled to 3 weeks a year of paid vacation (annual leave), which translates to 15 working days if you work 5 days a week. Your employer may legally reject any requests for paid vacation time and tell you when you're allowed to take your vacation (or even force you to take it at a certain time), although exercising that right may not always be wise.
If your employer keeps rejecting your requests for taking leave for a certain period (not going into the details, let's pretend it's a simple rule of 6 months), you are entitled to take the leave without their permission.
The vacation time doesn't have to be taken consecutively - 3 weeks is just a general way of saying 15 working days. If your normal working week is 6 days, you'd have 18 working days of annual leave.
Now's your turn to treat us like space aliens. How does it work in Japan?
Slacker Americans who insist on actually using the time the contract gives them might receive, say, 14 days off in an April to April fiscal year, in addition to public holidays (which are roughly as numerous as they are in the US, but not on the same days -- people work on Christmas and get off on the emperor's birthday, for example). While it is very much not the normal practice, I have special permission from my bosses to be allowed to take the majority of my days off at Christmas so that I can travel home and see my family.
The contract also allows for sick days, bereavement days (1 day for a child/sibling/spouse, 2 days for a parent -- I'm just reporting), and days off for weddings and childbirth. These are, ahem, not utilized to their fullest extent. In practice, the only sick leave I have ever seen taken at my company involved a) a nervous breakdown and b) chemotherapy for metastatizing bone cancer. (He got better... and came back to work!) Our best engineer came in the day after his mother died (although my boss tried to send him home).
Unused leave of the first kind accumulates, which results in older employees in my company having literally months of it sitting around. They will likely never use it, and they'll lose it when they separate from the company. Japanese law specifically forbids you from paying people for unused leave because the government thought companies would force people to work until they dropped, then take the payout.
We're very slowly getting better about this. There is at least one twenty-something male at my company other than me who actually takes all his vacation days every year. (He also left at 5:30 for much of my first year at the company... and stopped after he was informed that, quote, he was less Japanese than Patrick is.)
In a lot of small/middle sized companies, you officially have paid vacation but it's badly looked upon to actually take them. It's the same as being the first one out of the office at the official ending time...
In bigger multinationals like Sharp, it's a bit different. Some employees sued them over this a few years back, so now employees are forced to take their annual paid vacations.
Of course, as foreigners you're allowed and supposed to be a bit lazy/eccentric/quirky so you can take day off more easily (plus they understand the argument of taking days off to go see your family)
in chile it's pretty much assumed you will take either january or february as vacation. santiago is dead for both those months.
larger employers may have some more formal agreement. my partner, for example, can have all of february, or 3 weeks of her choosing throughout the year (this is at u chile). it's subject to approval, although being academics that is somewhat informal.
i'm not sure where you're from or if i am taking you too seriously, but i currently have a contract with a company in the usa and the deal there is a certain number of days every 6 months (can't remember how many, but it's a lot for a us company - maybe two or three weeks?). a small number of those can be taken without approval.
If you can get approved for 4 weeks then there isn't a problem. I get approximately 6 weeks (~27 days) so either take 2 3-week vacations or 3 2-week vacations. You can also use vacation time to pad out holidays. This is a popular option if there is a government holiday on wednesday, add thursday and friday and you have 5 days that only cost you 2 vacation days.
You don't have to take it at a specific time of the year. It can make it easier if everyone does it at the same time. Our office closes for a week in August and December. Since not enough people are here to run things you take them whether you want to or not (or end up running the switchboard by yourself).
It varies from company to company (and country to country) but usually you can take vacation days whenever you like, but they have to be approved by your superior. He makes sure that not everyone takes the same week off or that you don't miss a crucial part of a project etc. Often you are expected to take a certain amount en bloc (e.g. two weeks). At least that is my experience from working in the UK and Germany.
I'm in the UK too and its all manager's discretion so it varies massively.
One place I worked even let a guy save his allowance and work 4 days weeks from September to December. Another from time to time asked people to cancel their leave at very short notice because of the projects that were on.
Ever heard of duvet days? my mate's boss let him that day off by sending a text from his bed in the morning if he didn't fancy it that day.
There (Lithuania) you get 28 calendar days of paid vacation per year. You can split that in parts, but at least one part must be 14 calendar days minimum.
There are cases when you get 35 days—if you ar <18 years old, single parent, etc. but 28 is standard duration.
> Do you have to take vacation time consecutively? Do you have to take it at a particular time of the year? Is it subject to some sort of approval process?
I tell my boss I want to take that many days off at that date (normally has to be well in advance - a month or more is good). Unless there is something really urgent or I'll be gone for a really long time (2 weeks or more at a time) he'll usually agree.
If you take less than 5 weeks per year the remaining get added to the next year (this is purely theoretical for me, as I have never taken fewer vacation days than what I was entitled to).
I didn't realize you'd worked your entire life in Japan?
Anyway, at the places I've worked at in the US (I have 3 weeks vacation time + any carried over from the previous year), you can take it at pretty much any time you want, but it's preferred that you don't do it at "crunch time." There is an approval process, but I've never had a vacation request go unapproved and I've never not approved a request from my reports.
Some of the foreign born people I work with will take an entire 3-4 week block at once to travel to their home country but usually I just take off a Friday and/or Monday here and there to make a long weekend or at most one week at a time.
UK here - I get 33 days, with only days we have to take off being 2 at Xmas and 2 at New Year. Apart from that it is completely flexible.
Can take that any way you want - some people take it in big chunks (4 weeks or so) other as a mix of days here and there with a few weeks as well. Approval process is pretty straightforward and is mainly about giving enough notice so that people can plan round your holidays.
My wife is a lawyer and she gets 36 days, but she rarely gets to take them all due to the pressures of her work.
Wow reading some of these comments makes me realise how good I have it as a teacher in Australia.
We have 13 Weeks paid leave per year. 2 weeks for every 10 weeks worked, and then 6.5 weeks break over Christmas.
On top of that we have 10 days of paid sick leave each year. I can take sick leave by simply emailing that morning and letting them know that I'm not coming in. Sick leave accumulates and is paid out when you leave the employer. The beauty of this is that there is absolutely no stigma associated with taking time off work. If you're feeling over worked then take a 'mental health' day. No one will ever question you for it or demand to see medical certificates etc.
On top of this of course we also have "long service leave", which I assume every country has. It equates to 11 weeks paid leave after working for 10 years. So basically every 10 years a teacher can look forward to around 20 weeks paid leave (if the leave is taken between Christmas and term 1 break).
And at $78,000/year the pay isn't bad either :)
Basically it's the perfect job for someone who is also working on a startup.
You mean during the break time? Not at all. The school closes down and we are told to come back the same day as the students do :)
There are about 5 Professional Development days per year and these are conducted before the end of the school year. Which is a terrible time to do it since we're all in holiday mode anyway.
Sorry, compared to some jobs IT isn't that stressful. Think about the jobs that literally face life and death issues: medics, armed forces, police, lawyers, social workers etc.
I've known people in all of these areas and it really helps me put any issues I have into perspective.
According to an EMT I know, the job is intense but not stressful. There is excitement when you race off to the scene; the minute the patient enters the ER it's not your problem anymore.
He says he could never deal with a job like IT, where you actually think about work when you go home.
However, the problem of some paramedics is exactly that: they do think about their work when they go home. They see a lot of unhappiness and can't shrug it off. In that way, every line of work has its problems. The bottom line is: don't take your work home with you, unless it's also your hobby and your 'homework' is not just a continuation of your work. At home I do as much as I can in Scheme and Python, while at work I program Java. I'll be switching to a Ruby company soon and I'm not sure I'll continue doing as much Python at home.
I guess it depends on the person - I used to know a doctor who got extremely stressed when he had to break it someone that they had an incurable condition and that basically they were going to die.
I suppose stress levels depend as much on your personality as the job itself.
Doing a pointless and futile job (i.e. teaching) stresses me [1]. Uncertainty and not knowing how to solve a problem don't. I know people who can handle pointless grunt work, but can't handle uncertainty. I could imagine enjoying an EMT or surgical job (bandage the bleed, pass them on) but not necessarily primary care (treating people for diseases they could easily have prevented by putting down the potato chips).
The trick, I suppose, is to figure out what stresses you and do something else.
[1] Teaching people who want a grade is pointless. Teaching people willing to think is not. In my experience, most teaching falls into the former category. 5 weeks left!
I've never had any difficulties in being able to stop thinking about work when off duty, but then I've been around computers for so long that perhaps I have a very binary psychology.
I can't help but think these sorts of issues aren't limited to the IT world. Programmers and sysadmins are not the first, nor the last, groups to be asked to work long hours (or work them voluntarily), nor are they the only groups to sit at a terminal for most of the work day.
Now, excuse me, I have to start packing for my family's month long road trip....
Burning out sucks. Sorry I couldn't think of a more articulate way of putting it. I've been through that experience and am just trying to find some level of normalcy in IT where I can be a high achiever yet still live my life. It doesn't help when you have personal issues but then everyone's got their demons.
Some have quit, walked away and moved on to less stressful careers. Tasks that are less demanding on the mind. I would love to do that, but then would I really ever be happy like that? Alot of us thrive at being great at something, not just good but trying to be the best we possibly can. I know I'm constantly pushing my boundaries, yea its stressful but I also reap the rewards of higher knowledge. A part of life is learning and by giving up on that you are only hurting yourself.
The key is finding a balance, to know how to improve without losing yourself.
I've been "in IT" for 15+ years post uni, and nodded all the way through reading this (It's true that these things creep up on you).
Very recently our startup got funded (a modest Angel round), and now I can honestly say that I'm much less stressed than I have been in a very long time... I have more time for "me".
Sure, I work 80+ hours a week - but I do it on my schedule, so I can go bushwalking, fishing - have the odd random day off, and spend a few hours each evening with my family.
I think the dangers of IT can be "managed", if you have the flexibility (or discipline) to do so.
Thank you for this. A few months ago, I quit my job (developer) to pursue something else that is totally new to me. I am on training right now and I have never been so relaxed in my working life. The job also allows me to travel a lot (I do not have a family yet, so I guess this is plus points).
Right now, I do a little programming at night to work on my pet projects. Within a few months programming became a lobby and I am starting to love it again.
In 1999, when I was 19 years old, I started working at a "web buraeu", as we called them in my country back then. I did html, asp, php, graphics, design. All that. A jack of all trades, sort of, as I've always been talented with pretty much anything technical, and as it was a small company that needed its employees to "pitch in" where they could. I worked with this company for 1.5 years, until march 2001, when me and two others had to leave because of shortage of work. At this point I had developed a sociophobia and various, severe stress disorders, among them panic attacks. I took a position with another "web bureau" 2 months later to try maintain an income. 9 months later, in march 2002, just having had my 22nd birthday, I was broken down to the point that I often needed help with grocery shopping and most other daily errands related to the outside of my home. In late 2003, the side-effects hit their climax; on average I left my apartment 3-4 times per month - just to take the trash out. Today, march 2010, I have still not fully recovered my ability to work in the capacity normally implied by a "9 to 5". My normal hours in the two jobs that broke me down ranged between 10 to 14 hours per day, and I worked most saturdays and sundays as well.
I'm really sorry to hear this. No one deserves to have burnt out at 22. I hope you are able to exercise your body and relax your mind and get back to good health. Please try jogging / other exercise. They say it works really well in terms of building up an energy reserve. I need to do it, too!
I got burned out at 18. Took me three years to recover. I think it's a good experience to have early..it makes you realize what is _really_ important to you.
I had somewhat the same experience, I punched through the .COM boom,and i was well paid, but i didn't have much of a life, basically working my ass off for almost a decade.
At some point I decided I could not do this anymore, and quit my job, following that I have spent then about a year playing music and basically doing nothing. it took me a year to recharge my batteries, and it wasn't easy, I had to struggle with depression. But all in all, I learned allot, I pace myself much better now, and spend much more time on things I value, mainly my friends and loved ones.
sometimes you need a break to gain perspective, and rediscover the things you love to do.
Wow, this is like a club. I got burned out at 26 after three years straight with no time off and traveling all over for work (I was platinum with Delta at the time). I took a year off and started doing all the things I had alway wished I had the time for. When I came back to work the next year, I was much less intense and was able to manage a better balance between work and everything else.
However, I was also much less interested in "computers" than I had been all my life. For a few years, I left work at the office and found other hobbies to take up my spare time. That interest has since come back in a very strong way, but I think the mental break I took over that time has helped me out by making me a more well-rounded person.
I'm planning to take another sabbatical towards the end of the year. This time, it's being planned and will not be an emergency.
I want a vacation desperately... not just to use vacation time, I want to go somewhere and completely forget I have a job. The last 3 times I've tried taking vacation time I've been called to fix an issue.
The only way that you can be called in to fix an issue is if you let them. If you want a vacation desperately, then take one. And don't make yourself available to work, because when you do, it stops being a vacation...
The unfortunate reality is that this is a great way to make it onto your boss's shit list.
This might not be a big deal for some rock-star, well known developers around here who have head-hunters beating their door down offering them truckloads full of money and a job in San Francisco, but for those of us who are the norm, we actually need to try and stay employed.
I'm in the same exact boat. Every single time I've ever taken vacation, I have a blackberry tethered to my laptop and am helping people over the VPN. I am the sole tech for a company that has three offices spread across two states, and about 100 office workers...I also do all the ad design for any marketing things we do...what this means is that I'm the sys admin, the in-house developer, the desktop support guy, the creative director, and the graphic designer. Despite this, I get the feeling that my company is just itching to replace with me a recently unemployed best-buy geek squad employee who will work for half of my salary. Grr..sorry, now I'm getting a bit rambly, but sometimes I get the feeling that nobody at my office really even knows what I do here. Everything works, and there are rarely ever any problems that take more than a few minutes to fix.
My point is that I hear this sort of advice all the time "Bah! Just leave your work at the door! They'll get the message!" Really? Cause the last time I was on vacation somebody let some people into my machine room who weren't supposed to be there...do you know what they did? They unplugged my mailserver...just unplugged it! (To their defense, they needed to charge their ipod, and the sign on the door that says "If you're name isn't Ryan you are definitely not supposed to be in here" obviously didn't mean them) Awesome! So what do I say? "Sorry, folks, looks like nobody is going to have any email for the next two weeks until I get back! Bah I'm on vacation, figure it out yourselves!" Do you think my job would still be there when I got back if I had done that?
(This isn't as much of a problem now because I bought a serial terminal with a modem in it for when things go horribly wrong).
During the same vacation, the phone system "went down"...verizon was doing some work up the street, and our voice T1 died...should I have just ignored my cell phone and told them to figure it out themselves? ("Uhh...what's a circuit ID? Errr...dmarc?")
To be clear, I'm not complaining about my job...I love it and I love the freedom that it has given me to learn a lot of new technologies that I had never even seen before. My point is that your advice of "don't make yourself available" is absolutely horrible.
Too bad the author is such a poor writer. He probably has some interesting things to say. But I tuned out once I encountered multiple syntax errors in the first paragraph.
my advice: recognize the marginal utility of money and plan accordingly. recognize your frivolous "needs" for what they are. I realize this is a lot harder for people with, say, a family living in san francisco with very high living expenses and you are the primary bread winner. my advice for that is....don't be the primary breadwinner with a family in a high cost of living area? sorry but you made choices without realizing what you were getting yourself into.