None of us will be around forever. Some of our software might be...
That's the point of the exercise: to identify mission critical people and make them not critical to the entire business. If your business hinges on one person who knows everything and works on everything, you're fucked if they disappear and you haven't ensured at least some redundancy.
>Most work [during someone's vacation] will just be queued up until the person comes back or worse the person will be contacted during vacation to answer questions, provide information or do some work.
Nothing in that sentence implies that the person is referring exclusively to an especially important position.
As a senior eng, I try to do the same when I have time off - work notifications are muted, and my away message is typically set to "I'm away for X days. If you to reach me, no, you don't."
1 week, people can mostly ignore your job function and limp by
2 weeks, people can do ~50% of your job and limp by
3 weeks, you do need someone to complete all/most of your job functions.
Do you feel guilty when they pay you too? Paid vacation is a form of compensation.
Every day of your ~30 days of vacation which you do not use, they likely have to pay you out as a full day's worth of wages anyways.
Most will prefer you take a month or two each year off, recuperate, and come back refreshed and productive, rather than having to deal with the bookkeeping and tax hassle of paying you extra.
And then we have Easter, Pentecost, ascension day, Christmas, New Year’s Day. All public days off.
Personally for a long time my contract was 36 hours, get you 1 more day off every 2 weeks.
That American system sounds so depressing, but I guess you get used to anything.
To “squander” two thirds of the allotment in one go is rare.
https://www.statista.com/chart/15005/statutory-minimum-paid-...
Generalizing a bit but there is less of a divide between “fast food service and grocery store clerks” and professionals in Western Europe compared to some other places. Workers are workers and they have certain rights as that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...
And then you have parental days which are 480 in total per child which can be used both before they start preschool and for longer vacations when they are older. In Sweden it’s also quite common that both parents split it 50-50.
So 4-5 weeks of time off in the summer is not uncommon at all for parents and totally accepted by companies.
As you can imagine with the enshittification of literally everything in my lifetime, that moved to use it or lose it eventually. Then two years later, getting rid of it for 'unlimited PTO, how cool is that guys?'
Needless to say, that was the end of my run there.
[1] The Git maintainer. Not a kernel maintainer.
I do not have this mindset.
I am a maintainer.
I have been absent from one of my projects for 9 months. People actually use this thing. That eats me up inside. That anxiety is partially why it's difficult to start up again.
I am the kind of person who makes things, unfortunately when you make things you become the maintainer by default. It's not easy to hand over maintainership either though, you want to ensure the project is in good hands. One of my old projects has been absorbed into Linux Mint and that's quite gratifying to see that a project I made maybe a decade ago get a Catalan translation in just the last few months.
In the end, it’s always a bit satisfying to do. Still not a great situation but I’m trying at least.