Ugh, I hate wasting time

[johnridley]

The last 2 or 3 weeks at work have been pretty frustrating. They are changing vacation rules, not allowing as much carryover as before. So people are taking off weeks at a time to burn their accumulated vacation days. This means that even though I've got a pile of projects that are starting to get time-critical, I can't do them properly because the people I need to talk to aren't around, and they didn't get the stuff to me before they left. One team finally got enough people back in to finish up preliminary specs YESTERDAY and they're supposed to code freeze on the 28th. Yes, prelim specs to code freeze in 5 working days. I got their files processing on the server about 4 hours after getting the specs, handed back a bunch of items that wer broken for their next round, and they didn't get anything back yesterday or today. I'd hate to be the programmer over there. He's got 5 days to do about 2 months worth of work.

The most irritating thing is, the company announced this policy change TWO YEARS ago, yet people screwed around with burning their vacation until the last 2 months. I burned mine up earlier, but all that means is that now I might as well be staying home for all the good I can do, but I have no vacation time to use. OK, I have a week or so, but I kind of want to save that up for special days over the next couple of months.

Comments

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

The decision was simply to bring all divisions of the parent company to the same policy.
The new policy is that we're allowed to carry over however much we earn in 3 months over the year end. However, due to the nature of our particular business, we're not really allowed to take vacation between about October and March, so that means we have to run our vacation down to zero by the beginning of October, because we'll earn enough after that to max the carryover.

A number of years ago, we could carry over about 18 months worth. They've been rolling that back over the last 5 years or so, so this has been happening for a while first down to 12 months, then 6. Then they moved the rollover date. Now down to 3 months. This year has hit me the worst for whatever reason, I think it's just a coincidence that the people who I need to work with happen to all have taken off at once.

I can't judge whether it was a sensible decision, because honestly I don't know what the reson for it was, except to "make everyone the same." If that's a valid reason, then I guess the question is whether making everyone the same by moving everyone to the worst (for employees) policy of the bunch was the sensible thing to do.

I'm sure it makes a huge difference on the books; carrying potentially 18 months of vacation on the books for 50,000 employees is big.