Work/Life Balance With Sasha Rosenbaum, Bill Weiss, and Katie Prizy

Katie: [00:00:00] When I’m thinking of last time I took, you know, a long vacation. Yeah, you come back and you have 1,000 emails and you have to at least read them all. You can’t just delete them.

Matty: Sure you can. It’s time for Arrested DevOps, the podcast where we help you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. I’m Matt Stratton, and with me today is a special guest host.

Sasha: Hi, I’m Sasha Rosenbaum. This is probably my 4th appearance on this show, and today we’re gonna talk about work-life balance. And the show notes for the episode can be found at arresteddevops.com/worklife.

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Matty: All right, so we are coming to you from DevOps Days Chicago 2017. This is the 4th DevOps Days we’ve done here in Chicago. We’re joined by 2 of the speakers from the event, Bill Weiss and Katie Przybyl, and we’re going to be talking today about Work-life balance. This conversation’s really inspired by Katie’s talk that kicked off today. We’re here on the second day, by the way. Katie talked about the idea of devaluing hard work. Bill talked about why security shouldn’t be afraid of DevOps. Really had nothing to do with work-life balance, but Bill hasn’t been on the show before, so we told him he should join us. And he works and has a life, so we thought he might have some impact and some ideas. Before we kind of get started, Katie, can you introduce yourself to our audience? Tell a little bit about yourself, how you got into the DevOps thing.

Katie: [00:02:48] Sure, yeah. My name is Katie Prizy. I currently work at HCSC here in Chicago. I started off as a DevOps consultant, which is weird because I have no technical background prior to that, but I thought this stuff looked really, really cool. And so, I traded administrative services to work for a DevOps consulting company, and then in exchange they trained me to be a DevOps consultant. And I haven’t let it go since.

Sasha: Great.

Bill: Awesome.

Matty: And Bill, tell people about you.

Bill: I’m Bill Weiss. I’m a security architect at Puppet. I alternate between ops leadership and security pretty much throughout my career. I’m on the security side now. I helped run DevOps Days Chicago for the first 2 years, and now I help with Portland. It’s pretty great to be back.

Matty: Awesome, great. So Katie’s talk, as I said before, was called Devaluing Hard Work, and a big piece of, a big theme of that had to do with this idea of what we think about as hero culture, which is that we incentivize people and we reward people, and we think it’s being a great contributor to your organization when you put in lots of extra hours, when you do a lot of extra work, One of the ideas that I, at least I took away from the talk was that while we’re doing that, there’s no reason for people to want to do things in a more efficient manner, ’cause that’s not where we’re being rewarded. I mean, people respond to incentives, right? That’s just the end of the day. And if we’re not incenting for the behavior that we want, we’re not gonna get the cultural change that we get. And so the thing I wanna think about is that that seems like like really easy, right? Like, you know, hey mouse, here’s cheese. So, but yet we, we do no cheese. So why do you think that is?

Katie: [00:04:41] I think that with that, this automation stuff sounds super, super cool. And so I think that the assumption is that people are just attracted to cool stuff. And, and I think that as as organizations continue to try to do DevOps things, it turns out that people don’t really care. They don’t care that you call it DevOps. They don’t care that there’s a conference about it and that it’s really cool. People who care about those things are in this room, not the other 1,000 people at our companies. And so, I think a lot of I think that’s kind of where it starts from, is you just assume, oh, I’m giving you this thing that’s better than what you’re doing now. You obviously just should go do that. And that’s just not quite how humans work.

Bill: I also think there’s— people want to do the thing that immediately looks like the right thing to do. And so it’s hard to look at a problem and not say, like, I’ll go fix this. I’ll go spend the next 16 hours just beating my head against this thing and make it work. You have to really train to say, okay, maybe make it work this time, but let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again. And it’s hard to devalue people’s hard work, right? You know, if you spend a weekend like miserable firefighting, like keeping the site up, I don’t want to say like you did a bad thing. You did a good thing. It just should not be what we needed you to do. And so we need to incent keeping people from that.

Sasha: [00:06:14] I kind of feel like you should say you did a bad thing, especially if it happens recurrently. We kind of do this thing where we give people double incentives. We say, oh, we really care about collaboration, but here’s the competition for the best prize winner. Or we really care about you delivering things as efficiently as possible and not dodging production on the weekend, but here’s a prize to whoever worked the most hours this month. So we don’t get consistency. I think part of it is just that Many managers want people who are the most committed to their jobs, and nobody looks at research that says, hey, if you work more than 55, I believe, hours a week, you stop being productive. No matter how many extra hours you put in, you’re not actually accomplishing new things.

Matty: There’s a massive point of diminishing return on efficiency. I think it’s also just pure visibility. It’s just very blatant. It’s just like did more things. And it’s sort of the, maybe this is a little bit of the crusty old sysadmin in me, which is sort of the joke is, right? When you’re in system administration, nobody knows what you do until you do it wrong, right? It’s perceived as a thankless job. Nobody, when everything’s going right, everything looks great. And so you kind of need to have, if you, we want, People want recognition. Not everybody. Some people don’t. Some people want money, but, you know, all these different things. And we could talk about Daniel Pink and drive and all that other stuff, but generally speaking, attaboys and pats on the head, and as Katie said, claps are all things that people like. And, you know, Katie had a really good thing in her talk where she said nobody— I’m going to probably get it a little wrong— but said nobody gets claps for only working 2 hours on Friday. You get claps for working 10 hours on Friday. And the thing is, even though that is contrary to what’s good for the organization, and we talk a lot when we think about incentives that people will work to the incentives you give them, even at the destruction of your organization. So if you’re incenting people that the right thing to do is just work a lot, no, again, to Katie, to your point, no one’s going to try to make that better, even though it makes their particular life a little suckier, because they’d probably rather not be in the data center over the weekend or whatnot, but they feel like they’re not doing their job. And I had a sysadmin who used to work for me at a previous job, and this was a great example. I mean, phenomenally talented individual, great person, easily worked 70 hours a week every single week. And ’cause he took, and this was the thing, I think I’ve talked about this on this show before, and this is how my thinking has changed, but think about this as a manager, right? So I was a manager, And in this individual’s performance review, every time I reviewed him, one of the things I said was, this person takes our site’s uptime personally. And I think, and that was supposed to be a good thing. Like, this is how he was identifying was how good the things were going. And what that means was, by no means, he was gonna save the day every day. And this is reminding me about how different we used to think about things, and actually we still do, but, all these things that we rewarded in an industry. There used to be, I remember Microsoft had a poster, this random whatever, but I remember this poster we had in our office when I worked for a system integrator and it was a Microsoft, some kind of inspiring poster and it said, how does it feel to save the day every day? Not all superheroes wear capes. And it’s just funny ’cause I remember I loved that poster. I thought that was so cool, right? And now I think about that now I’m like, Oh, because it puts so much responsibility on the human, right, instead of the system.

Sasha: [00:10:10] And another thing that contributes to the whole problem, and we, by the way, had another talk today which was on burnout, which was a talk that has long been coming in demand, and it’s really, really great that Jason brought all this stuff up to life and talked about it openly because a lot of people struggle with that. And their company culture is toxic and forcing them to work these extra hours. But I think it’s gotten worse because of email and laptops and remote work. And it’s even easier for your employer to demand that you work around the clock all the time, every day, anytime they want to.

Katie: Right. And I think thinking about like an organization that doesn’t have a very strict On call rotation, who does a manager like the most on Monday mornings? The guy who answered the phone call on Saturday because the systems were down, or the guy or girl who let the call go to voicemail and never responded? You’re always gonna like the person that’s responding and that’s putting in extra hours that makes it seem like that person is invested in you and your team and your company and the systems. But at the same time, we’re all saying, yeah, don’t answer the phone call, have a good weekend, come back on Monday refreshed. So there’s, I think like everybody here has said now, there’s an inconsistency in the messaging.

Matty: [00:11:45] Do you remember, this was, I’m trying to remember the company and where the article, we’ll put the link in the show notes because I’ll find it. But there was an article I’m going to say it was New York Times or something like that. It probably wasn’t. I always get this wrong. I always say it’s New York Times and it turns out to be the Washington Post, but whatever. And they’re interviewing a CEO from some company or whatever, and she said— one of the things in there was she said, when I interview— if I’m interviewing you, if you’re going through the interview cycle with me, I’m going to call you on Saturday and see if you answer the call. And if you do— if you don’t, then you’re done, because I want to know that if I call you, you’ll answer. And That article got destroyed on Twitter, right? To be like, what are you promoting? Like, that right there is actually— and people are saying things like, well, if that were to happen, then I know I don’t want to go work for you because that’s it. So there’s, there’s, that’s one way where you can be directly inciting and saying, in that case, that’s a, that’s a directly toxic culture. That is, I am literally setting the expectation that I, I will tell you I expect you to work the weekends. I expect you to constantly work. And I feel like, and I don’t have the data to back it up, but I feel like that is less common than the other thing, which is the unintentional examples that leadership can set, right? Where you yourself, and this is the thing, as I believe, besides how you incent, the examples we set as leaders, and whether it’s our official, either whether we’re a line manager or a director, or just in a leadership position in a team that’s informal, like a senior-type person that people look up to, when you’re the person that is, like, put it this way, if your manager is always sending you emails at 10 o’clock at night, what’s the message you get? My manager expects people to work at 10 o’clock at night. And the funny thing is, you may talk to your manager, and she may say, I super don’t believe that, and she really probably doesn’t, She probably believes that she wants you to be at home watching The Walking Dead at 10 o’clock at night or whatever, but the message that you got is, we work at 10 o’clock at night.

Sasha: [00:13:50] So I wanna make 2 points on that. So one point is, so not necessarily indirect messaging, right, you can have direct messaging. So I read this article about one of the startups in Silicon Valley which had a policy of, if you’re on vacation, you can’t answer email or calls. And if you did answer an email or join a meeting, then the CEO personally called you and said, this should never happen again. So you can be very direct with the messaging. Now, and the thing is, it is for the good of the company because no single person can be available 100% of the time. And if you’re relying on that single person to be available 100% of the time, you’re actually not doing any good for your company and your project. But there’s another thing that is when your manager sends email at 10 o’clock on a Saturday, that does not necessarily mean that this is a toxic culture. And my example for that will be Microsoft, because at Microsoft, nobody cares if I sign out in the middle of the day and disappear for a few hours as long as I deliver my results. So some people who have little kids or something like that, their schedule may vary. Ferry.

Matty: [00:15:01] Yeah, I, I— it was for point of example of just saying, right, you’re setting the exam. So if your general— if, if the 10 o’clock at night was outside of normal working expectation, right, we’re, we’re setting— and, and thinking about leading by example, um, when Chef changed to an unlimited PTO policy, the very first thing that the CEO, the CTO, and the CFO did is go on 3-week vacation. And you tell the story at first, and people who don’t understand this think it’s really funny, and they’re like, oh, hahaha. And it’s like, no, actually, that was one of the most important things they could do, which was to say, yes, here’s our policy, and we certainly believe it, because we’re gonna lead by example. And that’s a big thing. When you’re talking about, like, some companies say, like, if you, you’re not supposed to check email, you’re not supposed to do those things. I think it’s Travis, Travis CI, they actually disable your accounts when you go on PTO. It’s not, ’cause you know what the problem is? It’s really hard not to do those things. Like, I said, when I go on vacation, I tell myself, I’m like, I’m gonna uninstall Slack from my phone. I’m gonna remove my work email from my phone. And it’s ridiculous. Like, I went on a week-long vacation. It was supposed to be mostly screen-free with my kids and my wife. And I did that. I removed it as an account on my phone. I removed Slack. And you know what I did about it? I got till about Thursday, and then I loaded it in a browser, ’cause I was like, something might have happened. And it’s funny because in 2 ways. One is, now I want to say that I really do believe that my workplace does not encourage that. In fact, if I had dared to reply to an email, I probably would have had anybody I replied to give that response of, go back on vacation. But it’s also incredibly arrogant on my part to be like, what could possibly happen that’s so important that it could, that could not wait? So I’m interested, like, kind of what are some of the experiences you had? And like, you know, Bill, you’ve been at Puppet for a while. I’m not trying to, you know, just sort of kind of getting the background, ’cause we’re all, I guess Bill and I kind of work for similar type companies, but, you know, Katie’s at a large enterprise. I mean, Sasha’s at Microsoft, which is very giant, large technology company. So I wanna kind of, you know, get a feel for how you feel that these behaviors are incented at your workplace or other workplaces you’ve been, your experiences?

Bill: [00:17:21] I’ll tell a story first because it’s— So when I was at my previous company, they moved to an unlimited vacation policy and a lot of people had real trouble with it. People would just not take time. And as a leader, the thing that I did as much as I could is if I was going to a conference, I would tell my team, and I’m going to take a couple days there. And if they looked, I’d shrug and go, unlimited PTO.

Katie: Right?

Bill: Like, I just can. And when I— I was terrible at this normally about disconnecting, but when I went to— so I got married, 2011, and my wife was understandably pretty concerned that I was going to, like, work through our, like, 4-week honeymoon like a jerk. And so the last thing I did in the office before I left Last thing is I opened up the change password form in Outlook, and I copied some junk out of my browser, and I hit paste, and I closed that computer. I was like, I can’t get back in. My boss was terrified, but it was fine. And the nice thing was, is that after a couple of weeks, I went, you know what, this is great. I’m pretty sure the company’s still there when I get back. They’re going to be fine. My team is on top of it. And I can’t check in. And I’ve tried to encourage people to do that. Weirdly, I don’t have many takers, so I’ve actually forced a couple of people. At Puppet, I did in fact have somebody who was like, you are going on 2 weeks, period. Do not log in. It was all fine when he got back, right? I actually really like this idea of, in certain— if you’re an accountant in like a super regulated kind of company where you have access to like real dollars, one of the things they do as a regulatory thing is you get surprise vacation. You show up on Monday and they’re like, nope, you’re not here this week and your accounts are off. And they are next week. Go do something. And the point of this is to basically give them enough time to find out if you’re cooking the books. Yeah. Right? That is to make sure that you are not doing something malicious. I kind of want to do that to our ops teams. If we can’t survive for 2 weeks without you, it should burn. I want it to go bad and have to fix it so that this is not your problem. Management’s a little scared of that thing.

Matty: [00:19:40] That’s really— it’s sort of a chaos monkey for your team.

Bill: Yeah.

Matty: I mean, seriously.

Bill: I love the idea of just some piece of software every Monday uses the reverse on-call schedule. You’re off.

Katie: I think, so I agree that it is an arrogance, and I’ve done that in the past too, of there’s no way that this team or this system or this company can live without me, right? I’m the most important person there, so I’m going to check my emails all the time, or I see something, go crazy on the weekend, and even if I’m not on call, I’ll just log into the server and I’ll just fix it. No big deal. We do it to ourselves. It is a little bit of a mind shift, and I think at a large, older-style enterprise, I don’t see anybody coming up to me and saying, guess what? We have unlimited PTO. Policy, or we definitely don’t want you answering emails on the weekend. I don’t think enterprises are going to move that quickly like smaller software companies do. So I think it’s the same arrogance that employees have to take to demand their lives back, that I’m too important, my family is too important for me to to give my whole self to this company every hour of my waking life. And I think if a company isn’t gonna stand up for you, and that’s okay because a lot aren’t going to, then you have to stand up for yourself and also realize that they might say, okay, well then you’re not gonna work here anymore. But you know what, that’s okay. And you can go work somewhere else where it is gonna be a better culture.

Matty: [00:21:41] And that’s probably the right thing. I mean, it can be terrifying to try to set boundaries anywhere in your life, boundaries with other, you know, within relationships, with family. And in some ways it’s almost the scariest to set boundaries within your workspace. But the truth is, no matter where it is that you need to set a boundary, what happens when you don’t is where that boundary should be, it gets crossed. And I feel like you probably have, scenarios like Katie said, like where you have to quote unquote stand up for yourself. But part of it is just declaring that boundary and just saying, look, I’m not doing that. But here’s why. But here’s the thing too, I think what’s important sometimes, and again, this is what managing up is all about, is sometimes you have to say, and this is why, and this is why it’s okay, right? You know what, ’cause this thing can deal. And you know what? And sometimes there’s people, you know, ’cause the truth is we’re like, you know, we’re sitting here and we could be like, oh, you know, everyone’s just misunderstood. Your manager probably doesn’t really want you to work 90 hours a week, blah, blah, blah. And maybe that’s true. And you know what? Maybe they do and maybe they’re an asshole, you know? And then maybe to Katie’s point, then maybe you do need to manage yourself out of that scenario ’cause it’s just like being in any other toxic relationship. At a certain point, if you try, that’s the thing. If you can’t set boundaries to protect yourself in any kind of relationship, you and other humans, you and an organization, then you need to get out of it because it’s never going to get better.

Sasha: [00:23:09] People mostly sort of make a decision for themselves. I’ve been in many companies and people worked very different amounts of hours, and they always claim the company encourages that amount of hours. So it’s kind of an interesting thing. But also, like, to quote Sheryl Sandberg, in her Lean In book, she was saying that her mentor at McKinsey was always surprised at how many people quit because of burnout, because McKinsey will take advantage of all the hours of the day that you got, but they quit with unused vacation. And his question was always, well, why haven’t you taken vacation if you’re so tired and overworked? And people just didn’t know how to say, hey, I just really need some time off, I just really need to plug out of the workspace.

Matty: I think also besides, you know, there’s things we can do where we say, okay, when we think about work-life balance, I just want to kind of shift a little bit because part of this is how we can protect ourselves from our organization, how we can do that. I think also some of this is just what are some practical things that we just as humans can do? Because to Sasha’s point, a lot of times some of this stuff is self-inflicted, right? And it’s not even because of its— I mean, incentives have a lot to do with it, but sometimes it’s just the way that we are. And I know that sounds like I’m kind of writing it off, but there’s nobody to blame but ourselves for some of it. And I’m gonna cast that on myself right now, is because again, work-life balance is not necessarily— the work part of work-life balance is not completely your employer work, but it can be all the things that go along with it. So when I look at the, you know, there’s X amount of hours of waking hours in a week, what percentage of them am I doing non, for lack of a better word, personal/family stuff? And by the way, I don’t count working on an open source project or writing a tech book or doing— that’s not personal time. That’s just a different kind of work. And it’s okay, but if you’re spending all your time doing those things, it’s taking away from something else. So I kind of want to maybe talk maybe about some tactical things that you all might do to sort of manage, ’cause I think we all have people that are important in our lives and families and pets and things we do that are not about technology and not about our careers. And what are, I’d just sort of like to know what are kind of the strategies that you use to actually literally balance those things and protect those things that are truly important to you from all the really nerdy, flashy, dorky tech things?

Katie: [00:25:49] Well, I think one thing that I started doing that I learned at a DevOps Chicago meetup one time. So, I would go to these meetups all the time and I would not charge my time back to my company, even though I’m a salaried employee, but they still want us to charge every hour to different buckets. And in my head, I was saying, well, that’s my own personal time. I’m choosing to go to these things. Why should I charge my company for that? I can’t remember who the speaker was, but the speaker said, this is training. You are bettering yourself. Whatever you learn here, you’re going to bring back to your company to do better. This is professional learning, and this is training. Charge this to your training bucket. So, I started doing that. For every DevOps meetup, I would go to, or any other type of tech event, I would immediately charge that back to my training so that if at the end of the week I charged 40 hours, it wasn’t 8 to 5 and then my own personal time spent at meetups from 6 to 9. If I spent 6 to 9 at meetups, that was included in my hours for the week.

Matty: [00:27:01] I think that’s good. I think having some rigor around that’s really smart. I’m going to steal that. Not that we have no time tracking system. System or whatever. But one of the things that I think where we can really get ourselves messed up is when we have a really flexible work environment, like Sasha said at Microsoft. It’s the same thing at Chef. Like, I work at home. Like, I have no office. People don’t know when I start or I finish. Half the people I work with are 2 time zones behind me. This is probably very— Sasha and I probably very similar scenario, right? So there’s a lot of, you know, great power comes great responsibility. But generally speaking, you’re in those— when you’re in that scenario where people are like, I don’t really care when you start and when you finish as long as you get stuff done.

Sasha: And you usually end up working more, not less.

Matty: Because you don’t have rigor. Like, if you— when I think about it compared to the times when I got on a train, came downtown, went to an office, at the end of the day I went home. Yeah, I might still do some stuff when I got home, but you have those demarcation points that are known as your commute. But when your commute is walk down the stairs from your bedroom to your office, okay, that’s one demarc, but then the end It doesn’t necessarily end. And, in my case, it usually ends, like, this is where, again, this is not— I’m gonna, like, have not take responsibility for my own actions. So, it ends when my wife comes home. I’m like, because then she’s like, um, where’s dinner? Why aren’t you talking to me? Why are you in your office? But, she has things she does besides be responsible for coming home and getting me out of my office sometimes. And, you know what happens on those nights? I sit in my office doing shit till 10, and then the worst part, one of the best things that happened is she’s out of town this week and I’m here at DevOps Days because otherwise, you know what happens if she goes out of town for a week? I’m up till 6 in the morning doing stupid crap, like working on stuff because I don’t control that. But to your point, if you sit there and say, okay, so I have this flexibility, if I’m gonna take that enablement time, it means that I’m going to literally block time on my calendar the next day and say, okay, Chef owes me 2 hours from last night, so I’m gonna block 2 hours and I’m going to go to the gym for 2 hours, or I’m going to go watch Breaking Bad for 2 hours. Probably, hopefully something a little more productive.

Sasha: [00:29:07] So for flexible and limited schedule, I do have a technique for that that works, and I’m not always bad about it and don’t always need it, but register for a class that starts at like 6 or something like that that you have to make. And that will get you out of the house, out of your computer, and going. So like a gym class or something, right? That’s easy things to do.

Matty: I have another one that’s along those lines with having things be regimented. It goes back to this idea of budgeting time against the employer. And this is what I would call budgeting time against my customers. So one of the things When you are a kind of customer-facing employee, everybody has meetings and it sucks and everybody feels like their calendar is at the mercy of other people ’cause people can schedule meetings. I’ve got news for you, if you’re an engineer, you know nothing compared to people that have to work with customers because you at least have some type of rigor to it, right? Customers, it’s like, oh shit, I gotta talk to somebody. Well, when can you do it? So I can sit there and say, I wanna spend like, I kind of sit there, I’m like, I’m gonna spend 2 hours a day doing my actual job. So what I’ve started to do is I, I actually have it broken out on my calendar every day. This is my— because I figured it out and I said I need 2 hours a day to do what I would call tasks, like actually sit down and do work, right? So what happens is ideally meetings don’t get scheduled at that time. Of course they do, but then what means is I have to reschedule that meeting to— that meeting with myself to another time. And I even do that with lunch. Because you know what else I’d never do is eat lunch. That’s super unhealthy.

Sasha: [00:30:47] I have tried this and this hasn’t worked. So, the scheduling time to— I skip it.

Matty: Well, that’s why you have to have the rigor to treat it as if it’s a meeting with somebody else. Because if somebody scheduled over, you would reschedule that if it was somebody else.

Bill: I think the downside of being a salaried employee and having unlimited vacation and all this stuff is it really encourages you to do more. There’s actually a bunch of studies. The HR industry loves unlimited vacation systems for 2 reasons. One, when you leave, they don’t owe you anything. If you have 4 weeks of vacation or 2 and you have that banked and you quit, they pay you for it. If you take 4 years and take no vacations at a company that does unlimited, they owe you zero. And overall, people take less vacation when it’s not accruing. Because when you have that little counter of, oh, you know, I have 2 weeks off, I should take it. Oh, I’m gonna lose 2 at the end of the year because I didn’t do it. You do it. And so it’s really valuable for me. I’m not perfect at it, but I actually try to track my time periodically as if I’m like billing customers. I’m not. Just so I have to stare at it every once in a while and go, wow, I spent a lot of time on my job and not a lot of time on like my family, my dog, you know, all these, or like these projects that I think are really important or whatever. I’m not doing that. I need to be honest with myself about it. So, it’s super helpful to track that. In the same way, I, every quarter, look at how much vacation have I used this year and how much do I expect to. If it’s August and I’ve taken a week off, I need to take a break.

Sasha: [00:32:21] I’m glad you said it because I was thinking that the unlimited vacation ends up being a trick which actually works against you most of the time.

Bill: 100%.

Matty: It really depends on the owner. Organization. And that’s why I think it can be— you look at some organizations, and I look at what I’ve seen at Chubb, and I believe that this was not a— I mean, there’s still a financial thing. The thing about not having to carry that liability on the books of having to pay it off, that’s super real. I get that. That doesn’t even necessarily bug me, except that it’ll piss me off when I eventually leave and I don’t get a payout. But I can get that. And even if that’s your initial driver, But if it’s the, oh, this is why people will take less vacation, that’s a thing you can do something about. And I think I’ve seen examples. So I know sometimes it’s true. So at Chef, I’ve seen certain things. There’s a— Nathan Harvey’s told the story about, you know, when he— when the policy went into place and he went for a while and taking vacation, you know, and he was reporting to Adam at the time. And Adam was like, dude, when are you going to take vacation? Yeah, whatever. He goes, no, here’s what you’re going to tell me, Nathan. You’re going to tell me how much money you’re willing to spend on a vacation with your family. And I will tell you when you’re going to go and where you’re going to go. I will figure out what it is, and you are going to make it happen, and that’s when you’re going to go on vacation. And that’s sort of showing a thing. And then Travis has another example where they track your vacation to make sure you’re there. Some organizations, instead of it where they have unlimited PTO, but they have a minimum PTO, and you actually, it works against you in your performance if you’re not taking the time. So that’s a whole other kind of ballwax. We’re kind of coming up on time. I just want to see if there’s any kind of last thoughts that everybody has on balancing your work, your life. Sasha has a thought.

Sasha: [00:34:09] So I wanted to bring up another question. I don’t think we have time for this, but sometimes working on vacation is a self-protection thing, right? And this is not in terms of my company is going to come after me, but I’m gonna come back to 1,000 emails of which 100 are gonna require me to do something about them, and I just don’t want to do that. That sounds like a really horrible Monday, right? So what do you guys think about that?

Katie: Yeah, that’s really hard. I think when I’m thinking of last time I took a long vacation, yeah, you come back and you have 1,000 emails emails, and you have to at least read them all. You can’t just delete them.

Matty: Sure you can. No, you’re laughing. I see Kevin back there nodding. That’s what we do.

Katie: You just delete all your emails?

Matty: Yep. Because if you’ve— but there’s a second piece to that. You can only do that if you have the proper backfill in place when you go, which is to basically fundamentally tell people in your out-of-office I am not going to see this message. I am on vacation. Here is the person you need to talk to, and they will help you now. If you do that, then you can do email bankruptcy when you get back. And to be honest, that’s actually probably much safer because you’re going to be in the right context to the per— your customer, whatever that means, was able to get taken care of at the time they needed help, not when you came back a week and a half later. Which doesn’t help them. You know that it got— because here’s the other thing that happens, right? So you can put in your out of office, like, this is the normal one, right? Hey, this is Katie. I’m going to be out of the office for the next 2 weeks, and if you have an urgent issue, contact my manager at blah. Otherwise, I’ll get back to you when I get back. Okay, guess what you don’t know when you get back? Did they contact your manager? Did they get their problem solved? Do you actually have to take action on it? So if you take the approach— and I know this is a little maybe controversial because I saw everybody somebody’s face when I said this. The assumption that you got taken care of or you didn’t, and if you didn’t, you’ll come bother me if you need it. That’s the other thing too, right? We’ve made jokes about like, oh, just drop the table and see who complains. Sometimes if you don’t reply to an email, and if it was really important, they’ll email you again. You know, we do that. It’s one of the hardest things is to declare Slack bankruptcy when you come back from out of office, is just say, not even going to bother reading the backscroll. It happened. If it’s important, it will happen again. I don’t know. Hard. Something to try. Try it. Let us know. Tweet us if you’ve tried it and you still have a job.

Katie: [00:36:46] So I was going to take just a little more of a conservative approach.

Matty: You have to, you have to train your coworkers that you’re going to do this though. You can’t just like have them find out when they get your out of office, right? You know, recklessly abandon Everyone, YOLO, it’s probably fine.

Katie: So what I’ve tried doing is my first day back in office, I schedule myself for a meeting all day long so no one can schedule me for anything. No one bothers me for anything. That’s my— we get one day work from home a week, and so that’s my work from home day that ensures that no one is coming to my desk to ask me things, and I don’t turn on my IM, and that’s my day to say I’m going through through all of my emails. I’m gonna follow up on things and ensure that I have a whole day to then get myself back together.

Matty: Excellent. All right, so great. If you’re listening to this later, go ahead and tweet us @ArrestedDevOps. Let us know your tips for dealing with when you’re out of office, dealing with work-life balance. If you’re looking for a job because you got fired for deleting all your emails when you’re on vacation, we can maybe refer you somewhere.

Bill: [00:37:53] Matt will hire you then.

Matty: Yeah, that’s fine. Come work. That’s great. We’re hiring. Can’t talk into DevOps Days without saying we’re hiring. So great. Yeah. Um, so go ahead, uh, head over to arresteddevops.com/worklife for this episode’s show notes. Uh, our website also has where you can sign up for our newsletter, The Banana Stand, uh, contribute to our Patreon, all the rest of DevOps stuff you could ever want. If you go to arresteddevops.com/itunes, leave us a review in the iTunes That really helps other people who are looking for DevOps podcasts find our show.

Sasha: And thank you so much for Katie and Bill for joining us today and contributing their thoughts on the issue. I’m Sasha @DivineOps on Twitter.

Matty: I’m Matt @MattStratton on Twitter.

Sasha: And we’re Arrested DevOps.

Matty: And remember, there’s always DevOps at the banana stand.