Asides

Responsible Time Off

I noticed one thing about a position description today. It advertised “Responsible Time Off” (RTO) instead of “Unlimited Time Off” (UTO).

The central requirement is that the employee ensures their job duties and ongoing projects are covered before their departure. This model places the onus on the individual to coordinate leave with team needs and business objectives.

In places I’ve worked with Unlimited Time Off, the main problem was that employees never took enough time off. In my recent position at OSK, I frequently had to remind reports that they will burn out if their vacations consist only of taking a long weekend every few months. So I have three somewhat uninformed thoughts about the idea of Responsible Time Off:

  1. This is solving for something that is rarely a problem with Unlimited Time Off, employees taking too much vacation.
  2. This is solving for managers who can’t or won’t manage the teams’s needs, and making line employees responsible for what is a managerial lack.
  3. This makes it really hard for employees to take vacation in many startups. After all, if the company understaffs (and too many startups are understaffed), then can’t “coordinate leave with team needs”.

Anyway, if the position I’m looking at becomes more likely, I’ll have to quiz them really hard on this before accepting. In the past, I have asked companies how many vacation days specific people have taken in the last year to see what their culture around leave really is like.

The Bots

Having a hard time focusing on work this afternoon, so here’s a short post on one of my favorite music discoveries of the last year. The Bots are a punkish duo out of Los Angeles. These two kids have talent. Listen to ʼem now so you can be of of the people who can say I’ve been listening to them since before they were popular! Check out their web site to play all their songs, but here’s the video for the song that got me hooked:

Tolling 520

In a moment of brain fog, I turned left… onto the 520 on-ramp instead of heading north on Montlake. You know, just after the last exit before tolling. To add insult to insult, it’s not like tolling on most roads on the east coast, where I could have paid the toll, gotten off at the next exit, and driven back on surface streets. The only way back without spending an extra 45 minutes on the road is to get back on 520 and pay the toll going the other way.

This was an expensive grocery shopping trip.

Reflective license plates

When renewing my tabs, the state Department of Licensing required that I purchase new license plates. My old ones are over seven years old, which meant that the reflective coating has worn off, according to them. So new ones (costing $20) it is!

I thought of a way to extend the life of these new plates though! I could add glitter to make them even more reflective!

Oddly enough, I have some leftover blue glitter that almost exactly matches the hue of the blue lettering on my plates.