When do you get to take a break(vacations)

Snow.bros

I once heard someone say IT forks don't go on vacations which made me curious about, how often do you guys take a holiday during the year and are there any sort of policies regarding taking a holiday during the festive season and how long is your holiday once taken?
If you there are strict protocols regarding taking holidays, how do you take a break?

Essendon

Most employers I've been with encourage staff to take time off during Christmas with things being very slow. Generally I tend to work over Christmas and keep my PTO in hand for other times of the year. I take my vacation in March, usually. With very few people around during Christmas, I get a lot of work done (especially documentation).

cyberguypr

This is definitely company specific. Some say "sure, go ahead", others try to put any excuse to deny/delay time off. Then you have people like Success101 who have lousy managers and can't even get sick.

I can take PTO whenever, even on short notice, and usually split it between June/July and December/Jan. I am part of a highly cross-trained team where everyone has a back up and the company can sustain normal levels of operation with any team member being out. Poorly managed shops usually put all their eggs on one basket and that's when they start crying when the main IT guys go on PTO.

Now that I think about it this may be a good question for interview time.

jvrlopez

Whenever I like as long as I am not needed specifically, there are people to cover, and I have the vacation time saved up.

Ukimokia

Working at a fairly large call center they'll usually give us time off as long as we request it two weeks in advance and there aren't already a bunch of people taking that day off.

Snow.bros

Ukimokia wrote: »

Working at a fairly large call center they'll usually give us time off as long as we request it two weeks in advance and there aren't already a bunch of people taking that day off.

Are you guys limited to a certain number of days?

MrAgent

I take a week off every year in August. My family goes to the beach in Nags Head for the week.

RHEL

Pretty much whenever I was, as long as I want. The only conflict would be if we were performing a major upgrade/exercise during that time, if I was on-call that particular week, or if my entire team decided to also take off the same days.

If I end up on-call, I can pretty easily swap weeks with another team member. We all end up with a lot of vacation to burn, so pretty much any time of year works. It isn't uncommon to see people taking weeks at a time.

JBrown

i have 30+ days of vacation -added up over the years, and have to submit a vacation form a few weeks in advance, and need an approval for it. Need to take care of projects. Juniors get the vacations whenever they want, usually.

RomBUS

I usually space my days out over the year. I usually do not take more than 3 days off in a row using PTOs. Another thing I do if I usually couple them with company holidays and they allow me to do with that with enough notice. I also like to keep a couple to roll over the next year too.

Cleverclogs

I get 25 days off a year in my support analyst role. The only issue with that is that I sometimes have to negotiate them with the 3 others I work with. Luckily my boss is very accommodating, he rearranged an impending move so that it doesn't clash with my wedding next month