The 2-Week Vacation Test for Engineers and Managers

Are you sharing knowledge with others or are you a bottleneck? This is what to do to find out!

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Intro

No matter if you are an engineer or a manager, you should be able to take a 2-week vacation with no issues.

If there are any issues, it’s a clear sign that you are not sharing enough knowledge with others.

This is not just bad for organizations, but if you are always a bottleneck, it's going to be really hard for you to have a good work-life balance.

And it’s also not a good look for you. People that provide the most value to the organization are the ones that make everyone around them better.

If you make 5 people 20% better it’s much bigger value than if you just improve your coding skills by 20%.

In today’s article, you can expect to read:

• Why you should use the 2-week vacation rule, no matter your role.

• What are the benefits of the 2-week vacation test.

• How I ensured I could take a 2-week vacation without checking Slack or emails as a full-time CTO.

Before we go and break down the 2-week vacation test, let me share a few words on hoarding your knowledge vs sharing it with others.

Hoarding knowledge to yourself is not the way to go

I’ve seen this behavior many times and I’ve also thought this was the way to go when I first started with my career as an engineer.

But it’s actually the opposite. If I see someone intentionally being a bottleneck and not sharing knowledge with others → that’s not a sign of seniority for me and I’ll be giving feedback immediately.

You shouldn’t focus just on making sure that you understand the specific domain, project or technology, but the focus should be on making it easier for everyone around you to either get started with it or be able to understand it.

This is what I have already mentioned in the becoming a go-to engineer article. It’s really important to understand that keeping knowledge to yourself is not the way to go.

This is what you shouldn’t do:

❌ Don’t keep the knowledge and the context only to yourself

❌ Not creating any documentation

❌ Not being supportive, not being helpful to onboard and support others working on that specific thing

Here is what you should do:

✅ Spread the knowledge and awareness about it

✅ Create documentation and learning documents

✅ Provide support, be helpful and be there when others need help

Now, let’s dive deeper into the 2-weeks vacation test.

Can you step away for two weeks without everything falling apart?

This is a good question to ask yourself. And this is not just for managers, but also for everyone in the organization.

The foundation of great organizations are teams and great teams build great software, not individuals.

The rule I like to stick to is that anyone should be able to take a 2-week time off and things should still move forward smoothly.

Of course, there are some exceptions to the rule, but that should generally be the case.

So, if the answer to your questions is yes → Great! You are sharing knowledge with others and you are not a bottleneck. Or if you are a manager, you’ve been able to create good processes and autonomy and you’ve been able to build leaders inside your team.

If the answer to your question is no → Well, you’ve got some work to do and it’s really important that you define what changes you need to make in order that is going to be possible.

The 2-week vacation test used as a stress test for autonomy and reliability of the processes

The goal should be that If anyone from the team decides to go on a 2-week vacation, all the processes and the whole team should continue to function normally.

And that person should not be responding to any emails, messages or worse, need to take their time from vacation and fix things if they break.

What’s important to note is that it also includes managers and all the leaders of the organization as well. Everyone needs and also deserves time off when needed.

As I’ve mentioned in the article, I am not a fan of heroism in the engineering industry, I value long-term good work, consistency, reliability and overall predictability a lot more than someone doing an extraordinary amount of work in a short amount of time.

The reason is that I rather know exactly what I can expect than hope to get good work unexpectedly. I want to avoid variability as much as possible when organizing work or considering any timelines for projects.

And the 2-week vacation test is a good sign of how reliable we are.

Here are all the benefits of the 2-week vacation test

• Good work-life balance

A good work-life balance may be different for every individual, but it’s really great that every person on the team knows that they can take a longer time off if they need it and they won’t be judged for it.

I’ve seen people (especially working for US companies) even though the company has an “unlimited paid time off policy”, they were afraid to take more than 5 days off the whole year.

This really is not aligned with being able to do good work long term and it’s a much bigger risk for people to burn out.

It’s different in Europe where in some countries there is mandatory by law that people take at least 10 consecutive working days of time off and in most countries in Europe everyone has 20+ paid days off, which everyone takes.

• Knowledge sharing

The 2-week vacation test doesn’t work if people are not sharing knowledge among themselves, especially written documents and clearly defined processes.

This incentivizes everyone to share what they are doing → so everyone can take the deserved time off without feeling like something could break anytime.

• People learn new skills

For example, we need to ensure that if a QA Engineer inside of a team goes on a 2-week vacation, other engineers in the team can take ownership and QA the PRs, create the necessary tests and also QA the whole app as well.

The same goes for PMs, BE Engineers, FE Engineers, etc. It should never happen that things just keep waiting for that specific person to get back.

It’s a great way for the whole team to get to know how other people in the team do their work, which is going to help everyone to do their work a lot better.

• People can step up and try themselves in a role they might want to grow toward

A good example is if a Team Lead or a Tech Lead goes on a 2-week vacation, then one of the engineers can step up, lead the necessary meetings and try themselves in that role for these 2 weeks.

They’ll get a much better understanding of how they like the role and also what particular skills are needed in order to do well in that role.

• We clearly see where the issues in the process might be

This is how we can ensure that we have a great process → that is predictable and consistent. No matter what happens, we would still be able to deliver based on the expectations.

How to start with your personal 2-week vacation test?

The incremental approach is the way to go, especially if it’s hard to spot where the issues might be.

Start with taking off 2-3 days and make sure to observe where all the issues might be → be very intentional about it. Maybe some PRs go stale, some decisions are not made and are waiting for you or maybe certain tasks haven’t moved forward.

Then, of course, make the necessary adjustments. After that, you’ll be much more prepared for a longer time off.

The goal as mentioned should be that you can take 2 weeks off without completely checking Slack, emails or any messages at all.

This is how I ensured I could take a 2-week vacation without checking Slack or emails as a full-time CTO

I’ve always had in mind that I can’t be a bottleneck, even though as a CTO, I am responsible for everything on the tech side.

So, the preparation started well before even I took longer time off the first time:

1. The first thing I did was → I ensured I had a great team that I can rely that they’ll take care of things if I am not present.

2. The second thing important to me was that we have a great process in place that is well-documented and can run well even without me being present.

And then, this is what I did before taking a 2-week or longer time off:

• I’ve let everyone know that I’ll take the time off the right amount of time before so that everyone can plan for me not being there → that goes for the whole leadership team and also my team as well.

• In case anything urgent happens, I’ve given my phone number to the relevant people, so they can call me (but just for emergencies).

• I’ve created the document of the top priorities and expectations, while I was being off and that was shared with all the relevant people.

• I’ve assigned the person who is going to be leading meetings instead of me (dailies, plannings, sprint demos, pre-planning) → that was the CPO in a lot of cases. Sometimes, I’ve also assigned one of the engineers to do that as well, particularly the person who wanted to try themselves.

In my 2-year time as a full-time CTO, it happened only once that I was called for something urgent, the other times it worked well.

I highly recommend the 2-week vacation at least once a year to every individual

As a manager, I’ve personally always encouraged people to take time off, because I knew that it would be ultimately better for my people and for the whole organization to do that.

I strongly believe that happy people build great products and not people who are overworked or close to burning out. If that’s the case, it’s not the fault of the people, but I believe that it’s the fault of the leaders in the company.

The amount of people burning out is quite alarming these days and I ultimately believe that it’s a big competitive advantage if you have highly motivated people in your company → people, who want to solve problems for the business and ultimately build products that customers/users are going to love!

Bonus: If you make yourself “irreplaceable” you won’t be able to grow

This is also an important thought and make sure that you keep in mind.

If you are someone that your team heavily depends on in order that the work will be finished → you won’t be able to grow and take the next step, because the whole project would be at risk.

This might feel “good” in the short term, but it is a huge risk in the long term, especially if you have career aspirations to grow.

I’ve personally seen some people being blocked from taking that next step for years because they were too attached to a certain piece of the system and the organization couldn’t afford to promote them to a higher position because of it.

And also in current times, you never know what may happen with so many companies doing layoffs. If that specific part of the system would get deprecated, your future at the company would be at risk as well.

Last words

Let’s end this article with the following:

Sharing is caring, so share knowledge with others and don’t make yourself a bottleneck!

It’s really hard for you to be able to do good work long-term and your goals should always be to make others around you better. That’s the ultimate impactful thing you can do.

You got this!

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We are not over yet!

How To Become a CTO

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