 Okay, great. So welcome everybody to our recording of Arrested Dev Ops. We'll be actually starting the real recording in just a second, but to kind of walk through a couple things, this is, I guess, are we live streaming? Hey, it's a live recording, all right, cool, I never really know. It's recorded before a live studio audience like Family Ties. So we're gonna go ahead and record this episode. It will get published sometime in the next week or so. If I was good, I would remember about what episode number we're on. The only reason I bring that up is we are really close to episode 100 of Arrested Dev Ops, and that will definitely happen by the end of the year, which is weird, but it's pretty awesome. So just out of curiosity, how many folks have listened to Arrested Dev Ops in the past? How many of you, this is the first time you're ever gonna hear the show? I'm sorry, in advance. Okay, so normally just for a little bit of background, so this is a show. We started at the end of 2013. First episode was recorded, I believe, in December of 2013. Me and Trevor Hess, who sometimes is on the show now when he shows up again. And we added another host, Bridget Cromhout, a little bit later in 2014. Obviously neither Bridget nor Trevor are here, so Sasha has agreed to be a special guest host. She's been on the show a few times before Bill was on once before. No? Didn't we have you on the Sis Admin show? No. Really? Oh, damn. And Katie has not been on yet before, so that's really fun. So yeah, so we're gonna go ahead and get started, and hopefully this is an enjoyable experience. Let me just set my stopwatch. It's time for Arrested Dev Ops, the podcast where we help you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for maximum Dev Ops awesomeness. I'm Matt Stratton, and with me today is a special guest host. Hi, I'm Sasha Rosenbaum. This is probably my fourth appearance on this show. And today we're gonna talk about work-life balance. And the show notes for the episodes can be found at ArrestedDevOps.com work-life. But first, we'll have a word from our sponsors. Except that we really aren't because we record the sponsors, and they get dubbed in later, so if you're watching on the livestream, go look at another episode and click on a sponsor link. Our sponsors include awesome companies like Tenth Magnitude and Datadog and VictorOps, and ThoughtWorks Go. So that's great. So anyway. So we are coming to you from Dev Ops Day Chicago 2017. This is the fourth Dev Ops Day we've done here in Chicago. We're joined by two of the speakers from the event, Bill Weiss and Katie Prizzi. And we're gonna be talking today about work-life balance. This conversation is 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. So 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. Sure, yeah. My name is Katie Prizzi. 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 the 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. Great. Awesome. And Bill, what people about you? 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 two years, and now I help with Portland. It's pretty great to be back. 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. And one of the ideas, 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, because that's not where we're being rewarded. 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 going to get the cultural change that we get. And so the thing I want to think about is that seems like really easy, right? Like, you know, hey, mouse, here's cheese. So, but yet we do know cheese. So why do you think that is? I think 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 I think that as organizations continue to try to do DevOps things, it turns out that people don't really care, right? They don't care that you call it DevOps. They don't care that there's a conference about it and then 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 that's kind of where it starts from. As 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. 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. I kind of feel like you should say you did a bad thing, especially if it happens to current, you know, and so many... 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 the prize to whoever worked the most hours this month. You know, 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. There's a massive point of diminishing return on efficiency. And I think it's also just pure visibility, right? It's just very blatant. It's just like, did more things. And it's sort of the, you know, maybe this is a little bit of the, you know, crusty old sysadmin in me, which is sort of the joke is, right, you know, when you're in system administration, nobody knows what you do until you do it wrong, right? You know, it's perceived as a thankless job. Nobody, you know, when everything's going right, everything looks great. And so you kind of need to have, if you, you know, 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, Attaboy's and Pat's 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 a little wrong. She said, nobody gets claps for only working two 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, 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 what not, but they feel like they're not doing their job. And I had, this is Admin who used to work for me at a previous job. And this was a great, phenomenally talented individual, great person, easily worked 70 hours a week, every single week. And because he took, and this was, I think I've talked about this on the 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 sites up time personally. And I think, and that was supposed to be a good thing. This is how he was identifying, was how good the things were going. And what that means was, by no means, he was going to 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, you know, 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, because I remember, I loved that poster, I thought that was so cool, right? And now I think about that, and I'm like, ugh, because it puts so much responsibility on the human, right, instead of the system. 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 of this stuff up to life and talked about it openly, because a lot of people struggle with that, and their company culture is toxic in 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. Right, and I think, thinking about 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, the guy or girl who let the call go to voicemail and never responded. You're always going to 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. 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, and probably wasn't, I always get this wrong. I always say it's New York Times in terms of the Washington Post or whatever, and they're interviewing a CEO from some company or whatever, and she said, one of the things in there was she said, 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 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, that's one way where you can be directly understanding and saying, in that case, that's a directly toxic culture. That is, I am literally setting the expectation that 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. So I want to make two points on that. So one point is, so not necessarily in direct 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 a 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, like, 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, you know, their schedule may vary. Yeah, it was, for point of example, of just saying you're setting the exact, so if you're general, if the 10 o'clock at night was outside of normal working expectation, right? We're setting, and thinking about leading by example, when Chef changed to an unlimited PTO policy, the very first thing that the CEO, the CTO and the CFO did is go on three-week vacation. And you tell the story at first, I think it's really funny, and they're like, ha, ha, ha, 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're not supposed to check email, you're not supposed to do those things, I think at Travis, Travis, yeah, they actually disable your accounts when you go on PTO. It's not, because you know what the problem is? It's really hard not to do those things, like, I sit, when I go on vacation, I tell myself 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? It got to about Thursday, and then I loaded it in a browser, because I was like, something might have happened. And it's funny, because in two ways, one is, now I wanna 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 reply 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 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, because 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 a 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 at other workplaces you've been, your experiences. I'll tell this 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, right? People would just not take time. And as a leader, a 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 gonna take a couple days there. And if they looked, I'd shrug and go, unlimited PTO, right? 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 four 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 and outlook, and I copied some junk out of my browser and I hit paste and I closed that computer. And 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 gonna 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 two weeks, period. You're 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're 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. 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 two weeks without you, it should burn. I want it to go bad and have to fix it so that this is not your problem. My management's a little scared of that thing. That's really, it's sort of a chaos monkey for your team. I mean, seriously. I love the idea of just, some piece of software every Monday uses the reverse on call schedule. You're off. 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. So we do it to ourselves. It is a little bit of a mind shift and I think at a kind of large, older style enterprise, I don't see anybody coming up to me and saying, guess what? We have a limited PTO policy or we definitely don't want you answering emails on the weekend. I don't think enterprises, I don't think 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 give my whole self to this company every hour of my waking life and I think if a company isn't going to 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 going to work here anymore but you know what, that's okay and you can go work somewhere else where it is going to be a better culture. That's probably the right thing. It can be terrifying to try to set boundaries anywhere in your life. Boundaries 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 where you have to 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 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, because this thing can deal and you know what, and sometimes there's people because the truth is we're like, we're sitting here and we can be like, 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 and then maybe to Katie's point then maybe you do need to manage yourself out of that scenario because it's just like being in any other toxic relationship at a certain point, 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 gonna get better. People mostly sort of make a decision for themselves. I've been in many companies and people work 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 I took quote Cheryl Sundar in her Weenand book she was saying that her manager at McKinsey was always surprised at how many people quit because of burnout because McKinsey didn't 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. I think also besides there's things we can do where we say okay when we think about work life and I just want to kind of shift a little bit but 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 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 about ourselves for some of it and I'm going to say it 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 are I doing non for lack of a better word personal slash family stuff I don't count working on an open source project or writing a tech book 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 because 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 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 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 and I can't remember who the speaker was but the speaker said this is training you are bettering yourself whatever you learn here you are going to bring back to your company to do better this is professional learning and this is training charges to your training bucket so I started doing that so for every DevOps meetup I would go to or any other type of tech event I would immediately charge it 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 I think having some rigor around that's really smart I'm going to steal that not that we have no time tracking 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 I have no office people don't know when I start or I finish half the people I work with behind me this is probably very Sasha and I have a very similar scenario so there's a lot of great power comes great responsibility but generally speaking 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 because you don't have rigor around when I think about it compared to the times when I got in 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 to the location 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 D mark but then the end it doesn't necessarily end and in my case it usually ends like this is where again this is not going to have not take responsibility for my own actions so it ends when my wife comes home I'm like because then she's like where's dinner why aren't you talking to me why are you in your office 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 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 to 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 two hours from last night so I'm going to block two hours and I'm going to go to the gym for two hours or I'm going to go watch you know Breaking Bad for Drivers probably hopefully something a little more productive so for flexible and limited schedule I do have a technique for that that works and I'm not always you know bad about it and don't always 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 you know out of your computer and going so like a gym class or something right that's you know easy things to do I have another one sorry allowing those lines with having things be regimented it goes back to this idea budgeting time against the employer and this is I 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 that sucks and everybody feels like their calendar is at the mercy of other people because people can schedule meetings we're going to use for 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 should I got to talk to somebody well when can you do it so I can sit there and say I want to spend like I kind of sit there I'm like I'm going to spend two hours a day doing my actual job so what I've started to do is I actually have it broken out on my calendar every day this is my because I figured out I said I need two 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 it that meeting with myself to another time and I even do that with lunch because you know what else I never do is eat lunch that's super unhappy I have tried this and this hasn't worked so the scheduling time to I skip it well that's why you 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 I think the downside of being a salaried employee and having unlimited vacation and all of 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 two reasons one when you leave they don't owe you anything if you have four weeks of vacation or two and you have that banked and you quit they pay you for it if you take four years and take no vacations at a company that is 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 two weeks off I should take it oh I'm gonna lose two 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 all of 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 and so it's super helpful to track that and in the same way I every quarter look at like how much vacation have I used this year and how much do I expect to and if it's August when I've taken a week off I need to take break 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 100% it really depends on the organization and that's why I think it can be you look at some organizations and like I just I look at what I've seen at Jeff 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 you know it'll piss me off when I eventually leave and I don't get to pay out but I can get that and even if that's your initial driver but if it's the oh this way people will take less vacation that's the one thing you can do something about and I think I've seen examples so I know sometimes it's true so at Jeff 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 and he was reporting to Adam at the time and Adam was like dude when are you going to take vacation 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 and you are going to make it happen and that's when you're going to go on vacation and like that's sort of showing a thing and then like Travis see I was another example where they're like they track your vacation to make sure you're 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 ball wax we're kind of 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 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 and this is not in the terms of my company is going to come after me but I'm going to come back to a thousand emails of which 100 are going to require me to do something about them and I just don't want to do that but that sounds like a really horrible Monday right so what do you guys think about that yeah that's really hard I think when I'm thinking of last time I took you know a long vacation yeah you come back and you have a thousand emails and you have to at least read them all you can't just delete them sure you can I see Kevin back there nodding that's what we do you just delete all your emails because 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 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 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 cause here's the other thing that happens right so you can put in your out of office like this is the normal one right so the next two weeks if you have an urgent issue contact my manager at blah otherwise they'll get back to you and they 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 cause I saw everybody's face when I said this the assumption that you got taken care of or you didn't and if you didn't you got to do complaints sometimes you don't reply to an email and if it was really important they'll email you again you know we do that 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 back scroll 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 so I was going to take just a little more of a conservative approach you have to train your coworkers that you're going to do this though you can't just like help them find out when they get you out of office right you know just recklessly abandon everyone it's probably fine 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 I am and that's my day to say I'm going through all of my emails I'm going to follow up on things and ensure that I have a whole day to then get myself back together excellent alright so great if you're listening to this later go ahead and tweet us at Arrested DevOps 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 you know maybe refer you somewhere Matt we'll hire you then 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 so go ahead head over to ArrestedDevops.com for this episode show notes our website also has where you can sign up for our newsletter the banana stand contribute to our Patreon all the rest of DevOps stuff you could ever want if you go to ArrestedDevops.com leave us a review in the iTunes store that really helps other people who are looking for DevOps podcasts find our show and thank you so much for Katie and Bill for joining us today and contributing their thoughts on the issue I'm Sasha at Divine Knops on Twitter I'm Matt at Matt Stratton on Twitter and we're ArrestedDevops and remember there's always DevOps at the banana stand and we're out so