Hello All,
Ah, summertime! Summertime brings warm weather, sandals, swimming and best of all VACATION DAYS! In honor of the long 4th of July weekend, I will be writing a little about vacation days.
Vacation days do more than revitalize employees; they also affect game development schedules. In the US, we have ten federal holidays; however most employers only observe 8 or 9 of them. Also, most employers offer two weeks paid vacation (for salaried employers) plus a smaller numbers of sick days (usually 2 – 6). In all, this adds up to 26 days off a year at the most for the average American worker. However, this time will always be dispersed throughout the year where the longest stretch of downtime would be 10 workdays for vacation. I know it may not sound like a lot when you think about how many work days there are in a year, but in a project with a three month schedule, a few days could really negatively affect schedule timing.
For example, say that my project is scheduled so that this week we planned to add in a couple features to meet beta next Friday. Let's also say that I forgot to factor in the 4th of July holiday when putting together the schedule. In this hypothetical project, my main programmer is scheduled to finish a “Task List” feature and get together a working prototype of a minigame by the end of the week. So, what if my programmer is sick on Thursday and takes a vacation day on Monday? That would mean that I lost two days of her work which would equal sixteen man hours! Not to mention the scheduled 4th of July holiday that she will not be able to work. That means, to get back on track, someone or a group of people would have to work those extra 24 hours! Just imagine how this number can balloon out when you are working with a large development house with many employees, that's pure nightmare stuff for you.
This type of thing happens a lot more when you work with European companies because they get SIGNIFICANTLY more vacation time. In the UK, businesses are mandated to give employees at least 24 days off a year. In France, I am sure it is more and the employees are not allowed to waive their vacation days. Also, these vacation days are just that, these do not include Bank Holidays which are sort of like UK federal holidays. So, when you are working with a developer in Europe, it is very important to schedule in Bank Holidays and employee vacation time so that there are no nasty surprises. When I was working with a British developer at my previous company (it was a one year scheduled project), I could have sworn that they closed down for some holiday about once a month. It really felt like that! I learned from that situation to try and keep a watchful eye on holidays in my developer’s country. Fortunately, I never had a liaison in a European country that took their 3-4 week vacation in the middle of a project, so that's a plus.
Sometimes it feels a little weird knowing that people in other countries get so many more vacation days than we do here in the US. Since I found out about the vacation time difference, I have made an effort to enjoy my time off of work to the fullest. I hope you all do the same this weekend.
Cheers,
Natascha Thomas
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