This week, for the first time in over 10 years by my estimation, I'm going on holiday=vacation with nothing that needs my 👀. I wrote this post on Friday and scheduled it to release today, which is a public holiday in the UK, US and many other countries.
In my new role at Cube I'm not really line managing anyone. I don't look after any production systems. I'm not a founder. Pretty much everything that my input is needed for is known well in advance or can wait till after my vacation.
I only accidentally realised this the other day, when I scheduled my out of office notification on Gmail. I've pretty much said: "I'm on vacation, I'll reply to you upon my return." I started to write down an alternative person to contact, but I realised I didn't need to.
For most of the last decade I've been a founder or leading a data team.
I'm naturally someone who tends towards workaholism. It's something I manage but will need to confront at some point. Being a founder meant I didn't have to deal with it, no-one would ever really know if a founder was a workaholic or not. It's the lifestyle. There is no stopping or starting work as a founder, you just do work as it comes along and fit life in around it.
I actually used to find weekends and evenings where there was no chatter or work coming in, in previous roles, annoying. I didn't want to be told when I could and couldn't work. I relied upon my work for a huge part of my entertainment and social input. It was kind of like taking my games console away from me. Yes, I'm one of those sickos who likes writing SQL and data models.
As a founder, no-one takes away your games console, it's always in your pocket. There is almost always a new move to take. The company is the production system.
When you lead a data team, you're always monitoring a production system. Have my dbt jobs run successfully? Is my data good? What have my observability alerts said? Do I need to do something about them? Has one of my key stakeholders said they need something urgently?
I was never afraid of anything going wrong or being complained at, but I didn't want to let anyone down either. I would prefer to respond on vacation/out of hours, lose a bit of sleep, work a bit harder... than have someone who depended on me go without.
Ultimately, as a team lead, you are responsible for the data being good. Your team members can go on vacation and switch off, because you're there to pick up the pieces if anything goes wrong. This usually doesn't work both ways. I've always struggled to not fix issues, or least make sure they are being fixed by someone else in a timely manner.
Data teams don't typically have platform folks yet, who have an on-call rotation and PagerDuty. They protect the rest of engineering from needing to be permanently on-call. Yet another way that data needs to catch up with software engineering
So, before I head off, I've turned off notifications for Slack, Superhuman and LinkedIn.
I hope you've managed to have some true rest this long weekend, and wish me luck with this, too!
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare
Leisure by William Henry Davies