Taking an out of season vacation as a tech lead

I recently took a 3.5 week vacation to South America, my first proper one of the year. I did some things to prepare for that, along with some things I didn't. Vacations in Norwegian teams typically happen during summer or Christmas, so my vacation this time was when everyone else was still working - which has some implications.

As tech lead, there's a lot of different meetings I'm part of - lots of discussions I have an ear on. Our structure in Aftenposten means I don't often have to have a voice, unless I'm taking on work to shield my team. This is a bit of a blessing when it comes to a vacation - it means that fewer people are depending on me to give answers. So a big part of going away for a bit is simply letting the team carry on as before.

The flip side is that there are some things that were 100% dependant on me. Services and things which I've created - which do have documentation - but only I know the intimate details of how they're deployed, maintained, or committed. I did my best to write up known work that needed to be done before I left, along with a pair programming session to make sure someone else has at least an idea of where to look when someone asks about it. There's something I could've done better there - I could've pair programmed with someone during the creation. At Aftenposten we try to do pair/mob programming every week, but it's quite different to be an active part of the creation of a service vs a review of the service.

I have numerous sync meetings which I'm part of, and we decided to distribute the responsibilities between the team: in some cases, some of my other tech leads would step in. In others, it could really wait til I'm back. This is especially true of meetings with many active participants which rarely have relevant topics unless you are the ones to bring it up.

Every user of chat software like Slack should be comfortable with the status emoji and message; I made sure to say when I am away from and where to reach with any questions. Typically, I'm a firm believer that all messages unless private should go into a public channel. Both for documentation purposes, and for the sheer factor that anyone can reply and share their knowledge. So, while I am away, I encouraged this further by directing messages to a public slack channel. This would hopefully reduce the amount of catching up I need to do when I would return - instead of asking my tech leads, I could just go through the slack channel.

To offboard myself, I ran a couple of a sessions with all the developers to let them know of things that might come up. Then I had specific meetings with other team mates that I had been working with, so they'd be able to raise any concerns or questions early on, and I could make sure that everything was covered. I also tried to ensure that these meetings would have a consistent overlap of attendees: both me, who had been working on it, and others, who would be working with it.

The vacation time was well needed and deserved, and I was quite energized to return. I did the inverse of when I left: I onboarded myself by syncing with my team and manager.

Two things I didn't do: one, while I did set myself to be away in the shared calendar, I didn't set meetings to auto-decline. I've been burnt by that before, where an important meeting was auto-declined and the other person in the meeting wasn't sure what was happening. Two, I didn't set an auto-replying email saying I was out of office. I find that if you have the auto-reply enabled, it means that anytime anyone creates an event in the calendar with shared Google Group emails, they get spammed with an auto-replying email. Also, I prefer to leave emails unanswered until it is time to answer them. This depends a lot on your team, though. If the culture is to have these things setup, it makes sense. In our case we have our holiday calendar which everyone can see so it's clear when people are on vacation.

It can be hard to come back from a long vacation and be productive, and that's been the case for me - particularly with my sleep schedule being messed up. But generally, I think it was handled well, and I'm excited for our development in the next few months.