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Comment by betaby | Hacker News Reader

In USA/Canada boss just going to call you during your vacations, because it's an emergency. So those task won't be understood and will continue to be seen as an exception.

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From a fraud perspective, the point is that a consecutive 2 week vacation is enough that someone probably needs to take over your financial roles, so it would become obvious to the newcomer that you're committing fraud. An example of a type of fraud this could expose (or prevent happening in the first place) is "kiting", where you steal a payment from a customer, then apply over customer's payments to that payment, then apply other customer's payments to those misallocated payments, etc. Doing this prevents those who look at the accounts receivable summary from seeing that payments from Company X have been outstanding for a significant amount of time. Making sure someone takes a vacation makes this much harder to do since someone else will be looking closely at your work in the meantime.

That was my experience when I worked for a law firm, it’s not my experience at a tech company.

Maybe time to look for a new employer.

Were you a lawyer before and then switched to coding? Or did you accept an in-house role?

I am a third year junior associate at a law firm, it would interest me how you transitioned.

I left tech when the dotcom bubble collapsed because obviously tech was over. Then came crawling back during the legal recession following the housing collapse. Mistakes were made.

Depends where you work I guess.

Even at Amazon, when I left work I left behind all ways to communicate and my bosses respected that. Nearly a decade there and never did a boss try to reach me on vacation.

Also been my experience doing technology in big banks for 20 years. Barring extraordinary circumstances, if you need to call someone who's on vacation that's an indicator of a broken process and unnecessary operational risk.

(I've also seen a person who believed he was indispensable and thought because of that he could behave like an asshole. Very satisfying to see him get fired.)

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