> Try managing a team where people take last minute personal days all the time, without having to give advance notice or a reason.

Try getting a job where they advertise a benefit, then complain when you use it.

I mean, there’s an upper bound on how often that can happen (how many personal days people have). Those days are intended to be used at short notice. So if people using them is a problem for the team, imo the team is not correctly matched to the workload.

I do think we often undersize our teams by ignoring the impact of vacation and personal time in taking on work ... but that’s not the fault of the people using the time they are entitled to as part of their compensation.

I mean, are the employees required to give advanced notice if possible? Are absences expected to be explained? You can't hold employees up to an expectation without telling them that it's an expectation.

Are your deadlines so tight that any time off, even planned time off that corespondents to the employee's allotted vacation days would put you behind? If so then it's an indication the issue is with the project being understaffed or not staffed with the proper personnel, or the deadlines being unrealistic.

Are you requiring Herculean effort and unpaid overtime regularly? If so your employees are going to eventually breakdown and need a day to recharge. Sidenote: I've noticed some people are happy to work optional paid overtime but unhappy to work mandatory unpaid overtime.

Are your employees regularly missing so many days to the point they are regularly taking leave without pay and not getting prior approval? That is an upper management/HR issue.

If you're running deadlines so tight or your bench is so shallow that any employee ducking out a day here and there is causing big problems, you have a planning/staffing problem.

The spontaneous employee vacation days are just making that problem more obvious.

If you treat people like resources I imagine its hard when they dont function like you want them to, consider treating them as humans (like you and me!) and you might just understand that they need some unexpected time off now and then.

Your job as a manager should be to ensure that things don't fall apart if people get sick. If there is a critical process managed by a single person then you failed as a manager.

If your team is hemorrhaging personal days left and right, the issue is not with personal days, but with how your team feel.

TBH, who cares? Waze is a traffic mapping thing, right?

It's not like they're managing a nuclear reactor or staffing an ER.

Tried, worked well, built a successful amazing product that's still successful and amazing.

And all that with European PTO benefits across the team!

I've got a chronic illness and I have personal days. I don't plan when I can't work. Deal with it, don't give me personal days, or fire me.

In every single work I was at people sometimes took a day off next day. It is not like everyone would had infinite amount of days off - it was never a massive problem.

Once in a while someone is missing. Typically, rest of team moves on through their day normally.

Unless they interfere with scheduled meetings, I can’t see why this would bug you as a manager. Pair programming, counting hours for clients, or sprint planning are the only other things that could possibly conflict with last minute personal days. It doesn’t really seem to bug the managers at my organization if there are no calendar conflicts.

If there are calendar items that have to be rescheduled, I think the onus is on them to find an alternative time