I was on vacation when my employer’s new fiscal year started. My manager let me take vacation because it’s not like anything critical was going to happen. Well, joke was on us because we didn’t foresee the stupidity of others…

I had to update a few product codes in the website’s web config and deploy those changes. I was only going to be logged in for 30 minutes to complete that.

I get messaged by one of our database admins. He was doing testing and was unable to complete a payment on the website. That was strange. There was a change pushed by our offsite dev agency, but that was all frontend changes (just updating text) and wouldn’t affect payments.

We don’t want to enlist the dev agency for debugging work, especially when it’s not likely that it’s a code issue. But I was on vacation and I couldn’t stay online past the time I had budgeted for. So my employer enlists the dev agency for help. It’s going to be costly because the agency is in Lithuania, it was past their business hours, and it was emergency support.

Dev agency looks at error logs. There are Apple Pay errors, but that doesn’t explain why non Apple Pay transactions aren’t going through. They roll back my deployment and theirs, but no change. They tell my employer to contact our payment processor.

My manager and the Product Manager contact Payroll, who is the stakeholder for our payment gateways. Payroll contacts our payment gateway and finds out a service called Decision Manager was recently configured for our account. Decision Manager was declining all payments. Payroll was not the person who had Decision Manager installed and our account using this service was news to her.

Payroll works with our payment processor to get payments working again. The damage is pretty severe. Online payments were down for at least 12 hours. Our call center had logged reports from customers the night before.

At our post mortem, we had to find out who ok’d Decision Manager without telling anyone. Luckily, it was quick work. The first stakeholder up was for the Fundraising Dept. She said it wasn’t her or anyone on her team. Our VP of Analytics broke it to her that our payment processor gave us the name of the person who ok’d Decision Manager and it was someone on the Fundraising team. Fundraising then starts backtracking and says that oh yes she knew about it but transactions were still working after the Decision Manager had been configured. WTAF.

Everyone is dumbfounded by this. How could you make a big change to our payment processor and not tell anyone? How did our payment processor allow you to make this change when you’re not the account admin (you’re just a user)?

Our company head had to give an awkward speech about communication and how it’s important. The web team can’t figure out issues if you don’t tell us what you did. The company head was pissed because it was a shitty way to start off the new fiscal year. Our bill for the dev agency must have been over $1000 for debugging work that wasn’t helpful.

Amazingly, no one was fired.

You guys go on vacation!

I've never coded (for work) on vacation. I just turn off my work laptop and my work phone. So I can spend the first week of back to work for going through my email & messages.

I'm not irreplaceable and I work with competent people. (At least that's my goal at work.)

It's uh, my hobby I guess.
And wtf is vacation?

Through my previous employer's complete incompetence and lack of a spine I had to work two days during my last holiday. He'd managed to approve time off for all three of the remaining staff at the same time, so as a compromise, our six day work week was covered by all of us for two days a piece. Sooo maybe not technically not coding on holiday?

The business could just about scrape by on one staff member, so the boss should've allowed the holidays to those who requested it first (myself and one other), but that would've caused problems with the third person who he just so happened to be related to.

I was made redundant a few months later. The company is in the a lot of trouble and on its last legs, but the one member of staff who kept their job was the least capable and, surprise surprise, the relative.

Feels bad to admit it, but I constantly work over hours and on holidays in the past year. The company is in a merger and complete overhaul of two internal systems landed on me, in addition to some other "role hats" I'm wearing.

Deadlines are unrealistic to fit in regular hours, but at least my immediate manager recognizes that and is supportive with extra work flexibility and bonuses every couple of months.

I keep calming myself down that this is temporary, just gotta hit those initial deadlines. Sounds a bit foolish, but I'm hopeful.

They are a good company to work for, and I've been with them from mid 2015.

I always make sure i can code on Vacation on my own projects. The flipside of this is tho: i never take time off, since my work is rather relaxed anyways.
My employer messages me about that recently, that i still have 100% of my vacation days left, so what i did is using it all up until the year is over. Essentially im almost all the time on vacation until the end of the year (+ a little), and can work on my own projects. One rust project might be in a publishable state soon actually.

EVERY FUCKING VACATIONS I'VE EVER HAD SINCE HIGH SCHOOL, when I first learned to code.
Since then there have always been some school or uni assignment or something croaked in production while I was away and n00bs couldn't hack it.

For my own business….yes