> The incentive was that we would have a pizza party IF we hit the deadline.
This same thing happened to me when I was a wee lad. I then personally ordered and paid for a few pizzas, breadsticks, root beer, a greek salad, about $50 all together, and hosted a pizza party myself at work late at night. To get your slice I just had you sign a petition against unpaid overtime and interest in joining the Teamsters Union. A couple guys didn't want to sign, the others did. A few weeks later I was fired with cause, had a better paying job by the end of the week. Company folded around a year later. And good.
I remember ComputerLand stores. Sounds like he was a hard working guy who earned his success.
Saipan is one of the most corrupt backwards places on earth. As a US trust territory, for many years they had slave plantations that produced clothing for chinese companies which was labelled "Made in USA". Many workers were kept under brutal conditions, raped, beaten and killed. The Saipanese are mostly incredibly lazy and loved this system as it allowed them to have houses full of slave servants and great wealth without ever having to work for it. It all collapsed a few years ago, but there's a close to 100% chance that they are the ones running the scam in this current case.
edit: Keep downvoting this, monkeys! I have no doubt I am one of a small handful of people on HN that has intimate experience of how Saipan works and how corrupt this place is. My post gives true insight to what is going on there. Imagine the worst fundamentalist christian ignorant half retarded hillbilly sex fiend town straight out of the movie Deliverance, but then give them dictatorial control over outsiders, a total lack of desire to work and a strong desire to dominate control and cheat others and you have Saipan. It's like a stereotypical town thought to exist in the backwoods of Arkansas, but it's real, slavery is still legal, and it's part of the US. Absolutely anything involving Saipanese officials that has a money angle for them is a total scam. Since their slave factories collapsed, they have been in desperate straits to steal what they can. I totally believe the CEOs explanation that they backdated their tax code specifically to target him, and then never served him of any real notice of it until now, after they've gotten a bunch of judgements against him in which he had no chance to represent himself because he didn't even know there was a case about this. That is exactly how they work. They are incredibly conniving and will work every system to get what they want. Typical small town american fundamentalist hillbillies, but in a pacific island trust territory. These comments apply to the people in control there. There's also the regular people who hate what has been done to their island over the years, many are ostensibly good people. It's the corrupt people in power that are the troublemakers, and dealing with them is exactly exactly like Southern Bible Thumping Fundamentalist - which the Saipanese basically are. The fundamentalist missionaries infected them with the peculiar sort of madness, entitlement, laziness and corruption that comes with that belief system. And if you had no idea about the slavery and corruption and you are downvoting this you are only proving how mentally you are exactly like them. This post tells you the truth about Saipan, a place that until just now you probably never heard of. Ignorant fools.
I think the OP is correct, despite all the people downvoting him for his tone. All these allegations have been been documented.
Don't forget this is the same Saipan that hired Jack Abramoff and lobbied Tom Delay (before BOTH went to jail on other corruption charges).
We turn now to Abramoff’s special relationship with the South Pacific island of Saipan and how it connects to his ties to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Saipan is an American territory in the South Pacific also known as the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. In the mid-1990s Abramoff was on the payroll of Saipan officials aiming to stop legislation that would crack down on sweat shop conditions, which run rampant on the island. In 1997, Abramoff arranged a lavish trip to the island of Saipan for Delay.
The Delay trip was originally reported by Brian Ross, Chief Investigative Correspondent for ABC News. We are going to play 2 excerpts from the report that aired on ABC’s 20/20 on March 13th, 1998. In this first excerpt, Ross interviews Allan Stayman, a Clinton administration official in the Department of Interior who was investigating labor conditions in Saipan. Brian also talks to a worker in one of the factories and ends with Eric Gregoire, a human rights worker. Most of the workers in these factories are from mainland China.
Yes, yes and yes. Absolutely. Key parts of the sordid, brutal and shameful history of american slavery in the 20th century. US slavery in the last 100 years, and the support and defense of that slavery by the certain groups of interest, should be taught in every social studies and US history class in every credible school. But it isn't. Instead we get propaganda about how that was all in the past and the US is free. Ha. The truth is very different.
If I earn $1.00 and owe 20 cents in taxes, I’ve earned my success in the amount of eighty cents’ worth of financial prosperity.
If I keep the entire dollar, I have earned my eighty cents AND I owe 20 cents in unpaid taxes.
This gentleman has not been convicted of any crime, but it is certainly possible that he has “earned his success” AND that he owes money for unpaid taxes.
did you not read the part where they backdated the changes? So if you owe 5 cent in taxes and pay that and then a few years later the gov't says "we changed the code you owe us 50 cents and this retroactively applies to the last few years." You would be perfectly okay with that?
As a citizen, I would be perfectly ok with hiring a lawyers and tax accountant and disputing the charges using the existing system we have for disputing taxes and/or having unjust laws stricken off the books.
I wouldn't have downvoted you, but then your edit included some incredibly bigoted and unwarranted stereotypes:
>...fundamentalist christian [sic] ignorant half retarded hillbilly sex fiend town...
>Typical small town american [sic] fundamentalist hillbillies...
>Southern Bible Thumping Fundamentalist
>The fundamentalist missionaries infected them with the peculiar sort of madness, entitlement, laziness and corruption that comes with that belief system.
This last one takes the cake. Even if I take it at your word that the Saipanese are as lazy and corrupt as you make them out to be (which seems to be the general consensus here and on Wikipedia, so I'll accept that for now), you have absolutely zero proof that they became that way because of "fundamentalist missionaries," rather than being that way to begin with. You say that these negative attitudes come "with that belief system." What belief system? It sounds like you're blaming the problems of Saipanese culture on some chimerical theology that doesn't really exist.
If those missionaries were protestants (especially if they were Calvinists) in the 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries, they most likely did their best to instill the indiginous people with a solid work ethic[1], exactly the opposite of the vices you are trying to pin on "fundamentalism."
Here's my anecdotal evidence: In college, I briefly dated a Samoan girl who was working on a graduate degree at a nearby university, with her research subject being the colonial history of the South Pacific. Samoa was proselytized by Calvinists in the 19th century, and she told me that when the missionaries first arrived, the Samoans were pretty much the way you describe Saipan today, and that the Calvinist influence helped bring about a more egalitarian and less corrupt culture (with unscrupulous European traders often at odds with the missionaries because they sought to profit from the native corruption). Samoa isn't Saipan, but it is an example of "fundamentalist missionaries" having exactly the opposite effect on a South Pacific culture from what you blame them for in Saipan.
Same, had no problem until I read the edit. I'm not an evangelical and certainly have my qualms with them, but I have some serious issues with bugsy's characterization. Living in the (mainland) US, you are exposed to many Christians of many denominations, and I don't know of a significant group yet that can be characterized as entitled, lazy, mad, etc. That may be an appropriate characterization for some of their oppressive false priests, but it definitely doesn't apply to the generality of congregants of any major religious group in the US of which I am aware.
Keep in mind that "Christian Fundamentalism" didn't even exist until the end of the 19th century. Trying to pin anything that happened in the 17th or 18th century on "fundamentalism" is a mistake.
In the modern sense of the term, that is true. However, one could certainly make an argument that Oliver Cromwell, et al were fundamentalists, as well as the original settlers of Plymouth. You could go back even further in time and apply the term to various Catholic orders at certain points in history.
All that being said, I was just using his term (in quotes) for the sake of continuity of conversation, and it was not my intent to lend credence to his application of the label "fundamentalist" to 18th- and 19th-century missionaries.
I didn't downvote you, while I don't think you did the best job of making your point, everyone who clicked downvote should take a minute and read the Wikipedia page on it Saipan because it does sound like a seriously messed up place.
TBH that link is next to useless - look at the talk page someone has a huge axe to grind there.
However I did note:
'"These factories have all closed down. (See "Economy"). The CNMI came under Federal minimum wage regulations in 2007 and immigration law in 2008. In June 2009, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security takes over the CNMI’s immigration and border controls.'
Also it mentions nothing about Bugsy's "fundamentalist christian ignorant half retarded hillbilly sex fiend[s]" that he claims are running the shop and enslaving everyone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Mariana_Islands reads as a better less emotionally charged and leveller article. The talk there appears to indicate that the problems of slavery and poor worker conditions were brought on by criminal or unlawful factions operating in the society. This contradicts the tone of Bugsy's comments that seem to suggest there was a malevolent Christian organised and government sanctioned (by the US) use of slavery ...
I didn't downvote but I do agree with you. It's much better IMHO if you take the downvotes on the chin and leave it to someone else to point out (as a reply) that the downvotes were not deserved.
That's part of the edit after an extremely useful post with insight into the reality started getting downvoted because it didn't conform with the political or whatever beliefs of the downvoters. HN would be better without the pathetic reactionary losers who use downvoting to promote their political beliefs.
Bugsy, I don't doubt that a lot of really horrific stuff has gone down in Saipan, owing in large part to the US's willingness not to enact labor laws there until just recently. But can you see how your method of saying this out overshadows the point your trying to make?
If someone were to walk up and say "Mexicans are lazy," most of us would consider that person racist. Nevermind that "lazy" is a culturally relative term, but you go way beyond that when you describe the Saipanese as "the worst fundamentalist christian ignorant half retarded hillbilly sex fiend town straight out of the movie Deliverance...", and you only hedge that toward the end by saying your comments apply to the people in power.
You getting downvoted has nothing to do with people trying to promote political beliefs. (Most of us didn't have any opinion on Saipan until now.) It's about maintaining the otherwise typically high quality of discussion on HN.
Want to point out that Saipan's lack of labor laws led to terribly exploitative behavior up into this decade? Please do. Want to share your personal frustration in dealing with Saipan's corruption? Sure, I'm interested. But please leave the abusive ranting for someplace else.
HN would be better without Ad Hominem Abuse such as calling people “monkeys” or “pathetic reactionary losers.” I don’t normally respond AND downvote, but these words have earned an exception.
In fact abusive language is against the HN guidelines[1] under "In Comments":
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Perhaps, but again - there is some seriously messed up stuff going on there. It's hard to not be outraged and have that spill over. He's outraged at the situation (in addition to being downvoted for the TRUTH), so I think it's understandable.
Well, elevating form over content is a hallmark of the superficial. Formalism dictates that the way something is said is more important than the meaning of the words.
But form is content in its own right; in a forum, the tone, diction and precision of someone's contribution contains a lot of metadata about their own emotional investment in the topic, relevant background knowledge, and willingness to participate in constructive discussion.
Bugsy's comment may have included some factually accurate content, but his form of expression is a signal of questionable credibility and a potential conversational rathole (such as this has become) should one choose to engage him further.
I wouldn't say we've elevated form over content. Only that we require form to meet certain minimal standards. This requirement allows us to keep discussions productive and evidence-focused -- in other words, our standards for form result in improved content.
Ignoring those requirements leads to low-content discussion like, for example, this one.
I downvoted you for your tone, not your facts - which are entirely correct.
However, I will say that Millard knew all this about Saipan and still located there so he wouldn't have to pay his taxes. If they turn on him, that doesn't make him a hero, no matter how "earned" the money was to start with. It makes him a fool.
">...fundamentalist christian [sic] ignorant half retarded hillbilly sex fiend town...
>Typical small town american [sic] fundamentalist hillbillies...
>Southern Bible Thumping Fundamentalist
>The fundamentalist missionaries infected them with the peculiar sort of madness, entitlement, laziness and corruption that comes with that belief system."
Yes. They are an isolated small community which takes horrible advantage of people in their own society who can't defend themselves, and then they started importing even less empowered people to oppress. Similarly to how rich white plantation owners oppressed both other poor white people and imported African slaves.
I don't hate Saipanese people due to their ethnicity or anything, and I'm not opposed to Christians as a group (I know good and bad ones); it is just the way Saipan works that I hate.
>Yes. They are an isolated small community which takes horrible advantage of people in their own society who can't defend themselves //
Just to be certain. You put this down to the work of Christian missionaries? (Your point that you know some good Christians is noted, irrelevant as it is to the current question).
Presumably either you or Bugsy know the names of these notorious sex fiend missionaries that have so transformed Saipan, I'm always curious about such reports.
As an aside WRT your note on "white plantation owners" I'm sure you know that black and coloured plantation owners too have exploited their slaves and workers.
There are lazy and corrupt people everywhere, saying "one of the most corrupt backwards places on earth" and "the Saipanese are mostly incredibly lazy" tells me more about you then the N. Marianas. Tacking on "this is just about the people in charge" doesn't work either, paint with a thinner brush in the first place.
It's just an internet board, don't get worked up if you get downvoted now and then. Try not to call everyone monkeys and ignorant fools, we're mostly human beings and above average here.
We'll assume that whatever it is you are having people do is something that is intrinsically rewarding, benefits them, and is not taking up their entire life. We're not talking about having interns come in and work 8 hr days on projects you specify for no pay and you retain original copyright ownership as work for hire without pay. It's more like Stack Overflow answers.
As has been pointed out, in such a system by offering cold hard cash, you can and will attract gamers and the wrong element by paying, and you can and will also destroy the intrinsic motivation of the many sincere people who enjoyed contributing for free before.
At some level of contribution there needs to be pay off though, especially if you are directly monetizing contributions. I am thinking of youtube here. There are now professional youtube performers, people who make a living writing original comedy and commentary and skits for youtube and earning money from the shared ad revenue. This is only done with top earners who are making enough from ads to actually be able to fund doing it as a full time job. The result has been higher quality material and more stickiness from popular contributors.
None of those cost money yet so few workplaces value them since disrespect, micromanagement, and industrial era style division of labor are addictions of the corporate management crowd. It's gospel to Ivy League educated and Old Money.
As a separate issue, "As startups, we can't really offer top-dollar salaries to our employees." is complete nonsense. First of all, "we don't pay top dollar" is doublespeak for "We pay below market rate." Nothing says "We don't respect you." as much as that does. If you can't at the absolute minimum pay market rate for the level of talent you require you shouldn't be in business. End of story.
This is not a helpful comment. It only sounds like one. In fact: since nobody on HN would sponsor a "respect-free" or "autonomy-free" or "control-free" work environment, it actually doesn't say anything at all.
This is frustrating because there are probably a million things we could do for (e.g.) Matasano team members without having to restructure the business, and I'd love some more ideas.
We are exploring an alternate mode of vacation (one might say, the French model, although not because it is not national) -- in which the company essentially shuts down august till labor day, on top of a couple weeks of ordinary flexible paid time off. We hope that this will enable people to take real vacations (without worries that something really important is happening around the lab), and the lab isn't hamstrung when missing someone important. Plus, a month of free time allows people to take a serious sabbatical and do something really substantial outside of work.
Those we around a month of productivity, we think that people will end up being more than 10% more productive/happy/creativity, and the people we can attract may be 10% better suited to our work. We think it's a perk hardly any other american company can match; great hackers value their time.
More than any of these, philosophically, we want to allow our colleagues to experience the world. We want them to experience freedom.
Forced vacation isn't freedom. If August isn't a convenient time to take a vacation, and the employee would rather work, let them work and take that chunk of time off at some other point. If taking that time off another time during the year is unacceptable, then your policy simply isn't fair to all your employees.
Where I work even the national holidays are floating holidays, so if I want to work on Christmas that isn't a day off for me, and I can trade that for a day off for any other day of the year.
Especially for travel, it's way cheaper to do so for off-peak seasons, so forcing August or the last week of December etc. when just makes for more expensive vacations. This is one reason why I think the "French model" kind of sucks.
This works for some businesses and not for others. Most successful YC companies, for instance, cannot simply shut down for the entire month of August. In others, teams are so tightly coupled that the business wants vacations as synchronized as possible. It all depends.
The important thing to remember is that there is almost always some degree of freedom withheld by vacation policies. It's not especially productive to reason about vacations as if absolute freedom of scheduling is a sacred principle. Some businesses can come closer to others in providing freedom, and if that freedom is especially valuable to you, you should adjust your compensation expectations accordingly.
But remember the iron law of supply and demand. If a company provides a benefit (say, "months of paid vacation any time of the year on no notice"), and the market values that benefit, candidates will factor that into their compensation negotiation and the salary the company needs to pay for a given level of quality will decrease. In other words: you're paying for the vacation policy one way or the other.
(This is a subtext to the constant jealous comparisons between European and American vacation policies that tends to bug me.)
Most successful YC companies, for instance, cannot simply shut down for the entire month of August. In others, teams are so tightly coupled that the business wants vacations as synchronized as possible. It all depends.
We're certainly in the latter category, so this is an important distinction. I do think groups in product organizations have this freedom where operational groups don't, though something similar may be possible there.
But remember the iron law of supply and demand. If a company provides a benefit (say, "months of paid vacation any time of the year on no notice"), and the market values that benefit, candidates will factor that into their compensation negotiation and the salary the company needs to pay for a given level of quality will decrease. In other words: you're paying for the vacation policy one way or the other.
I don't really think that talent is best thought of as an efficient market. People are empirically quite limited in their ability to perceive ahead of time the situations in which they will be the happiest or most productive, and salaries seem to be primarily determined by societal norms.
For us, the decision mostly hinges upon whether or not our employees will actually be happier, more creative, and ultimately more productive under the new model. The policy might sway a few candidates that would otherwise look elsewhere, and it might retain several candidates confronted with lucrative alternative offers, but ultimately it's how it will effect the team's spirit that really matters.
I'm not sure it takes an efficient market for candidates to be able to do a simple math problem. The company that offers 4 weeks vacation a year pays a $90k salaried employee the equivalent of $51.10/hr; the company that offers 6 weeks vacation pays $53.50/hr, or 5% more.
Comp clearly isn't the only reason people pick jobs, but it's a big reason.
There's a "quality of vacation" point you're making, but generally I think the real issue there is that employees are pushovers, and ask permission to use all their vacation time all at once, instead of just informing their employer that they're going to take July off.
Myself I pretty much don't do jack shit in any given hour of the year, so I guess companies that would hire me at those rates are getting ripped off since they aren't getting anything for their money.
On the other hand, over the period of a year, I am amazingly productive and product thousands of times more value than the typical engineer.
Interestingly, the less down time during that year, the fewer incredibly valuable things I make.
It's a bit frustrating to see very insightful contributions like my comment here downvoted. Downvotes isn't meant to be for good points. Let me make it more explicit though for people who have difficulty understanding things.
ENGINEERS THAT CREATE THE THINGS YOU SELL DO NOT CONTRIBUTE BY THE HOUR. THEY CONTRIBUTE BY THE QUARTER, THE YEAR AND THE DECADE. HOURLY WAGE CALCULATIONS ARE THE WRONG WAY TO CALCULATE HOW MUCH THEY ARE PAID BECAUSE THEIR FUNDAMENTAL UNIT OF TIME ISN'T THE HOUR. WERNER VON BRAUN DIDN'T DO ANYTHING NOTICEABLE IN ANY GIVEN HOUR OF DESIGN WORK.
What does this mean in practice to the MBA set? It means that measuring engineering work as cost per hour means there is something seriously wrong with your company because you don't understand the fundamental nature of the work.
Question: have you experienced both models, or are you just guessing? This isn't meant to condescend -- I'm just truly curious.
The trouble is twofold -- two or three weeks of paid time off, while standard, isn't enough for people to have significantly different experiences in their lives. Furthermore, if the business is still running, then many people will have to continue to work through their vacation. (as is currently happening for me, as we speak).
Question: If forced vacation isn't freedom, are weekends freedom?
Weekends are forced vacation too. It'd be great if companies adopted a "floating weekends" policy too, for the same reasons I outlined, but no company I've come across seems to do so, officially (you do see unofficially here and there bosses who recognize an employee working the weekend and allow them to take a couple days off later, and simply not reporting the vacation).
As to your first question, yes I've experienced both. Not month long shutdowns, but week long ones, but it's the same thing: if it's not convenient for you to take a vacation during that time, it's pretty much a waste and it sucks. If your spouse doesn't get 4 weeks off on August, are you going to go on a 4 week vacation then? Probably not. But then you'll resent the people who do actually take that 4 weeks off to go somewhere. It's bad for morale.
I agree that a solid 4 week vacation is enriching, but just declaring an arbitrary 4 week shutdown is a cop out. Fix the structural problems that require every one to be in the office at once, and then give everyone that much vacation time to be used when they like it. I'm not saying that this is easy to fix, but if you really believe in giving people time to have significantly different experiences in their lives, this is what you'd have to work at.
I am afraid, though, that I can't imagine how our company can work effectively without at least some people in the physical lab at the same time. I will meditate on this.
In the meantime, I will think about how to give people an alternative plan of time off while still being effective.
"If you can't at the absolute minimum pay market rate for the level of talent you require you shouldn't be in business. End of story."
One of the key pillars of the startup ecosystem is that you can offer someone equity in exchange for significantly "below market rate" wages. In some or even many cases, this will be below the "the absolute minimum pay market rate for the level of talent ... require[d]."
If you view that as a sign of disrespect, then you should probably only ever work for 1)bootstrapped businesses that are pretty far along the bootstrap curve or 2) venture-funded businesses that have significant funding. That's a totally viable approach to working for a startup, and I respect you for refusing to work under less than a given rate.
But I don't think it's fair for you to impose your minimum wage upon others. Some people are willing to work for more nascent businesses in exchange for more upside. That should be their right too.
I haven't a clue why this is being downvoted, unless the point you are making is too obvious. Perhaps the parent was only describing startups that neither give employees equity nor pay them at market rates?
Hm, well thanks for the clarification. I just reread it several times and it's not clear. I'll agree that it's ambiguous. It would be interesting to know more. Is this a fixed 25 day cut off then, or is it prorated? Kind of alarming is the part where the monthly salary as an example is £100, surely he meant to type £3000?
It sounds like you might work there? If so I have a couple questions for clarification, in addition to (1) clearing up that the £100 thing was just a random number and not representative (since some Chinese developers do make in that range, so it's not an impossible salary to claim). (2) Did "What’s normal for time off varies from country to country" mean that US employees of the company (for example) are expected to use less days than european ones? That the cut off for what is considered "unreasonable use" differs depending on company. (3) If the answer to that is yes, then are salaries matched to standard market rate in the economy each employee lives in? Are SF based employees paid 20 times as much as the guy in Bangladesh for the same work? (4) With a worldwide workforce, how does the company handle paying social insurance tax and providing for benefits in each country? Are competitive insurance plans offered, a different one for each employee? Or is there some insurance company that is able to provide insurance for all employees regardless of what country they are citizens of and resident in? Thanks for any clarification you can provide, these are all interesting subjects.
I used to say native applications were the only way to do a lot of things like photo editing. Since then I have been proven wrong in finding photo editing and even audio production tools running in web browsers. Not the highest end stuff, but useful enough. Javascript has come a long way and Canvas really reorganizes the playing field.
The thing I am realizing is both Apple and Microsoft have extremely unstable APIs that are driven by political or maybe stupidity purposes (some non-engineering reason), where perfectly good software just stops working because some bureaucrat at the Duopoly decided to nix something for arbitrary or foolish reasons.
But you can't do this with HTML apps, since it's not a monopoly, duopoly, or oligarchy, it's an actual competitive market for browsers. If your browser decides to stop supporting HTML4, it's broken and no one will use it.
This means you can write once for web apps and be confident it will continue to work forever.
That's a huge advantage and has changed the way I think about things. Now I am of the opinion that if there is any possible way to make something run in the browser, that is the preferred and superior choice. It's also instantly Mac/PC and Linux cross compatible too.
"Only people whose sick leave exceeded 2 standard deviation were notified"
I don't understand what notified means? Notified of termination? So each year the company measured which people had the most sick days, which would of course be those dealing with cancer treatments as such, and fired them? IF so, it is reminiscent of Jack Welch's notorious dictat to fire the 10% "at the bottom" each year.
No doubt I am misunderstanding the policy you are describing, which is why I am asking for clarification.
Notified means they and their manager were told that the sick leave taken exceeded the norm, there was no retaliation, just as a check of reasonableness of leave. I am not sure how longer duration illness were treated, may be put on short-term disability benefit.
For those that work, they do go mad. Haven't you noticed that Americans are obese drug addicts with little knowledge of world culture, don't speak any other languages at all, and love to declare war or otherwise bully anyone they can while shouting rah rah patriot freedom? That is part of what happens from never being able to take a month of vacation, which means no long trips to europe or south america or africa or anywhere really other than across the state line to the indian casino for a few days of gambling and buffet eats.
All right, perhaps not every one would go mad. There's quite a few jobs especially in bureaucracies like government and banks where work is a social club where they chat and drink coffee all day. These people probably don't need a vacation, but they are the ones where there is no problem for them to take it since they weren't contributing much in the first place.
It's the productive people that get backtalk from managements about vacation: "You can't go, we are in a crunch."; "This is a crisis, where is the team spirit."; "I can't believe you are considering taking 5 days off this year when things are the way they have been lately."
This same thing happened to me when I was a wee lad. I then personally ordered and paid for a few pizzas, breadsticks, root beer, a greek salad, about $50 all together, and hosted a pizza party myself at work late at night. To get your slice I just had you sign a petition against unpaid overtime and interest in joining the Teamsters Union. A couple guys didn't want to sign, the others did. A few weeks later I was fired with cause, had a better paying job by the end of the week. Company folded around a year later. And good.