Varifrank: Dead Week

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Dead Week

Theres a tradition in the software business called "dead week”. That’s the week between Christmas and New Years. Hardly anyone works during this week, most everyone around the globe are out on vacation, taking personal time off and so on. Since so many people are out, there is no "critical mass", no quorum of managers, so "Dead week" is a nice quite time to work in the business. Theres almost no expectations for your time during that week, theres not enough people around to add up to any sort of possible surprises. If anyone gets ambitious, you can quickly bury them behind a wall of signatures they cant possibly get, because at the end of the day – everyone in authority is gone. Better still, it’s the Christmas holidays, and unless there is some deep disaster afoot no one will call anyone at home.

Unless you are unfortunate to be a part of some “year end - go live” project, the time from December 15th to the day after New Years is total bliss. Its quiet, and it gets quieter every day as you move through the end of the calendar. You just have to be creative on how you use your time.

When I worked in San Francisco, we created minature golf courses in our cube farms and played a "round of 9". We held little contests like how many coke cans could you crush in 30 seconds and posted the scores in main conference room. We went shopping, ate lunch for 4 hours, made margaritas in the breakroom and caught up on our technical reading (and by “technical reading” I mean we set up DOOM and played it on the company LAN).

I pretty much do those things every day now that I work from home so in some ways “the thrill is gone”, but back in the days when I commuted to work, it was the one time of year I actually didn’t mind the time and effort spent getting to work.

Tommorrow I will finish the last of this years meetings and presentations and with that, “Dead week” for me at least, officially starts. It’s been a busy year for me this year, and I’m looking forward to the next couple of weeks of no phone ringing, no emergencies and no email panics from “amature night” managers with no real clue what is going on.

The luxury of free time. It really is hard to beat.

Posted @ December 18, 2007 08:18 PM | Current Affairs

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Way beck when I was a unit commander in the Army, it seemed to me that the Pentagon loved to put out requirements for some useless report, with a suspense date of about January 10. By the time it filtered down to my level, the suspense date was January 2, (or the first work day of the New Year). That meant that during "dead week", us poor slobs at the bottom of the pile had to make some sense of what they wanted, get the data, put it into their format, and sent up the line.

So much for a Christmas break at work.

Posted by: Dave Harrington at December 19, 2007 10:53 AM

I'd been in the ARMY a couple years before I realized how stupid it was to take leave during "Dead Week", Frank. Much of my time in the ARMY was spent in training or in training others, and those units have absolutely nothing to accomplish until after the New Year rolls in.
I simply asked my family to come join me, and got paid for doing similar things to those you wrote about.

Merry Christmas and Happy "Dead Week" to ya!

Posted by: Greybeard at December 19, 2007 10:58 AM

A dead week is not just in software but also some inspection works. Hard to get into some places to inspect when people have closed up shop to go holiday shopping.

Posted by: s1c at December 19, 2007 05:02 PM