Vacation Tool = Less paperwork in Prague

Vacation Tool = Less paperwork in Prague

Lesson from movie Brazil

I always wondered why we, at Prague Engineering Center, must fill out a paper form to request a vacation or day-off. And get it physically signed by a manager.
And I was always told that we need a paper copy, since it's required by local law. How much I envied other parts of Sun since they were happy to use various online vacation tools.

Well, one can see that too much bureaucracy and paperwork can even kill people and I definitely didn't want to end up wounded by all the vacation forms. Lenka, from my team, did a quick legal check and guess what: It was a myth! There is no Czech law or regulation that dictates the form of vacation request.

I started to hunt for solution. Every country has cooked up its own solution  to comply with local law. Do I have to implement everything from scratch also? What a waste of time!

Sharing, sharing, sharing

Sharing is the weapon against NIH syndrome.

Fortunately, I mentioned the vacation tool  to Sin-Yaw, VP and Site lead for engineering in China (see the picture). Lucky me! They've already implemented a vacation tool and they're going to share it with Prague Engineering and the site in St. Petersburg. It runs on an opensource platform, using JSPs.

To make it even more interesting, we're forming an international team that will work on the localized version (huh, wouldn't be fun to have Chinese holiday in the Czech Republic?
If anyone else from Prague Engineering Center is interested, let me know.

Posted at 04:34PM Oct 23, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Global Engineering  |  Comments[1]