My company typically gives everyone half days on Fridays from Memorial Day to Labor Day (and most people only put in a token amount of work - if that - on those Fridays - no meetings are allowed to be scheduled on any Friday of the year). This year, in addition to that, they gave everyone every Friday off for the month of July. And... the company still functioned just fine. We run on sprints and we finished just as many story points during those sprints as during sprints when we work full Fridays. I'm pretty sure we could all stop working every Friday and things would go perfectly well.
Also, we aren't allowed to make any code changes from Thanksgiving to New Years. So nothing really happens from Thanksgiving to mid-December and then the entire company stops working the last two weeks of December - we don't even submit time off for it, you just don't show up. That is essentially 10-20 business days where no real work happens. That is almost the equivalent of a year's worth of Fridays.
Similar thing - half of the year now with no meeting Fridays & 4hrs Fridays.
This gets extended month to month based on performance, so it could stop, but if they stop it I will really try to find a job where they do a similar thing.
No meetings on Friday means that in four hours you can do as much as with normal Friday but with meetings (given the meetings produce 0 value, which is not the case of course, but also sometimes the meetings could have been an email, a tweet, or a joke).
This is pretty standard for organizations that see a large portion of their revenue during those months. This is especially important for ecommerce-like shopping around the US holidays, for instance. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and every intervening day between Thanksgiving and Christmas and the New Year's holidays.
No daily/sprint code changes, release management, emergency approvals and the like. It works pretty well, no major outages and the site kept taking orders.
Source: worked on high-traffic e-commerce infrastructure around US Black Fridays/Cyber Monday shopping days.
That is the time of year when the vast majority of our business occurs. The systems must be as bug free as possible, so no changes are allowed unless a bug pops up that is mission critical. If that were to happen it would involve huge meetings with tons of conversations and dozens of eyes looking at it, even if it is a simple change on one line of code.
No code changes pushed to production is what I've experienced in such places as a risk mitigation strategy, not that everyone is sitting around twiddling thumbs. Every hour of downtime between Black Friday and Christmas will cost a lot of revenue, and sometimes the company will be working with a skeleton crew for a huge chunk of that time,which makes fixes take longer as a bonus. So why risk it?
This was standard protocol in my org at Microsoft as well. The time was suppose to be spend reviewing tech debt/the years oncall issues and come up with plans for them.
I have the opposite experience at my company. We are given half days on summer Fridays. However, because the workload and client communications were not reduced, 80% of weeks the junior team members would take off, and myself and other senior members would not only have to unofficially work the full Friday, but also take on the work of the rest of the team.
Nothing pushed to prod, but for all practical purposes all code changes stop. We use the holiday season to learn stuff, write documentation, brainstorm, clean stuff up, etc.
That just sounds like your company has too many employees. But also if they haven't discovered this themselves, good on them for paying for extra, unneeded jobs.
Well, the company does have tens of thousands of employees. I'm not sure how anyone would determine if there are too many. Of course some of the salaried employees are the lifeguards at the pool, the rock climbing wall people, etc. You would probably consider those to be extra, unneeded jobs.
Also, we aren't allowed to make any code changes from Thanksgiving to New Years. So nothing really happens from Thanksgiving to mid-December and then the entire company stops working the last two weeks of December - we don't even submit time off for it, you just don't show up. That is essentially 10-20 business days where no real work happens. That is almost the equivalent of a year's worth of Fridays.