Tech company Dyn now grants days off work to coincide with major game releases due to the absenteeism this week for Portal 2.
We’ve all been guilty of such transgressions at some point in our life as gamers. Calling out of work “sick” in order to play a just-released game is a time-honored tradition, and at least one employer has finally decided to make it official. Dyn Inc. in Manchester, New Hampshire is a technology company that provides internet and email services to a wide range of clients like Twitter, Meetup, Bit.ly, Scribd, Twitpic and Wikia. After noticing a steep drop in attendance this week due to Valve’s release of Portal 2, Dyn updated the official employee handbook to award an extra PTO (Paid Time Off) day that can be used for major game releases.
“As a long time Counter-Strike player and general Valve fan, I saw this one coming. I’m glad our HR department made the right decision on this,” said Dyn’s Edward Bender. “Seriously, we are in the midst of a hiring spree and need to be real about the people we want on our awesome growing team.”
A representative from Valve said such sparse attendance was to be expected. “This comes as no surprise to us and we support Dyn’s decision to do what every cutting edge workplace on the Internet, or anywhere, should be doing,” said Doug Lombardi, VP of Marketing at Valve.
Dyn’s statement is pretty much a tongue-in-cheek way to say that it is a cool place to work. I don’t know how true that is, but any company that gives its workers time off to play games gets an A+ in my book. If you have the tech chops to work on email and DNS systems and don’t mind moving to New Hampshire, I’d certainly consider applying to work at Dyn.
Now, if you’ll excuse, I have to go back to building my Lego renditions of Atlas and Peabody on company time …
Source: Dyn
