It is unfortunate that so many people are stuck in jobs that don't offer sufficient time off. It seems fairly common for employees to "start"* with just two weeks of paid time off (and many, I think, even lack access to unpaid leave for non-medical reasons).
One might argue that two weeks is sufficient for a week-long vacation every six months, but most people I know use most of their time off for family obligations and "work outside of work" like home repairs. This is a crap situation.
* Quotes because it is becoming less and less common to work for a company for decades, so the traditional system of awarding vacation based on length of tenure is becoming more and more insane. How many people never even get past the initial level of paid time off before switching jobs?
When I take vacation I get anxious if I haven't touched a computer in 24 hours, although it goes away after a couple of days. The worst part is coming back from vacation, often can't sleep or work effectively the first week back because of the stress I've had about not working. I'm sure something like this is universal, no one likes coming back from vacation but I wonder if there is a way to avoid it.
That re-entry stress can be killer. I recently took 3.5 weeks off to travel around Japan and I didn't take a laptop. The company I work for was okay with that but when I got back my work seriously suffered for about two weeks.
It just took me that long to get back into things. I'd lost a lot of those "unsaid practices" that tend to accumulate.
That means the vacation probably wasn't long enough. It takes at least two weeks to really clear your head. If you're really that stressed about not/working you could really use 3-6 months off. I do it every 3 years or so am not "rich."
Dude, it's a fine prison you built for yourself. This from a guy in tech, tech being one of the few areas where labour supposedly still has negotiating power.
I'm in the final year of my PhD, but yes I agree I should probably look into better ways of handling work. I'm thinking of changing things after finishing, this is not a good way to live life.
Oh, a PhD... well that's different, yes, a grad student always feels like they should be working on their thesis. I've done this, and regret not taking a month off once for a trip. I wouldn't have had a hard time with it once I was actually on the trip, but I couldn't justify taking it in the first place. Productivity-wise probably would have been close to a wash.
I can't think of any place I've worked in the last 15 years that didn't start with at least three weeks vacation and a couple weeks sick time. Then again, I may be just self-filtering out those places by not even interviewing at the kind of place that would give two weeks vacation. 'cause if we got to the offer stage and I was offered two weeks vacation, I'd laugh and walk out.
A lot of jobs out there give 2 weeks PTO to entry-level employees. It's mainly "blue collar" (for lack of a better term) jobs like trades (I suspect due to many being smaller family-owned "Father & Sons" businesses), or jobs with very low barrier to entry for applicants (no degree requirements/past experience, for example).
A large portion of my extended family works in retail where 2 weeks is pretty standard for entry-level positions. It's tenure-based all the way.
Some employers offer relocation assistance. So, if you find a position that you think you'd be a better fit for or would enjoy more, but it's far away from where you live now, you may want to ask about that.
Sure, although I don't wanna derail the discussion too much with my silly situation. I work at a Delphi 5 (!) shop in the Midwest. I spent about a year trying to get interviews in my strong field (C#/.NET, no degree though). I wound up here because it's the first and only place I could even get in the door. Not the most elegant position but I couldn't go on much longer working clothing retail.
Less than half of one--this is my first dev gig. I'm basically 'unproven' so I understand why it was slim pickings for me.
I'm hoping building some experience here will give me a better chance in the future, although I'm a bit worried that working with such an old tech stack might not work in my favor.
If you want to move to Portland, my company is hiring. We're converting some old Delphi legacy systems into .NET. And I promise you we offer more PTO than that. Shoot me a message on my LinkedIn (link is in profile) or gmail (same as HN handle)
Thanks. So---do not worry about your performance at the company at all. Work the lowest amount of hours you can get away with for a few months, and spend all your time upgrading your skills and hunting for better jobs.
Seriously, people will pay for you to move to one of the coasts, higher cost of living but better salary and ludicrously better time off, if you'd like help finding a place let me know - noah@noahpryor.com. Obviously there are tons of reasons for you to want to stay there, but if it's just financial/cash flow issues, companies will help with those.
(I'm a dev, not a recruiter, no financial interest in this).
They were actually a great company. I interned with them during college, learned a ton. They just had some very old-fashioned policies which I suspect were due to the CEO/founder (and most of the higher-ups) being from a military background.
In the U.S., military members get 30 days a year of paid leave, though weekends count as 'on duty' even if you would not normally work. Of course this can always be overruled by your commander - you can get stuck in a situation (i.e., deployed in Afghanistan) where you can't use your leave, you just get paid for it.
There was actually some back and forth on the matter. Eventually they offered 10 days but at that point I had other offers and wound up with one that started at three weeks vacation.
Of course, that job sucked for a variety of other reasons which led to me leaving after six months. "Oh, we hired you as a programmer? Babysit this Excel spreadsheet for me."
2 weeks is considered pretty standard for professionals in most of the U.S. I think. Many of the professionals I know have that agreement, and some of the companies I used to work at offered that for the starting point. You could negotiate higher if you came in with a lot of experience and your hiring manager wanted you badly enough to justify the extra expense.
I would say that 2 weeks is standard for most companies for entry level positions. But worse than that, 2 weeks is standard for anyone beginning at about 50% of companies I talk to.
We'll get through an entire interview process where they know I have 15+ years of expertise and team lead level of what they are looking for, yet they still offer 2 weeks vacation.
Fortunately, I've found this to be the most easily negotiated point of the offer as it doesn't actually cost against anyone's budget. I'd put it at around 20% of companies total that absolutely can't be flexible and offer more than two weeks for a new employee at the senior level.
I don't deny that there are probably plenty of places that offer 2 weeks to start. But I took the context to be professional software positions. But even assuming that context, it would appear from the comments that even 2 weeks can be too much to expect. May it's a geographical function as well. I don't know that you could hire anyone to write code in the Seattle area without giving at least three weeks.
Yes, also there tends to be a stigma against using vacation time until you've been at a job for a while. You might have worked for 6 months but the other people in the company still see you as the new guy. This stigma, coupled with changing jobs semi-frequently has led me to not having a week-off vacation for over 2 years. And before that it was probably another 2 since my previous one. I have taken a few long-weekends though.
Point is, there's always a reason to hold off on the vacation and waiting for the "perfect timing" isn't a good idea.
The problem is that it's hard for most people to tell if someone's capable and belongs on the team in the first few months. Since ability and contribution are hard to measure, most human groups assess people based on shared suffering ("being a team player"). That creates a lot of the vacation-hostility that, after a while, people start internalizing. It's ridiculously stupid and utterly counterproductive. Total productivity is actually maximized (for most of the work we do) around 6 weeks off per year.
This stigma, coupled with changing jobs semi-frequently has led me to not having a week-off vacation for over 2 years
Pro tip from someone who has worked for 4 companies in 6 years, and taken 6 weeks per year of vacation: once you have been offered the job, tell them you have a vacation already planned (approved by your last job) and it can't be rescheduled. This gets you an exemption from rules like no vacation during the first 6 months of employment, and it sometimes also lets you get your 2 weeks upfront, instead of having to accrue them. This is also your opportunity to get a longer vacation approved (e.g. my last job offered 3 weeks, or I had 3 weeks banked up that I had to use).
He's simply asking the new company for an exception to the normal vacation rule. Instead of waiting until the days are all accrued, he wants to use them ahead of time.
If the new hire is a great match and the company is eager to have them on board, allowing him to virtually start a few weeks later than planned isn't that big of a problem. Or if he disappears for 3 weeks a little while after he's started, so be it.
You can ask for (and receive) a hell of a lot more out of a new employer before your start date than you can after it.
You can ask for (and receive) a hell of a lot more out of a new employer before your start date than you can after it.
Exactly. Few employers will approve a 3 week vacation when you've only been on the job 2 months, but if you tell them the vacation is already scheduled, they pretty much have to grant it.
@philsnow My point was mainly getting the vacation approved in the first place. I wouldn't push my luck by asking them to front me the 2 weeks, but half of my companies offered it (you just start negative, and by the end of the year you have 0 days).
> You can ask for (and receive) a hell of a lot more out of a new employer before your start date than you can after it.
Yes. The most power an employee will almost ever have in the relationship is after they've offered you the job but before you've accepted it/started working.
It's just a part of the comp negotiation, the same as a starting bonus. It's not a rollover from the old job and it's irrelevant if you got paid out for it there.
Lots of companies have mechanisms to let employees go into "vacation debt" of 1-2 weeks when needed. Asking to take vacation may cost them exactly zero, since they're going to pay you those days eventually anyway.
What form are you seeing this Stigma, because in all my jobs I have never felt this at all? And two of those jobs I have vacations organized before I joined, and at one place I was there for one week before leaving for 3 weeks. Never felt any stigma at all?
Some of the perceived "stigma" may be just guilt as well. At my last job, I took a week off, and felt guilty.. I said something, and was reminded "It's you're time, that's what vacations are for". If my boss hadn't told me that, I may have just perceived that guilt as stigma.
The EU mandates a 20-day minimum. A country that doesn't require 20 days of vacation (and not the pooled bullshit that combines sick leave and vacation) can't get into the EU. In that context, a 2 week per year limit is positively inexcusable in 2013, when the civilized world (which the US ought to join, but hasn't; see also, health insurance) knows better.
The gap is even bigger if you consider that most EU countries also have ~2 weeks of fixed statutory holidays that aren't included in the 20 days, while most U.S. companies give only between 0 and 3 "free" fixed holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas are the most common; sometimes there's a 3rd floating one that can be used for a holiday of the employee's choice, such as Yom Kippur or Good Friday).
So more or less all Europeans get at least 6 weeks off per year. In the wealthier EU countries it's often 7 or 8, if you count both fixed and movable vacation (e.g. the legal minimum in Denmark is 5 weeks movable + 9 fixed days).
Almost all the companies I've worked for gave Christmas Day, New years day, Thanksgiving, July 4th, Memorial, and Labor days. Many also through in Christmas Eve, and day after Thanksgiving, plus 2 floating holidays.
One thing I'm not sure how I feel about, is the combined sick/vacation PTO -- you end up with a larger number of days that you can use as vacation, but usually a smaller number of days overall (my current company is 18 days total PTO, previous company was 5 weeks). This works out great for people like me, who never need to take sick days (if I have a bad cold, I can work from home usually).
Now what would work really good (and what I think my current company had before I started), is one vacation pool, which us use when you are going to be off for 2 or more consecutive days, and a separate large pool of PTO days for either under-the-weather days, actual illnesses, or "fix the garage door / wait for Cable installer" days.
Another thing to look for, is how the vacation is rolled over. The best is where you earn X.something hours every paycheck, and can be sitting at any one time on what you would earn in 2 years. So a previous employer (Motorola) gave me 3 weeks a year, but I was always sitting on 6 weeks available until I had to take some time off to avoid losing new accumulation.
I remember reading the Dilbert http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-02-12/ as a teen and being really surprised learning later that the joke, Catbert eliminating sick days and making employees use vacation days for them, was not a ridiculous caricature but reality.
U.S. workers really need to revive the labor unions, it's unfortunate that the population has been so effectively persuaded into regarding them as a bad thing. Sure they can make a dent to the profitability, but the improved quality of living makes it worth it.
The biggest evil of labor unions is the fact that in many cases, they are a necessity. It's not that I'd rather not be part of a union, but I'd rather have the type of employment where unions aren't needed, or even beneficial. But this only happens when the work you do is both skilled, and in short supply, unfortunately.
Even in cases where there is some leverage (due to work being skilled/scarce), I'd often like someone to negotiate on my behalf collectively. I'm not an expert on employment law, on "gotchas" in employment contracts, or on what my rights are under local law, and I don't really want to become one. And I don't want to fight every individual battle over and over again when many of us have similar preferences. For example, why should I have to fight every company over noncompete clauses and "we own all your weekend IP" clauses? Even if I could win, this is a huge duplicated effort if every one of us has to argue this same point, and I'm not a contract lawyer or professional negotiator in any case. I'd rather delegate my negotiation authority to some association of technologists that negotiated at least baseline employment conditions.
I guess an alternative model is to take it really collective and just have the state pass laws mandating working conditions that all employers have to follow, that way nobody needs to negotiate those conditions. That's the approach California took with just banning noncompetes by statute, for example.
If you don't get sick, you're not using the unlimited pool of sick days. After all, those are meant to get you healthy again (and protect your coworkers from you, in case it's contagious)
To make sick days more manageable for employers, in Germany the health care system takes over, paying wages after 6 weeks - down to 70% under the assumption that you don't have certain costs related to work (such as health care payments, commute) while sick.
I think some employers take extra (private) insurance for earlier coverage.
Of course, there is some abuse which is, of course, an immediate termination reason.
As mitigation, sick days policies require (by law) to see a doctor if it's more than three days, and most employers require it for the first day.
Yes, all that is terribly unfair to those healthy employees that don't get to enjoy feeling miserable in bed...
Autodesk is one for example.Again that is not substitute for STD and LTD it is for cases when lets say you get 2-3 day sickness (cold or something like that)
And to be honest, it's one of the biggest reasons I don't dream of moving to the US anymore - even though nearly all of the interesting jobs in my niche are over there.
I find the US concept of sick days very strange... Either you're sick or you're not. In every other country I've worked in, sick days aren't counted: you get a note from the doctor, social security covers your wages and that's it. Sure, some people game the system a bit, and it costs a bit more in taxes, but at the end of the day, in 2014 should we really have to worry about being sick?
You can not have universally improved quality of living while lowering productivity, unless you getting money from outside of the system. Lowered productivity means the system has less resources, thus overall sum of the qualities of life is less. Which means to make your quality of life better, somebody's quality of life must suffer. In order to do it not only for yourself but on any kind of scale, somebody's quality of life has to suffer massively, or on equally large scale. Who would that be and why do you think they won't fight back and make your quality of life suffer instead?
I don't think "most" U.S. companies only give between 0 and 3 holidays. Every U.S. company I ever worked at at least had the following holidays: New Year , Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Day after Thanksgiving, Christmas. And then usually there are 2 or 3 other holidays depending on the company.
How does that really work? Like, the company I work for gives 10 paid days off, plus 10 national holidays, plus a couple of days of sick leave, which gives 20 days off a year (honestly, it's a more than that, but that's what it says in the handbook). Is that similar to the EU, or is it 20 paid days off plus holidays, plus some sick leave, or is it just 20 paid days a year plus some sick leave?
Here in The Netherlands we have an infinite number of sick days. You can be sick for up to a year, after that the government takes over. You take a 30% cut, but at least you have an income.
Here it's at least 24-25 days off, plus holidays (6, easter, ascension, pentecost, 2 days Christmas and January 1st). Sick leave doesn't count as off days. When you get sick during your time off and you consult a doctor those days don't count, too.
Mind you that The Netherlands, although liberal compared to the US, ranks amongst the lowest number of paid time off in Western Europe. I'm not complaining though, 25 days is a sweet spot for me: 3 weeks summer holiday, 1 week in the winter (goodbye dreary, cold days, hello sunshine!) and some days for personal stuff. I work part-time (4 days a week), so I get 20 days of paid vacation instead of 25, but for every week I take off they subtract only 4 days.
The combination of a decent amount of paid time off and the abiliy to work part-time makes for a much, much healthier work-life balance. I really hope this is something you guys across the pond will take over someday.
Edit for clarification: I realize i make it sound like we have some kind of socialist paradise here. There's another side to this: a heavy tax burden. With all the income tax, property tax, VAT (21%) and ridiculous gas prices (about $6.60 per gallon) life isn't exactly cheap here.
> There's another side to this: a heavy tax burden. With all the income tax, property tax, VAT (21%) and ridiculous gas prices (about $6.60 per gallon) life isn't exactly cheap here.
Life seems cheap in the US - until you realize you need to save like crazy: for sending kids to college, for retirement, etc. After you factor all that stuff in, it's much less rosy than it seems at first sight.
With all the income tax, property tax, VAT (21%) and ridiculous gas prices (about $6.60 per gallon) life isn't exactly cheap here.
Our middle class has been demolished by the Satanic trinity: housing, healthcare, and education costs.
Tuition: our reputable public universities are comparable to European private ones in cost. Our private ones cost almost $50k per year. It's also competitive enough to get into the top universities that the game increasingly starts in high school or before; in New York, it's very typical for merely middle-class parents to hawk up $30k per kid per year from ages 4 to 18: admissions are that competitive.
Health insurance is another nightmare. Decent plans cost $500 per month for an individual in a employer-provided plan (and, increasingly, "employee contribution" of 25-100% is the norm). If you're on the individual market, you're fucked: it's closer to $1500 per month if you're healthy and have no children.
Then there is housing. You can actually get a good deal (say, $150 per ft^2) in wide swathes of the country-- but those are in places with imploded job markets. To buy anywhere with an active job market is pretty much unaffordable on the typical software engineer salary, and even rents will typically be 20 to 40% of after-tax income.
Europe has a lot of issues and extended liabilities, but the U.S. is far more fucked in the coming decade. I'd gladly pay $7/gallon for gas not to have to worry about healthcare (even if you have insurance, it will often fail you at the worst time) or, in the future should I have kids, education costs.
> I'd gladly pay $7/gallon for gas not to have to worry about healthcare (even if you have insurance, it will often fail you at the worst time) or, in the future should I have kids, education costs.
I wonder if there are arbitrage opportunities for the education of the children. You live in the US but you have your kids study in Europe - French universities for example are free, so if the kids can speak French it will be cheaper to have them study there, and as Americans their chances of admissions must be pretty high.
Except that French universities are crap, because they aren't allowed to select and have tiny budgets (due to being free). So the real education happens at the Grande Ecoles, which are either very hard to get into (STEM) or very expensive (Business). And in fact a lot of French parents are willing to pay for a UK or US education (usually if the kids are good but not quite good enough to go to an elite French college)
> There's another side to this: a heavy tax burden. With all the income tax, property tax, VAT (21%) and ridiculous gas prices (about $6.60 per gallon) life isn't exactly cheap here.
Any comparison with the US reminds me just how much value I'm getting in exchange for my tax. I pay it gladly. We still have a functional middle class.
I am from the UK and here it is 28 days minimum holiday [1]. I believe it is fairly common to have the 8 days bank holiday as fixed days and then 20 days chosen by the employee initially. After working at a company for a period in increase in the holiday allowance would be expected. After one year at my work I am on 25 + 8 days, there is flexibility to work on some of the bank holidays, taking the holiday at a different time, as long as the office will be open (pretty much every time apart from Christmas).
Here in the US we have been convinced that we are getting a good deal with our 3 weeks PTO (mine includes sick leave), but European countries just have far more.
I think it's true that we're stuck in an uncanny valley between the old ways of lifelong employer/employee commitment and the more modern ways of transitive, as-needed-type employment. The old way was always dangerous, but there was a strong social expectation that you'd take care of your people. Now no one has "people" any more per se, so the social expectations of committed employment have dissipated.
However, I _don't_ think the answer to this is to depend on companies to issue more vacation time. That's expensive for everyone, and it's hard for little guys to compete with the bigger guys who can afford to pay 6-12 weeks of salary to someone who isn't working. The answer, I think, is for each individual to take more individual responsibility, save their money, work in contracted increments, and go on vacation between contracts.
We should complete the transition and get out of the uncanny valley.
And only the executives and high-end employees will be able to save money for vacations. Brilliant.
Strongly disagree with you when you say that no one can pay 6 weeks of vacations, using this as an argument to say "no one can pay vacations at all".
It's clearly the question of our social model that you are asking and I will say that: the social model I want for me, my children, and the others, is a world where you don't have to sell yourself as a work slave if you don't want.
Paid vacations are not perfect, they are expensive, but they also are a not so bad approximation of a world where you can live your life outside of the work if you want (at least periodically).
That would be nice, but as long as healthcare is also tied to employment, it won't happen. Those same people who have their time off eaten up by obligations generally can't afford to be without health insurance for two weeks every few months. Additionally, they can't justify paying for private health insurance when their employer forces them to accept its own coverage (and won't give them the cash equivalent).
Also, I think that while "contract" employment is nice for programmers, there are a large number of jobs (majority?) for which that simply doesn't make much sense because it increases training costs for employers. It is still, to this day, very common for employers to look for employees who plan to stick around for awhile. They want the best of both worlds, basically, long-term employees who can be laid off at a moment's notice.
Unless Obamacare eliminated COBRA (haven't checked but I doubt it), you get to keep your health insurance for 1 year after you leave a job. The out of pocket cost is 101% of what your employer paid.
So basically, this is only a problem if you want a 13 month vacation.
COBRA still exists and it is good that it does, but it doesn't address this situation. COBRA exists to give people a safety net between full-time jobs. In the context of the original argument, COBRA is somewhat part of the problem because it too is tied into the world view of people having full-time jobs with employer-provided healthcare insurance.
If you're a contractor who is working in 3-6 months contracts you very likely aren't going to have employer health insurance coverage to begin with (thus COBRA doesn't apply to you) and will need to have your own individual plan... which (even with Obamacare in its current state) is going to cost you on average significantly more than an employer offered plan would because of economies of scale and our steadfast refusal to make real changes to the way healthcare insurance works in the US.
"your own individual plan... which (even with Obamacare in its current state) is going to cost you on average significantly more than an employer offered plan"
I don't disagree with your greater point about the US system, but my experience is that ACA individual policies were about the same cost as what I can purchase as an (admittedly very small) employer.
If you buy an ACA plan, you're in a much larger risk pool than any individual employer can provide.
I believe you're right and I didn't make my reasoning clear in my original post, but in the case of employee-provided healthcare insurance it is common (though not universal, YMMV especially based on company size) for the employer to cover some portion of the actual per-employee cost which means a lower out of pocket cost for the employee (though not the employer).
This is another aspect of our current system that has some negative side effects -- a lot of people don't realize what the actual overall cost of their healthcare insurance is. I currently pay $46 per two-week pay period for good single-person PPO coverage (of course the actual cost to the employer is significantly more), so $92 a month. That cost becomes my mental baseline for insurance, and then I go look at the cost of ACA plans which apparently average $328 and that seems insane, over 3x the cost!!! Thanks, Obama!!! (of course, it isn't really more, the overall cost of my prior coverage has just been obscured by the old system where my employer subsidized me).
But then your comment reduces to "paying for your own healthcare is more expensive than getting someone else to pay for it for you" or perhaps even "it's nice to have people give you money."
Not that it isn't true, mind you, but given all of the policy debate around the ACA that's happening it seems a little unfair to bring the ACA into it at all.
> which (even with Obamacare in its current state) is going to cost you on average significantly more than an employer offered plan would
To be fair, that's part of why you charge more per hour when contracting than you'd be making as an employee. There's also taxes (that your employer covered but now you do), vacation time, etc. You want to charge an hourly rate as an independent contractor equal to at least what it cost your employer to have you on payroll, not what they actually payed you. The difference is significant.
If you're a contractor who is working in 3-6 months contracts...
This is not the situation glesica was describing:
...can't afford to be without health insurance for two weeks every few months...can't justify paying for private health insurance when their employer forces them to accept its own coverage (and won't give them the cash equivalent).
Either you are part of the individual market (in which case your vacation doesn't affect your coverage) or the employer market. In either case, you can do exactly as cookiecaper suggested. Glesica's objection is simply wrong.
I have no idea what "economies of scale" you are referring to.
Under the ACA, health care is no longer tied to employment. It's practically the whole point of the individual mandate that is being villianized -- when everyone has to buy insurance, everyone can be placed in the same risk pool, including individual buyers.
It's not as sensible a system as single payer, but it's a big step toward making people less dependent on their boss for their health.
In practice: I'm on an ACA plan, was formerly on COBRA coverage from my previous employer. Dollar for dollar, an ACA plan with the same monthly premium as my former insurance gets me both a significantly lower level of coverage AND a network that's at most 20% the size of my old PPO plan.
On the NY state exchange (I can't speak for other states), there's no way to pay more money for a larger network: every ACA provider in NY offers only an ultra-limited "EPO" network . I believe that 3 out of the 8 providers are even literally the same network, as two of them are licensing their network from the third.
You should have been looking elsewhere. We have a similar situation in Washington with our Blue Cross provider, who is on the exchange, but our Blue Shield provider is not on the exchange and has a much more complete network.
The only compelling reason to use the exchanges is if you qualify for subsidies.
Do you have any recommendations of good places to look?
I tried to look up plans on my former insurer, but they just referred me to eHealthInsurance; after entering my zip code, eHealthInsurance came up with a handful of plans from a single insurer that were all on the exchange.
It's entirely possible you're just screwed in whatever county you're in, but I don't know how exhaustive eHealthInsurance really is. I didn't use it, though it does show my new off-exchange plan. I already knew which company I needed to go to since I wanted a Blue Cross or Blue Shield plan.
What I would do is assemble a list of every health insurance provider in New York and directly visit each website and/or call each company to see what the options are in your area.
I'd also check with an actual insurance agent who might have a clearer picture of the situation where you are. Even though I knew I needed to go to Regence Blue Shield and that they have coverage in my county, I still went to a local agent to help me make sure I got everything right.
EDIT: NYT actually did an article on this in October[1]. They point to eHealthInsurance, but also GoHealth.com, which I haven't seen before.
In the sense you mean, health care is most certainly still tied to employment. The individual mandate will not accomplish having everyone in the same risk pool--not even close. It's a tiny, trivial, and nearly insignificant step toward making people less dependent on their boss for their health.
They did away with pre-existing condition exclusions. That alone makes way more people "less dependent on their boss for their health"; the only way to avoid those exclusions in the past was through getting group insurance from an employer.
That doesn't help people who get coverage through an employer though. Sure, maybe they can go buy coverage once they leave their employment, but then they have to get rid of it again once they get another job. What would be nice is if employers would give you the cash in lieu of your benefits, but I've never heard of that being an option.
Employer premiums are pre-tax. Individual premiums are not (unless you happen to be self-employed). Until that stupidity is fixed, "cash in lieu of benefits" ends up costing a lot more, because the employees have to pay taxes on that cash.
In Switzerland, you buy your health insurance yourself using post tax money (employers can't provide it); like ACA, they can't discriminate for pre existing conditions and it's mandatory to have insurance. Everyone is pretty much on the same footing.
> Under the ACA, health care is no longer tied to employment.
Under the ACA, health care is very much tied to employment, and (except that the new employer mandates have been delayed in implementation) even more employers are required to provide insurance. It's true that there is a new additional individual mandate that falls on people who both have a certain minimum income level and do not have employer-provide health insurance, but the existing incentives that tie health insurance to employers remain and new mandates that encourage employer-tied health insurance exist.
> It's not as sensible a system as single payer, but it's a big step toward making people less dependent on their boss for their health.
This is true insofar that the exchanges by existing, the larger risk pools for individual insurance purchases, and the subsidies for low-to-moderate income workers (and the Medicaid expansion for lower incomes) make it less likely that you will end up with no insurance that you can afford if you lose your job, it doesn't do much to make it any less likely that you won't be financially able to retain your existing insurance (and access to the particular provider network it has) if you lose your job.
>That would be nice, but as long as healthcare is also tied to employment, it won't happen.
Indeed, one should also not depend on their employer to tend to their personal health obligations. Honestly the entire employment model is outmoded, and was never suited to office work. People should stop allowing corporate bigwigs to push them around, and start demanding acceptable working arrangements.
Maybe it's just that I'm so personally unemployable for long periods that I've learned to adapt and not rely on a single party for any of these fundamentals. I've never held a "real job" for more than eight months, there's always been some beyond the pale behavior in superiors that's pushed me over the edge and caused me to turn in my resignation. On the other hand, I've had some clients on contract for 4+ years and we continue to get along swimmingly. Things are much less intense for everyone if you don't allow that co-dependence to develop.
The answer, I think, is for each individual to take more individual responsibility, save their money, work in contracted increments, and go on vacation between contracts.
That's been my approach for the last few years, except I do it as a full-time employee. Your employer gives you 2 weeks paid vacation, but you can also take additional time as unpaid vacation. I have averaged 6 weeks of vacation per year for the last 5 years by taking a month unpaid each year.
>guys who can afford to pay 6-12 weeks of salary to someone who isn't working
This is the basis of the misconception that time off is optional. For a healthy life, time off is not optional. Denying employees sufficient time off is effectively asking them to sacrifice their health and well-being for the company, a condemnable practice.
As to how much time off is sufficient or necessary, and in what sized chunks of time, I would leave that to the professional psychiatrists to figure out.
People should take time off, I agree. It's not a matter of the employer denying it, they aren't dictators. Citizens in the United States are free persons and they can choose not to work for an employer who they don't feel is willing to buy them enough vacation time. The question is, "Who should have to pay for [large amounts of] vacation time?"
Also, I don't know if you've ever been involved with a small business before, but "can't afford it" in that context usually means "literally do not have that much money", not "can't afford to take it out of my bonus because then I'd have to buy last year's yacht model".
Giving employees less vacation is just the same as underpaying them, except it's even worse for morale and turnover. If a business can't afford to pay it's employees a reasonable market rate, it either needs to hire more junior folks or start charging more.
Citizens in the United States are free persons and they can choose not to work for an employer
With unemployment in the US at 7 % and voluntary quits still unusually low the picture isn't nearly as sunny as you paint it. One does wonder why you are saying things that aren't quite so.
If you are running a small business yourself, consider that in more civilized countries, like the EU, small businesses are exempt from many regulations.
If you are running a small business that isn't doing too well, perhaps it's time to let it go under - the market has spoken, it shouldn't be kept afloat for a few months more on the backs of your employees.
You are assuming that the small business owner is cooling his heels in some expensive yacht. While the employees back at the office are grounding their bones to dust to make such a thing happen.
The reality is far from that, the business owner is taking far bigger risks, has much more to lose and suffer due to failure and at any given point of time is going through far more stress, putting a lot of effort and has much more bigger role to play than some one who just joined the company can possibly fathom.
Now you are virtually asking them to pay you, while you don't work for nearly half the year(If you take vacation, sick leaves, and weekend off's into account). Then you have this 'working from home' thing, which is synonymous with having to take a leave, without officially taking one(Sorry but that's how WFH is being abused these days). Then you have pay them health insurance, be perfectly OK with this 5 hour work per day thing.
Putting this all together, work hardly gets done. Now not all businesses fit into a typical engineering domain, where money can be made non-linear to efforts(It's exceptionally difficult even for these businesses). There is no way ordinary office businesses can survive, let alone make profit in such situations.
If you want them to simply shut down. Its likely they will start up in some other country where the math makes sense.
> The question is, "Who should have to pay for [large amounts of] vacation time?"
An utterly meaningless question. In your "modern" contracts-only world, it's still the employers who pay for it, because the employees would earn the money for between-contracts "vacations" through sufficiently high contract rates.
> Also, I don't know if you've ever been involved with a small business before, but "can't afford it" in that context usually means "literally do not have that much money"
The technical term for a business incapable of paying its employees is "bankrupt". Keeping such a business running is, in many jurisdictions, a crime.
Not granting adequate time off is effectively the same as failing to pay wages, and a business that cannot do it needs to die sooner rather than later.
Keeping it running doesn't appear, in the UK, from the information you provide to be a crime unless it is done dishonestly to defraud creditors (fraudulent trading), and mere current inability to meet payments isn't enough. Lots of acts done with intent to defraud are criminal -- the fundamental wrong criminalized is fraud.
Mere trading while insolvent, without dishonesty and intent to defraud, appears to be an unlawful-but-not-criminal act that results in personal civil liability for company debts. "Unlawful" and "criminal" are not the same thing.
How long do you envision these contractual relations being? To suggest vacation will be replaced by the time between contracts says to me you figure the average contract would be somewhere between 6-12 months, but there are vast swaths of jobs that take months just to get up to speed...
An additional week off is maybe 3% higher pay. If you're a little guy, it seems like you should look at offering 3-4 weeks of vacation in your base package, given the dual benefits of attracting candidates and having happier, healthier employees.
Few large companies are offering more than 2-3 weeks vacation to new hires any more. I don't think any are offering 4-6, much less "6-12".
For longer tenured employees, getting an extra week off after 3 or 5 years is equivalent to a 1-2% raise each year. If a business can't support that, something's wrong.
I personally like working with the same people day-in, day-out. Contracting is not the same as being a part of a company and forming a strong team to solve real problems.
It might work for small time "innovation" like snapchat and domylaundry.com, but I highly doubt you can get the kind of work we saw come out of Bell Labs with anything less than a well-paid team of long-term employees who'd been working there for a while together.
I wanted to 'not get paid' instead of going negative on my PTO. (I don't like any form of 'negative' debt) I was told I couldn't do that without quitting and coming back because the benefits system was all wired up wrong. This would of course reset everything in the system.
If I had an ACA-based health insurance policy, I would be covered there, but any other benefits via the company would be canceled for the time period.
I think there needs to be a bigger push for benefits that we select and maintain ourselves with companies just contributing some sort of minimally mandated stipend related to salary level.
I value the freedom of my time over wage (salary, but still) slavery the older I get.
I agree 100%. I used to work in an IT job for a school and there was very little for me to do for most of the summer. I asked if my contract could be adjusted so I could have a month or two off during the summer, unpaid and, like you, I was told that just wasn't feasible due to various bureaucratic concerns.
I like the idea of benefits that are not tied to the employer but to which the employer contributes some amount of money. Although at that point, might as well just pay me more and let me take care of it.
If you're going to go into "debt", vacation debt is the right kind. It doesn't accrue interest, it doesn't impact your credit rating, and they can't subtract it from your paycheck in most states (like CA) if you leave the job - they have to chase you to pay it back, and many companies don't bother.
Here's how I deal with family obligations, home repairs, etc. - I do them as needed and take no PTO. I'll email my team and say "Garage door getting replaced. Be checking email sporadically". Now if the company I'm working for says nothing, that's good. If the company I'm working for says "You need to log those X hours as PTO", I give notice. It's expected that we (employees) put in a little extra effort when at the end of a project or the end of the fiscal month or whatever. And I don't ask to be paid for that extra 4 to 12 hours of work. So if I take 4 hours here and there, you'd damn well better NOT bitch at me.
Absolutely. I'm much more selective in where I work now so I've not had to do this for the past decade. But the first decade I was working, I was drawn to money figures without paying a lot of attention to the work environment.
With that said, I would still walk out on an abusive employer...
I like that attitude, but not everyone can afford to follow through and actually quit, that's part of the big problem, most people have relatively little leverage and can't afford to "take" leverage.
If the company I'm working for says "You need to log those X hours as PTO", I give notice
Terminating employment without compromise because they won't let you break the rules sounds cool when you pretend you did it on the Internet, but please don't use this as an employee-employer relations strategy in real life. If you quit because they won't let you count installing cable TV or something as work time, that is almost certainly not the reason why you quit, unless your priorities are very strange.
Sorry if you don't believe me. I have done this, and I will do this again. If a company expects me to put in extra effort at busy times of the year, it is only fair that they are OK with me doing a 30 hour work week some weeks to take care of issues that came up while I was working that 80 hours.
Edit: To be clear, the companies where I quit when they had no empathy were body-shops.
It was the end of a deadline that "we couldn't miss". My sump pump had actually died, and I needed to replace it. Bought the replacement, but sat on it for several weeks because "we couldn't miss the deadline". Those last 3 weeks, I was working 7 days a week for about 15 hours a day. When I got home, I ate, crashed on my couch, slept, and went back to work. Once the release "we couldn't miss" was done, I stayed home one day and put in my sump pump. The next day I was told to record the 8 hours as PTO. So given that I had just worked 300 hours in 3 weeks, but they wouldn't bend on 8? Yeah...I quit.
And I'm glad I replaced the sump pump. It rained for 3 weeks straight after I gave notice.
Oh yeah. The deadline "we couldn't miss"? It got pushed 3 weeks.
The writing was on the wall for what they expected. But I was young and "stupid" living under the auspice of my father's work life (2 jobs his whole life - 20 years in the Army and 20 years for the State of Alabama). So I worked the hours because I wanted to be the team player. I wanted to help. In the end, I was shown that the relationship was one way. So now I'm old and more careful and less willing to put up with one-sided relationships.
7 days a week and canned for a day off? That should prompt anyone with self respect or integrity to walk out the door and drop emails asking for help or pointers with the codebase.
It was Splatter Consulting in RTP. They don't exist anymore. They shutdown probably 7 months after I walked. This was back in '98. The deadline "we couldn't miss" was to build a product. This product would move them from consulting to a product company. It was actually a neat product. Had to do with camera optic systems. Writing software that interacts with hardware was really cool. It still is, but I've gotten lazy and enjoy being wasteful using a whole byte for a boolean and what not...
After I left, it was probably 4 months before everyone but the 2 sales guys and President were laid off. They lasted 3 more months before folding.
I actually left a good job to take this one. Lured me away with money :) Like I said - young and stupid.
The middle ground of both the stated position and your reply is probably closer to the truth. Both sides look at the other, someone will take a note down in private, and the relationship will likely deteriorate.
If you work for a company that expects you to pull all nighters, but doesn't re-comp you for an extra hour or two for the unavoialble/banalities of random real life problems...that's a huge red flag if not an immediate need to hit the eject button. There is plenti of kubuki theatre in the workplace, but this is a point of fundamental fairness.
I know if I have people working for me like that, they are either getting the next friday off or a morning off or something else as an aknowledgement. Most jobs that require his kind of work and comittment are also (typically) cyclical, and there should be some 'slack' in the workflow that follows a big push.
So I don't think the only options here are bluster vs exploitation, and that goes for you or those that work for you. Just my $0.02.
If your employer decides to obsessively focus on HR policies and petty accounting of time rather than simply getting shit done, that sounds like a great reason to quit. Particularly if the accounting is one-sided as justrudd described ("expected that we (employees) put in a little extra effort when at the end of a project or the end of the fiscal month or whatever").
I have quit a job due exactly to an obsessive focus on HR nonsense.
I did, however, wait a week to cool off just to convince myself I wasn't behaving rashly. Not as cool sounding, but whatever. I don't regret the decision.
justrudd is describing unilaterally breaking the rules because of his personal notions of what constitutes a fair contract.
I have a hard time imagining a more dysfunctional method of "negotiation". There are better ways to address differences in work expectations.
I understand the idea that you should be fairly compensated for fulfilling work expectations. I also understand that it's common for companies to have flexible PTO rules. But I've also heard of companies, very good ones to work for, that are not flexible about these things. It might not be the manager's choice. Or it might, and it might be possible to work around his/her style. Or it might not matter that much in the grand scheme of things. These are things you should be thinking about before you randomly quit over a rules quibble.
An employment contract contains both explicitly specified terms as well as informal expectations, and sometimes the two even conflict. (For example, consider a bureaucratic corporation with a small division where managers shield underlings from the outside world.)
Justrudd isn't advocating staying and breaking the rules. He's advocating leaving when the informal expectations of the employer and employee don't match. I hardly see how it's "dysfunctional" to end a relationship that isn't making both parties happy.
In your opinion - you're absolutely correct. I am breaking the "rules" because it is fairly obvious what we both believe is fair is very different.
For me, fair is what doesn't harm me financially and/or emotionally. It is easy to be glib and say things like "cable being installed" but what about sump pump being busted and my basement being flooded? Or a limb fell through my roof? Why is it OK for a company to expect me to put in extra effort but when I need a little kindness, empathy in return it's OK for them to say no? Sorry. You'll never convince me there are good companies to work for that do that. I am all for making money and increasing stock value (especially if I have options), but there has to be some give here.
Where I've been handed a formal policy document at a tech employer, it's always said something along the lines of "Hours are X to Y or as your manager directs". The latter part of that means in effect "this is between you and your manager unless you can't work it out".
If you can't work it out, best to go elsewhere, because that's a toxic culture for a tech company.
That's not it at all. I am an adult and expect to be treated like one. When a deadline looms I make sure it gets done. The flip side is if I need to take care of some personal items I should be able to go do those.
Now, if I'm not performing up to standards then get rid of me. If I'm excelling who cares when I take time off?
Hopefully I will never have to work in a company that cares more about office time than work done again.
I think you're derisively trying to trivialize something which is actually fairly significant.
I only have 14 days of PTO a year, and that includes sick time. I use almost all those days visiting family, especially my parents, all of whom live hundreds of miles from me. I took the week of Christmas off this year and still ended up committing some code. It wasn't much, but the people who weren't taking off easily could have done it (i.e., it wasn't something that only I knew how to do). I was still asked to do it.
Although I could easily pay cash for a nice European vacation, I won't go on one this year because I don't have the time.
I'm making my job sound terrible. It's not, far from it, but your extremely mechanical interpretation of the parent post is pretty frustrating for me to read. This sort of policy has real effects on real people's lives. It doesn't just affect me, either--it affects my parents who can only see me a few weeks out of the year. I don't know about you, but I don't believe in an afterlife, so this is all the time I've got for them. I don't own a home, but if I did and I had to use some of my very valuable PTO just to do home maintenance, while still being expected to commit code while taking PTO or in the evenings occasionally, you can bet I'd be pretty upset.
Thanks for the link to seeyourfolks.com That's quite a poignant site, and a another reminder about what's really important. Great article, and a great discussion thread.
My experience is that managers who are that pedantic about policy generally imply one (or both) of the following: 1) there is a culture of micromanagement and paranoia that employees are basically thieves or children who have to be monitored all the time; 2) one (or more) employees are no longer desired on the payroll, so instead of being adults and letting them go management instead chooses to make their lives hell by enforcing petty technicalities in policy in a childish, passive-aggressive way.
Neither of these is an indicator of a quality company to work for. Both are strong indicators that the company is not good to work for.
... and the second is called "constructive dismissal" and ends up in compensation for the employee in most jurisdictions, where the employee knows his/her rights.
In which jurisdictions in the US is the burden of proof for constructive dismissal permissive enough to include enforcement of company policy as detailed in the Employee Handbook, no matter how onerous, (unless the policies are not uniformly enforced or are arbitrarily enforced)?
I worked for a company for many years with a great attitude about flexible hours and work from home. Got a ton of work done, felt very good about my work and coworkers, and put out a great product. It was acquired by a larger company who, soon after the acquisition, announced a 9-5 butts-in-seat policy.
Nine months later, after buying a house, I was canned for violating that butts-in-seat policy, largely because I was attending to the many little things a new house requires: inspections, installations, etc. Under the old regime, coming in later and working later, or working from home, being accessible by video chat, IM, and email would have raised no eyebrows. Under the new one it was cause for termination.
I should have seen the writing on the wall and simply started to look for a new job as soon as that more restrictive company took over. I was pressured to stay by the ties I had to stock options, my good professional relationships with co-workers, and my desire to get into a house quickly. The end result was that I went into a lot of bad debt in the months following my layoff, and almost lost my house as I ran out of cash. I could have avoided it if I had planned better. Needless to say I was under a lot of stress for a while.
The long and short of it is, I agree with parent. If you have the freedom to do so, disassociate with companies who have unreasonable time-off or flex work policies, sooner rather than later. Your mental, physical, and financial health are at stake.
This deserves more upvotes than the one that I can give it. Also, genwin is right. The zero-tolerance time-Nazi stuff was to push out people with stock options. If the policies weren't also applied (with the same penalties and enforcement) within the acquirer, you probably could have sued and, at the least, gotten a decent settlement due to their desire to avoid embarrassment.
Butts in seat policy is the worst. It attracts the kind of talent tnat is complacent with making it seem like they are doing work as opposed to people who like to make progress.
I also think it's an open admission by management that they are lazy idiots who don't understand what their employees do well enough to judge output and don't care to learn.
I assume most of us have salary jobs, no employer can make you take partial days out of your PTO. If you work for 15 minutes or whatever the minimum increment for hourly employees, it counts as a full day.
I don't know what PTO means, but I'm assuming it's unpaid. If so, I disagree. When I work less, I expect to get paid less. But when I work more, I also expect to get paid more. There's no such thing as unpaid extra hours, and I reserve the right to refuse working extra when I've got private obligations.
If they do demand unpaid work, and for some weird reason I agree to that, then the door is definitely open for paid non-work. Whatever the deal is, it works both ways.
>most people I know use most of their time off for family obligations and "work outside of work" like home repairs. This is a crap situation.
Some companies are changing this approach and allowing remote working. Many people on my team will work remote and a day they need to get the garage repaired and just work around their work requirements. Combine with flex time it works out pretty good.
Here's a tip that a lot of people don't realize. When negotiating salary, quite often you if they won't give you what you want in pay, you can probably squeeze an additional week or two time off. Esp. if they are trying to head-hunt you from somewhere else, and if you've been working for a number of years/decades.
I've experienced the opposite of this; since the number of weeks people get tends to be very standardized, there is extreme reluctance to give anyone a special perk like extra yearly vacation.
I found that vacation was the least flexible part of negotiation, because it was explicitly tied to tenure with the company.
It was enough to make me decide to stay in London when my H-1B came through. Very short-sighted for a CA company trying to attract international talent too, since the biggest cost of moving is the lack of ability to easily visit loved ones, and short holidays make transatlantic trips uneconomical.
This wasn't the case for me. I managed to get a 30%+ salary increase (alas, the new company didn't have bonuses so this wasn't a ridiculous increase) but I had no room to negotiate vacation days.
This is exactly why we should adopt the same minimums as Europe: 5-6 weeks usually, and on average people get 7 weeks. This allows for family, seasonal trips, and random time off.
>>It is unfortunate that so many people are stuck in jobs that don't offer sufficient time off.
This is because outside of Silicon Valley, and outside of software development in general, corporations have been gaining more and more power over their employees. You can see this when you look at stagnating wages for everyone outside the executive class. Don't like your job? Too bad. You should just be grateful that you have a job in the first place. Don't have a job? Better go door to door begging everyone to employ you. Haven't had a non-minimum-wage job for the past year? Good luck convincing any HR person that you're worth even an interview. Etcetera.
What this country needs is another labor movement. The first one gave us things like healthcare and retirement benefits, improved workplace conditions (especially safety), and the five-day workweek (down from six). Hopefully, the second one will give us remote work, paid paternal leave, 30-day minimum vacations every year, and a hard cap of 50 hours per week.
"What this country needs is another labor movement"
Totally agree.
Trade unions and collective bargaining can produce some outstanding results for workers, but the only way they can have any teeth is through a coordinated "attack" against hostile work environments. It's hard to imagine how a loosely coupled workforce like IT professionals could effectively "wage war" on their employers. Words like "attack" and "war" might sound like hyperbole, but these types of disputes can get ugly; when describing the 1984 Miner's Union strike in the UK, Margaret Thatcher characterized the situation as:
"We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within,
which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty."
There are countless other examples of openly hostile responses to unionization across the world.
Part of the solution to this adversarial standoff between employer/employees might be a move to normalizing and standardizing the collective bargaining process. As a high school teacher I work as member of a heavily unionized workforce. Disputes about pay and conditions are baked into the system and occur on a rolling basis. In South Australia, where I work, our enterprise agreement is renegotiated on a rolling 3 year basis. The last agreement took a year longer to finalise which means that negotiations for the 2012,2013,2014 enterprise agreement overlapped the 2015-2017 negotiations (which went on in parallel). From my perspective I see a functioning system which brings great results for me as an employee while protecting my right to a safe workplace.
To give an example of the conditions which teachers in my state have fought for:
- 13 weeks paid vacation
- 10 paid, no questions asked sick days
- Excellent salary. I'm earning 20%-30% more as a teacher than I did as a developer
- 2 weeks paid paternity leave
- 14 weeks paid maternity leave
- 22 hours of class time per week
- Tight unfair dismissal laws
- Ongoing unconditional pay increases that outpace inflation.
"...corporations have been gaining more and more power over their employees."
absolutely agree with you there. There was a lively discussion on HN a while ago about whether making salary information public is a good idea. Employers don't want employees to have this information because one of the things it can lead to is collective action along the lines of "...hey we all want to get 110k/yr just like Joe over there..."
I'm not sure how exactly the lessons from not-for-profit, tightly regulated workplaces like schools can be applied more broadly to the rest of the economy, but what I do know is that my standard of living, autonomy and ability to actually stop and smell the roses has increased immeasurably since I became a teacher.
I think the labour movement that you're calling for needs to be broad based. Instead of a teacher's union and a miner's union I think a broad based worker's union regardless of sector needs to arise which demands that the fruits of our collective labour need to more evenly and fairly be distributed. The 1st world is a rich place, but you'd have trouble spotting with much of the modern day wage slavery that must be endured.
> Words like "attack" and "war" might sound like hyperbole, but these types of disputes can get ugly
See, that's the thing. Nobody is willing to lose their job for another week of vacation a year. Especially if it looks like there isn't another one coming.
Also, as an Australian, you have the privilege of living in one of the best managed economies in the world. Which means teachers aren't faced with "do you want layoffs or pay cuts this year?" every year for a decade.
That's a slightly loaded question. I'm assuming you're alluding to difficulties schools have with firing burned out and ineffective teachers due to strict rules governing employee dismissal.
This is definitely an issue, however in my experience it is exaggerated by the media. Yes there are some who shouldn't be teaching, but they are far outnumbered by regular hard working people.
As for the other protections enjoyed by teachers i'd say they have a positive effect on employee mental health and would therefore have a positive flow on effect on student learning.
Actually I really wasn't trying to allude to anything. I am genuinely curious about how more teacher-friendly policies like those you mentioned affect students. Your last sentence answers my question.
Suppose that employees are working less than before, fewer people are actually working, and compensation is up. Would that be evidence that power shifted to employees?
(Wages have stagnated because companies have shifted compensation to untaxed non-wage benefits.)
...another labor movement. The first one gave us things like healthcare and retirement...
This is not the result of a labor movement. It's the result of working around a dumb law. Employers wanted to raise wages in order to compete for employees but there were laws against pay raises and wage competition. Net result: "we pay the same as everyone else, but also free health care/retirement/etc."
If only there were some kind of national organization that could solve the problems of people entering into voluntary contracts that you don't like! And, in general, doing anything you do not approve.
The same national organization, while at it, could also mandate minimum salary of $200K and minimum vacation policy of 50% of the business days, not including holidays of every religion, sick days and days where going to work just doesn't feel like something one would enjoy. I think such national organization would be a huge thing, can't wait for it to appear.
Sure, but it's a useful perspective to help make a strong business case for it.
Not every company cares if their employees have "lives" and are "well-rounded individuals", but talk in terms of dollars & cents, and more businesses will pay attention.
I think the point is rather: even if you're doing the startup thing and devoting your whole life to a project for a few years - even then you should take time off (and not feel guilty).
Devils Advocate: people often use the excuse of "I'm feeling burnt out" to not push themselves. Taking your metaphor of the professional runner, while its clear that they need breaks between marathons, they also push themselves to extremes during training and races to make themselves better.
I think people often feel like they are the technology equivalent of a professional athlete and need time to recover, yet while they are working, they never actually push themselves to their physical (and mental) limits.
No argument that if you work hard, you need vacations. Thats absolutely correct.
> ... yet while they are working, they never actually push themselves to their physical (and mental) limits.
You could argue that in the long run, only those who push themselves see any kind of career progression. For the likes of your example the future holds stagnation or, in the most extreme case, unemployment/unemployability.
Athletes don't push themselves to extremes during training - I remember reading about the training schedule of a pro cyclist (Cavendish IIRC), and it was a lot lighter than my usual day. He was getting up early, doing a couple of hours in the morning, lunch+siesta, then another couple of hours in the afternoon. And nice and early to bed. (He also had someone to cook for him, do his washing, etc. etc.)
Racing is of course a different matter, but even the hardest working athlete (say during the playoffs or a major tournament) is only playing every other day. The Tour de France riders are some of the hardest working, but even then the top riders are only expected to actually be competitive in one major race per year...
I guess it depends on your definition of extreme. My definition is that they are constantly pushing the boundary of what they are capable of, i.e. always just surpassing their current proficiency so that they can constantly get better.
I don't see that same level of intensity in most tech workers I've met.
I think you're overestimating how hard athletes push the boundary of what they're capable of during training: professional athletes are very careful not to overtrain, as that inevitably leads to injury.
That said, I'm not sure we're completely disagreeing, perhaps it's more semantics than anything else... but my definition of intensity also includes a time factor - and a professional athlete has loads of rest time available, something a lot of (most?) tech workers don't seem to have.
There are some sample times here (no guarantees of accuracy, but they seem in line with what I've read previously in interviews), the highest seems to be about 40hrs/week:
I really have a problem with the generalization of "people often use the excuse..." Clearly I'm being picky about language semantics here; however, I think that it's important to note that there is no proof of such a claim.
I hear about "feeling burnt out" so infrequently that I'd argue the opposite is true, and I work around a LOT of hard working people. Then again, I'd have no proof of such a claim.
"Preventing burnout is part of your job. Staying well rested is part of your job."
More employers need to understand this. At my last job I felt like I was close to burning out. I was getting involved in management duties, customer service, hardware design(not area of expertise at all), maintaining a back-end and front-end, dabbling in some networking, aiding in negotiating airtime rates, and looking up new parts to cut costs.
For the first few months it was all fun as we were trying to give legs (and profit!) to an offshoot business from the main business. I was the only technical person with the flexibility to to juggle all of those tasks and keeping costs low was a priority so I was happy to help this fledgling business by giving my time and energy to all these different areas. I never learned as much as I did during that time but there came a time when I felt the burnout coming on. I was getting less done and was losing interest in going to work.
I decided to take a 'staycation'. I filed for a week off where I planned to just stay at home and do whatever I saw fit for that week.
I got teased about taking time off just to stay at home. "Why don't you just come to work if you're planning to stay home? What's the point of the vacation? You sure are lazy."
All of these comments were light heartedly and in jest, but it seemed like most people really didn't understand the concept of taking some time off just to catch a breath.
I took the time off and came back fresher than ever and pushed through my todo list faster than I had been before I took time off. All I did during that week was manage my finances, watch netflix, clean my apartment and run some errands that had been piling up.
After more than 5 years I am currently on 16 day break where I just stay and do nothing but benchpresses and deadlifts. The refreshment is amazing. Sometimes you just need to relax a bit.
I am getting to the point of feeling bored and longing to get back to work. Awesome feeling.
A massive component I see to rest vs. work is flexible scheduling, not just vacation time. You don't need as much time off if you are working at a pace where you are comfortable and not overly stressed. I'm not sure it applies to startup founders who lack the security of a stable job or demand delivery for immediate market presence, but for people with more wiggle room working "slower" and smarter is very rewarding, and in my experience yields higher quality results due to a more ample time to digest ideas.
It also can carry a perhaps heftier social stigma than extensive vacationing if viewed in the wrong light, because of the potential for abuse. If I watch a movie in the middle of the day between working, how is that viewed? Is it different than if I were to take a mid-afternoon bike ride on a Tuesday for a couple of hours? They are both ways that I can decompress and allow me to come back to ideas later with a fresh perspective, and that's sometimes the most valuable thing to me when I'm working.
I would take flexible scheduling over excessive vacation time any day of the week, and I'm fortunate that the software engineering field is one where working from anywhere at any time is extremely easy.
I'm curious to see what people here think of "unlimited vacation" days policy in companies like Netflix. The place where I work has the same policy.
I'm inclined to believe this "vacations are for the weak" idea tends to make employees fewer vacations than they would if they were, say allocated a fixed 15 PTO days.
We have it at the startup I work for. I recently spent 3.5 weeks traveling around Japan and Seoul and I didn't take a computer. I think I responded to about six work emails the entire time.
Yes, exactly. I was at a startup that wasn't going so well, and we had the standard three weeks per year. It was already socially awkward to take those three weeks. Then the policy was changed to "all the vacation you need". For the people already taking zero vacation, there was no change, of course. For the rest of us, it increased the pressure to do without.
I know someone who works at a startup with unlimited vacation, and for most employees there it apparently turns out to be about 3 weeks of actual vacations taken (he defined it as left your home city for at least 2 days). They do use more single days here and there than they would otherwise, and they don't have to lie about being sick to use sick days. If I started a company, I'd want to offer unlimited vacation.
I think it works very well for us at Heroku. I've been here 3 years, and people certainly take enough time off in general. Probably 3-5 weeks for most folks. If they don't take enough time off, their managers are supposed to get on them about it :)
Case in point: our office has been closed for the holidays for the past couple weeks, and I haven't seen evidence of anybody doing any serious work on non-side projects (outside of the unavoidable on call responsibilities). Nobody had to use precious PTO for this or feel bad about traveling overseas to visit relatives.
I'd say it's highly dependent on company culture, though. We were always encouraged by our founders and office managers to take plenty of time off, and they led by example in this way. If that wasn't the case, it might not be working out well for us. I've certainly heard of other companies where it leads to less vacation.
We didn't track vacations at my last company, because we agreed with the Netflix principle of hiring the right employees and giving them a lot of freedom, including allowing them to take whatever vacation days they needed, whenever they needed it.
There were worries initially by some about employees abusing this policy, but that has not happened once in the 6+ years we've been around. However as we've grown, I strongly suspect that the opposite is happening, i.e. employees are not taking as much vacation as (I feel) they should, perhaps due to the feelings of guilt mentioned in the article. This sucks because, unlike jobs where vacation days are tracked, we can't even compensate them for any unused days.
So over time I've come to believe that unlimited vacations days is something that sounds good in theory but not so much in practice, especially as a company scales. I would instead recommend the traditional model of tracking vacation days, but with a very liberal number of days (vs. the typical measly 10 days a year or whatever).
Vacations are fantastic. Writing from Helsinki where I'm on vacation. Along with hundreds thousands of my compatriots who all have around ten days off on the new year.
Which helps forcing even people who avoid vacations to have some.
In my opinion, those who don't travel don't live, and that's where you need vacations. Visiting your relatives, too.
At my employer (here in the US) we start at 18 days. People who've been here for 10 years have 33 days. There are even people who've been at the company for 25 years who have 53 days (though today the max is 23 days). Our parent company is in travel (a GDS, think reservation system) and has been around for 50 years. You can't save up from year to year (except if your manager is OK with it) so people take the time off. People are generally happy and productive and the company does well. Why anyone thinks working 90 hour weeks and never taking time off is a good idea is beyond me (even if it's your own startup at some point you will burn out).
"Professional runners take long breaks between marathons. They make no excuses for this, and no one judges them for it, because everyone knows that rest and recuperation is an essential part of being a pro athlete. The same is true for entrepreneurs (and everyone, really). Preventing burnout is part of your job."
Everyone is different and even comparing muscles is not the same.
Some people may need to take time off to prevent burnout others may not. I worked 5 or 6 years without a break and didn't think anything of it.
That said it's probably natural to try and elevate oneself when you have some ability that someone else doesn't appear to have. Some people do need less sleep (not me) and would almost certainly have an opinion of someone who need more than 8 hours.
The thing about "making fun" of other people is that you isolate one thing (that you identify as negative) not everything about them. And there is nothing wrong with trying to perk yourself up because you can do 20 pullups with your feet out while the other guy (who only needs 4 hours of sleep) is focusing on his extra productivity as a way of feeling good about himself.. Human nature.
You are splitting hairs hereIf I say I am taking a vacation and am going to come back refereshed and you say "no, it is because I am going to enjoy life", If you still have to come back to work then the difference is moot.
The difference is, if my company said, "instead of vacations we've invested in Refresh-O-Pods; you will each spend a day in them and come out refreshed for work" I'd say fuck that.
That's not what the author said, though. He said what you quoted, which supports his point about feeling justified (instead of guilty) when taking vacations.
He didn't say "take a vacation so you can work better."
Agreed. It's an unfortunate artifact of some people's personalities. I'm planning a vacation for a few months from now, and I feel guilty about taking an extra day. Forcing myself to ignore that.
With the amount of technology and automation we have, and how productive we have become, we should be heading towards 4 day weeks, and month long vacations.
No shame in taking a break at all here. Also, work to live, don't live to work; or you'll miss out on everything important.
Here in The Netherlands we have a legal minimum of 4x the amount of hours you work per week for time off. So you work 40 hrs, you get 160 hrs off each year. The vast majority of employers give more, though. I haven't seen less than 24 days off. In addition to that, you get 8% of your yearly gross income as "vacation money" in the month of May.
I never get why most Americans have so much trouble with taking/giving time off. Or working part-time, for that matter, which is basically impossible, from what I've heard.
> you get 8% of your yearly gross income as "vacation money" in the month of May.
I dislike this type of policy, which essentially acts to obfuscate your true gross income.
"Oh, you understood that we would add vacation money? We included vacation money in the quoted income, sorry."
I'm not in the Netherlands but I've been in this situation and had to take frustrating legal action (which, under new legislation, I would now have to pay for).
It's pretty well known, when you're quoted a yearly salary, the 8% is usually included. When you're quoted a monthly salary, it isn't. Weird, I know, but it's so common here that almost everybody knows. Though i can imagine it's frustrating for people from abroad!
On a side note, true gross income doesn't say that much. You have taxes, 401K plans that are sometimes partially included, meal plans, etc. i had a bigger paycheck at my last job, but my net income is higher at my current job. Unfortunately, the only way to truly know what you're making is to wait a month after starting working somewhere, and check your bank account.
How can I get a software developer job in Netherlands? Or do a startup. I am willing to learn the native language if I must.
Btw, I'm Canadian, can we speed up the process?
never mind, the tax rate is higher. but seems like a great place to work. or be financially poor but live a great quality of life from social benefits.
Finding a job could be difficult, the financial crisis is not showing any signs of going away anytime soon, and there's a decent supply of CS grads for a small number of jobs. This could change in the future, though. No need to learn Dutch, it's a hard language to learn (as in unpronouncable!) and everybody speaks English anyway.
Doing a startup here is challenging, too. The Dutch are pretty risk-adverse, the market is small (16 million) so we don't really have angels or VC money. If you start the startup in the US and then move to The Netherlands after, say, round B, that does sound like a plan. Which is exactly the way I'm planning on doing mine!
Tax rates are pretty high, with the exception of big multinationals. Think U2, Gucci, KPMG. They're officially based in The Netherlands because of the tax breaks.
On a side note: as a Canadian, you probably would like it here. Climate and mentality are pretty similar, and I know several people who made the switch. My elementary school teacher was from Canada.
There's actually a treaty -- the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty (DAFT, yes, really)[1] -- that makes it relatively easy for Americans to go to the Netherlands and start a business, and I believe time spent under the permit counts toward the requirements for permanent residency.
Before I came to work at FullContact, I went through the same sort of guilt every time I left for vacation.
Nevermind that I was working 60-hour weeks. Nevermind that I was plugged in, often checking email & sneaking in work, while away on "vacation" (much to the annoyance of my fiancee). And it wasn't unique to me - talking to most of my friends, it seemed like a common thread in the startup world. If we take vacation at all, we don't leave work at work. I guess I had been in it so long, I didn't even notice anymore.
This year I took my first Paid, Paid Vacation - no email. No internet. No work of any sort allowed. And I came back more refreshed than I can ever remember being. Not only with ideas that had germinated while away, but also an extra drive I hadn't had in a long time. It was freaking amazing.
Sad thing is, I probably wouldn't have done it, were I not working for a place that made "unplugging" a condition of my getting a bonus. The overwhelming "work more" startup culture is a tough thing to break free of.
Why would you even care to give an excuse to anyone? We need to take vacations because that is one of the reasons we work so hard. If we didn't need vacations, if we didn't want to eat what we love and do things to spoil ourselves, might as well give up everything and go live in a jungle.
This brings to mind a speech by Arianna Huffington, who argued that too many professionals in D.C. brag about never getting rest.
She was on a date with a man who bragged, "I only got three hours of sleep last night." Huffington replied, "This dinner would be more interesting if you had gotten six."
I think looking at the analogy to a marathon gives the best comparison.
If you've run a marathon, you trained months for it and you have run the 26 miles (made your startup ramen-profitable) then then you can take time off.
If you haven't even run a marathon yet, yeah maybe you've run 5mi a couple of times, what do you want to take time off from? You need to run 15mi another 10 times now and the run the 26 mi marathon. Then you can take time off.
I think once a startup is ramen profitable, the founders can take some time off, because then it's much more about making the right strategy decisions, which formally take 0 time. It's just a matter of connecting all the variables correctly and that works much better in a balanced mind than in an overworked mind.
If the product of the startup isn't even finished though or it doesn't have traction yet, putting in the hours is much more needed than creativity, because thinking about strategy is a waste of time anyway before you get to the next milestone. It will all change once you launch anyway.
I couldn't agree more with op.. I remember when I was younger (20) and working on my first startup, my partner and I would work 6 days a week, some times from 9am - 2am with only a break for dinner. I now realize that this type of schedule is absolutely not sustainable.
Indeed. It amazes me how willing people (well, Americans at least) are to give up vacation time. All it takes is the smallest whiff of a threat to somebody's all-important "Career", and they'll back down from any plans for a real vacation. Other folks I've worked with simply don't even bother, and if forced to take the remainder of their paid time off in December, they'll just hang out on the couch with the XBox.
Makes no sense.
Anyway, here's the obligitory six year old blog post:
This is just crazy. In the UK, the minimum holiday entitlement is 28 days (Full details at https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights). That usually does not include Bank Holidays - unless you're working somewhere a bit sketchy - so that's another 7 days (although you can't decided when to take them).
In some companies I've worked for, HR can force you to take holiday if it looks like you've not been using it.
I'm not claiming the UK is a Socialist paradise, but I shudder when I look at the terms of employment with US companies.
Do you want a happy, healthy, dedicated, and motivated workforce? Or do you just want to burn people out as quickly as possible and then replace them?
Exactly my thoughts when reading these comments. I'm in my first year in employment after graduating from University, and I get 27.5 days holiday a year...if you don't take it you get in trouble with HR (although I can carry 5 days over to next year with prior agreement).
I can also buy more days if I wanted to, my manager does for example so he can spend more time on his sailing hobby.
The latter, almost uniformly. Over here employers cry about having a shortage of skilled workers to hire one day and the next either lament at how ungrateful and spoiled the ones they already employ seem to be when they balk at working another 60 hour week or negatively compare the ones who are efficient and have families to the 20-something single guy who happily toils away until midnight every day.
It's a ridiculous class system we have in this country, no doubt.
If they're replaceable, the later. That's why technical people get a lot of time off and "soft skill" people get less time off. Not saying it is right, but that's how companies look at it.
Also, business owners don't like government telling them how to run their business. If a company mismanages their talent and burn them out, that's the company's problem, not the government's problem.
I'm not heartless but I also wouldn't like the government telling me how to run my business. That many mandatory days off can crippling for smaller companies.
As a programmer who feels I should spend at least some of my life in silicon valley, this is the primary reason I don't. American employment law is frankly barbarian.
Same in Australia - we also have a maximum 38 hour work week for full time employees (the employee can choose to work reasonable overtime but if an employer was found to be forcing them to, there are penalties).
That, and the lack of an affordable healthcare system (I pay less than $1000 a year for private health insurance but if I couldn't afford that I could get healthcare free of charge - the main difference is longer waits for elective surgery) mean that working in the US really isn't that appealing despite the startup scene being more exciting.
Once I come back from vacation I need another vacation. I've gone so hard and done so many things while exploring some new place that i'm exhausted. So maybe the type of vacation should depend on what you're using it for?
For me, a relaxing "vacation" is snugging up in bed for an entire weekend and doing nothing but eating, sleeping and watching fun shows with a loved one. If you find it difficult to get away from work in your own home, try to structure your day so you don't have time to check on work.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadOne might argue that two weeks is sufficient for a week-long vacation every six months, but most people I know use most of their time off for family obligations and "work outside of work" like home repairs. This is a crap situation.
* Quotes because it is becoming less and less common to work for a company for decades, so the traditional system of awarding vacation based on length of tenure is becoming more and more insane. How many people never even get past the initial level of paid time off before switching jobs?
I know that every time I do, I feel extremely guilty.
It just took me that long to get back into things. I'd lost a lot of those "unsaid practices" that tend to accumulate.
Dude, it's a fine prison you built for yourself. This from a guy in tech, tech being one of the few areas where labour supposedly still has negotiating power.
A large portion of my extended family works in retail where 2 weeks is pretty standard for entry-level positions. It's tenure-based all the way.
Do you mind if I ask what kind of software/position? That sounds like a gulag.
I'm hoping building some experience here will give me a better chance in the future, although I'm a bit worried that working with such an old tech stack might not work in my favor.
(I'm a dev, not a recruiter, no financial interest in this).
I declined.
Of course, that job sucked for a variety of other reasons which led to me leaving after six months. "Oh, we hired you as a programmer? Babysit this Excel spreadsheet for me."
We'll get through an entire interview process where they know I have 15+ years of expertise and team lead level of what they are looking for, yet they still offer 2 weeks vacation.
Fortunately, I've found this to be the most easily negotiated point of the offer as it doesn't actually cost against anyone's budget. I'd put it at around 20% of companies total that absolutely can't be flexible and offer more than two weeks for a new employee at the senior level.
Point is, there's always a reason to hold off on the vacation and waiting for the "perfect timing" isn't a good idea.
How do you measure this?
Pro tip from someone who has worked for 4 companies in 6 years, and taken 6 weeks per year of vacation: once you have been offered the job, tell them you have a vacation already planned (approved by your last job) and it can't be rescheduled. This gets you an exemption from rules like no vacation during the first 6 months of employment, and it sometimes also lets you get your 2 weeks upfront, instead of having to accrue them. This is also your opportunity to get a longer vacation approved (e.g. my last job offered 3 weeks, or I had 3 weeks banked up that I had to use).
Why should I expect the next employer to give me the three weeks of vacation that "are coming to me", if I've already taken cash for them?
Is your situation different ?
He's simply asking the new company for an exception to the normal vacation rule. Instead of waiting until the days are all accrued, he wants to use them ahead of time.
If the new hire is a great match and the company is eager to have them on board, allowing him to virtually start a few weeks later than planned isn't that big of a problem. Or if he disappears for 3 weeks a little while after he's started, so be it.
You can ask for (and receive) a hell of a lot more out of a new employer before your start date than you can after it.
Exactly. Few employers will approve a 3 week vacation when you've only been on the job 2 months, but if you tell them the vacation is already scheduled, they pretty much have to grant it.
@philsnow My point was mainly getting the vacation approved in the first place. I wouldn't push my luck by asking them to front me the 2 weeks, but half of my companies offered it (you just start negative, and by the end of the year you have 0 days).
Yes. The most power an employee will almost ever have in the relationship is after they've offered you the job but before you've accepted it/started working.
Lots of companies have mechanisms to let employees go into "vacation debt" of 1-2 weeks when needed. Asking to take vacation may cost them exactly zero, since they're going to pay you those days eventually anyway.
I'm a "doesn't pick up on the taboos I'm violating" sort of person.
So more or less all Europeans get at least 6 weeks off per year. In the wealthier EU countries it's often 7 or 8, if you count both fixed and movable vacation (e.g. the legal minimum in Denmark is 5 weeks movable + 9 fixed days).
One thing I'm not sure how I feel about, is the combined sick/vacation PTO -- you end up with a larger number of days that you can use as vacation, but usually a smaller number of days overall (my current company is 18 days total PTO, previous company was 5 weeks). This works out great for people like me, who never need to take sick days (if I have a bad cold, I can work from home usually).
Now what would work really good (and what I think my current company had before I started), is one vacation pool, which us use when you are going to be off for 2 or more consecutive days, and a separate large pool of PTO days for either under-the-weather days, actual illnesses, or "fix the garage door / wait for Cable installer" days.
Another thing to look for, is how the vacation is rolled over. The best is where you earn X.something hours every paycheck, and can be sitting at any one time on what you would earn in 2 years. So a previous employer (Motorola) gave me 3 weeks a year, but I was always sitting on 6 weeks available until I had to take some time off to avoid losing new accumulation.
U.S. workers really need to revive the labor unions, it's unfortunate that the population has been so effectively persuaded into regarding them as a bad thing. Sure they can make a dent to the profitability, but the improved quality of living makes it worth it.
I guess an alternative model is to take it really collective and just have the state pass laws mandating working conditions that all employers have to follow, that way nobody needs to negotiate those conditions. That's the approach California took with just banning noncompetes by statute, for example.
Why does it matter to you or the employer why you are taking a day off?
What if I don't get sick? I would have to lie to my employer or let paid time off go unused.
As long as the sick day count is rolled into the total vacation allowance, the only change is not having to lie when taking a day off.
To make sick days more manageable for employers, in Germany the health care system takes over, paying wages after 6 weeks - down to 70% under the assumption that you don't have certain costs related to work (such as health care payments, commute) while sick.
I think some employers take extra (private) insurance for earlier coverage.
Of course, there is some abuse which is, of course, an immediate termination reason. As mitigation, sick days policies require (by law) to see a doctor if it's more than three days, and most employers require it for the first day.
Yes, all that is terribly unfair to those healthy employees that don't get to enjoy feeling miserable in bed...
And to be honest, it's one of the biggest reasons I don't dream of moving to the US anymore - even though nearly all of the interesting jobs in my niche are over there.
Here it's at least 24-25 days off, plus holidays (6, easter, ascension, pentecost, 2 days Christmas and January 1st). Sick leave doesn't count as off days. When you get sick during your time off and you consult a doctor those days don't count, too.
Mind you that The Netherlands, although liberal compared to the US, ranks amongst the lowest number of paid time off in Western Europe. I'm not complaining though, 25 days is a sweet spot for me: 3 weeks summer holiday, 1 week in the winter (goodbye dreary, cold days, hello sunshine!) and some days for personal stuff. I work part-time (4 days a week), so I get 20 days of paid vacation instead of 25, but for every week I take off they subtract only 4 days.
The combination of a decent amount of paid time off and the abiliy to work part-time makes for a much, much healthier work-life balance. I really hope this is something you guys across the pond will take over someday.
Edit for clarification: I realize i make it sound like we have some kind of socialist paradise here. There's another side to this: a heavy tax burden. With all the income tax, property tax, VAT (21%) and ridiculous gas prices (about $6.60 per gallon) life isn't exactly cheap here.
Life seems cheap in the US - until you realize you need to save like crazy: for sending kids to college, for retirement, etc. After you factor all that stuff in, it's much less rosy than it seems at first sight.
Our middle class has been demolished by the Satanic trinity: housing, healthcare, and education costs.
Tuition: our reputable public universities are comparable to European private ones in cost. Our private ones cost almost $50k per year. It's also competitive enough to get into the top universities that the game increasingly starts in high school or before; in New York, it's very typical for merely middle-class parents to hawk up $30k per kid per year from ages 4 to 18: admissions are that competitive.
Health insurance is another nightmare. Decent plans cost $500 per month for an individual in a employer-provided plan (and, increasingly, "employee contribution" of 25-100% is the norm). If you're on the individual market, you're fucked: it's closer to $1500 per month if you're healthy and have no children.
Then there is housing. You can actually get a good deal (say, $150 per ft^2) in wide swathes of the country-- but those are in places with imploded job markets. To buy anywhere with an active job market is pretty much unaffordable on the typical software engineer salary, and even rents will typically be 20 to 40% of after-tax income.
Europe has a lot of issues and extended liabilities, but the U.S. is far more fucked in the coming decade. I'd gladly pay $7/gallon for gas not to have to worry about healthcare (even if you have insurance, it will often fail you at the worst time) or, in the future should I have kids, education costs.
I wonder if there are arbitrage opportunities for the education of the children. You live in the US but you have your kids study in Europe - French universities for example are free, so if the kids can speak French it will be cheaper to have them study there, and as Americans their chances of admissions must be pretty high.
Any comparison with the US reminds me just how much value I'm getting in exchange for my tax. I pay it gladly. We still have a functional middle class.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights
However, I _don't_ think the answer to this is to depend on companies to issue more vacation time. That's expensive for everyone, and it's hard for little guys to compete with the bigger guys who can afford to pay 6-12 weeks of salary to someone who isn't working. The answer, I think, is for each individual to take more individual responsibility, save their money, work in contracted increments, and go on vacation between contracts.
We should complete the transition and get out of the uncanny valley.
Strongly disagree with you when you say that no one can pay 6 weeks of vacations, using this as an argument to say "no one can pay vacations at all".
It's clearly the question of our social model that you are asking and I will say that: the social model I want for me, my children, and the others, is a world where you don't have to sell yourself as a work slave if you don't want. Paid vacations are not perfect, they are expensive, but they also are a not so bad approximation of a world where you can live your life outside of the work if you want (at least periodically).
Also, I think that while "contract" employment is nice for programmers, there are a large number of jobs (majority?) for which that simply doesn't make much sense because it increases training costs for employers. It is still, to this day, very common for employers to look for employees who plan to stick around for awhile. They want the best of both worlds, basically, long-term employees who can be laid off at a moment's notice.
So basically, this is only a problem if you want a 13 month vacation.
If you're a contractor who is working in 3-6 months contracts you very likely aren't going to have employer health insurance coverage to begin with (thus COBRA doesn't apply to you) and will need to have your own individual plan... which (even with Obamacare in its current state) is going to cost you on average significantly more than an employer offered plan would because of economies of scale and our steadfast refusal to make real changes to the way healthcare insurance works in the US.
I don't disagree with your greater point about the US system, but my experience is that ACA individual policies were about the same cost as what I can purchase as an (admittedly very small) employer.
If you buy an ACA plan, you're in a much larger risk pool than any individual employer can provide.
This is another aspect of our current system that has some negative side effects -- a lot of people don't realize what the actual overall cost of their healthcare insurance is. I currently pay $46 per two-week pay period for good single-person PPO coverage (of course the actual cost to the employer is significantly more), so $92 a month. That cost becomes my mental baseline for insurance, and then I go look at the cost of ACA plans which apparently average $328 and that seems insane, over 3x the cost!!! Thanks, Obama!!! (of course, it isn't really more, the overall cost of my prior coverage has just been obscured by the old system where my employer subsidized me).
Not that it isn't true, mind you, but given all of the policy debate around the ACA that's happening it seems a little unfair to bring the ACA into it at all.
To be fair, that's part of why you charge more per hour when contracting than you'd be making as an employee. There's also taxes (that your employer covered but now you do), vacation time, etc. You want to charge an hourly rate as an independent contractor equal to at least what it cost your employer to have you on payroll, not what they actually payed you. The difference is significant.
This is not the situation glesica was describing:
...can't afford to be without health insurance for two weeks every few months...can't justify paying for private health insurance when their employer forces them to accept its own coverage (and won't give them the cash equivalent).
Either you are part of the individual market (in which case your vacation doesn't affect your coverage) or the employer market. In either case, you can do exactly as cookiecaper suggested. Glesica's objection is simply wrong.
I have no idea what "economies of scale" you are referring to.
It's not as sensible a system as single payer, but it's a big step toward making people less dependent on their boss for their health.
In practice: I'm on an ACA plan, was formerly on COBRA coverage from my previous employer. Dollar for dollar, an ACA plan with the same monthly premium as my former insurance gets me both a significantly lower level of coverage AND a network that's at most 20% the size of my old PPO plan.
On the NY state exchange (I can't speak for other states), there's no way to pay more money for a larger network: every ACA provider in NY offers only an ultra-limited "EPO" network . I believe that 3 out of the 8 providers are even literally the same network, as two of them are licensing their network from the third.
The only compelling reason to use the exchanges is if you qualify for subsidies.
I tried to look up plans on my former insurer, but they just referred me to eHealthInsurance; after entering my zip code, eHealthInsurance came up with a handful of plans from a single insurer that were all on the exchange.
What I would do is assemble a list of every health insurance provider in New York and directly visit each website and/or call each company to see what the options are in your area.
I'd also check with an actual insurance agent who might have a clearer picture of the situation where you are. Even though I knew I needed to go to Regence Blue Shield and that they have coverage in my county, I still went to a local agent to help me make sure I got everything right.
EDIT: NYT actually did an article on this in October[1]. They point to eHealthInsurance, but also GoHealth.com, which I haven't seen before.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/your-money/health-insuranc...
http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/
It gives pretty accurate information (within a $20-30 margin for me) and if a plan looks too expensive try calling the provider and getting a quote.
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stories/2013/november/25/sta...
Under the ACA, health care is very much tied to employment, and (except that the new employer mandates have been delayed in implementation) even more employers are required to provide insurance. It's true that there is a new additional individual mandate that falls on people who both have a certain minimum income level and do not have employer-provide health insurance, but the existing incentives that tie health insurance to employers remain and new mandates that encourage employer-tied health insurance exist.
> It's not as sensible a system as single payer, but it's a big step toward making people less dependent on their boss for their health.
This is true insofar that the exchanges by existing, the larger risk pools for individual insurance purchases, and the subsidies for low-to-moderate income workers (and the Medicaid expansion for lower incomes) make it less likely that you will end up with no insurance that you can afford if you lose your job, it doesn't do much to make it any less likely that you won't be financially able to retain your existing insurance (and access to the particular provider network it has) if you lose your job.
Indeed, one should also not depend on their employer to tend to their personal health obligations. Honestly the entire employment model is outmoded, and was never suited to office work. People should stop allowing corporate bigwigs to push them around, and start demanding acceptable working arrangements.
Maybe it's just that I'm so personally unemployable for long periods that I've learned to adapt and not rely on a single party for any of these fundamentals. I've never held a "real job" for more than eight months, there's always been some beyond the pale behavior in superiors that's pushed me over the edge and caused me to turn in my resignation. On the other hand, I've had some clients on contract for 4+ years and we continue to get along swimmingly. Things are much less intense for everyone if you don't allow that co-dependence to develop.
That's been my approach for the last few years, except I do it as a full-time employee. Your employer gives you 2 weeks paid vacation, but you can also take additional time as unpaid vacation. I have averaged 6 weeks of vacation per year for the last 5 years by taking a month unpaid each year.
This is the basis of the misconception that time off is optional. For a healthy life, time off is not optional. Denying employees sufficient time off is effectively asking them to sacrifice their health and well-being for the company, a condemnable practice.
As to how much time off is sufficient or necessary, and in what sized chunks of time, I would leave that to the professional psychiatrists to figure out.
Also, I don't know if you've ever been involved with a small business before, but "can't afford it" in that context usually means "literally do not have that much money", not "can't afford to take it out of my bonus because then I'd have to buy last year's yacht model".
With unemployment in the US at 7 % and voluntary quits still unusually low the picture isn't nearly as sunny as you paint it. One does wonder why you are saying things that aren't quite so.
If you are running a small business yourself, consider that in more civilized countries, like the EU, small businesses are exempt from many regulations.
If you are running a small business that isn't doing too well, perhaps it's time to let it go under - the market has spoken, it shouldn't be kept afloat for a few months more on the backs of your employees.
The reality is far from that, the business owner is taking far bigger risks, has much more to lose and suffer due to failure and at any given point of time is going through far more stress, putting a lot of effort and has much more bigger role to play than some one who just joined the company can possibly fathom.
Now you are virtually asking them to pay you, while you don't work for nearly half the year(If you take vacation, sick leaves, and weekend off's into account). Then you have this 'working from home' thing, which is synonymous with having to take a leave, without officially taking one(Sorry but that's how WFH is being abused these days). Then you have pay them health insurance, be perfectly OK with this 5 hour work per day thing.
Putting this all together, work hardly gets done. Now not all businesses fit into a typical engineering domain, where money can be made non-linear to efforts(It's exceptionally difficult even for these businesses). There is no way ordinary office businesses can survive, let alone make profit in such situations.
If you want them to simply shut down. Its likely they will start up in some other country where the math makes sense.
An utterly meaningless question. In your "modern" contracts-only world, it's still the employers who pay for it, because the employees would earn the money for between-contracts "vacations" through sufficiently high contract rates.
> Also, I don't know if you've ever been involved with a small business before, but "can't afford it" in that context usually means "literally do not have that much money"
The technical term for a business incapable of paying its employees is "bankrupt". Keeping such a business running is, in many jurisdictions, a crime.
Not granting adequate time off is effectively the same as failing to pay wages, and a business that cannot do it needs to die sooner rather than later.
No, its "insolvent". Insolvency can lead to bankruptcy, but they aren't the same thing.
> Keeping such a business running is, in many jurisdictions, a crime.
[citation needed]
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_while_insolvent
Mere trading while insolvent, without dishonesty and intent to defraud, appears to be an unlawful-but-not-criminal act that results in personal civil liability for company debts. "Unlawful" and "criminal" are not the same thing.
Few large companies are offering more than 2-3 weeks vacation to new hires any more. I don't think any are offering 4-6, much less "6-12".
For longer tenured employees, getting an extra week off after 3 or 5 years is equivalent to a 1-2% raise each year. If a business can't support that, something's wrong.
It might work for small time "innovation" like snapchat and domylaundry.com, but I highly doubt you can get the kind of work we saw come out of Bell Labs with anything less than a well-paid team of long-term employees who'd been working there for a while together.
If I had an ACA-based health insurance policy, I would be covered there, but any other benefits via the company would be canceled for the time period.
I think there needs to be a bigger push for benefits that we select and maintain ourselves with companies just contributing some sort of minimally mandated stipend related to salary level.
I value the freedom of my time over wage (salary, but still) slavery the older I get.
I like the idea of benefits that are not tied to the employer but to which the employer contributes some amount of money. Although at that point, might as well just pay me more and let me take care of it.
Edit: fix some grammar
With that said, I would still walk out on an abusive employer...
Terminating employment without compromise because they won't let you break the rules sounds cool when you pretend you did it on the Internet, but please don't use this as an employee-employer relations strategy in real life. If you quit because they won't let you count installing cable TV or something as work time, that is almost certainly not the reason why you quit, unless your priorities are very strange.
Edit: To be clear, the companies where I quit when they had no empathy were body-shops.
And I'm glad I replaced the sump pump. It rained for 3 weeks straight after I gave notice.
Oh yeah. The deadline "we couldn't miss"? It got pushed 3 weeks.
The writing was on the wall for what they expected. But I was young and "stupid" living under the auspice of my father's work life (2 jobs his whole life - 20 years in the Army and 20 years for the State of Alabama). So I worked the hours because I wanted to be the team player. I wanted to help. In the end, I was shown that the relationship was one way. So now I'm old and more careful and less willing to put up with one-sided relationships.
7 days a week and canned for a day off? That should prompt anyone with self respect or integrity to walk out the door and drop emails asking for help or pointers with the codebase.
After I left, it was probably 4 months before everyone but the 2 sales guys and President were laid off. They lasted 3 more months before folding.
I actually left a good job to take this one. Lured me away with money :) Like I said - young and stupid.
If you work for a company that expects you to pull all nighters, but doesn't re-comp you for an extra hour or two for the unavoialble/banalities of random real life problems...that's a huge red flag if not an immediate need to hit the eject button. There is plenti of kubuki theatre in the workplace, but this is a point of fundamental fairness.
I know if I have people working for me like that, they are either getting the next friday off or a morning off or something else as an aknowledgement. Most jobs that require his kind of work and comittment are also (typically) cyclical, and there should be some 'slack' in the workflow that follows a big push.
So I don't think the only options here are bluster vs exploitation, and that goes for you or those that work for you. Just my $0.02.
I have quit a job due exactly to an obsessive focus on HR nonsense.
I did, however, wait a week to cool off just to convince myself I wasn't behaving rashly. Not as cool sounding, but whatever. I don't regret the decision.
I have a hard time imagining a more dysfunctional method of "negotiation". There are better ways to address differences in work expectations.
I understand the idea that you should be fairly compensated for fulfilling work expectations. I also understand that it's common for companies to have flexible PTO rules. But I've also heard of companies, very good ones to work for, that are not flexible about these things. It might not be the manager's choice. Or it might, and it might be possible to work around his/her style. Or it might not matter that much in the grand scheme of things. These are things you should be thinking about before you randomly quit over a rules quibble.
Justrudd isn't advocating staying and breaking the rules. He's advocating leaving when the informal expectations of the employer and employee don't match. I hardly see how it's "dysfunctional" to end a relationship that isn't making both parties happy.
For me, fair is what doesn't harm me financially and/or emotionally. It is easy to be glib and say things like "cable being installed" but what about sump pump being busted and my basement being flooded? Or a limb fell through my roof? Why is it OK for a company to expect me to put in extra effort but when I need a little kindness, empathy in return it's OK for them to say no? Sorry. You'll never convince me there are good companies to work for that do that. I am all for making money and increasing stock value (especially if I have options), but there has to be some give here.
Where I've been handed a formal policy document at a tech employer, it's always said something along the lines of "Hours are X to Y or as your manager directs". The latter part of that means in effect "this is between you and your manager unless you can't work it out".
If you can't work it out, best to go elsewhere, because that's a toxic culture for a tech company.
Most people do not have white-collar jobs. Tech workers are absolutely not in any way representative of the general population.
Now, if I'm not performing up to standards then get rid of me. If I'm excelling who cares when I take time off?
Hopefully I will never have to work in a company that cares more about office time than work done again.
I only have 14 days of PTO a year, and that includes sick time. I use almost all those days visiting family, especially my parents, all of whom live hundreds of miles from me. I took the week of Christmas off this year and still ended up committing some code. It wasn't much, but the people who weren't taking off easily could have done it (i.e., it wasn't something that only I knew how to do). I was still asked to do it.
Although I could easily pay cash for a nice European vacation, I won't go on one this year because I don't have the time.
I'm making my job sound terrible. It's not, far from it, but your extremely mechanical interpretation of the parent post is pretty frustrating for me to read. This sort of policy has real effects on real people's lives. It doesn't just affect me, either--it affects my parents who can only see me a few weeks out of the year. I don't know about you, but I don't believe in an afterlife, so this is all the time I've got for them. I don't own a home, but if I did and I had to use some of my very valuable PTO just to do home maintenance, while still being expected to commit code while taking PTO or in the evenings occasionally, you can bet I'd be pretty upset.
http://seeyourfolks.com/
Neither of these is an indicator of a quality company to work for. Both are strong indicators that the company is not good to work for.
Nine months later, after buying a house, I was canned for violating that butts-in-seat policy, largely because I was attending to the many little things a new house requires: inspections, installations, etc. Under the old regime, coming in later and working later, or working from home, being accessible by video chat, IM, and email would have raised no eyebrows. Under the new one it was cause for termination.
I should have seen the writing on the wall and simply started to look for a new job as soon as that more restrictive company took over. I was pressured to stay by the ties I had to stock options, my good professional relationships with co-workers, and my desire to get into a house quickly. The end result was that I went into a lot of bad debt in the months following my layoff, and almost lost my house as I ran out of cash. I could have avoided it if I had planned better. Needless to say I was under a lot of stress for a while.
The long and short of it is, I agree with parent. If you have the freedom to do so, disassociate with companies who have unreasonable time-off or flex work policies, sooner rather than later. Your mental, physical, and financial health are at stake.
If they do demand unpaid work, and for some weird reason I agree to that, then the door is definitely open for paid non-work. Whatever the deal is, it works both ways.
Some companies are changing this approach and allowing remote working. Many people on my team will work remote and a day they need to get the garage repaired and just work around their work requirements. Combine with flex time it works out pretty good.
It was enough to make me decide to stay in London when my H-1B came through. Very short-sighted for a CA company trying to attract international talent too, since the biggest cost of moving is the lack of ability to easily visit loved ones, and short holidays make transatlantic trips uneconomical.
There is too much silence on this topic though.
This is because outside of Silicon Valley, and outside of software development in general, corporations have been gaining more and more power over their employees. You can see this when you look at stagnating wages for everyone outside the executive class. Don't like your job? Too bad. You should just be grateful that you have a job in the first place. Don't have a job? Better go door to door begging everyone to employ you. Haven't had a non-minimum-wage job for the past year? Good luck convincing any HR person that you're worth even an interview. Etcetera.
What this country needs is another labor movement. The first one gave us things like healthcare and retirement benefits, improved workplace conditions (especially safety), and the five-day workweek (down from six). Hopefully, the second one will give us remote work, paid paternal leave, 30-day minimum vacations every year, and a hard cap of 50 hours per week.
Well, closer to the root cause. The root cause is culture.
(Well, actually the root cause is human nature, when placed in certain circumstances. But that's too theoretical to be useful in political practice.)
Trade unions and collective bargaining can produce some outstanding results for workers, but the only way they can have any teeth is through a coordinated "attack" against hostile work environments. It's hard to imagine how a loosely coupled workforce like IT professionals could effectively "wage war" on their employers. Words like "attack" and "war" might sound like hyperbole, but these types of disputes can get ugly; when describing the 1984 Miner's Union strike in the UK, Margaret Thatcher characterized the situation as:
There are countless other examples of openly hostile responses to unionization across the world.Part of the solution to this adversarial standoff between employer/employees might be a move to normalizing and standardizing the collective bargaining process. As a high school teacher I work as member of a heavily unionized workforce. Disputes about pay and conditions are baked into the system and occur on a rolling basis. In South Australia, where I work, our enterprise agreement is renegotiated on a rolling 3 year basis. The last agreement took a year longer to finalise which means that negotiations for the 2012,2013,2014 enterprise agreement overlapped the 2015-2017 negotiations (which went on in parallel). From my perspective I see a functioning system which brings great results for me as an employee while protecting my right to a safe workplace.
To give an example of the conditions which teachers in my state have fought for:
"...corporations have been gaining more and more power over their employees."absolutely agree with you there. There was a lively discussion on HN a while ago about whether making salary information public is a good idea. Employers don't want employees to have this information because one of the things it can lead to is collective action along the lines of "...hey we all want to get 110k/yr just like Joe over there..."
I'm not sure how exactly the lessons from not-for-profit, tightly regulated workplaces like schools can be applied more broadly to the rest of the economy, but what I do know is that my standard of living, autonomy and ability to actually stop and smell the roses has increased immeasurably since I became a teacher.
I think the labour movement that you're calling for needs to be broad based. Instead of a teacher's union and a miner's union I think a broad based worker's union regardless of sector needs to arise which demands that the fruits of our collective labour need to more evenly and fairly be distributed. The 1st world is a rich place, but you'd have trouble spotting with much of the modern day wage slavery that must be endured.
See, that's the thing. Nobody is willing to lose their job for another week of vacation a year. Especially if it looks like there isn't another one coming.
Also, as an Australian, you have the privilege of living in one of the best managed economies in the world. Which means teachers aren't faced with "do you want layoffs or pay cuts this year?" every year for a decade.
More like, luckiest. The resource bonanza of digging up Australia and selling it to China has not much to do with good management.
This is definitely an issue, however in my experience it is exaggerated by the media. Yes there are some who shouldn't be teaching, but they are far outnumbered by regular hard working people.
As for the other protections enjoyed by teachers i'd say they have a positive effect on employee mental health and would therefore have a positive flow on effect on student learning.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/RCPHBS
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECICOM
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USAAHWEP
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO
(Wages have stagnated because companies have shifted compensation to untaxed non-wage benefits.)
...another labor movement. The first one gave us things like healthcare and retirement...
This is not the result of a labor movement. It's the result of working around a dumb law. Employers wanted to raise wages in order to compete for employees but there were laws against pay raises and wage competition. Net result: "we pay the same as everyone else, but also free health care/retirement/etc."
If only there were some kind of national organization that could mandate that all employees receive a certain minimum amount of time off per year!
Israel has 12pto + 18 sick days iirc and I wouldn't work for an employer that gives so few days off.
The norm starts at 18pto for juniors and then it climbs up annually.
The same national organization, while at it, could also mandate minimum salary of $200K and minimum vacation policy of 50% of the business days, not including holidays of every religion, sick days and days where going to work just doesn't feel like something one would enjoy. I think such national organization would be a huge thing, can't wait for it to appear.
There's more to life than work. Without adequate time off you've no time to live.
Sure, but it's a useful perspective to help make a strong business case for it.
Not every company cares if their employees have "lives" and are "well-rounded individuals", but talk in terms of dollars & cents, and more businesses will pay attention.
I think people often feel like they are the technology equivalent of a professional athlete and need time to recover, yet while they are working, they never actually push themselves to their physical (and mental) limits.
No argument that if you work hard, you need vacations. Thats absolutely correct.
You could argue that in the long run, only those who push themselves see any kind of career progression. For the likes of your example the future holds stagnation or, in the most extreme case, unemployment/unemployability.
Racing is of course a different matter, but even the hardest working athlete (say during the playoffs or a major tournament) is only playing every other day. The Tour de France riders are some of the hardest working, but even then the top riders are only expected to actually be competitive in one major race per year...
I guess it depends on your definition of extreme. My definition is that they are constantly pushing the boundary of what they are capable of, i.e. always just surpassing their current proficiency so that they can constantly get better.
I don't see that same level of intensity in most tech workers I've met.
That said, I'm not sure we're completely disagreeing, perhaps it's more semantics than anything else... but my definition of intensity also includes a time factor - and a professional athlete has loads of rest time available, something a lot of (most?) tech workers don't seem to have.
There are some sample times here (no guarantees of accuracy, but they seem in line with what I've read previously in interviews), the highest seems to be about 40hrs/week:
http://www.timeout.com/london/events/fitness-tips-from-olymp...
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080908091244AA...
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130115143443AA...
I hear about "feeling burnt out" so infrequently that I'd argue the opposite is true, and I work around a LOT of hard working people. Then again, I'd have no proof of such a claim.
More employers need to understand this. At my last job I felt like I was close to burning out. I was getting involved in management duties, customer service, hardware design(not area of expertise at all), maintaining a back-end and front-end, dabbling in some networking, aiding in negotiating airtime rates, and looking up new parts to cut costs.
For the first few months it was all fun as we were trying to give legs (and profit!) to an offshoot business from the main business. I was the only technical person with the flexibility to to juggle all of those tasks and keeping costs low was a priority so I was happy to help this fledgling business by giving my time and energy to all these different areas. I never learned as much as I did during that time but there came a time when I felt the burnout coming on. I was getting less done and was losing interest in going to work.
I decided to take a 'staycation'. I filed for a week off where I planned to just stay at home and do whatever I saw fit for that week.
I got teased about taking time off just to stay at home. "Why don't you just come to work if you're planning to stay home? What's the point of the vacation? You sure are lazy."
All of these comments were light heartedly and in jest, but it seemed like most people really didn't understand the concept of taking some time off just to catch a breath.
I took the time off and came back fresher than ever and pushed through my todo list faster than I had been before I took time off. All I did during that week was manage my finances, watch netflix, clean my apartment and run some errands that had been piling up.
I am getting to the point of feeling bored and longing to get back to work. Awesome feeling.
It also can carry a perhaps heftier social stigma than extensive vacationing if viewed in the wrong light, because of the potential for abuse. If I watch a movie in the middle of the day between working, how is that viewed? Is it different than if I were to take a mid-afternoon bike ride on a Tuesday for a couple of hours? They are both ways that I can decompress and allow me to come back to ideas later with a fresh perspective, and that's sometimes the most valuable thing to me when I'm working.
I would take flexible scheduling over excessive vacation time any day of the week, and I'm fortunate that the software engineering field is one where working from anywhere at any time is extremely easy.
Case in point: our office has been closed for the holidays for the past couple weeks, and I haven't seen evidence of anybody doing any serious work on non-side projects (outside of the unavoidable on call responsibilities). Nobody had to use precious PTO for this or feel bad about traveling overseas to visit relatives.
I'd say it's highly dependent on company culture, though. We were always encouraged by our founders and office managers to take plenty of time off, and they led by example in this way. If that wasn't the case, it might not be working out well for us. I've certainly heard of other companies where it leads to less vacation.
There were worries initially by some about employees abusing this policy, but that has not happened once in the 6+ years we've been around. However as we've grown, I strongly suspect that the opposite is happening, i.e. employees are not taking as much vacation as (I feel) they should, perhaps due to the feelings of guilt mentioned in the article. This sucks because, unlike jobs where vacation days are tracked, we can't even compensate them for any unused days.
So over time I've come to believe that unlimited vacations days is something that sounds good in theory but not so much in practice, especially as a company scales. I would instead recommend the traditional model of tracking vacation days, but with a very liberal number of days (vs. the typical measly 10 days a year or whatever).
Which helps forcing even people who avoid vacations to have some.
In my opinion, those who don't travel don't live, and that's where you need vacations. Visiting your relatives, too.
Everyone is different and even comparing muscles is not the same.
Some people may need to take time off to prevent burnout others may not. I worked 5 or 6 years without a break and didn't think anything of it.
That said it's probably natural to try and elevate oneself when you have some ability that someone else doesn't appear to have. Some people do need less sleep (not me) and would almost certainly have an opinion of someone who need more than 8 hours.
The thing about "making fun" of other people is that you isolate one thing (that you identify as negative) not everything about them. And there is nothing wrong with trying to perk yourself up because you can do 20 pullups with your feet out while the other guy (who only needs 4 hours of sleep) is focusing on his extra productivity as a way of feeling good about himself.. Human nature.
The ancient Greeks were spot-on: «παν μέτρον άριστον» (all in good measure).
Excuse me? You don't just take a vacation so you can be more productive at work.
He didn't say "take a vacation so you can work better."
Take a vacation to discover a new country. Learn to SCUBA dive. Go trek the Himalayas, bungee jumping or rock-climbing because they are FUN.
Not because they'll recharge you for work.
With the amount of technology and automation we have, and how productive we have become, we should be heading towards 4 day weeks, and month long vacations.
No shame in taking a break at all here. Also, work to live, don't live to work; or you'll miss out on everything important.
I never get why most Americans have so much trouble with taking/giving time off. Or working part-time, for that matter, which is basically impossible, from what I've heard.
I dislike this type of policy, which essentially acts to obfuscate your true gross income.
"Oh, you understood that we would add vacation money? We included vacation money in the quoted income, sorry."
I'm not in the Netherlands but I've been in this situation and had to take frustrating legal action (which, under new legislation, I would now have to pay for).
On a side note, true gross income doesn't say that much. You have taxes, 401K plans that are sometimes partially included, meal plans, etc. i had a bigger paycheck at my last job, but my net income is higher at my current job. Unfortunately, the only way to truly know what you're making is to wait a month after starting working somewhere, and check your bank account.
Btw, I'm Canadian, can we speed up the process?
never mind, the tax rate is higher. but seems like a great place to work. or be financially poor but live a great quality of life from social benefits.
Tax rates are pretty high, with the exception of big multinationals. Think U2, Gucci, KPMG. They're officially based in The Netherlands because of the tax breaks.
On a side note: as a Canadian, you probably would like it here. Climate and mentality are pretty similar, and I know several people who made the switch. My elementary school teacher was from Canada.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT_(treaty)
Before I came to work at FullContact, I went through the same sort of guilt every time I left for vacation.
Nevermind that I was working 60-hour weeks. Nevermind that I was plugged in, often checking email & sneaking in work, while away on "vacation" (much to the annoyance of my fiancee). And it wasn't unique to me - talking to most of my friends, it seemed like a common thread in the startup world. If we take vacation at all, we don't leave work at work. I guess I had been in it so long, I didn't even notice anymore.
This year I took my first Paid, Paid Vacation - no email. No internet. No work of any sort allowed. And I came back more refreshed than I can ever remember being. Not only with ideas that had germinated while away, but also an extra drive I hadn't had in a long time. It was freaking amazing.
Sad thing is, I probably wouldn't have done it, were I not working for a place that made "unplugging" a condition of my getting a bonus. The overwhelming "work more" startup culture is a tough thing to break free of.
She was on a date with a man who bragged, "I only got three hours of sleep last night." Huffington replied, "This dinner would be more interesting if you had gotten six."
If you've run a marathon, you trained months for it and you have run the 26 miles (made your startup ramen-profitable) then then you can take time off.
If you haven't even run a marathon yet, yeah maybe you've run 5mi a couple of times, what do you want to take time off from? You need to run 15mi another 10 times now and the run the 26 mi marathon. Then you can take time off.
I think once a startup is ramen profitable, the founders can take some time off, because then it's much more about making the right strategy decisions, which formally take 0 time. It's just a matter of connecting all the variables correctly and that works much better in a balanced mind than in an overworked mind.
If the product of the startup isn't even finished though or it doesn't have traction yet, putting in the hours is much more needed than creativity, because thinking about strategy is a waste of time anyway before you get to the next milestone. It will all change once you launch anyway.
Makes no sense.
Anyway, here's the obligitory six year old blog post:
http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/02/two-weeks-vaca...
In some companies I've worked for, HR can force you to take holiday if it looks like you've not been using it.
I'm not claiming the UK is a Socialist paradise, but I shudder when I look at the terms of employment with US companies.
Do you want a happy, healthy, dedicated, and motivated workforce? Or do you just want to burn people out as quickly as possible and then replace them?
I can also buy more days if I wanted to, my manager does for example so he can spend more time on his sailing hobby.
It's a ridiculous class system we have in this country, no doubt.
Also, business owners don't like government telling them how to run their business. If a company mismanages their talent and burn them out, that's the company's problem, not the government's problem.
I'm not heartless but I also wouldn't like the government telling me how to run my business. That many mandatory days off can crippling for smaller companies.
That, and the lack of an affordable healthcare system (I pay less than $1000 a year for private health insurance but if I couldn't afford that I could get healthcare free of charge - the main difference is longer waits for elective surgery) mean that working in the US really isn't that appealing despite the startup scene being more exciting.
For me, a relaxing "vacation" is snugging up in bed for an entire weekend and doing nothing but eating, sleeping and watching fun shows with a loved one. If you find it difficult to get away from work in your own home, try to structure your day so you don't have time to check on work.