>> have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard)
Wait, what?
Is it really this bad in the States?
Wait, what?
Is it really this bad in the States?
1) No paid vacation at all
2) 15-25 days of vacation a year
3) "Unlimited vacation," which is usually a hip facade for 1 or 2.
Really? 25 days is 5 weeks; I feel like the standard for PTO is 10-15 days, and often it's 10 days, but you get bumped up to 15 after you work at a place for a year or two.
3) "Unlimited vacation," which is usually a hip facade for 1 or 2.
Is that really true? I have very limited first-hand experience; only two of my employers have offered unlimited vacation. For one of them, it was as you describe. For my current company... well, by the end of this calendar year, I think it'll add up to a little over 5 weeks, which is fairly unusual by US standards.
As a response, many companies are switching to "unlimited" plans. These look good to the uninitiated. But the real impetus for an "unlimited" plan is that it frees the company from having to guarantee -- or pay out for -- a minimum number of days for each employee. It's not really about lifting the ceiling; it's about lowering the floor.
I'm sure there are companies out there who really do have, and make every effort to honor, "unlimited" vacation plans. But I believe these companies are the exception to the rule.
In reality, it was nowhere near "unlimited vacation" as everything still needed to be approved, and it was very common for vacation requests to not be approved for a variety of business reasons. She probably ended up with ~20-25 days off per year, including stat holidays, which is the same as you'd get at Google or Microsoft.
Since it's a young company, most employees are indespensible, and without any written guarantee saying "you have X days of vacation a year", everyone is too afraid to even ask for any time off.
I worked for one of those. I'm glad I got out. Unfortunately, I landed at a company that's ridiculously stingy with PTO (10 vacation days, 8 holidays, 7 sick days -- this is slightly mitigated by the fact that you can make up hours you miss without using PTO, so I've done things where I leave early one day but stay late the next), however because company policy requires that employees take all our vacation days every year, at least I know what their expectations are. I took a vacation this year because I knew I had the days for it and so I just filled out our standard form and gave it to my boss, knowing it would be accepted. On the contrary, I didn't take a single vacation during my time at my previous employer, and in fact I never even asked for one, because we were bouncing from crisis to crisis, and I could just imagine my boss saying "are you crazy?".
"Can I take three weeks off in July?"
"Absolutely! But we might penalize you on your performance review."
Usual disclaimers about not every company etc.
Just my experience, but yeah, what I've seen is a 15 day minimum, and I don't explicitly filter out places that offer less.
Perhaps it's the type of companies I go for? If I recall correctly, Google, FB, Amazon, MS etc. all offer 15+ days for new hires, and most other large companies try to at least match them.
Some people negotiate additional PTO as part of their compensation package but I don't need to tell HN that engineers are notoriously bad at doing this.
Not to mention that tech industry firms are reputed to be more generous than what is otherwise common, that sounds really low even outside of the tech industry; its lower than any company I've seen, and lower than what most sources I've seen indicate is common. [0]
[0] e.g., http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm and http://www.salary.com/time-off-paid-time-off-from-work/
I worked as a programmer at a big boring company which did this - 10 days of company holidays, 10 days of you-get-to-choose. It's a month off total, but you only have control over 2 weeks, so it's presented as 10 vacation days.
The first source I linked provides actual averages for paid holidays, paid vacation, and paid sick leave.
10 paid vacation days is dead average for professional, technical, and related employees -- with only one year of service, and low for such employees with more service.
I was at a start-up once where we got a new CEO who essentially canceled a week of "whole company time off" at Christmas. If you wanted that time off, it came out of your vacation. He didn't care . . . and soon after that, I didn't care, either :-)
[Didn't help that he was really scarce in the office that week...]
This pressure isn't universal, but I'd say the majority of the companies I've worked for hardly anyone ever took more than a week off in a go, and when they did it was the topic of uncomfortable conversation with managers kind of acting like the person taking the time off was doing something wrong (even if just kind of half-joking about it).
It really is an entirely weird situation, for all the talk of meritocracy and such the day-to-day reality is you are pressured not to take real PTO (paid time off) and instead just do the Office Space thing where you're at work almost every day even if there are periods of time where you aren't really doing anything productive for a large chunk of most days.
So you start with 22 working days off including holidays, plus generous sick time. Not perfect, but could be worse.
In 12 years I don't recall any jobs with fewer than 15 days. My current job is "unlimited", and I took nearly 25 days one year.
But also remember it's business days. So 10 days = 2 weeks.
You don't make an omelet without enslaving some chickens their entire lives, keeping them in barely one cubic foot of space from birth to death so they can push out eggs at maximal productivity, killing them as soon as they're no longer at peak performance, and of course, breaking the eggs.
In other words, you get what you pay for.