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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

But in Switzerland, my husband's company gave employees six weeks of vacation a year.

And yet, I find people get used to it and consider it normal rather than a great thing. I give my employees 36 days of paid vacation per year (7.2 weeks) and, yep, got complaints the other day when I suggested making December 22nd a mandatory holiday day(!) :-)

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I think the complaint here (if I understand you correctly) is that you are giving a vacation day and then making a certain day mandatory to use it. This practice is common among companies and extremely infuriating and in my opinion should be illegal. Better to have 35 days paid and make december 22nd a company holiday.

It's not that uncommon to include "company holidays" in "paid days off". Denmark has that as well, I get 5 weeks of vacation, and 5 days of vacation/days-off. My employer is free to "spend" the 5 days for me.

Seems like in this case, how the company originally presents what you're getting matters. So, as you point out here, qualifying the # of days off w/ days that are set [that count as part of that allotment] would set expectations accordingly. Otherwise, still a good deal, but employees would feel misled if they want to use it other parts of the year.

My first "real" job out of university had this. Every time I looked at how much PTO I had, I had to remember that it was dupe because I had to knock off Federal holidays in order to calculate how much PTO I could actually use whenever I wanted.

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