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Comment by shiroiushi | Hacker News Reader

OP said "for tech". Tech jobs have long had much better vacation time and other benefits than "regular" jobs in the US. However, with the way things are going, this may not last and I wouldn't count on it. Also, it seems to depend a lot on employer: working at a big place like Apple or Google will of course get you lots of vacation time, but working at some shitty little 30-person company will probably get you the regular 2 weeks, and these days, the good jobs are probably a lot more scarce, forcing more tech employees to work at those shitty companies.

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>Tech jobs have long had much better vacation time

Yeah, no.

Google is 3 weeks/year, and has been that way for as far as I have known it.

KLA+ (formerly, KLA-Tencor) has several (IIRC, 3) weeks of sick days and vacation COMBINED, so if you get sick, no vacation for you.

Those are representative examples.

There are also quite a few companies that offer “unlimited” vacation, but in practice they pressure/shame their employees not to take “too much” time off.

When Cadence switched to "unlimited" vacations, my manager straight up told me that he expects it to be three weeks unless I exceed his expectations, or it will adversely affect my performance reviews.

Which is how it effectively works, except usually managers are less direct.

That doesn't seem right. I have more at amazon. Meta also has more. I've never heard of KLA.

Just looked it up and the number of days increases with seniority at Google.

>never heard of KLA

KLA, ASML, TSMC are companies that are huge globally in their fields.

The field being semiconductor design and fabrication.

Whatever device you're reading this on almost certainly has components made with machinery by one (or all) of those.

With all the stuff about chips and fabs and Taiwan in the news in the past year, you'd have to be living under a rock to not know who TSMC and ASML are.

However, I too have never heard of KLA. Somehow it never gets mentioned alongside those other companies. Maybe it's similar to how everyone knows about Microsoft and Apple, and even my mother knows what Linux is, but almost no one has heard of Green Hills Software?

I don't know what's common knowledge, but comparison to Green Hills doesn't hold.

KLA makes wafer inspection and process control equipment and has very little (if any) competition in what they do. They're big.

As in, they have 10B revenue and 15,000 employees.

That's roughly 1/3 of what ASML is (ASML has 30B revenue and 45K employees).

It's more like your grandma knowing about Nintendo, but not Valve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KLA_Corporation

This is in line with my experiences, as well.

> Google is 3 weeks/year, and has been that way for as far as I have known it.

Not true. Google starts at 3 weeks/year but that increases quickly after a few years. I was getting 5 weeks/year when I left.

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