Unlimited vacation, it seems, encouraged employees Not to go on vacation

fastcompany.com

10 points·alvinktai··6 comments

Is 25 days a year considered generous in the US? I am in Europe and receive 26 days a year (Not including public holidays of course) and I consider that to be a fairly standard amount for tech workers. Do Americans maybe have more public holidays that offset this?

My partner on the other hand receives, what I consider a "generous" holiday package of 6 weeks a year. And no, not as a teacher, she works in a creative field.

Ten days is standard in the US for professional jobs, but there's no legal minimum whatsoever. Five or six weeks is unheard-of, at least for rank-and-file employees.

10 days? Fuck.

I get 24 days at my current job (c++ developer) and I don't think it's enough.

There are managers and directors here that get upwards of 40 days per year.

10 days seems typical for starting a professional job. My company's old system would have me at 10 vacation days per year, now that I have unlimited, I usually take ~12 per year (2 week long vacations, and then 2 for emergencies).

I just stood around at a conference with people who have decades' more experience than me and they all get 10 days of vacation each year, and are encouraged not to use them. One guy started going on about how that's just what we do in America to have a bigger economy than everyone else, and how all the world's immigrants prefer America.

This is the kind of thing that makes people think Americans are weird and masochistic.

Ten days seems really, really low. No legal minimum also seems like a problem.

This explains for me why it seems a lot of US developers claim to suffer from burnout and the like. Breaks from work are very important.

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