Hacker News Reader

Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

Vacations are wide and broad. Normally I try to cram so much traveling, visiting, sight seeing, partying and drinking/eating into my vacation that I'm more burned out when they are over then when I started them. I often joke that I need a vacation from my vacation. I also have this habit to book my flights as close to when my job ends/starts, like take a red-eye right after work and come back the day I start work again, going straight from airport to work.

Given that, I absolutely can believe meditation is better then vacation. But I'd have to wonder, if my vacation consisted of calmly driving to a Cabin in the forest and pleasantly sitting on the side of a lake reading or pondering or looking at the lake by myself for the whole vacation, would that still be worse then meditation? Or is this starting to count as meditating?

View on HN

Americans just don't get enough vacation time. If you only get two weeks a year, you feel compelled to cram as much in as possible. Four to six weeks is the norm in Europe, so you don't feel guilty about "wasting" a week. With that amount of vacation time, you can take several short breaks and still have time for a big summer trip.

Most professionals get more than two weeks. Two weeks of paid vacation is really minimum entry-level stuff. I walked into 3 weeks and negotiated 4 weeks for next year in my review, and I've known people who (much further in their careers) have 5 or 6.

One of the problems in the tech industry specifically is a lot of the PTO schemes in the US are tied to length of service at that company. If you're jumping around every 2-4 years it's hard to get more than 3 weeks unless you're at a much higher level. At one of my previous very conservative, corporate/public, healthcare industry jobs there was a developer who had been at that company for over 20 years and he got 6 weeks a year. The manager had been there for a year so only got 2 weeks.

>Most professionals get more than two weeks. Two weeks of paid vacation is really minimum entry-level stuff. I walked into 3 weeks and negotiated 4 weeks for next year in my review, and I've known people who (much further in their careers) have 5 or 6.

Americans tend not to use all of their vacation time; professionals often end up working remotely while on vacation. There's a fear of losing your job or being overlooked for promotion. This is a largely alien concept in Europe, where job security is much stronger.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/55-of-american-workers-dont...

"Americans don't use their vacation" is a lot different than "Americans don't have enough vacation." And while I'm sure there are companies and cultures that expect you to work on vacation, I've been working in tech professionally for over a decade at multiple companies and have never felt remotely pressured to do anything on vacation, and doing so is certainly not the norm.

Expedia research says on average Americans take 11 of their 15 days available to them. Europeans have 30 days available to them.

In my corner of Canada in the oil industry, vacation days are often based on age and job level. When I turned 30 they automatically gave me additional 1 week. I have 4 weeks plus 2 weeks of "flex days". Flex days are meant for one or two days off at a time, can't use 3 or more flex days back-to-back.

EDIT: Also it is standard for women to get 1 year for maternity leave at a reduced salary.

Did that for a trip to Hawaii, and it was amazing. No itinerary, no plan. First couple of days were super chill: wake up, eat breakfast, snorkeling / swimming for an hour or so, then relax and read on beach all day and eat poke. By day 3 or 4 we started getting antsy and would spend time after snorkeling to find other activities.

Highly recommend the "go where things take you" approach to vacations.

I definitely think that the idea that you have to "make the best use of your time off" and the old "work hard/play hard" adage means that people are as stressed/busy when they're vacationing as when they're working. The concept of a staycation or just having weekends of not doing anything is really important.

These days I've found that my entertainment media is less stimulating and more inane precisely because I want to be able to disengage and let things recharge.

> I also have this habit to book my flights as close to when my job ends/starts, like take a red-eye right after work and come back the day I start work again, going straight from airport to work.

I used to do this and it's terrible to the point where it ruins entire vacations for me. My wife and I have a yearly vacation with a group of friends that happens to be Sat-Sat. I'll almost always take another 2-4 days on top of that, on either side, so I end up taking a ~2 week vacation with a week long trip in the middle of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com