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Comment by mjcohen | Hacker News Reader

How about benefits such as health insurance, vacation days, sick days?

I miss vacation so much.

I just fly home from the US. And … I still have to work instead of just spending time with my parents that I haven’t seen in years.

I earn more than 200k. ( not west coast ) it’s a decent salary right? Why can’t I have vacation, too? I asked and putted and asked again…

All that will accomplish one thing: one day in the next 2 years I will wake up, look at my bank account. And quit. To have actual free time.

I told that to my boss in those term, we have a decent relationship. But … he gave me some HR bullshit.

How much were you willing to sacrifice in salary in exchange for additional vacation? Was it a net-positive deal for your counter party (employer)? I ask because I hear this kind of thing all the time who want to make the same money, for less time at work.

Most people need spare time to be happy, productive, not burn out. And as a company or society, you don't want to encourage people to work too hard for money because most people are stupid and will actually work too hard for money, and not be happy, become less productive, and burnout.

That's how it works in Europe. It's common that a boss will ask an employee to work less, because the amount of time they work is not even legal sometimes, or to force people to go on vacation for weeks to use their vacation days. It's also more fair and don't put pressure for other employees that value their life outside work.

Forcing employees to take a holiday is often done purely out of the company's self-interest, as accrued leave is a liability on the books.

Also, at least in finance, they force you to take a couple weeks off once in awhile to make sure you're not up to anything illegal.

Of course I would be willing to reduce my yearly salary for 2 or 3 weeks of extra time. Should not be that hard.

It’s worth more than the proportional time I would take off. It’s very valuable to me. Like 5k / week would be a good price tag. I have no debt and more stuff than I need. Now let’s me enjoy life while I still can ( and keep working on that job that I actually enjoy )

I’m not sure to understand about the net positive. The response I got was that taking time off without pay would 1) set a bad « example » or something of that sort and 2) make it hard to plan for resource availability.

Does that answer your question?

The crux here is, of course, that one week of your time is a lot more valuable than 5k to your employer if they pay you 3.7k per week, and probably a lot more than you would be willing to part with or find reasonable (think 20k+ a week)

It's a pretty infuriating setup. From the employers perspective, the amount of money you lose by having someone not work is so obscene, so quickly, that you have to fight your monkey brain pretty hard to not be a total asshole about it.

Even in this well paying industry, you could give everyone obscene raises, before time off makes any financial sense for the average employer. I don't think enough employees realise this.

Even if their time was 5 times as valuable to the company as their pay, it seems very unfair to pay someone 3.7k per week, but require 20k from them if they want to take a week off? That basically means that if you took 3 months sabbatical, and worked the rest of the year, you would actually pay your employer 100k for working those 9 months...

A system, where other people make more off your work than you do has pretty intrinsic problems.

Customers and clients of all sorts obtain consumer surpluses; if they were indifferent, they would not make purchases... Employers are just a different sort of customer.

Honest question: why does it “cost” the employer so much to have you on leave?

I heard this argument in North America but not here in Australia. I mean, small businesses might require critical people at critical times, but generally in larger orgs this shouldn’t be too hard.

Say your employer makes 20k a week of the produce of your work. This means you having a single, unpaid week off will directly cost your employer 20k. Even if you would willingly take a (from your perspective) pretty hefty pay cut of 4k for that week off, the employer would still be down 16k compared to before.

This is the weird and intuitively wrong stuff that happens, when employers make more through their employees work than their employees do, even after factoring in their salary.

Is your employer going to write down a loss of $20k on the books when you take a week off work? Probably not, because opportunity cost isn't actually an expense.

I would love to understand that better to negotiate my next job better on that specific issue.

There is something that make me think something is fishy in that approach : why are more and more places switch to unlimited PTO if it’s that costly to give folks time off?

I had unlimited PTO a couple of times, it can sucks ( pressure NOT to take any PTO for the company sake ) Or he just fine.

> There is something that make me think something is fishy in that approach : why are more and more places switch to unlimited PTO if it’s that costly to give folks time off

"Why do people get more time off now than ever before in human history (which they do)?"

There are now more forces than ever, that work against unlimited exploitation of human labor. For example, human beings in most countries have enforceable rights and they want time off, and the market that has to compete for those people. Humans are shitty machines. If you piss them off, they do shitty work. If you treat them poorly they leave. (In reality, "treating them poorly" translates to "treating them slightly less good then someone else") Since having someone quit working for you is pretty fucking expensive (assuming, of course, that they are actually being productive), you better make sure they do want to continue working for you and so you make it worth their while.

Another important example would be worker protection laws, that simply dictate certain amenities.

"Why is everyone doing unlimited PTO, specifically?"

Less clear on that one. Part of it is certainly it being a trend. If other people do it and employees want it, then you might have to go along, again, to not get pushed out of the market.

But since it clearly does not ever actually mean "unlimited PTO" (you'd be out of a job pretty quickly if you tried), an interesting followup question might be what the fuck it actually means and who benefits? Maybe employees are a little confused about how much time off to take and take less than before? Or maybe they feel pressured to underbid each other? Maybe it's also just that the flexibility it adds to the job leads to more loyal employers, which is pretty nifty in a market starved for workers.

By ‘net positive’ I mean willing to take a cut larger than is directly proportional to the reduction in hours worked. The reality is that reducing each person’s annual work will increase costs for the company overall, as it needs to pay additional overhead and benefits, which are related to employee count, rather than hours worked.

I think that everyone is a bit wary of setting difficult precedents in employment situations, as well as the possibility of creating rifts between people with different ‘deals’. That said, I think we should all place a higher priority on coming up with mutually beneficial arrangements.

I see : yes, I’m compensated roughly $3000 / week. I don’t know how much I do cost per week but probably around $4000 ? Idk.

As I stated it’s easily worth 5k for me. ( 7 days, 5 days would be $3500 )

That négociation did not go well. I got 2 extra day off and was told to stop making noise.

Oh. well.

Except that it increases employees morale and motivation and thus productivity, and reduces chances of burnout. There are benefits for the company too.

Exactly. I stay longer in a previous company with unlimited PTO ( real one ) for that reason.

It’s crazy how they don’t realize it’s just alienate workers.

This blows my mind. Throwing your prime (or prime-st remaining years) at an office. Can you put your foot down and take unpaid leave whether they like it or not? Come up with an excuse if you have to. They will always try to push you to follow their line but will you regret that later in life?

Yeah if a boss said I couldn't have 4 weeks off per year I'd probably tell them they're functionally incompetant.

Its always interesting to see how other people live.

I've rejected some jobs that offered less than 30 days (in a 5 day workweek) vacation per year.

Good for you! I will cash a few years more of that sweat US money and go back retire at home. Where every gas station attendant has 5 weeks of PTO.

Don't forget to live your life now as well. All fine and dandy to save for 'later', but if you keep going until you burn out you won't be enjoying your later that much. That or if you get run over by a bus tomorrow it was all for nothing.

You be you. May you have interesting times in early retirement.

If your job is getting in the way of your life goals, why don’t you find one that doesn’t?

Oh. Thanks, never thought about it that way. Sarcasm aside yes: I’m not gonna keep working in the US for that specific reason.

I could be wrong, but it seems that there's no great shortage of companies offering 4+ weeks of PTO per year in the US. Or are you expecting more vacation than that? (Or are perhaps otherwise constrained as to the choice of employers?)

I've got 4 weeks paid vacation. It really doesn't feel like much. That's only 1/13th of your weeks being work-free per year. I personally would like more. I think something like a 20-25 hour workweek plus 8-12 weeks of vacation would be good enough that I would stay in the workforce long term. As it stands today, it seems more feasible to continue working full time, hit FI in a few years and retire early rather than find such a good work-life balance.

We offer equity comp, health stipend, and equipment stipend for anyone contracted on a 20 hour per week minimum.

Sick/vacation days are harder because we pay for whatever I get an invoice for. Since we don’t track what people do on a day by day basis (I often don’t even know if someone is working that day until I reach out to them or slack, or vice versa), there’s nothing stopping them for billing me for extra hours. And to be honest I really wouldn’t care. I just care about output and quality of that output.

> I often don’t even know if someone is working that day until I reach out to them or slack

If you don't know if they're working, don't fucking slack them. How about you check their calendar or send an email.

Slack is not for asynchronous communication.

It's amazing how high and mighty people can be and then they ping people for non-emergencies while they're on vacation.

> Slack is not for asynchronous communication.

Depends on the organisation.

Where I'm currently working, we use Discord. Discord is similar to Slack.

It is explicitly for asynchronous communication. We are supposed to not expect immediate replies to questions and comments on Discord, especially as other teammates are in different timezones. Sometimes there's real time chat, but it depends who is on at the time.

I posted some comments yesterday. There was one reply within a few hours, and two more this morning.

Email is pretty much deprecated. Nobody uses it, except to set up calendar entries for meetings, and formal things like HR and invoices.

Why don't you just not check your Slack messages when you're on holiday?

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