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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

"Oh, and we decide when you take those vacations."

This is sort-of normal elsewhere, actually. Even in Europe, employer has sway over vacations. Not a dictatorial power, but No will often be No for a certain period. It makes sense in many industries; you can't have a power plant running with too few qualified people present.

Edit: downvoted for a perfectly neutral response. Yes, looking at my own country's labor code, vacations are determined by the employer. They will likely meet you halfway and approve vacations for July and August (slow season) without too much hassle, but they do not have to. As said above, it makes sense; certain skeleton crews must be maintained at all times in many industries.

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In Europe, worked in couple of countries. All the employers had the right to force you to take vacation at a certain date I have never seen it done. I am talking about software industry ofc.

Software is more permissive, yes. OTOH doctors are very used to have their options limited by the hospital they work in.

In Switzerland for example, doctors can take vacation as they want (apart form Christmas/New Year/Easter when its strictly managed by hospital), but they need to apply 6-12 months in advance.

Another example of the situation above are factory workers, ie in Germany there are millions of cars moving south every summer during specific weeks valid for their part of the country, when +-whole factory goes out.

> In Switzerland for example, doctors can take vacation as they want (apart form Christmas/New Year/Easter when its strictly managed by hospital)

You need a more diverse workforce. Where I am, the Persian guy will work every Jan 1 as long as we guarantee him the first day of spring off. The Muslim lady will do Dec 24/25 as long as she gets some other specific day off.

The hard days to schedule are “family day” and other non-cultural holidays.

> You need a more diverse workforce. Where I am, the Persian guy will work every Jan 1 as long as we guarantee him the first day of spring off.

This is only a solution some of the time. I worked through Christmas / New Year's at eBay the year I joined, because I hadn't accrued enough vacation for it to make sense to take vacation.

But there was no work to do, because... everyone else was on vacation. Having me in the office benefited no one.

Some employers just start you off with 3 or whatever accrued days of vacation, or let you go into the negatives within reason.

Though I’ve often try to work the non-holiday days around Christmas because it lets me clean everything up without anyone asking for much. But we always keep a skeleton team around in case (critical operation).

> Some employers just start you off with 3 or whatever accrued days of vacation, or let you go into the negatives within reason.

That solves the problem considered from my perspective, but it's less good from eBay's perspective. What the company really wants is to make the vacation at that time compulsory. If I have nothing better to do, under the system I experienced, I can still come into the office and eBay has to pay me despite the fact that they have nothing for me to do.

This is just optimization. Work when most people take vacation and you can have an easy few weeks, then spend your vacation when you want.

The other tactic I saw was block out vacation, but don’t actually take it so you actually have time to catch up on work. Every leaves you alone (because they think you’re off).

The chaos of the NHS beaurocracy in the UK means that doctors don't get rota for their 4-6 month rotations earlier than usually 2-6 weeks before they start, so you aren't able to plan ahead further than the rotation you're in

In financial industry AFAIK it's somewhat known tactic - against fraud. So you're required to take PTO every so often in specific minimal-sized chunk, because it acts both as sort-of chaos monkey, and exposes possible fraud issues when whatever schemes fail due to missing a person they depend on to execute flawlessly.

Generally, the guidance in the US is that employees who perform/have the ability to perform sensitive financial actions take a minimum of two consecutive weeks off per year (that's the guidance from the FDIC, Federal Reserve, and NY DFS). There's no requirement that the employer dictate when their employees take that time, just that their vacation/time off policy must require it.

I can confirm this one. The technical term is MTA, Mandatory Time Away.

Yeah I think it's more something done in industrial contexts (shut down the factory for two weeks, etc). Though definitely less painful when you end up with 6 weeks a year of days off in total.

It happens whenever a minimal presence is needed, even in the software industry, e.g. for support.

In general management prefers team members sort things out among themselves. E.g. one goes on leave during the first week of the school holiday the other on the second week.

In the UK lots of companies shut down between Christmas and New Years. Some of our suppliers in Europe also shutdown for a couple weeks in August.

I'm actually a bit surprised that you haven't come across it before because I've always been under the impression that these winter and summer shutdowns are pretty common.

Is this not the case in most of the world? me and my SO both work in areas in which have to operate 24/7. (healthcare & telecom). Usually, you either arrange this far in advance with your team. (My SO has to give in her holiday period preference for summer atleast a year in advance) or you manage it with coworkers (my case, so atleast one of our team is present during the summer months).

Working during the peak holiday seasons usually isn't too bad because vacations are more expensive, so going outside of season is better. (but not possible if you have school aged kids).

Also, tons of downtime to get errands fixed that have been left all year.

Only normal in certain companies.

I left a company due to that! Being forced to take holiday during the peak super-expensive period :/

I can understand that. I am so bad at subordinating myself to anyone else that I have been self employed for vast majority of my adult life.

But a society of my clones would probably fall apart.

Yes, for teachers vacation always coincides with national holidays.

As a child, this always sucked. Whenever I had a day off, they did too!

The government also cut back on their professional development days (probably because it created a problem for parents to arrange childcare), but I heard these days became useless anyway as the budget for them got eliminated.

Europe is a big place. While I think my employer (UK scale-up) reserves the right to decide when you take holidays, I've never seen this enforced, even over Christmas.

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