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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I interviewed at Amazon and got an offer recently, but I have to admit, it did kind of sound like this kind of job. I really liked the offer stage, where I asked for 4 weeks vacation (what I have now) instead of their standard 2 weeks. "That's not negotiable! It wouldn't be fair if you got better benefits just because you're better at negotiating than others on your team!"

True. Offer rejected.

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Europe and Australia have forever ruined me with their standard 4 weeks of vacation time. I can't fathom ever going back to anything less.

True. The 'standard' in France is 5 weeks.

Six weeks here in Denmark and a maximum work week of 37 hours. You have to wonder how we ever get anything done here...

Productivity and long hours are inversely proportional, in my book.

Having the time to take off, and also the cultural push to take it all, makes a huge difference in productivity from my perspective.

Out of curiosity, is there much of a start-up culture there? If so, do founders (and first employees) adhere to the same guidelines? At least here in the U.S., founding/working at a start-up basically assumes long-ish hours.

No, our country is notoriously lacking in entrepreneurship, make of that what you will.

We do still manage to have a pretty good economic output and some business success stories though, so there might be something to be said for working fewer hours.

Yeah, I wasn't calling all Danes lazy--just curious if a notoriously overworked sub-culture might exist there.

Sweden has 5 weeks of vacation and a 40 hour standard work week, and pretty successful companies such as Spotify, Skype, Voddler, SoundCloud, Flattr, etc, were founded here. I doubt most of those founders only worked 40 hour work weeks though, as an entrepreneur you decide your own hours, and overtime for regular employees is not uncommon.

It probably varies a lot depending on company culture. A friend working at a startup recently got hi-5's from the bosses when he said he had worked 11 hours a day the entire previous week, no talk about taking compensation leave to rest or anything like that. At my company (not a startup) an 11 hour day would be pretty extreme, and if my boss was aware he would probably insist I come in late the following day.

Old joke: "Being a founder means you can work half-days if you want. The best part is you get to choose which 12 hours that is."

Awesome!

I think the the start up culture is less prevalent here in the Netherlands than in SV but it certainly exists.

From my personal experience I can say these guidelines are not strictly adhered. The young, university educated people I hang out with all work more then 40 hours and take about 20 vacation days and work 40-60 hours, more if necessary.

However I think direct comparison is pretty hard. What does count towards the total amount worked? For example including social drinks in their total biasing the amount upwards.

"Nanny-Culture, Lack of Risk Taking, Not Sharing What makes Finland such a wonderful place to live and raise a family may ultimately be what kills it as a startup hub."

I've looked at the European statistics a while ago, and the average working hours are pretty much the same wherever you go, regardless of what's the maximum per week, how many vacation days you get and how many holidays the country has…

And I think the general first-world deviation isn't that big either, apart from the Koreans (and to a minor degree, Americans).

Six weeks is not uncommon in the USA if you are in higher ed.

When we talk about vacation weeks, we mean sets of 5 working days, not 7. Right?

So e.g. 2 week vacation == 10 work days off.

Yes.

Yes, but vacation = 10 work days off + weekends and holidays, right?

You sure the legal minimum is six weeks? Just got hired and my contract says five weeks paid holiday (sorry can't disclose the company name).

I just checked and you are right, it is actually five weeks. Sorry about that. (I have my own business so the rules don't apply to me. Let's just say I have grounds for an epic lawsuit against myself :))

For me, it's hard to make even 4 weeks work when I have to count programming conferences as vacation. My ideal job would offer me twice that vacation (or pay for 4 conferences a year, their choice). So far, it seems nobody will do this in the US.

(And you wonder why people are always posting to HN about how they can't hire anyone. The problem is not that people don't want to work for you. The problem is that you can't afford them.)

I've never had to use vacation time for conferences, but then again I only go to one conference a year. Here's hoping my Aussie employer bucks that trend!

At Oracle UK I used to get up to 42 days, of which 10 could roll over to the following year. We were periodically overworked and under-compensated anyway (which is why I left). Our US colleagues hated were really envious.

The legal minimum in the UK is now 5.6 weeks; That's still amongst the lowest in Europe. I simply cannot comprehend how even the best paid workers in America expect less holiday than the lowest-paid European labourers.

The reason is because the market doesn't demand vacation time. We get paid more and have less taxes, though.

Regarding income, it varies greatly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income

As for taxes, I'm Norwegian, live in the UK and looked into moving to California. At my income level taxes would end up within 2-3 percentage point of each other regardless of which of the three places I'd live.

Difference being I'd get far more services for my tax money in the UK or Norway.

There certainly are places in the US where you'd pay far less taxes than in almost all of Europe, but far from everywhere.

This is when most people realize that the U.S. is a third-world country.

If not that, it's when they go to the doctor in France and ask about billing and get a funny stare.

Look at the bright side: it is still the richest third world country, at least until Wall Street casino wrecks it for good...

Noooo. They seriously only give 2 weeks holiday a year? that's insane.

That's very normal in the US.

If I recall correctly, the US is the only developed country without mandatory minium paid employment leave (federal employees excepted). Which small-government fans might accept readily, but it also has amongst the lowest actual average vacation times… Apparently free citizens want to work. (One statistic had the Canadian average lower, though)

Strangely enough, this doesn't seem to have a straight-forward correlation with yearly hours worked. Italians have about the same number as Americans, but 20 mandatory days and quite a lot of Catholic holidays. Koreans and the Greek seam to top that list, although I'm currently not a big believer in Greek statistics…

Italian office hours are something like 8-12 and 2-8 or so. The (official) workday is much longer there,with a nice break in the middle.

2 weeks vacation plus 6 days personal days when you start. After a year, they bump it up to 3 weeks. They raise it to 4 weeks after 6 years of employment. Not too terrible, really, but not great either.

Two in year one, three in year two.

Plus an additional 6 "personal days".

That being said, I've yet to actually take a vacation day at Amazon, despite regularly getting automated e-mails about it from HR. I send a polite OOTO e-mail to my team and that seems to be sufficient. This may very from team to team and manager to manager.

I get 7 days paid holiday here in Taiwan. and additional 1 week as a part of Chinese new year. 2 weeks/year is twice better to me.

You know, I think when I was hired, I went from 3 weeks of vacation to 2 weeks... and I didn't even think about it, because I was too busy dealing with the fact that they didn't want to pay me anywhere close to what I was making before. Which was, by the way, a below market salary paid by a startup, to begin with! I finally got them to meet it with a "hiring bonus" that would match my previous salary for the first years I was there... I left before that ran out.

Other mistake I made-- I'd been working for startups for so long, that I really, really wanted a nice, stable job, where I would be able to put in 40-60 hours a week, and leave my work at home. That's something they pitched me on, too. So, I compromised... I figured, less stress, a little less compensation.

Turns out, it was much more stress. Even if your hours are lower, really bad management can make your life terrible. (and it wasn't just my boss, it was pretty much the whole of engineering management, near as I could tell.)

According to "Showstopper!", Microsoft would allow developers to go MIA for a bit after completing a tough project. That seems like a fair policy if you have a mature set of developers who deliver on their commitments.

There are significant parts of Amazon where this does happen - but it really varies from department to department, and manager to manager.

The depressing thing is, when you do get some time off after pulling long hours for a tough project, it's all done under the table. Amazon is extremely cheap when it comes to off-time, so managers essentially have to put their ass on the line to let their reports get well-deserved downtime.

Kudos to the bosses that do it, but one of the reasons that eventually convinced me to leave was that... things like this shouldn't have to be done with a nudge and a wink.

At MS it's pretty typical for the pace of work to become very, very casual after a release (which typically happens every few years).

That's terrible. MIA is the worst airport in the world. How is that supposed to help morale?

Oh, wait. I misread that.

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