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Comment by jeremyjarvis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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