- 23 days off every year for everyone.
- 5 extra days off for COVID years (but doesn't accumulate between years)
- 18 days of (paid) sick leave (also for family)
- Lots of leaves for stuff like family sickness (1 month a year), bereavement (10 days), paternity (6 weeks), maternity (6 weeks) on top of the ones we get from the government (3.5 months parenting leave for example).
- 2 times a year where taking a holiday only costs half called roughly "office shushing" where you take 2 days but are away 5.
- Plenty of holidays etc, requirement to take at least of 5 days consecutive (so 10 days off with weekends) of vacation a year and it only accumulates up to one year's worth so you are required to use your PTO in practice.
After a long time, you also get a sabbatical which is pretty crazy to me in a tech company.
In practice you take few long vacations (e.g. 1 month off twice a year during the times of the hadmama where it "costs" half) and a bunch of short ones (long weekends).
This isn't based on level and you don't have to be a principal engineer to get these benefits it's just market competition - SW1s fresh out of college get the same amount of vacation.
- 25 days off every year for every one (5 days minimum can carry over). Most tech companies have 30 days off.
- No extra days for COVID
- Unlimited sick days
- 240 days of parental leave (so per parent. Increase if you have more than one child (twins, triplets). Plus 10 days for the non-birthing parent to be together the first weeks. 96 days per parent can be saved beyond the 4th year.
- 17 holidays but they are sometimes on weekends and thus give no extra days. The only day that gives you a spare day if it happens on a weekend is our "independance" day.
* 30 regular days off, that have to be used by year+1, and HR people usually argue with people to use their days off ( the labour inspection checks this kind of stuff)
* 10-12 ( depending on year because it also covers for public holidays that are on a weekend that year) "rest" days if you're not on the regular 35h/week contract ( so most people in IT and similar, because it's supposed that you work more). They have some caveats like not carrying over.
* Some rather limited parental leave ( non-birthing parent's leave was recently increased to like a month, and birthing parent's is somewhere around 3-4 months if i recall correctly? Far too little if you ask me, coming from an ex-communist country where it's 1-3 years)
* 11 public holidays (you don't get a compensation if they fall on a weekend, usually, unless the employer so choses)
240 days of parental leave sounds amazing and very generous!
I don't like the deal, to me it feels like a ripoff. But the government has conveniently put half our income tax on the employer as an "employer tax" that many people don't even know exists, so people think our tax is 30-ish percent since they don't see it on their payslip.
Income tax: 30% (of income)
Employer tax: 31% (on top of income)
VAT: 25% (When i spend money)
Petrol, Alcohol: Ω%
Back in the days there was a system called "Tjänstemannaansvar" which held our politicians accountable if they grossly mismanaged our money. It's sadly been taken out, since the politicians don't want any responsibility.
I like the nordic model, I just don't like that our politicians can spend money as they like without any repercussions, and since our government is big/fat it's worse than if it was a small/slim government.
If "decided by government" had a clearer, more transparent, less corrupt path from "elected by the people" that'd be great. But here we are buying "medical socks" for 100$ a pair rather than the identical 10$ one that is always out of stock.
We used to have great roads, great healthcare, great social security and all other things you'd expect to get for paying 50% of your income to it. We don't have either of these anymore, taxes haven't gone down significantly during this time, things have just become worse :(
I very much doubt that. In most EU countries sick days are limited to 90 days, after that a panel of doctors will examine your case and move you to disability pay for example, as you can't just be on sick leave "unlimited".
But overall we in NL are not familiar with the stress of losing our days off because of illness. This should be the norm for every decent country that cares about human well-being.
Isn't that illness called a sick day? Like I said, everyone calls it unlimited sick days, but in Austria, and I think in Poland, Germany too it's limited to 90 days per year. Sick longer than 90 days gets your cased evaluated by a doctor's committee and probably moved to disability pay. But I doubt there is such a thing as unlimited sick day. Sure, you can be sick for an unlimited time, but your employee and insurance status will change after a certain number of days.
Even if you get serious ill your employer has to pay, so from what I know, employers need to insure themselves against this. Only after 2 years are they off the hook and will people be transferred to disability pay if required.
In some sense, discussing about 90 days vs. 'unlimited' sick days is not really relevant. 90 days would feel like unlimited to me as a regular healthy employee anyway.
But to be very clear, in NL we don't have these 90 days of sick leave. We don't have a budget as an employee for sick leave.
Have you checked your national insurance conditions? In Austria this also isn't in any employment contract because it's ratified in the national health insurance agreement everyone working here must have, which limits everyone to 90 days sick leave but many people don't know this and think they have "unlimited" sick leave. IIRC, Poland and Germany also have 90 days of sick leave by law.
Maybe you're not fully aware of it but I'd assume your national health insurance will specify a similar threshold by law that's obviously not in your employment contract.
https://dutchreview.com/expat/sick-leave-netherlands/
The two years I mentioned are right.
>Some Dutch workplaces include “no-pay waiting days” (loonvrije wachtdagen) — these are the first one or two days of your sickness where the employer is not obliged to pay wages.
Here in the UK we can "self-certify" sickness for anything less than 5 days. If you're ill for less than a week then you just tell your boss you're ill and don't come to work. You're still paid. If you're ill for more than 5 days then you need to get sign off from a doctor. You're still paid for the time you're sick. If you're ill for several weeks or longer then you move to "statutory sick pay" which is usually less than your salary but some employers will still pay you your full salary. If you're off work for a really long time (6 months+) then most employers will negotiate with you to resign.
At no point are you ever really in danger of losing your job though, or being forced to return to work. Employers are mostly pretty good about it, especially in tech.
In theory I could be genuinely ill every other week for a full year and self-certify 26 individual weeks off without needing to visit a doctor or losing my job. In that sense, we absolutely do have "unlimited" sick days.
- an unlimited PTO (you'd have to explain going beyond, say, 4 weeks, but otherwise working)
- mandatory 2 payed weeks off (1 in December and 1 in Jun)
- mostly remote using the "office-hub" model, only requiring presence when necessary
- every 2 weeks there something we call a Focus Friday, when nobody can contact you and you are free to concentrate on things you want to work on.
This covers all offices, i.e. Texas, UK, Spain.
Pretty comfortable, I'd say. I don't feel I need more time to restore some energy.
> (you'd have to explain going beyond, say, 4 weeks, but otherwise working)
Unless "I'd like to take a 5-week vacation" isn't enough explanation in itself, it clearly isn't working. An employee shouldn't have to justify _why_ they want to go on vacation.
Me: I'd like to take a 5-week vacation
Manager: Why?
Me: I haven't taken a long vacation in about year.
Manager: Sure thing. Approved.
This is what happens and it's better than dealing with accrued PTO where I have to keep track of the days off. I'm sure companies are doing this because they've done the math and see that on average people take less time off with UTO. But if you have a good team and good managers then it isn't difficult to take time off.
Additionally, in the accrued PTO case, if you end up taking 5 weeks straight with absolutely no justification and your manager isn't good then there's probably a chance at retaliation. In either case, it depends on your relation with your manager.
I do agree that mandatory vacation is probably the best however, it's extremely rare in America which is where the unlimited vacation trend has started.
The US office had untracked PTO, and from the get-go he would let the Americans know that the French office had around 7 weeks time off, and that they'd use it, so they should as well.
He took essentially the month of August off, which did help establish that 4 week vacations were "normal".
I (an European) always took this as granter yet considered it crazy people have as little as just a single month of vacation a year. It's been just recently I found out this isn't even the case in the USA where people normally have just 2 weeks. This scared the heck out of me. Why even live at all if all you have to live is 2 weeks a year and you have to sell the remaining 50 weeks of your life time yearly? I would rather commit suicide.
In America, our government and media are all controlled by corporations, so there's a massive propaganda machine that tells the population they need to be workaholics if they want a chance to be wealthy.
Also, employees have no leverage. You can't decline a job because they only offer 2 weeks PTO when everyone else also only offers 2 weeks.
People that push for a culture shift for more PTO are shouted down as being lazy, and the propaganda machine screams about how bad small businesses would be hurt. The machine LOVES to talk about small businesses, and people fall for it.
This is less than the PTO mandated by law in many European countries. Hardly unlimited.
I had to double check this as it doesn't match my experience.
Yes, it is a minimum of 28 days, but that can include Bank Holidays (normally 6 days, though we have extra "Jubilee" Bank Holidays this year), so in practice it's 20 days plus Bank Holidays minimum.
In Spain 22 days + public holidays.
That's the minimum, many jobs give more, e.g. 28-32 days + public holidays. (On my last job in Britain it increased slowly, when I left I had 33 plus the public holidays.)
It would be informative to see if the people in Britain and Spain take more holiday than those in Texas.
In fact, this doesn’t really sound attractive at all. At my current employer I work 32h/week, get 6½ weeks off (+ bank holidays), am entirely remote, and every Wednesday is entirely free of meetings.
Mandatory PTO is the best. That way you don't have fomo, no pressure to work whole on vacation and no catching up to do when you're back.
I'd like to work somewhere with more mandatory vacation.
Overall I'd say in the US there is a LOT more appetite for "how I'd like to allocate my PTO" vs things like "how I'd like to divvy my working hours" at most places.
Today is the first day of my month long vacation in Italy on my new team