Comment by inglor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inglor | Hacker News Reader

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At Microsoft Israel we have:

- 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.

In Sweden we have

- 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.

In France we get:

* 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)

Nice! (To be clear, the 18 days are paid sick leave - after 18 days you get social security meaning the government pays for your sick leave and not Microsoft - you still get paid but it's capped at ±100K USD a year which is significantly less).

240 days of parental leave sounds amazing and very generous!

When I look at my tax statement nothing about what's mentioned by parent(gp) looks generous anymore. 50% of what my employer pays for me is conveniently put into the governments pockets rather than mine. Add 25% VAT, petrol that costs 2$ per litre, alcohol that's taxed through the roof, another 20% tax if you make more than 44KSEK/mo.

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.

What country do you live in? In Sweden the Social Insurance is paid by the employer and that tax is in 2022 31,42%, of the gross 2.6% is for the Parental part.

Sweden, maybe I wasn't clear enough. I'm sorry about that.

Income tax: 30% (of income)

Employer tax: 31% (on top of income)

VAT: 25% (When i spend money)

Petrol, Alcohol: Ω%

I don't think anyone expects the Nordic model to be free. Higher taxes in exchange for the associated benefits is what has been decided by the government, elected by the people. Of course there will be people against it, as well as people for it.

The problem is the disassociation that keeps happening where "everyone" (literally everyone I talk to) thinks that the government is spending money on things that we don't want them to spend on.

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 :(

>- Unlimited sick days

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".

In NL the concept of ‘sick days’ doesn’t exist. If you are ill, you are ill. You can get the flu and be out for a week or so and nobody bats an eye. Some use more than others and some may game the system.

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.

Yeah, not having unlimited sick days also had the bad outcome that people go to work sick (to avoid using sick days) and infect other people.

>In NL the concept of ‘sick days’ doesn’t exist. If you are ill, you are ill

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.

I have not seen anything about 90 sick-days in any contract with an employer ever, even when I was still a regular 'waged' employee.

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.

> I have not seen anything about 90 sick-days in any contract with an employer ever, even when I was still a regular 'waged' employee

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.

Forget about the 90 days, it doesn’t apply to NL.

https://dutchreview.com/expat/sick-leave-netherlands/

The two years I mentioned are right.

That's pretty good. I guess Austria just wants to be employer heaven.

From the link you posted, I find this baffling that this is allowed in Europe.

>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.

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".

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.

How do you get any work done?

Well rested and unstressed people are more productive than people "being busy" for 50+ hours per week, 50 weeks per year.

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