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Comment by cardy31 | Hacker News Reader

$200K comp and 2 weeks of PTO. I don’t know how people handle only having 2 weeks off per year. American working culture is bizarre.

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I’m a “Software Engineer” in Boston at a large company. Base time off is 24 days flexible time off (sick and personal) plus 8 fixed holidays.

Lots of jobs are just shitty.

At Meta we get 21 PTO days + 2 choice days + 5 "Meta days" + 10 government holidays. That's a total of almost 7 weeks off...

Not sure if it's still the case but when I worked at Reddit we had "unlimited" PTO and I saw quite a few people taking over 6 weeks off per year.

If you want to see an extreme work culture maybe look at China or Japan, but as far as tech goes the US ain't bad these days.

I think most european countries have 4 weeks counted as weeks not days and american ones usually only count work days so 15 days is actually 3 weeks. At google I had 25 days in my last year = 5 weeks which is not too bad. Amazon is traditionally a shit show with only 2 weeks your first year and 3w thereafter

4 or 5 weeks, usually (although this might vary by country) counted in days where 5 days = 1 week for a full time worker.

The UK has 28 days minimum, that includes "bank holidays" (USA: Public holidays?) which are days decided by the government as holidays for everyone - like Christmas. So it's more like 5.6 weeks total in the UK, and the UK aren't particularly generous - your final year in Google, an exceptional comapany, barely meets the statutory minimum in the UK.

Google also had around 14 holidays so no it far exceeds uk min requirement. Most us companies dont count holidays in their pto numbers and most have around 10 holidays

That might be the difference, nobody (that I've met) in the US would count a public holiday in PTO time.

Google's not super exceptional in this matter (that's mostly their pay/on-site experience). I have 4 weeks (20 days) at the moment, and have for a few years, along with 8 paid holidays (28 days total). Next year I get a fifth week (33 days with holidays). I don't work at a FAANG/MANGA company, but just some random company in the Mid-West.

But I've also worked service jobs before with 0 paid days. Holidays were mandatory work days because everyone who did have decent jobs were off and wanted to eat at a restaurant. The talk about the bottom in the US being below elsewhere isn't a myth. The US doesn't like putting floors on matters this side of the 60s.

Is it still common in the UK/EU to only grant "holiday pay" (i.e. you get paid a fraction of your normal salary) during PTO? In the U.S. it has always been standard practice to get paid your full salary on PTO and national holidays. Even if that is so, I still think I prefer the European system.

At least in Finland you get the holiday pay (0.5 * salary) on top of the normal salary. It can also be converted to additional days off.

Holiday pay is full pay.

Parental leave is usually not. Parental leaves start rather high (100% or 90%) and then go slowly down (to 60% or 50%)

And sick days aren't limited, you can't control how long you're going to be sick.

PTO is measured in addition to standard holidays, which is 8-11 days depending on the company. So 2 weeks of PTO would mean 3.5-4 weeks of time off total at most professional jobs.

I haven’t seen a job posting or working at a company with only 2 weeks of PTO since I was a junior, but they’re out there.

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