10-15 days’ vacation is pretty bare minimum if you are trying to get top talent. Maybe think about adding 5 days onto those buckets to get higher quality candidates.
As someone else pointed out, some companies still offer vacation time and sick leave separately. None of the companies I've worked for still do, all have combined those into a single Paid Time Off pool.
An allotted amount of "sick days" doesn't really make sense anyway, not like you can choose to be sick next year.
(Only exception is for long term sicknesses, if you are sick for more than 6 consecutive weeks, then the next week your health insurance will pay you 60% of your normal wage instead. Or if there is no hope of you ever being able to work, again insurance.)
Oh and if you are sick on vacation you get your vacation days back as you were not really able to take advantage of them.
I really disagree strongly with trying to push things onto companies.
The government want to pay basic income? Great! The government want to provide health care? Great!
This to me is the main advantage I like about basic income, is it really seems like we can get rid of all these suboptimal laws with horrible abuses and bad tradeoffs, including: - min wage - overtime - vacation requirements - healthcare requirements
So businesses can just focus on what they do best and the government provides a safety net.
In Germany it's just more structured. There's multiple special rules, like the employee must be working at the company for a while, it has different rules for companies with fewer employees, companies can't be in an emergency situation, there might be the possibility tax rebates.
This is mostly handled by careful accounting. You need to provision future money for it rather than living in a reverse "paycheck to paycheck" situation. I never had a German company but I had a company in a country with similar arrangements and my accountant made me learn it all.
It also has the side effect of having businesses to care about employee quality of life. Someone working 12 hours a day will probably burn out quickly.
More or less everyone has a 5-day week. Most jobs offer 25-30 days/year + unlimited sick days
I've had interviews where they were pretty open about the company culture not being one where you take vacation.
There is something to be said for working people a ton of hours to compensate for talent/skill. A few notable Canadian startups are built heavily on evening and weekend labour of immigrants and young people.
In a way, being open about it actually makes sure you get exactky those candidates. As I said, exploitative.
Yeah, just saving the world, no big deal.
Usually those claims are bullshit, but not in this case. If I had the qualifications to meaningfully contribute to this, I'd jump at the chance and minimize my vacations for the next several years.
It is better than calling it "Unlimited Vacation" and then leaving it up at discretion. They're being up-front and honest about it. It should be totally OK to advertise a job with 0 vacation days. We're talking about fully functional and grown up adults who have great college education who can make that decision if they would like to take on a high-responsibility and high-risk job.
In fact, I would argue the complete opposite. Doing anything else is interference and forceful coercion.
We use the word exploitative to capture that sort of scenario. It suggests that the employer is exploiting candidates' extenuating circumstances. It's generally not sustainable for either party and the side effect for the employer is high churn and low productivity/quality.
The entitlement is simply astonishing and incongruent, completely untenable even in the most charitable interpretation.
Furthermore, I believe that in jobs like this, companies cannot afford to hire someone that is going to take 8 months parental leave, for example. That would be consider exploitation of the employer by the employee in my view.
I prefer to give people plenty of holidays. Enjoy life, recharge. I often come up with some of my best work ideas while or after a holiday.
(I'm often concerned about the productivity of people who don't take time off. I work with independently contracting software engineers and some of the most productive ones take plenty of time off)
But since that's not the case, there are alternatives.
Go and ask any PhD student at a top 10 CS university what they think of 20 days vacation and 30 hour work weeks. I think you'll find the answer expands your worldview.