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Comment by mtmail | Hacker News Reader

"Dream Sports, an Indian fantasy sports company, forces employees to pay $1,200 if they contact people who are on a break. “Once a year, for one week, you’re kicked out of the [company] system…you don’t have Slack, emails, and calls,” founder Harsh Jain told CNBC in an interview, referring to the period as being on “unplug.” That decision helped set expectations for appropriate communications with those on vacation."

Article doesn't say why only one week per year

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The article also doesn’t say who gets the $1200 fine. Seems to me the disaffected person is the contacted employee, not the employer.

The employer getting the financial benefit of the fine seems very “Amy’s Baking Company” to me.

It's the person who initiates the contact (not the one who is on vacation):

> forces employees to pay $1,200 if they contact people who are on a break

That’s not what I am saying. I am saying who should get the money from the fine.

Company imposes the fine. Ok, they are the authority in the situation, but the company was not hurt by the contact—in reality they likely benefited from it. As a company if you are going to collect fines to discourage the behavior, why should you (the company) get the financial benefit of fine?

While it's not made clear in this case, it's somewhat common for financial companies to do this as a fraud-prevention measure.

> Article doesn't say why only one week per year

"That decision helped set expectations for appropriate vacation length per year."

And here I am, reading this in country were 30 days of vacation plus bank holidays are the norm, 24 days the bare legal limit and anything below 28 days considered exploitation.

Curious what 30 days means in this case?

When I used to work in Russia, the standard was 28 days (or 4 weeks), but there were some requirements: you have to take first vacation as 2 weeks minimum, most companies expect you to submit your vacation before the year starts, and you can take vacations only in weeks. So 28 days is actually only 20 working days. As basically it counts weekends too.

In the US it was a disappointment to learn that I only had 15 working days as vacation, but after learning the system, you can always make it work way better, by combining bank holidays with vacations, you can be on vacation like 5-6 times a year, but shorter periods, which I liked way more.

30 working days, with the clear expectation to take all in a given year. In fact, you have to take the legal minimum of 24 days (varies with contractual working hours) per year. Employers insist in taking it all, any carry overs show up as outstanding accounts in balance sheets.

As an example, you want to take of the week Christmas and New Year, the 25th and 26th are bank holidays as is Jan 1st. This year Dec. 26th was a Monday, so whole week required 4 vacation days. Some years bank holidays fabor employees, other years favor employers.

That is really cool! Not sure where you at, but feels like with so much vacation, I would just take 1-2 days every week at summer time, and have only 3-4 working days during summer. Can you do it that way as well?

Depends on the exact employer, but nothing speaks against this. Of course, you would have to respect responsebilities and colleagues' holidays.

Sounds like Germany. At least this is exactly how it works in Germany.

And regarding your plan: Depends on the employer but yes it works. I had a colleague who didn't plan to do any big vacation so he just took a day of every friday for months.

Germany it is. The expectaton sonis that people at least once two weeks in row, not sure if there is something in the labor laws, but I wouldn't be surprised. That's a good thing so, as vacation is there for employees to relax.

Basically all of (at least) Western Europe gets 4-7 weeks of vacation per year, usually in addition to several public holidays.

Depending on where you work, you might find yourself required to take vacation a full week at a time. My job (in the US) does, because we can only have two people (of 11) on vacation per day, and before the week-at-a-time rule was implemented, certain employees would immediately sign out (nearly) every Monday or Friday of the month, meaning that nobody else could take a full week off.

> So 28 days is actually only 20 working days. As basically it counts weekends too.

Similar in my country. The legal minimum by law is 24 days and based on a 6 day work week (Mon-Sat) thus for most workers it's 20 days.

It is also very interesting to read some articles about countries with most vacation, where Russia is also listed like they provide 28 days a year, that make it to be in the top of the countries with the most holidays. And we already know this is not true.

Similar, everyone is Russia believe that they are paying only 7% income tax, which is also not true, because your employer pays close to 40% of the taxes for you, which you don’t know of.

Based on that, if “regular” Russian folk (without doing much research) looks online, they think that they live in one of the best countries:

- taxes lower than everywhere else, they think it is 7%, when it is close to 40-50% (one of the highest in the world). - vacations are only 20 working days, which is good on average.

That sounds similar to the UK system in that working days are mon - fri and weekend bankholidays roll over into the week (eg If Christmas Day is on a Sunday, Monday is a bank holiday). Compared to France where I work where Saturday can be counted as a work day (even if it isn't usually worked) and bankholidays that fall during the weekend aren't rolled over. In 2022 in the UK you could have taken 3 days and been off 25 Dec - 02 Jan whereas in France it would have required taking a full 7 days off.

I appreciate that explanation. I had no idea that some countries handle vacation like you describe in France. The US system of vacation days seems to be very similar to the UK - only counting from M-F and the bank/national holidays that occur on weekends are "observed" on either a Monday or a Friday.

This was a joke, alluding to a recent trend of companies switching to the "unlimited" number of vacation days (just recently Microsoft has announced it). Which leads to the teams enforcing unofficial limits to the vacation days, no more than 1-2 weeks, or you will be evaluated a low performer and fired or refused promotions/benefits. Not saying that's a rule, but it should be expected outcome.

One week still seem low compared to 25 minimum days "People working in India are entitled to 18 vacation days a year along with an additional 7 days of casual leaves, totaling to 25 a year." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...) but I'm otherwise not familiar with Indian work customs.

> That decision helped set expectations for appropriate vacation length per year

The article says

> That decision helped set expectations for appropriate communications with those on vacation

I'm not sure what motivates someone to manipulate a quote in such a highly deceiving manner.

Come on, that was a joke. It's literally two lines below the actual quote in the base comment.

perhaps not intentionally deceptive but clearly grossly negligently deceptive

I agree. I promise to be more careful with quotes in the future. I'm using them very often to signify "sarcastic" subtext, and missed that it could have been interpreted as a real quote.

especially by dumbasses like me who didn't read the article

Yeah right, it was an appropriate joke, I didn't really account for the context. My apologies.

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