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Comment by outcoldman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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