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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Huh. Is that not common vernacular where you're from?

I’m from Eastern Europe and I’ve learned what PTO means after working with US folks.

For us it was always called “vacation”. It is taken for granted that sick days, funerals (and plenty more that I can’t list from my head) are always paid.

That makes sense. I forget sometimes that we got vacation and sick days munged together into PTO.

"You'll get more time off!†"

† assuming you never get sick.

Thanks!

In my experience, it's not common in English-speaking countries outside US/Canada. "Leave" is common, or just "holiday", or non-abbreviated "time off" (the "paid" is implied!)

> Huh. Is that not common vernacular where you're from?

I don’t know about the parent commenter, but I am of the opinion that regardless of how common an abbreviation is, it should always be expanded, unless the circumstances prevent you from doing that. Here, in Hacker News, submissions must have a title with maximum 80 characters, but look at this:

  30 characters -> Workers of the World, Take PTO
  46 characters -> Workers of the World, Take Paid Time Off (PTO)

I can only speculate why the original poster decided to use the abbreviation alone.

Wouldn’t you prefer to err on the side of caution and expand abbreviations whenever possible? Particularly in contexts where the audience may not be familiar with the abbreviation or where clarity is particularly important. I believe that expanding abbreviations is a simple but effective way to demonstrate inclusiveness and promote greater understanding and participation in communication, especially in multicultural contexts, like Hacker News, where different people have different levels of familiarity with certain terms.

This is very common in technical documentation, specifically things like RFPs (Request for Proposals) <-- Is to state the acromyn the first time, and expand it and throughout the RFP you can then use the acronym, the real reason this is important is that RFPs --> $MONEY and thus, will be scrutinized by the "penny pinchers" who will lack a lot of domain knowledge being addressed with an RFP for a project.

For example, I, as a Director of OPs was constantly educating our CFO on cloud spend, and would have to kind of train him on technical matters while at the same time explaining where all our costs are etc...

Or when designing a huge project (I have worked on many projects with budgets over $1 billion) and going through vendor selection processes, where we review the RFPs with the vendors and the finance holders for the project, there are many times when one has to justify telling Mr. Money Bags why simply accepting the cheapest offer is not sufficient.

This was actually a type of work, which at the time felt tedious, but now I realize how much I actually liked this aspect of my career.

The company I work for uses Requests for Discussion (RFD) where they really mean RFPs. Drives me batty.

And yes, all the documentation just said RFD as well. :)

It's one of the reasons I heavily use the HTML (hypertext markup language ;) <abbr> abbreviation tag [0]. I think it's useful for reminding the reader what the acronym/abbreviation/initialism means so they don't have to backtrack to where it was originally referenced. I know how it feels to read something with unknown abbreviations because I've read comments here on hackernews about machine learning.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ab...

The acronym does not make sense outside of English.

With a little lest context I would default to Power Take off (like on a tractor, or large truck)

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