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Comment by throwaway914 | Hacker News Reader

I have a pretty awful view of this:

In the less complex jobs, they struggle to get things like paternity leave and time off. We have those. We should be looking at those ridiculous things we think we don't deserve and organizing to get them. We could be a leading example for the industries that come behind us.

Paid time off is common in softwareland. Let's make it mandatory "you must take 4 weeks off minimum a year". We know "unlimited time off" is a guilt-tripping farce.

If 1 software dev can add billions of dollars of value to a company, we should be getting these ridiculous things. These things that seem like coddling us. Maybe even a formula for "if i added x% profit, I deserve y% of that"

I think hollywood is ahead of us on compensation formulas imo.

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You are not selling unions very well: why would I want mandatory time off? If I want time off I will take it, my coworkers taking or not taking it does not concern me a single bit. More so, being forced to take time off is not a benefit for me, at my current work there is no PTO accrual so I feel forced to take time off and it's not ideal, other benefits are good enough to outweigh this but with everything equal I'd choose some place where I could cash out time off over the one where I can accumulate multiple months of time off over the one where I have to use-it-or-lose-it.

There are many such policies in a union, ask anybody who is a member of one and nobody is happy with all the policies of the union. Not to mention people who want to start a career and cannot even join the union (hello SAG) and cannot get a job because they are not in the union.

I'm viewing software engineers like FAA pilots, where they must have a certain minimum amount of time between shifts so they can't [necessarily] be exhausted. But that's pertaining to long shifts. In softwareland I'm used to seeing folks who are poor at recognizing their own fatigue. I understand there are some that do not want time away, but I'd say considering the impact of our work it'd be important to mandate time away. Maybe that's reaching, but I'm looking at it from a safety aspect and the potential to do harm if you're not careful/cognizant due to long hours and extended months of work to beat deadlines. Depends on the area you're working in, I'm sure - but it's a ridiculous thing I'd love to be commonplace. Paid time away: 4 weeks minimum that you must exercise. Doesn't have to be contiguous.

You're saying your work doesn't have PTO accrual: There's another thing we should lobby for.

How many times has productivity doubled since the industrial revolution? I would love the tech world to stand still for a time so we can demand these things that seem ridiculous, because we've been succumbed to wage slavery. Even that sounds odd: Software wage slavery - puh-lease, right? Except few things have expanded the economy of several nations in the world like software, like tech. We should be much more demanding.

</harp>

And this is exactly why people fight with unions. It's not just they don't give benefits, they enable people who think they know better than oneself what one needs. In the USSR they had mandatory daily calisthenics for workers, so they would "stay healthy". With the current level of busybodies arrogance I won't be completely surprised if unions will do that too. Or ban parking lots so programmers "exercise" by biking to work, also a popular trope on HN etc. etc.

To get people on-board union organizers would need to come up with some real benefits that people would want from unions, not with what organizers themselves want.

>There's another thing we should lobby for.

Your mandatory 4 weeks off is mutually exclusive with PTO accrual, you do understand that?

I think very much you're an outlier. Rampant fatigue in the tech sector is a huge problem.

I do not see how mandatory 4 weeks off (paid) are mutually exclusive with PTO accrual. In my own corner, I've been elected to a board to represent other employees. Something we're lobbying for is a certain minimum of mandatory paid leave - as well as circumstances where being overworked would accrue additional time. Am I mixing up terms?

Something we're trying to cut down on is 7 days a week, 14-hour days. We've attacked this from a cost point of view if we can't get leadership to understand the humanitarian need. We're now putting it in policy that working lengthy hours will accrue paid (admin) leave. So the supervisor ultimately hurts themselves authorizing so much overtime. They will have to settle the books, and lose that person for their minimum and accrued time.

PTO accrual: you have a PTO balance, which you can spend as you wish and which is filled by a certain number of PTO hours each pay period.

Mandatory 4 weeks: you have to take 4 weeks off each year. You cannot spend your PTO as you wish.

In my case I don't have accrual, my PTO balance is reset every 1st of January, if I have any days left, they are "gone". I get the same balance of Jan 1st if I had 30 days of PTO on Dec 31st and if I had 0 days. It's not ideal but still is better than mandatory time off as I still have a choice to let the PTO "burn".

As far as me being an outlier I think you just get industry experience from reddit and have not worked much. Wherever I worked managers sent emails with dozens of names on the cc: regarding PTO balance reaching cap, there were always giant threads whenever HR posted about PTO cash out or cap change polices etc. If people starved for PTO that would not have been happening.

>why would I want mandatory time off?

because even with "unlimited time off" it is a herculean task to get a long vacation approved. And without those plans, accrued time off is lucky to hit 2 weeks a year. So I have to not be sick or have emergencies for 2 years straight to get what is normal in the EU?

It's easier to force mandatory vacation than go through all that. US as a whole has horrible days off policies and I'd happily take some mandatory vacation. You are even free to use it to research stuff if you really want to get ahead or whatever.

> I'd choose some place where I could cash out time off over the one where I can accumulate multiple months of time off over the one where I have to use-it-or-lose-it.

Where are you where you can accumulate "months of time off"? Every plan I've had had max accruals of anywhere from 14-28 days. You literally hit a point where you have to use it, and this is after multiple years of accrual, not a single year.

There are alternatives I listed, the choice is not between "unlimited time off" and "mandatory". "Unlimited time off" would probably stand beneath "use-it-or-lose-it" in my evaluation because with the latter I'd be able to collect my PTO balance upon resignation.

>And without those plans, accrued time off is lucky to hit 2 weeks a year.

I never had less than 20 days (4 weeks) PTO, not counting holidays and Christmas lockdown and since I did not bother to negotiate any special PTO, I believe thousands upon thousands of my coworkers had the same luck.

>So I have to not be sick or have emergencies for 2 years straight to get what is normal in the EU?

I believe if you took a SWE job for what the normal in EU you could have also negotiated 10 weeks of PTO on top of that.

>It's easier to force mandatory vacation than go through all that.

It might be easier that that, whatever that is, but it's not desirable for me.

>Where are you where you can accumulate "months of time off"?

In the last TNC where I worked, I cashed out over two months of PTO (it capped over 40 days, 380 hours or some strange number like that) when I resigned.

>Every plan I've had had max accruals of anywhere from 14-28 days

So? If PTO is so important to you just make it a condition of your employment, it's just money for the employer, take more PTO, take less other comp. It's as same as if it had been made mandatory except people who are not interested in long vacations can have cash instead.

>I never had less than 20 days (4 weeks) PTO, not counting holidays and Christmas lockdown and since I did not bother to negotiate any special PTO, I believe thousands upon thousands of my coworkers had the same luck.

I guess it's simply a problem of my industry if that's the case (you can probably guess it at this point). Or you found some extraordinary workforce, perhaps ones not based in the US.

>If PTO is so important to you just make it a condition of your employment,

I'd love for a $400k salary to be a condition too, but life is full of compromises. I simply haven't seen such deals in my industry, except for ones not based in the US, of course. I still have growth/networking plans for long term goals, so I'd rather not leave my industry just yet.

however, my industry also has horrible work conditions in general, so even if I do have a long term exit plan, I'd love for others to not go through my cruddy benefits. So I'm still all for a union.

I am talking about my employment as a SWE in various private and public businesses in the US since it's the topic of this HN post.

>I'd love for a $400k salary to be a condition too, but life is full of compromises. I simply haven't seen such deals in my industry,

I am not sure what your industry is, but in this particular thread the discussion is about programmers, and why they need a union to force mandatory 4 weeks off on everyone. If your industry is so bad that you cannot even trade PTO for your cash compensation then you might be better with unions, I don't know what industry that is and, obviously, I am not employed there.

We can't do Hollywood style compensation because we rely on actually functional computers which are obviously incapable of Hollywood math.

More seriously, we need to make sure the entire team is getting the goodies. Even your fairy-tale 1000x developers depend on good ops/infrastructure, support and QA and clever management; if they can only hire on McStaff warm bodies, they're massively hobbling those "ridiculously compensated" devs.

> We know "unlimited time off" is a guilt-tripping farce

Alternately, treat minimum time off like accountants. One cannot cook the books alone indefinitely if there's a week you're not there and somebody else has to do your job. Similarly, only having one guy that can fix specific issues that nobody else can touch means your sprawling Fortune 500 has a bus factor of 1 - which even executives can see is not smart business.

>One cannot cook the books alone indefinitely if there's a week you're not there and somebody else has to do your job.

Oh well, they deal with that when they layoff people to get 2% lower expenses for earning's call. Why should I care about a bus factor if the company doesn't?

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