How Google became such a great place to work
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Is it also true that there is no minimum amount of annual leave allowance in the US? You have to negotiate it?
edit Not to suggest Ireland is ahead of the curve here, paternity leave does not exist whereas it would in, say, Sweden.
Those working blue collar jobs, however, aren't always so lucky. They might not have any vacation days or even holidays.
<generalisations follow>
In reality most IT companies give ~25 days and give the 8 public holidays off too. Longer service often gets you more days. I'm up to 27 days/year (plus the 8 public holidays).
Any reasonable IT company will also require you to take all of your holiday during the year, it's a manager's responsibility to ensure that his team are using their holiday. There's certainly no pressure to not use all of the days! I can carry over the odd day or two across years but generally not allowed to accrue large amounts of unused paid leave.
We don't have a concept of an allocation of "sick days" either, if you're unwell for a day or a few days you can self certify yourself off work sick. If you're ill for longer than a week the expectation is that you'll provide a letter from a Doctor explaining the absence. If you're ill frequently then the company will discuss it with you (and if you're pulling frequent sickies then that'll be dealt with as a disciplinary). I've had 3 days off sick in the last 5 years.
20 days is until you have 10 years of work experience, but graduating counts as 8 years of experience so most people just have to work 2 years to jump to 26 days.
Broadly speaking, salaried employees in the US can expect a statutory minimum of 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave. Fairly few states mandate paid maternity/paternity leave. They're available at many companies as a perk.
Broadly speaking, Americans enjoy broad discretion in negotiating the amount and format of paid leave. By law and custom, the practical minimum is ~2 weeks plus holidays for most white collar workers. We historically do not have European-style vacations as an expected feature of the social contract.
edit Anecdotally, even companies based in the UK have had trouble with the difference in employment law when setting up (or wrapping up) here, though I would put that down to lack of diligence rather than any cultural thing.
12½% corporate tax rate. EU base. Less strict attitude towards EU data protection et al.
find the adjustment difficult - 20 days minimum
Heh, reminds me of someone I know working for an Irish tech company that was bought by a US company. They had to sit the new owners down and say "Yes, we are actually entitled to paid holidays. No, that's the law here."
But that's a different story...
And yes, it is true that there is no minimum leave federally. I don't know about individual states. The Department of Labor is linked[0] on the wikipedia article about leave, seems to be an accurate source.
[0]: http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/workhours/vacation_leave.htm
http://www.netapp.com/us/careers/your-career/benefits-new.as...
Google's actual US benefits are scattered, unfortunately, but:
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Google-RVW2...
NetApp offers a $3000 401k match, whereas Google does $8750 (50% of maximum) with no vesting.
NetApp gives you 25 days vacation a year after 10 years, 15 days after year 2, 20 on year 6. You get 25 days after your 5th year at Google, 20 on 4th year, start at 15.
NetApp offers $5250/year in tuition reimbursement. Google offers $13,000/year.
In addition to all of these, it's well known that Google provides donation match to a charity, gym reimbursement, heavily subsidized massages, sick days as needed.
If Google benefits are hype, I'd love to see data that shows where other companies beat them out.
Please don't misunderstand me, obviously Google is one of the better place to work these days. Their benefits are great, but it's not far and away best for every individual. Articles like this are marketing for Google.. grumble grumble link to pg's submarine article.
Anyway, the benefits are confirmable if you just ask someone who works there - those are the baseline benefits everyone already gets just by signing an employment contract. While I don't doubt that this article is a plant, I was making a point that I am pretty sure their benefits are best in industry, and I haven't seen any evidence that there are any companies that there are, as you say, several places that are on par with Google across the board. In fact, when I've spoken with people, the number of companies in Silicon Valley that are even close (NetApp is certainly one of them) can be counted on one hand.
I love it whenever people bring up Sweden and don't realise that countries like Sweden and Germany can't sustain the benefits they give out. When I get older I won't have the same access.
Germany pays around 50% taxes, Sweden it's around 30-40% for software developer salaries.
Furthermore, maternity leave and holiday time are neither expensive nor are they getting more so in the future.
What is more worrying in the long term are benefits associated with retirement because due to demographic changes that cost will continue to grow even as the number of people in the labour force stays steady or slowly shrinks. Those problems are not unique to Sweden.
Its like this in Germany (tax wise): (http://i.imgur.com/6oiGx5B.png) - the lower blue curve is the amount of tax you pay. The x-axis is the amount of money you get (on which you have to pay tax) and the y-axis is the tax percentage. This is for self-employed people only, regular employees will deduct 1000 Euros from the amount ("Arbeitnehmerpauschbetrag"). Other amounts such as the health insurance can also be deducted.
One side note: the link you have given also calculates health, pension and unemployment insurances. This might be confused with tax, but one should be make it clear that self-employed people don't have to have pension and unemployment insurance and health insurance is much higher than for regular employees. [But one can (in practice) get around paying for health insurance, but no sensible person will do that. - Nobody enforces that you have a health insurance if you are self employed.]
Now, with pension and unemployment insurances, will the tax bracket be higher than 30% for 100k ?
You are right, no one sensible would go without the health care portion. But some people (moi) don't trust pension with governments. (Argentina, Hungary.. etc)
Now, if those things are mandatory, how much would be left of a 70k salary? Still on the 30%?
Don't mix up tax and health/pension/unemployment because (that was the starting point of this thread) one can believe that if you say 50% tax these insurances might come on top of that.
Otherwise, if you want to know how much you will have on your bank account after getting 70k/year, your link was very good AFAICS. You will most likely get something like 40k out of it.
Method of detection: use of the term "free market" as a non-contextualized, noncomparative term.
Otherwise, using the term just turns into a competition of politics between Republican shills (ie: you), minarcho-capitalist ("libertarian") ideologues, mutualist anarchists, and socialists on what it means to be a "free market", how "free" a market has to be to qualify for the term, and whether the relative "freedom" or lack thereof of a market matters at all.
I fall into that last camp. There are actually reputable studies showing that given 100% Free markets never occur in reality (perfect competition, perfect information, zero transaction costs were the definition they used), most not-completely-retarded allocation mechanisms other than those are more-or-less as decent as each other; there was basically a 3% allocative-efficiency advantage to the realistically imperfect market over the tested form of central planning.
A mathematician also showed that even perfect theoretical markets can oscillate neverendingly between multiple general equilibriums rather than ever converging to one efficient equilibrium.
In conclusion, stop using the term "free market" outside of meaningful context.
Where have you ever lived in Europe?
I like to think you were downvoted because they didn't grasp you meant delayed or behind progress :)
Sorry if I offended anyone, it was wrong.
http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/employment_r...
An artifact of commenting at 6am.
A better solution is for governments to not force such things but allow companies to negotiate freely with employees. Some may decide to offer extended maternity leave as a differentiator and to attract and retain female talent. But if they do so, they are doing so with coercion and for rational reasons.
My general response to letting companies negotiate freely is that it seems important, but potentially destructive at it's extreme. I think there should be certain minimum labor standards applied to all employers so that no one employer is at an economic disadvantage by treating their workers humanely. Regarding such minimum requirements including six months of paid maternity leave I'm not sure how I feel.
Your attitude -- that everything that doesn't fit into particular economic worldview -- is a "troll" or an "April Fools joke" is unfortunate.
Correct. So that's why we ban that economically rational hiring approach. Problem solved.
Correct. Unlike the EU, the US has no minimum holidays. however ¾s or so of US employees have holidays. For white collar workers, you're almost certainly guaranteed holidays (from what I know).
Not to suggest Ireland is ahead of the curve here
I was talking to some Germans a few years ago. They were shocked to discover we only had 20 holiday days. You get 30 in Germany. They didn't know what they'd do with only 20.
Fun excersive: Look at the list of EU countries by how much paid holiday time they give. Look at the lowest countries. Then look at the countries that are being bailed out by other EU countries. :P
Case in point - "Noogler" is what a new employee is called. They would often wonder when you're no longer considered a Noogler, and the commonly-given answer was, "You're not a Noogler anymore as soon as you publicly complain about the free food." It usually only takes a month or two.
I think even more radical thinking on employee benefits is required in general by most companies.
Taking my own personal case, I am a software dude as is my lovely wife. We now have 2 young babies, to look after.
I like what I do as does my wife, but we are definitely not willing to outsource our kids upbringing to some random childcare provider, so the only choice is, one of us must leave the workplace....now both of us are highly skilled and experienced ( seriously) and I guess maybe if the projects were planned in such a way that smaller contributions could be made to them, then there might be a way for me or my wife to continue with our profession! If you get my drift...
Also quantifying software development on the basis of time is also a broken paradigm, everyone is different.
What I am saying is that if tasks could be so well planned and decoupled, that anyone could pick them up and fulfill them, that would be the way to go, like a service bus, each task/unit has an associated monetary value. The end goal is that if a business is operating at capacity but needs more they could push a component request onto to the service bus and have it fulfilled by whoever, whenever ( within reason).
So I could join this service bus and pop some task off and code it, a bit like a software mechanical turk...and get paid and get some good karma points!
- What typically happens after 12 weeks of paternity leave? Mommy returns to work and child goes to daycare?
- This article mentioned only women, what about men? Any father periods/leaves ?
Paternity leave is pretty rare, and limited to the upper end of white collar jobs.
English version: I don't pay big salaries because I have lots of money, I have lots of money because I pay big salaries.
If you treat your employees well, they will do good things to your company
Keep them as happy as possible and good things will follow. They will be pretty loyal (non-monetary perks build way more loyalty) and very motivated. I really don't get how anything else is a viable long term strategy.
I usually go for a very spartan furnishings. My computer, a few books, a clock and a calendar.
If I'm not, however, I like having things that speak to me around. (I also like plush animals as debugging partners. It's surprising how many bugs you find just by explaining what you do to a stuffed toy ;)