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Proud to be a European
(discuss.tchncs.de)
As a European it makes me proud to get a direct shout out from Linus 🫶🏻
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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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I'm European, but I don't get your excitement. Everybody has summer vacations, no? Not just Europeans. So what's the deal?
Most people over school age in the US do not get a summer vacation. Most are lucky if they have enough vacation hours to rub together to cover a random illness so they don't have to work while barely able to function for being too sick.
And I'm not even close to joking or exaggerating.
It's fucking bad here. We're horribly jealous.
I'm extremely fortunate for having 5 weeks of vacation per year, and half of that is only because of working extra on the weekends to bank extra time. And good luck getting approval to take more than about a week of it at a time.
You don't have mandatory paid sick leave but have to use your vacation instead?
I actually do have separate sick leave, but plenty of times at other jobs have had combined PTO, which basically means I'm burning my potential vacation by being sick.
Other times, I've not even had sick leave at all, got fired once for taking one day off with explosive diarrhea because I couldn't afford to see a doctor to get a note on minimum wage.
Some companies are better. Some states have actually somewhat decent protections. Lots of others are complete garbage.
So yeah... A lot of us are jealous of what Europeans have, but not enough so to organize and demand better of our employers and our government
That's just crazy... When I'm sick I'm getting paid leave - when coming to work and they notice I'm sick they'll send me home. This even makes sense from a 100% capitalist perspective, because it costs less to pay one person to stay at home and recover as quickly as possible than to have them spread their infection, making everyone less productive, but at the same time keeping everyone at work, greatly slowing down the recovery.
Vacation also is known to be net positive since even just one week or just a few days off every ~2 months greatly increases productivity and prevents burnouts. It's like weekends but more extreme. You wouldn't want someone who probably already is stressed because they have to catch up after being sick to also lose their vacation.
Those US-american laws don't even make sense from the USA's system's 100% money focused view.
They do make some sense if you consider the US's puritanical roots where, in essence, suffering is considered good and moral, or at least leisure and enjoyment are considered hedonistic and immortal.
Also, that for whatever reason everything is short term thinking: is this quarter better than last quarter? If not, your business is failing. Is this quarter enough better than last quarter? Business is failing.
From a business perspective, it makes no sense, but businesses don't make decisions. People do. And those people frequently do not stick around to see the fallout from those decisions, they just pump up the business' bottom line long enough for the stocks to rise, sell out, then bail out taking a generous severance before the company crashes and burns.
And nobody is really stopping it because it's so lucrative at the individual level that the individuals that might be able to change it are profiting from it.
And lack of regulation is what permits it to continue.
We don't have many workers rights. In Virginia my employer paying near min wage can charge ya $5 for a new name badge. Totally legal. And they do.
It's definitely not great here at all, though I'd say it's a bit different for professional software developers (who probably make up the bulk of contributors), since that kind of job tends to give you better benefits. In my experience, it's typical to either have unlimited PTO (that you may or may not be able to take, admittedly, though I've never had an issue with that), or at least a couple weeks of vacation a year. I've never worked anywhere as a software engineer where I had to really even account for sick time at all. I just tell my team I'm sick and that's about it.
In the US, because the minimum required by law is so low, the actual distribution of vacation days varies a lot from employer to employer.
This chart, updated annually, shows the average by length of service time: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employee-benefits/paid-leave-sick-vacation-days-by-service-requirement.htm
Seems like the average for people in the private sector with 1 year is 7 days sick, 11 days vacation.
This fact sheet, as of 2021, breaks down the details a bit more: https://www.bls.gov/ebs/factsheets/paid-vacations.htm
Table 1 breaks it down pretty well, with people at the 1 year mark hovering mostly between 1-3 weeks, people at the 5 year mark mostly between 2-4 weeks, and people with 10 years at 3+ weeks.
People with government jobs, which is about 15% of the workforce and about 20 million workers, tend to get better benefits, including paid time off.
I’m in the US but suddenly need to take a couple weeks vacation because my European employer has some weird fiscal year nonsense going on. Apparently the current year is 2025 and my “rollover” vacation days from 2024 expire soon
Timezones are super unintuitive, but we already have 2025 here in Europe. And no, it's forbidden for us to tell you who wins your presidential elections, so don't ask.
In the US you probably get 2 weeks of flexible PTO and about 5 days where everybody gets a day off. Even that is not guaranteed US law doesn't require any PTO.
Another shocker for others, maybe, is that many companies require you to use those same pool of days as your sick leave. Get sick and no vacation for you. Japan does this as well (though Japan actually has ma-/pa-ternity leave which is more than I can say for the US)
Holy shit.. if I get sick during my vacation, I'll get those vacation days refunded so I can use them later, when I'm not sick anymore. I can call in sick for up to three consecutive days, 25 days total per year without a doctors note. You only need a doctors note if you exceed those limits, and with a doctors note you have paid sick leave until the doctor says you are fit to work (although the government covers your salary, or part of it, not entirely sure about the details, after the first two weeks or something).
Doctor's notes are usually up to the company to decide. There are various insurances and such as well that can kick in for long-term illness. Japan has a program that pays 60% of salary for some period of time, though I don't know the details.
To clarify a bit: what I mentioned above is the legal minimum an employer can give me regarding sick days. They are of course free to do more, and I my personal case, I'll usually just work reduced from home (answer mails and do lightweight administrative stuff) if I'm starting to get a cold or something, get better in a day or two, and come back full time, without logging any sick days, because my employer prefers that I'm available for small stuff and get well fast rather than that I take "full" sick leave if I'm just mildly sick.