Vacation Days!

[Sean Aaron]

Truthfully, I'll probably just end up using them randomly when I feel like sleeping in.

If your boss is receptive I find a string of consecutive 3- or 4-day week-ends to be quite relaxing.

 

[RoJoHen]

Truthfully, I'll probably just end up using them randomly when I feel like sleeping in.

If your boss is receptive I find a string of consecutive 3- or 4-day week-ends to be quite relaxing.

That is very likely what I will end up doing.

My boss told me when she did my job she would take off every Friday the last 3 months of the year.

 

[Holdfast]

On the general discussion about vacation time: I love being self-employed, but the one thing I don't have these days is paid vacation time. I used to get about 45 days a year (can't remember the exact figure but it was about that) but now I'm either available for work, or not. My average hours are a fraction of what I used to work (with roughtly the same overall income) so I guess most days feel like part-time work, but if I'm out of the country on holiday, I'm not earning. That's kind of weird to get your head around, especially at first. I got itchy feet towards the end of a long break I took last winter as a result. I've switched how I go on holidays now. Instead of one big long annual break abroad, I'm now more likely to take more frequent but shorter breaks if I'm going abroad.

 

[Lindley]

That's how it should work, though the way I see it done in the States where you need to earn the time in advance is total bullshit. You shouldn't have to work a full year without leave before you can take two week's holiday.

Two weeks is a very long vacation if you're working on an active project. I wouldn't expect to be able to take that much time off all at once until I'd been at a job for at least a year. A few days here and there to pad out weekends long enough for a trip would be reasonable, though.

However, I do think it's BS that some companies try not to give any vacation time until you've been with them for X months. You should be accruing a few hours per week from the start.

In my case, I recently passed the 5-year mark with my company, so now I earn 7.69 hours of combined PTO every 2 weeks. That's 25 days per year. (For the first 5 years, it was 20 days per year.) Unfortunately, sometime soon the company is returning to a split vacation/sick policy which effectively cuts down my time off, as has been mentioned.

 

[RAMA]

I'm not sure you have a good concept of where I live.

The closest city is Chicago, which is a 3-hour drive (round trip we're talking about $80 in gas), and I grew up right outside of it, so I really wouldn't consider that traveling.

I agree with iguana. I hate where I live yet can find plenty of things to do to keep me out of trouble. It's called making the best of what's around. You don't need someone or something else to entertain you.

And stop whining that gas is pricey. It's a hell of a lot cheaper in the US than most places. I do miss the days of $1.50/gal though, but it ain't coming back.

Iguana told me I should travel. Doing random things around my town isn't traveling. Because of things like gas, I can't travel very far. I'm not whining about gas prices; I simply can't afford to do much right now.

You always make it sound like you live in a black hole, with stretches of hundreds of square miles with no women and nothing to do....now I know that Europeans often don't realize how big the USA really is if they haven't seen much of it, and how open some areas are, but this seems a little strange to me....you're not working for the Dharma Initiative are you??

 

[RAMA]

Not the way it works. On January 1st, I get all of my vacation days, and I have until December 31st to use them. Whatever I don't use by December 31st goes away, and then I start with a fresh batch of vacation days for the entire following year.

That's how it should work, though the way I see it done in the States where you need to earn the time in advance is total bullshit. You shouldn't have to work a full year without leave before you can take two week's holiday.

I don't quite get the logic behind giving you all your vacation upfront, and then having it expire at the end of the year, vs accruing vacation over time, and then letting you (for example) only carry over 10 days.

Well, it's about letting your employees have a break. Yes they might leave and you'll have to pay them for holiday owed, but by the same token if they've taken their annual leave and leave before the end of the year then they owe you for that. It all balances out.

And this is one reason more why working in the US sucks. I'm sure there are other kind of benefits somewhere, but from an European point of view, that's not work, it's servitude.

Canadian holiday leave is pretty much the same: 14 days/year, which I why I didn't see any point in moving to Canada from the UK. After I moved to the UK which has the EU minimum of 20 days per year I felt like everyone in America was a bunch of suckers. 10 days a year is ridiculous.

Funny, 10 vacation days for a previous year of work is pretty good in the US. Some places only give 3-7 vacation/days off for a year's work.

Another thing...sick days...employers in America think the world has come to an end if you call in sick. Myself, I almost never call in sick, haven't in 6 years. My wife got fired one time solely for missing 3 days in one year....

 

[RoJoHen]

I agree with iguana. I hate where I live yet can find plenty of things to do to keep me out of trouble. It's called making the best of what's around. You don't need someone or something else to entertain you.

And stop whining that gas is pricey. It's a hell of a lot cheaper in the US than most places. I do miss the days of $1.50/gal though, but it ain't coming back.

Iguana told me I should travel. Doing random things around my town isn't traveling. Because of things like gas, I can't travel very far. I'm not whining about gas prices; I simply can't afford to do much right now.

You always make it sound like you live in a black hole, with stretches of hundreds of square miles with no women and nothing to do....now I know that Europeans often don't realize how big the USA really is if they haven't seen much of it, and how open some areas are, but this seems a little strange to me....you're not working for the Dharma Initiative are you??

I live in the Quad Cities. Look it up. There are hundreds of miles between me and other things. Hundreds (or at least fifties) of miles of corn and soybeans!

Now, there are plenty of things to do where I live, but I work the completely opposite schedule from nearly all my friends, so I just don't get a lot of opportunity for fun (which is fine right now, because I'm broke!).

As for the women thing, I just never put that much effort into it. I'm also way too preoccupied with other things to worry about that right now.

 

[RAMA]

Leaving aside the economics, I think culturally Americans as a nation have a belief that hard work pays off that does not exist in the same way in quite a few other western nations.

This is true, Americans feel that...and its true to an extent, but working smart is really the key. I admit I'm known as a hard worker, and I do like that. I've been to Europe and have European relatives, recently another one just visited the USA. She told me she thought we were nuts here because we are all so busy and it's so fast paced. Europeans seem very laid back to me.

RAMA

 

[bluedana]

You can only carry over 6 weeks? I don't even get that much to start with!

I've been with the gov't for almost 17 years. With each milestone, you increase the number of hours you accrue per pay period. Also, I rarely take vacations (I'm lucky if I get away for a total of 3 weeks scattered throughout the year).

At my level of seniority, I accrue 8 hours of vacation and 6 hours of sick leave every two weeks. So, yeah, it builds up, even with the myriad of "kids randomly out of school" days.

Of course, it is the government, so this is the only enviable benefit we get.

 

[RoJoHen]

I'm pretty sure I max out at 4 weeks no matter how long I'm with my company.

 

[Sean Aaron]

In my case, I recently passed the 5-year mark with my company, so now I earn 7.69 hours of combined PTO every 2 weeks. That's 25 days per year. (For the first 5 years, it was 20 days per year.) Unfortunately, sometime soon the company is returning to a split vacation/sick policy which effectively cuts down my time off, as has been mentioned.

I've worked a couple of jobs in the States that use PTO. I think the idea of sick time is crap, so PTO is great for people like me who never take sick leave. I've only worked for one company here that had defined sick time; normally if you're sick you phone in and that's that unless you off for more than a couple of consecutive days in which case a doctor's note is required.

Funny, 10 vacation days for a previous year of work is pretty good in the US. Some places only give 3-7 vacation/days off for a year's work.

Yeah, I found out about that a few years ago. Hard to believe America had strong unions and workers had rights at one point...

 

[Robert Maxwell]

That's how it should work, though the way I see it done in the States where you need to earn the time in advance is total bullshit. You shouldn't have to work a full year without leave before you can take two week's holiday.

Two weeks is a very long vacation if you're working on an active project. I wouldn't expect to be able to take that much time off all at once until I'd been at a job for at least a year. A few days here and there to pad out weekends long enough for a trip would be reasonable, though.

However, I do think it's BS that some companies try not to give any vacation time until you've been with them for X months. You should be accruing a few hours per week from the start.

In my case, I recently passed the 5-year mark with my company, so now I earn 7.69 hours of combined PTO every 2 weeks. That's 25 days per year. (For the first 5 years, it was 20 days per year.) Unfortunately, sometime soon the company is returning to a split vacation/sick policy which effectively cuts down my time off, as has been mentioned.

I believe I mentioned how people who work here get all their vacation days for the year up-front, right? When you're new, you get a 90-day probationary period, and I don't believe you get any vacation time right off. However, once your 90 days are up, you get a pro-rated number of vacation and sick days based on your original hire date.

 

[nevermore]

But then I look like a flake. I don't work in the kind of place where I can just be gone on a random day and no one will care. Things don't get done and people will want to know why. Ah well.

In UK Academia, this is called "being a researcher"*. When I used to work in a old university, only the administrative staff used to take actual holidays, researchers would simply go - so on paper it looked like nobody ever actually took a holiday. Some people you never saw for six months or more.

This lead to a big culture shock when I went for an job at a new University and during the interview had a conversation where I was bemused that they expected me to go to the University everyday and they were bemused that I was used to not having to.

* does not apply to the sciences!

Really? Even our administrative staff doesn't come into the office every day. If the research staff was suddenly expected to show up more than about 7 or 8 days a month there would be a riot.