That said, I used my full two weeks to get out of the office from mid-December through the end of the year, and ended up working through part of it anyway due to more tight deadlines I was committed to without any significant input from me.
Had I not taken the days, they would have disappeared on January first without anything in exchange. In my case, it seems to just be a lose-lose.
- You respond normally to emails and Slack, but don't show up to meetings or other work in the office. This counts as a legitimate vacation.
- You simply don't schedule the time off, and nobody says anything. Some companies will pay this out in cash equivalent (giving you an extra week or 2 of pay), but usually it just "expires" at the end of the year.
I do 8-10 weeks off every year (the proper no-email kind) now that we have the 480 parent days. Together with the 6w holiday you can just slowly take those parent days and make longer paid holidays.
I'm not sure how many more percent pay I'd want to accept 0 to 3 of weeks of not-quite-off, and no parental leave. 50%? In any case, it puts my measly european software salary in a different perspective.
That is not at all normal.
When we are talking about "guilt" for time off, it depends largely on the company. At the very highest levels, usually they don't like having everyone store up a lot of vacation, because that's a liability on the books (if you lay someone off with vacation time stored up, you usually have to pay them for it).
Therefore most of the guilt comes from lower level management or peers. When you are in a team of 6 and everyone is overworked, you feel guilty if you leave for two weeks, knowing that everyone remaining will be working 20% harder. For the same reason you will see people checking their work e-mail hourly while on vacation.
It's a cultural problem. This is why you may have seen some US tech companies advertising "minimum required vacation days:" if you are required to take the vacation, then you can't feel guilty for it.
We had times they said we weren't allowed to take vacation - mostly around Christmas, but sometimes different. I had trouble getting 2 weeks off in a chunk when my soon-to-be spouse visited, and had to find someone to work my scheduled weekend to do so. Usually they only let you take a week at a time.Some stores would do a payout for vacation time at the end of the year. It was a pharmacy, and we worked holidays and weekends.
Some places are much more strict than this, however. And some places don't offer vacation time at all, though a few offer more.
As someone who is also in a position like the OP, it's always "life or death".
Wouldn't the rational thing be to turn off your phone when you take a vacation or even leave it at the office?
ELI5: are employees sometimes (often?) expected to work on their vacation? Or take those days out as extra pay instead? Or is it just that it's never "a good time" to take that holiday?