Don't forget, you have to use half of that vacation time to go to the dentist, doctor, car repair, visit your dying grandmother, funerals, taking care of kids while your wife is sick, etc... Yes, 2-3 weeks is total trash. Employers just view us as cogs in the wheel, not as human beings with human needs anymore. You get punished for having to take time to do personal things. It is completely maniacal.

I had to use 1 week of my 2 weeks PTO to go support my wife having a child in the hospital. It was complete BS. I was so angry at my boss, furiously angry that he would treat me and my family with such utter disrespect as to take away my hard-earned vacation time simply because my wife needed my support.

Paternity leave? What's that?

The level of punishment varies a lot by employer and role. I only worked for a very short time for a guy like that, who was, well, basically crazy and hated his wife and assumed everyone else hated their wives too.

On the other hand most employers are pretty chill WRT the G-Grand-Ops post if you answer your phone for emergency calls once in awhile, then going to the dentist once in awhile during the day is simply handwaved away. Home with a sick kid is handwaved away as "VPN working from home day".

Another interesting strategy if working outside "tech" is to work for an employer with a union, I'm not in the bargaining unit and I'm on salary and if my results and goal metrics are good there is literally no comment to make WRT car repair appointments or something. I'm not on the union timeclock, I have written defined long term goals and metrics, and where I'm sitting at precisely 3:35pm on Tuesday is definitely not one of them.

Obviously life is different in ops or hell desk which often has an abusive call center like atmosphere.

US based only:

I know it's not PTO, but there are certain qualifying events that allow you to take extended leave from work without repercussion. It includes childbirth and medical conditions where a family member needs care. It's the Family Medical Leave Act[0]. The shitty part is that it's unpaid, so if you can't afford to take 1/2/3 month(s) of absence without pay, it's useless to you.

[0]: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/benefits-leave/fmla

The FMLA also allows your employer to require you to use PTO before unpaid leave, so you don't have the option to save your PTO for an actual vacation after your medical leave.

I don't know about other states, but California provides up to 6 weeks of Paid Family Leave. "Benefit amounts range from $50 to $1,173 per week and represent about 55 percent of your previous weekly earnings (maximum reimbursement amount is $1,173 per week)."

http://edd.ca.gov/Disability/About_PFL.htm

I wish it were longer, and I wish it paid more, and I wish it were federal, but it's better than nothing.

In many states employment is "at will" for both parties (employee & employer). I suspect that companies/managers who refuse any work-from-home and require you to use PTO for those dental visits would find a way to terminate employees soon after they return from FMLA.

>and work at a location where the company employs 50 or more employees within 75 miles

Well, I work for a small MSP, so... unfortunately the government screwed me. Surprise, surprise. Either way, unpaid paternity leave is still ridiculous, no other country in the world does that that I'm aware of.

Let me play devils advocate. Having a kid is a choice isn't it? Why should someone get more time for their elective activities than someone else? Should smokers get extra breaks to smoke that others don't get?

Rather than paternity leave, why not more general leave for everyone?

Having a child is to society what eating food is to the individual.

You can choose not to eat food, but the individual will not last long.

You can choose not to have kids but the society won't last long.

It's in our interest to support the human part of humanity. We do that with breaks, meal breaks, sick time, vacation time, and other things. But it's also in our interest to benefit society, not just the individual. So we incentivize choices which are mandatory to the health and success of our society, such as creating the next generation to replace those aging out of the workforce.

It would be in the general interest of society if I took some time off to volunteer my efforts in aid to those in need in other countries (or maybe my own). Maybe I would rather do that than have kids. Should we create a special category of time off for that?

Some employers to have that. They're called sabbaticals.

My current employer also has a policy allowing a certain amount of unpaid time out of the office for charity projects that you'd like to participate in.

Indeed, and sabbaticals are not limited to taking leave for children. They are something entirely different from maternity or paternity leave. Something of that nature is what I am proposing.

There's no immediate need to go volunteer. That's an incentive that an employer might offer. Society does need to maintain some level of growth, though.

Now that you mention it, I'd like to take some time off to hit the gym and get into shape instead of having kids. Improving individuals improves society, and if everyone had this benefit, there might be less obesity.

Many workplaces do offer a wide variety of fitness related benefits. Free on-site gyms, fitness programs like walking or stretching offered on company time, memberships to nearby fitness facilities, etc.

Other cultures tackle it differently to. In Japan, organized stretching before work is commonplace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqPW6H3soKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biGPteoP2jg

However, it's very silly to compare procreation with fitness.

The fat procreator still benefits the society far more than the slim non...procreator, because on a 100 year or 200 year scale, both are dead, and the society only contains the progeny of one of them.

Put it this way: would you rather have a phone that can be upgraded a ton but will eventually wear out and stop working, or have a phone which can be endlessly replaced such that it is always modern and working, even if it isn't top of the line?

Alternatively, having kids harms society because they use up more resources than not having kids at all. The argument cuts both ways.

Without kids you'll eventually run out of employees and customers.

And you have fewer people over which to divide out resources like land, oil, and water.

And a supervillain is born.

Oh? Am I a supervillain because I want people to be wealthier and happier?

We have a collective interest in supporting stable families that can raise children, whether you personally decide to have children or not, regardless of your values around parenthood, especially in the early weeks when the infant is cross-culturally identical for most intents and purposes. We have no similar collective interest in supporting smokers. In fact, we should be rewarding people who stop or who never picked up smoking in our health care system to continue that line of reasoning.

Having children is the choice that, if nobody were to make, would lead to humanity's literal extinction. For many it's also a natural biological drive, and nobody should be pressured about it one way or the other. Calling it an "elective" is stretching it even for devil's advocate.

Your position sucks, dude. Everyone should get more, not less. So yes, non smokers should be getting 'smoke' breaks that they can use for a walk, for example. And everyone will be happier.

Agreed. This is exactly what I was saying in my last sentence.

I agree with you as well, even if your position isn't a popular one.

My employer has a strict 9 to 5 attendance policy (which I disagree with for a number of reasons), but one thing that really bugs me about it is that it applies to days when the roads are hard to navigate due to winter weather. Even if there's a state of emergency and the roads are "closed", we're expected to be here because our customers are all around the country, and they didn't have a snow storm, so we need to be here to support them.

Employees with children tend to get leniency in terms of coming in late on days like that, typically because they had to arrange alternative care for their kids with schools closed. But I have no kids, so if I get stuck behind a snow plow and end up getting to the office at 9:05 I'm probably going to get a lecture on how being late is me being disrespectful to the boss and the company.

Not having kids implies having a shrinking workforce which will have deleterious economic effects for everyone.

At least until the robots replace most of us.

I'm sorry, but that is an extremely shitty position to take.

I was thinking that things like parental leave and bereavement leave generally don't happen during the same era of your life. Why couldn't they fall into a more generalized category of leave?

Unless your parents were heavy smokers, and you are the youngest of many siblings, you're probably going to take parental leave for all your kids before taking bereavement leave for either parent. If you base the leave on some kind of verifiable qualifying event, the accounting would probably be satisfied by the company paying premiums to an insurer. So you could give people time off whenever they are likely to be very distracted from work.

It doesn't just have to be because a crying baby is making an ordinary sleep schedule impossible. Jury duty with sequestration could be distracting. A tornado or house fire might be a bit stressful. Having your car totaled might be worth a few days off to sort out the crisis during regular business hours.

I'm not really very personally invested in parental leave any more, now that I think maybe I won't have to change any more diapers until the first grandchild. But I can think of all kinds of hypothetical circumstances beyond my direct control that might cause me to take some PTO here and there, which can easily chisel away the amount of actual vacation I can take, until I'm down to maybe extending a 3-day [holiday] weekend into 5 consecutive days away from work, and then not getting sick for the next 3 months.

That's not the kind of leave that reverses burnout.

Alternately, maybe just flush the PTO experiment into the toilet of history, reinstitute sick leave and true vacation, and give people enough of each that they can absorb those life events that eventually happen to everyone.

> Alternately, maybe just flush the PTO experiment into the toilet of history, reinstitute sick leave and true vacation, and give people enough of each that they can absorb those life events that eventually happen to everyone.

This is what I propose, although you say it more eloquently. Rather than trying to carve out cases, why not offer x months of time off for every y unit of time? Those who want to spend that time with their kids can do that. Why should I remain chained to my desk because that's not what I want to do?

Why is that?

It sucks at college too. Get sick for a week? You missed a few lectures that you now need to get notes for from someone, maybe missed a test that you have to schedule a make-up for with your professor, probably missed a TA help session that makes the upcoming assignment comprehensible, etc. All that times the 3-6 classes you're taking, good luck ever getting caught up. You get more time off as a student, but it's not really as flexible.

So much of our society punishes you for illness, and it's sad.

So, what do you propose?

I think about this all the time, haha. I think right now my ideal higher education solution would be somewhere where all of the resources you need are online and you can go at your own pace, so if you need to take time off it's no big deal. Then you have a central location where your fellow students and professors/TAs/experts/whatever are there to help you learn and answer questions, not to lecture to a huge room where 75% of the people are on their phones.

Sounds like Coursera or Udacity!

I finally have 5 weeks vacation after 21 years at the same place. Though my elementary school-age kids have 30 days off, not counting Xmas vacation. That's 30 days of teacher service, gov holidays (I don't get), etc.

So even 5 weeks does not allow us to actually go on a vacation.

When I hired on, I was told that using more than 3 days for sick leave would get you fired.

First, I live in the US. I get 5 days of paternity leave. I get 3 weeks of PTO separate from that. My company is considerate but there are definitely companies with better packages than mine. Look around if you're unhappy.

Second, from the perspective of the employer, why should he be punished and forced to pay for these things? He's paying you for your labor, that's the exchange that's been set up. He's not your patron and he hasn't pledged to care for you for the rest of your life. He gets no value when you are not working. What is he paying for, and on what basis should the government compel him to do that?

PTO is a perk, not a right. You are not entitled to your employer's money. That's not to say you shouldn't find an employer who will give that perk, but there's no reason the law should compel him to do so (other than the convenience of the employee).

> Scheduling your life around the 2 or 3 weeks that US employers give is madness. When you do take the vacation, you're expected to be reachable by email.

And, heaven forbid you want to do something like take 2 of those 3 weeks within the span of a month.

Seriously, our obsession with work in the US is completely absurd and I cannot understand it.

It's because everyone is afraid of losing their job.

This

US vacation times are nuts. Honestly I don't understand how people can cope with only total of few weeks of vacation per year for decades and additionally do over 40h per week constantly.

No wonder people burn out.

Hehe, a 'few weeks'. It's far more common to get 0 or 1 paid week if you don't have an office job, and even then you usually have to be with a company for at least 3 years to get more than 2 weeks, which is becoming less and less desirable if you want to advance in your career now that pensions are virtually extinct.

Unemployment is our only real vacation, and those who go through extended periods of that know it feels like anything but.

Software developers might have it better, although not always. Here in the midwest I have yet to interview anywhere that offered more than 2 weeks of vacation for a new hire.

Wow. That's low. Boston area e-commerce and we offer all employees (SWE or not) 19 days in year 1 and add a day per year of tenure until reaching 24 days. Add to this the 8-9 company holidays (too lazy to look it up) and a 4-week paid sabbatical every five years and you approach European levels of leave.

I think our sabbatical program isn't common, but the rest of the policy seems fairly standard for the area.

Edit: We also accrue sick time at some pace (maybe 5 per year that don't roll over; I honestly have no idea as I've never tracked nor taken a sick day (in the HR systems); of course, I've stayed home while sick when warranted) and have paid parental leave (6 weeks paid for primary and 2 weeks paid for secondary caregiver).

For a comparisson, in an SF based org with 2/3 remote engineers we have 14 regular holidays, most of which can be taken +- 2 weeks of official date, plus 5 days at the end of the year. Start with 12 days PTO (negotiable), 15 at 1 year, 20 at 5 years and 25 at 10 years. All employees acrue 9 sick days per year. Additionally can take 2 paid days off to volunteer at a non profit or educational institution. There is also a sabbatical program, but it's unpaid and for up to 2 months. This can be taken every 3 years. Parental leave is 12 weeks of 100% pay.

If taking all possible days, in the first year you have 42 days off, up to 55 by year 10

Software developers only have it better if they work for the government or one of the top firms that happens to have a laid back policy (e.g. Microsoft, instead of Amazon).

When in grade school my holidays were July and August.

Then in High School it was Mid June to August.

Then in university mid May to August.

Then I graduated and started to work: 2 weeks, yay![1]

[1] This is true for full time employment. One way to escape it is to work freelance contracts. I did this for years, and regularly gave myself a few months off between contracts.

I wonder what the effects on our society would be if we had a national three month summer holiday. No one in school, no one at work. Fascinating to think about!

Come to Paris in August, the whole city is on vacation!

Joke aside, it baffles me every time this comes up wrt. american workers. I have 5 weeks PTO and I'm the worst off from all of my friends: most have between 7-8 weeks, some even up to 9-11 weeks per annum. [and they're not even teachers] Of course you're also expected to take every last day.

11 weeks = 55 days, this is a lot. I have an average of 42 (depends on how bank holidays are placed in a given year) and it looks good (Paris area).

Though when I think of that, a friend of mine who works at the CEA mentioned something like 50 days off.

For US folks :this does not include sick days, these are completely independent (and not capped)

Yeah and there is even more peace of mind when everyone is off at the same time.

This happens a few days a year in north america, say at christmas or thanksgiving.

You can almost feel the whole country breathing a sigh of relief.

Not everybody.

Someone invented shifts. Imagine, you go on vacation for 3 months in summer, I go on vacation for 3 months in winter, next year we switch. Wouldn't that be awesome, eh?

I think the country would be a much healthier and happier place.

Health care expenses would go down a lot and I believe in many jobs productivity wouldn't suffer much either. I see so many people just going through the motions pretending to be busy.

> you're expected to be reachable by email.

If you're expected to be reachable then you aren't really on vacation. I simply tell them I'm going hiking in $NationalPark where phone service is not possible. If you let them know you are available then they will take advantage of it. If you let them know you are unavailable they'll plan for that.

> I simply tell them I'm going hiking in $NationalPark where phone service is not possible.

That's how I got married = "I was told that if you take one of the trails from the lodge over to a high overlook your phone will report signal for at least one carrier from down in the valley, but they're not sure if anyone's ever actually managed to make a call."

Sequoia might not be that isolated these days, but it was still a great choice.

I agree. I've worked at a number of big name tech companies and smaller companies, and I always unplug from work email when I'm on vacation. It's not an issue, you just have to do it. If it is an issue where you work, I encourge you to look for a new job. It's not universal.

I only choose to work at companies with unlimited vacation policies (yes I know it's not really unlimited). I don't understand how people can tolerate this whole notion of counting down how many days you have left for the year (unless it's 4+ weeks). Feels like being a prisoner.

I had a job with unlimited vacation once and it's such a strange and uncomfortable concept for me. Upon hiring, my boss told me to take as much vacation as I need/like, "but of course, you cannot go off on for example 4 months of vacation". So, apparently, the vacation is not really unlimited (as 4 months is above the limit) - the limit is merely undisclosed. This policy was one of the reasons I didn't stay in that company for long.

> some invisible seniority list despite all your previous years of experience working other places

Maybe this is the plan to fight churn. The devil you know at least gives you a few more days off.