Perhaps but the way a lot of British people view things is quite inverse to Americans: Instead of thinking of ourselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" like a lot of Americans do, we think of ourselves as having "temporarily escaped poverty."

Meaning we view other countries through their most disadvantaged and genuinely believe that that could be us one day. If America treats their poorest badly, we believe they'd treat us badly if we ever had a bad run of luck.

The UK used to be a country of strong social safety nets, I'm not sure what it is today -- I don't recognise it (without getting overly political).

Unless I am reading that wrong that's 26 days off/year which is still better than I have had at any tech company.

My first tech job had 2 weeks vacation, 2 weeks sick leave. Next 2 where 16 days total comp bumped to 18 + 2 floating holidays.

UK has a legal minimum of 28 days off, but as with any minimum many are significantly higher.

It's a bit weird because they recently lumped sick days and vacation PTO into one generic pool. It's nice because it gives way more time to just take off without faking sick.

Most places significantly cut total vacation time as part of the conversion and you still need a reserve to cover sick days anyway.

The loss of sick days also tends to get people to show up to work sick which is terrible downside IMO.

> The loss of sick days also tends to get people to show up to work sick which is terrible downside IMO.

True though we're 90% hot/hotel seating now so pretty much everyone is setup to work from home if they're sick-ish and don't want to use a day.

Plus 52 weeks of weekends. Funny how we always leave that out when accounting work. So its 26 days + 10 federal holidays (in the US) plus 104 weekend days == 140 days off work a year.

Somebody posted about how medieval peasants had way more days off than us today - but it turns out it was about equal, considering everything.

365-144 = 225 which is far more than the 150 for medieval peasants quoted here: https://nypost.com/2013/09/04/medieval-peasants-got-a-lot-mo...

The other half of the US equation is many people don't take their full vacation days either though direct pressure or informal social norms. Working weekends are also very common.

That figure for medieval peasants is for a very short period of time after the plague when labor was in short supply. Not at all indicative of the quality of life you could expect as a peasant.

Same here. Work for a US company and get 24 paid vacation days per year plus the 13 or so stat holidays.

Every 5 years you get an additional month off for that year.