Assuming 4 weeks off for vacation, if you do one of them a quarter, each for a week, that's 8%. Close enough.

Yeah I'd much rather spend that extra week per quarter on vacation instead, and I'd probably get about as much done. My job just does not require 1 week of solid meetings per quarter.

What makes you think these are "solid meetings"?

Basically whatever they are, half meetings half forced vacation, I'd rather just have real vacation.

They can be none of that but regular work, just in person except you have the time to bind in person and decide (or not) to share time together after work.

My team is split across several countries, I don't need to see my teammates in person on a daily basis but I like to have the chance to see them once or twice a year and also tackle specific problems, run some workshop together during hackathons and participate in a teambuilding event.

The current company I'm working for, VC funded startup, does two company wide offsites per year, 5 days (one work week) each. Then another department wide offsite for another 5 days in another quarter, then the final quarter is a team-wide one that is up to each individual team to schedule and intended to last 4-5 days. So that tracks pretty closely.

TBH I feel like it's just a little much, but not much more than a little much. In other words, I think probably two weeks (10 full days) is probably a good minimum because I do see some value in seeing the team once or twice a year in person. So somewhere between 10-20 full days is probably the sweet spot for me.

More like 20-22 days or so if you are working 5 days a week, have around 25 days off + all the public holidays, which are about 4 weeks.

2 weeks every 6 months doesn't sound extraordinary to me. These are not vacation, these are regular work days. For an engineer I would imagine that would be what we call hackathons.

It's not 30 days typically, IME it's around a week or so, sometimes even just a few days. An off-site is typically also somewhere pleasurable.

It's also usually a huge, ridiculous cost to the company. A few companies ago they spent a million or so sending us 200 employees to an island. It would have been cool if it hadn't been immediately followed by layoffs citing cash burn being too high.