Re:Creating a Great Place to Work
by pasbesoin on Thursday December 27, 2012 @01:05PM
(#4974297)
In my multiple corporate jobs, my best recollection is 7 holidays, like so:
Memorial Day 1
4th of July 1
Labor Day 1
Thanksgiving 1
Christmas - New Years 3 (one day moves between the
two, depending upon the
calendar / weekdays for a
particular year)
Some places also gave the day after Thanksgiving; however, this was increasingly disappearing (personally observed at more than one location during my tenure). Some (fewer) places also made Christmas Eve and/or New Years Eve a standing holiday; again, this was disappearing from practice.
Paid vacation often started at two weeks -- 10 days. However, depending upon your manager, you could end up consuming a significant portion of that for doctors appointments, home maintenance, managing whatever problem the kids have, etc. (Some managers insist you take every hour out of the office as time off; others are more flexible.)
A fairly standard policy seemed to be to add one week (5 days) of paid vacation after 5 years tenure. Another week at 10 years tenure. Most such increases maxed out at 3 or 4 weeks vacation, no matter the length of tenure.
Sick days were increasingly disappearing; this seemed to be a target of management consultants' recommendations for "streamlining" operations.
Some workplaces were/are somewhat more generous; however, none of that is mandated. (And again, the consultants with their "best practices" seem to have been making inroads on this -- just as they've continued to wedge people into smaller and smaller cubes having lower and fewer walls.)
I mention all this in part because I think many higher level technical people are somewhat sheltered. (Not all, though.) While technical, I worked fairly closely with many people who were not, and the above was not unusual.
Paid vacation often started at two weeks -- 10 days. However, depending upon your manager, you could end up consuming a significant portion of that for doctors appointments, home maintenance, managing whatever problem the kids have, etc. (Some managers insist you take every hour out of the office as time off; others are more flexible.)
A fairly standard policy seemed to be to add one week (5 days) of paid vacation after 5 years tenure. Another week at 10 years tenure. Most such increases maxed out at 3 or 4 weeks vacation, no matter the length of tenure.
Sick days were increasingly disappearing; this seemed to be a target of management consultants' recommendations for "streamlining" operations.
Some workplaces were/are somewhat more generous; however, none of that is mandated. (And again, the consultants with their "best practices" seem to have been making inroads on this -- just as they've continued to wedge people into smaller and smaller cubes having lower and fewer walls.)
I mention all this in part because I think many higher level technical people are somewhat sheltered. (Not all, though.) While technical, I worked fairly closely with many people who were not, and the above was not unusual.