A whole week off is not seen as weird in most of the US. I’ve had 3-4 weeks of vacation for decades and I’ve always taken pretty much every day. Among many of the people I’ve known that was by no means unusual.
Sorry for generalizing. In my experience, it was very rare for people to use up all their vacation, and people were routinely used to being denied vacation time for whatever business reason, both at my company, and previous companies. Don't know how common it is across Silicon Valley, but it exists at least.
We had to push people into taking vacations in my team, and we never, ever denied vacation requests, as long as people had earned the time off.
I really wish people were more pushy about their vacation time, because they've earned it, just like they've earned their salary. Not taking vacation time is essentially giving money to your company, which is dumb, because you get nothing in return.
I totally agree. Based on numbers I've seen people in the US do better than their stereotype. But a lot of people still leave vacation on the table in a way that is foreign to me.
Sure, some companies are dysfunctional in this respect. But, it's also true that at a company I worked at for a long time where I pretty much saved up my vacation for month trips on a number of occasions, a fair number of people couldn't really understand how I could do this. (My managers had no problems and I did quite well there for over a decade.)
In all fairness, I've also worked with people who didn't like to travel and got bored with staycations so they didn't take much of their time. Alien to me but I sorta get it to some degree.
Anecdotally, I’ve had one job in the past 20 years that didn’t have at least 15 days PTO. Because of corporate policy, they wouldn’t budge. I asked for extra pay to compensate.
We had to push people into taking vacations in my team, and we never, ever denied vacation requests, as long as people had earned the time off.
I really wish people were more pushy about their vacation time, because they've earned it, just like they've earned their salary. Not taking vacation time is essentially giving money to your company, which is dumb, because you get nothing in return.