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by davidrm 2556 days ago
> doesn't like when people go on leaves while he himself enjoys vacation twice a year

the US sounds like a dystopia more and more everyday. sure, one could make the case that these work habits are a reason for your success, but who is really benefiting that success?

2 comments

> the US sounds like a dystopia more and more everyday. sure, one could make the case that these work habits are a reason for your success, but who is really benefiting that success?

Talking about India not US!

ahh it ocurred to me that i might be wrong, but repeatedly hearing from expat friends how americans find the number of vacation days in EU shocking, i decided to poke anyways
But India has the same tech work culture like US but startups in India are worst, I was talking about the product based startup I worked at - cool tech, cool work but horrendous vacation policy! Don't even ask me about vacation scene @ Service based Indian companies!
I thought the same. I think 10 days paid leave is considered competitive in the US. I’m in the UK where 25 days is considered competitive.
28 Days is the minimum in the UK and I had well over 30 from day 1 when I started at RELEX (reed Elsevier).

I have also had a CTO who worked in the UK and The Valley and he said he got as much work out of the UK team as the one with only two weeks al in the states.

10 days is garbage even in the US. You take it, but you grumble about it. Partially, nobody in the US knows how to value vacation, I think. So even highly paid people kinda shrug at vacation and don't really factor it in.
>Partially, nobody in the US knows how to value vacation, I think.

It's partly engrained into the culture and partly to do with the prohibitively expensive means of travel.

For example, you could probably find a flight from London to Paris (return trip) for under 50 quid (for one). In the states, there's no way you're traveling that same distance and paying less than 300 quid, I'd say.

So, it's a combination of both but I think the expense contributes, or lends itself directly, to the social stigmatisation.

Just did some test trips of that distance, and for me (based in Chicago) it would be about $200 for flights of the same distance.

But that just takes me to St.Louis, Cincinnati, Detroit. I've been to all of them before, and there's some nice parts about them, but they're not a completely different culture like Paris is to London. Hell, St. Louis is just barely in a different state.

Pretty much all the chain stores are the same in every city you go to in the US, so it really enforces the sameness of the country. There's unique landmarks and museums and parks and local restaurants, but half the city is going to look the same as every other city.

Detroit is actually the closest comparison to London/Paris, because you can go through a tunnel at the edge of Detroit to Windsor Canada, and then you do get a bit of a culture shift.

But with Paris, further travel to other very different cultures are just some quick and cheap train rides away, whereas I just have more Canada.

We have a similar minimum in Australia to the UK, and our airfares are considerably more prohibitive than the US.
Its easier to get vacation in US compared to India. Managers in Indian IT companies have a target that x% of their team must be billable at any time (or at least that's what they tell us), and use that as reason to deny our leave requests.
This isn't the US, this is human nature. Or rather, "bad manager" nature. A dystopia would be where everybody was a bad manager.