[untog]

Bear in mind that the US is severely out of whack in terms of work/life balance. It's one of the things I find most difficult about living here - when I first arrived I had 10 days vacation a year. I currently only have 15. And don't forget to factor in healthcare costs and the like.

Money certainly isn't everything.

[barrkel]

10 days vacation was one of the biggest reasons I didn't move to the US when I got my H-1B visa.

Company policy was that vacation was a reward for tenure, rather than a negotiable component of compensation. Best they could do was offer 20 days for the first year, and only the first year.

It was an asinine policy if you ask me. An immigrant is exactly the type of person who would want to take a holiday back home to see friends and family. To make the cost and hassle of two long flights worth it, it would have to be two weeks at least. And that would leave 0 days left for the rest of the year.

[untog]

Agreed, I spend most of my vacation days visiting family back home - it's been a long time since I've had an actual holiday, lying on a beach in the sun.

[alkonaut]

Yeah, that IS crazy. How come companies don't offer holdays as comp? Here (Sweden) having an extra week holiday (6 rather than 5 weeks) is a common comp.

Why aren't companies competing with that in the US? If I was offered $150k with 10-15 days holiday and 50hr work weeks (expected), I'd immediately start bargaining for 25-30 paid days off, and make sure I wouldn't be expected to work more than 40h/w. Is that uncommon in the US?

Or is it common to take unpaid days off, which you can afford given the high salaries?

[untog]

I suspect that, particularly in the startup arena, time is more valuable than money. VCs are throwing cash at you, but they want you to launch yesterday.

[alkonaut]

Sure, and I realize good developers are hard to find, but unless you are looking for the 23year old "ninja" type developers who like doing all nighters, would you not need to care about work/life balance of employees too?

Startups that need to launch yesterday I realize often have young employees without family, but these are large corps like Oracle/Yahoo/Google, these have to employ quite a lot of engineers in their 30s, 40s and 50s? Like I said, I'd be willing to accept a substantially lower pay for a good holiday (5-6 weeks), and a good work/life balance otherwise, like good processes that ensure there's no regular "crunch time".

[nerfhammer]

It's not part of the culture. People sometimes quietly grouse about the lack of vacation time or the number of hours but no one is willing to publicly do anything about it for whatever cultural reason.

[alkonaut]

So in this culture, is it common to do a few years of high-income work with 12hr days and high compensation, and then you get a "quieter" job somewhere else when you need a job that allows you to pick the kids up at 4.30pm? Or how does it work? Obviously children aren't unheard of in Silicon Valley, and as far as I understand it's a pretty progressive part of the US, so I assume that families have two careers to worry about? Something doesn't add up if long days are norm.

[nerfhammer]

> is it common to do a few years of high-income work with 12hr days and high compensation

People working the longest hours aren't necessarily making more money because of it. There's no overtime.

People don't want to make less as they go on in their careers, and don't want to look like they don't want to work a lot, so if they take less time they try not to do so overtly.

> then you get a "quieter" job somewhere else when you need a job that allows you to pick the kids up at 4.30pm?

Recalibrate your expectations. No one is leaving work at 4:30pm. 45 hours a week is called "40 hours a week" and no one works just 40 hours a week. People don't expect to do very much outside of work except on the weekends.

[hollerith]

In the past in the pages more than a couple of US developers have described a pattern in which they work for a year or 2, then quit and take 6 months off (living off of savings).

I would suppose that they were single with no dependents.

[thejdude]

Yes, but healthcare is a few 100 bucks a month, which we pay too, only for us it's mandatory by government.

Vacation sounds like a real problem, but it seems like you could circumvent that by going freelance and just taking off x days a year between projects.

[untog]

Well, on a visa you certainly can't.

[pessimizer]

Germany and the US do not pay the same amount for health care (regardless of who is responsible for actually sending the check.)

http://www.statista.com/statistics/215502/per-capita-health-...

[thejdude]

Not on average, but it's ~15% of your salary in Germany, so a high-income person pays a lot (it's capped at a certain level though).

[monort]

Does it means, that you can't get unpaid vacation days too?

If you can get additional unpaid 15 days leave, then it's just 6% less salary per year.