Exactly. Often, "loyalty" in this context boils down to "not leaving when you want to or are able to". If this is not reciprocated by the company in some way, then it's just a voluntary reduction of your own bargaining power, and as a consequence, your income.
> slashing costs in a bad economy your getting fired
It's not even like it takes a bad economy. "We made record profits and met all our targets, but sacking people is what analysts want to hear this year. Security have your things at the front desk."
Do we have statistics on this? Or are you just amalgamating a bunch of different anecdotes you've heard, and your personal experiences? Rather than some tangible evidence that indicates that it is prevalent for companies to request "loyalty" while simultaneously not reciprocating?
Note, I don't quite think a company should "be loyal" when it's in dire financial problems. The only loyalty they can provide at that point is to the few employees it can keep.
This depends on what "loyalty" means. What does it mean for a company to ask for "loyalty"? Does it mean "please put aside any personal gain in order to contribute to the prosperity of the company" ? Is it "please work harder because it's tough time for us right now"?
Does it imply a Quid Pro Quo, "if you are loyal, whatever that means, you'll benefit personally from it"?
It is just a matter of legislation. You cannot expect "good will" from a company because this is not how capitalism works.
And even if I think that it is right that laws allow companies to fire people when they need it, it should never be easy or cheap. Being able to fire at will makes a nation of slaves that must always obey their employers unless they want to risk themselves to loose everything.
Reciprocity on loyalty is a strange concept if you think about it. First, if the company can't pay for personnel, then they have to get rid of them; it is as simple as that. Second, loyalty could be used by employees to make sure they are the first in line to get a promotion. But be honest, do we really want that?
It's impressive how big cultural the gap is between people not taking their full vacation entitlement and people not taking their full salary.
I've had people try to hand back vacation days - but I've never had anyone try to hand back salary.
Personally I try to take all my vacation because, as a professional, I have an obligation to make sure the company could keep going if I change jobs or get hit by a bus. Doing routine tests for bus factor resiliency is as important as testing your backups restore and your backup power works right :)
Bankers in many countries are even required to take off two weeks in a block each year; and no communication with the office. That's to make the books harder to cook, but I am sure it helps many of them stay sane.
All the people in the video who say they check in with work while they're on vacation 'in order to help out their colleagues' - if you really want to help out your colleagues, pick up their work when they're on vacation so they don't need to do work when they're on holiday.
Why are you the only person contactable for certain issues. etc.
One of the best pieces of advice I was given very early in my career was 'If you can't be replaced then you can't be fired, but you can't be promoted either.'
It's not always easy or possible to have redundancy for every role. At a company with 20 devs, hiring 2pms, 2 data scientists and 2 DBA just to handle vacation coverage is not realistic. At MS or FB this makes sense, but lots of places are much smaller.
Sometimes the best business decision is not the most convenient one for the employees - life is full of tradeoffs.
It doesn't have to be 1:1 personal redundancy -- it's more like, several of the 20 devs being able to assume lightweight PM/DS/DBA responsibilities for a few weeks while that person is away (I've personally as a dev covered for pretty much that set of roles -- and always had a renewed appreciation for the skills of that person when they returned). In other words, don't silo your roles too rigidly, especially when you're small and can't afford 1:1 redundancies.
And if your company absolutely 100% relies on having a full-blown PM/DS/DBA around at all times, well, then you DO need (at least) two of each, otherwise your company tanks if your one DBA gets sick or leaves for a company where they don't have to suffer the permanent stress of being a SPOF.
And if you CAN survive for a few weeks while you hire and train a new DBA in that situation, then you can survive for a few weeks while your DBA is on holiday.
But you're also a country with mostly "at will" employment laws - any one of those employees can quit with no notice. If you can't cope for a week without any of those individuals then you have some serious business risks.
Except "coping" isn't what everyone thinks about, there's some bizarre expectation of 100% efficiency for short notice things. If the DBA needs a week off then plan around it. I can see a case in a small firm for some people to be contactable in case of dire emergencies - but with significant costs like holiday day reimbursement and cash if activated. Not an expectation of any contact, view that as a significant failing.
Many small companies are stuck with serious business risks, such as critical people leaving. Their goal is to grow fast enough to work around those risks.
Some will die due to those risks. Most likely the right way to mitigate those risks is not European style work/life balance but rather Valley style "pay the SPOF a lot, give him ownership, and make him feel highly valued".
Well there might be sufficient data to bear that out. Plenty of startups are adopting work / life balance friendly policies. It would be interesting to see if they have a better / worse change of success... Perhaps one for Mattermark
Sometimes the best business decision is not the most convenient one for the employees - life is full of tradeoffs.
That's very true, and sometimes the best business decision is one that favours staff retention over short term profit. Losing the experience and expertise of someone who's been in the company a while just because you can't manage your team well enough to get people trained to cover one another's vacation time is going to get expensive when people burn out and quit, not to mention the effect it'll have on staff morale and your business's reputation as a bad place to work (which has a knock-on effect on sales).
You're entirely right that a small business can't afford to have complete redundancy for every staff position - the appropriate strategy is to put well documented processes in place, with good handover management and proper knowledge sharing. Discouraging people from taking vacation time to the point where you'd only hire in countries where you can give your staff zero paid vacation days is not.
Is it really a good business decision if loosing one of your employees could send ripples through your products and negatively affect it for months to come?
It's less of an issue where people take their vacations at the same time (eg 4 weeks summer, 1 week christmas, etc). Then you just need a skeleton crew, no PMs and your CTO & other founders can be on-call for ops emergencies. As your company grows so that you no longer have technically competent management you start having 2 PMs and 2 DBAs too :)
You're right, we should just move our businesses to whichever countries currently allow the most exploitation and abuse of workers and race to the bottom. Why not just cut to the chase and implement slavery already? It's the most economically efficient method of production after all.
Slavery is not economically efficient at all. The fact that economists pointed this unpleasant fact out is what got economics tagged with the phrase "the dismal science".
I think you misunderstand the article, the term comes from Carlyle rejecting the free market as a philosophical principle, not some efficiency analysis. And in fact his essay was a defense of plantation owners whose businesses were failing because they had just lost access to extremely efficient slave labor thanks to inconvenient regulations.
If the economy were a little more global back then, those plantation owners should have moved their businesses to different, more slavery/business-friendly countries rather than adapt to the new human rights the workers had been given, no?
Yes, the "philosophical principle" Carlyle was rejecting is economic efficiency. Slavery is not efficient because the world might contain a more productive employment opportunity for a slave, which the slave would freely choose if given the opportunity.
I have absolutely no idea why you wish to portray slavery as economically efficient. Is it truly your belief that welfare is maximized with some people enslaved? (I suppose this is not a particularly uncommon left wing view, but it's very rarely stated so explicitly.)
I think the ways we are using the phrase 'economically efficient' are different, and that's where much of the disagreement lies. In fact I'd reject the notion of the existence of a universal objective welfare function. If you include the welfare of slaves in your calculation certainly I'd agree that the system is inefficient; but since when has any slave owner done that?
It's actually an extremely uncommon (nonexistent) left wing view that welfare is maximized with some people enslaved. Literally nobody believes that and I certainly hope for your sake that you don't believe anyone believes that and are just trying to be incendiary. It is a very common view among most people (since it's the truth) that the welfare of /certain people/ is maximized with /certain other people/ enslaved. And then we can conclude if the first group has economic power and is subject to no regulation and act according to maximizing their economic welfare, they will implement it.
The contention is that your position, that businesses should refuse to operate in countries which regulate rights into existence since these rights have costs which hurt the bottom line of the business, if adopted leads directly and immediately to slavery. Slavery is unquestionably disgusting and reprehensible, so therefore your position, which leads to an unacceptable result, cannot be accepted.
So I'm suggesting that the /subjective/ welfare of people in a position to own slaves (wealthy business owners) is maximized under slavery. And from that I conclude the maximization of the welfare of wealthy business owners -- the natural result of unfettered capitalism -- is something to be categorically rejected. So we need fetters.
It's actually an extremely uncommon (nonexistent) left wing view that welfare is maximized with some people enslaved. Literally nobody believes that...
Simply not true. Several elected officials believe or previously believed that, and some proposed legislation for that purpose:
And then we can conclude if the first group has economic power and is subject to no regulation and act according to maximizing their economic welfare, they will implement it.
Yet strangely, that doesn't seem to happen. Multinationals with huge economic power and subject to minimal regulation tend to treat employees better than smaller and weaker local companies (at least in India, the US, and other places I'm familiar with).
I don't dispute much of what you wrote about why we shouldn't do business with those who practice slavery. I'd draw a very clear bright line: do workers agree to their terms of work? In India or the US, the vast majority of IT workers do. I guess you want to go further and tell my employer/me what work conditions are acceptable?
Okay, if you define a required short limited period of service for public good as slavery then sure most civilized and uncivilized countries implement it and many people support it. I'll concede this point, though I don't think there's very many people in this universe who would use the word 'slavery' to describe this so you may be a unique snowflake in this regard.
I think the reason multinationals treat employees better is because that since they are multinational, they are a single company subject to the laws of every nation: it is more efficient for them to treat EVERYONE by the same rights as the most stringent (Europe) whereas companies local to India or the US can abuse the lack of rights these countries give workers since they only deal with local workers.
And I would agree with you about consent being the big bright line. Except I think consent is very complicated. If you allowed people to sign themselves into slavery, people would consent to slavery. No matter how awful something is, if it's allowed, people will "consent" to it -- the most desperate in society are forced by circumstances to consent to it. I think the word consent only has meaning when there are other meaningful options available. Which I think is the fundamental difference: the definition of consent. We all agree if someone puts a gun to your head and demands consent it's not consent: but what if a faceless nameless system forces you to die or consent to whatever some collection of business owners demand and you agree: is this consent or not? I say not really.
Employment laws in India more or less apply only to either larger companies or friends of connected people.
I would have no concerns hiring someone and telling them "hey, I'm paying you well because I need you available all the time, just in case." They will almost certainly lack the ability to use the legal system to screw me over.
I personally am strongly against any kind of "unlimited" vacation days or other such perks. In my experience hardly anyone takes advantage of them because they are made to feel guilty. Even most places that claim to offer working from home rarely have people take advantage of it due to the culture (not at desk means you're lazy).
I prefer the employer just to be upfront and if I want to work from home then I'll negotiate to do that once a week upfront.
These are two different issues. What you have a problem with isn't the "unlimited", it's the "no minimum". Would you have a problem with "unlimited vacation days, four weeks a year mandatory minimum?".
As in, if you haven't taken any vacation when December rolls in, see you after new year's.
So telling you that I have 30 days of paid vacation here in Germany wouldn't actually make a difference because you wouldn't take your 30 days if you had them?
Btw, when I'm on sick leave that is also paid.
Also, I don't know how it's in Germany, but in other parts of Europe, your employer can force you to take your vacation days. Most do it at the end of the year, because if you have unused vacation days and you quit, they have to pay you extra for the vacation days you lose by quitting. And as you noted, sick days aren't counted in that. In fact, I can take a one-day sick leave whenever I want without so much as a doctor's notice (company policy mainly due to the fact that taking a sick leave with a doctor's notice creates more administrative work which isn't worth it for a single day).
I don't know either if your employer can force you to take your vacation. But I heard that your health insurance may deny benefits for stress related issues if they find out that you didn't take all of your vacation days.
Here in Poland he can force you, and often does, because if it is found out that employees didn't take all of their vacation time the company can pay a substantial fee for that.
In Australia, the standard is 20 days paid vacation per year.
There is usually a set amount of paid sick leave as well (think it various across industries, but there are legal minimums.) Most places do not require a doctor's certificate for two or less days sick, unless they are adjacent to a public holiday.
(I've never heard of anyone being able to substitute sick days while on vacation though.)
you probably didn't even think of it, but I fear it needs to be spelled out explicitly here: those paid days of sick leave don't count against your vacation either.
I don't know how widespread this is, but in some places if you get sick while on your vacation you can use your sick leave and get some vacation days returned to you.
I'm a UK employee of a US bank and manage 3 employees based in NY. To be perfectly honest I've not noticed any significant pressure on my US colleagues and team to not take vacation days. If anything my own US based manager is frequently reminding everyone to plan their vacations and not leave too much of their allowance until the end of the year. So clearly this culture of not taking full vacation days isn't ubiquitous, and of course the culture may be different in other parts of the bank - I work on the tech side. Maybe it's partly because as a global organization the US side has absorbed some of the vacation culture from other regions. Don't know.
Having said that, contract employees are only paid for the days they attend, and they tend to take much fewer days off in the US than UK based contractors, typically maybe 2-5 or so per year. But that's their decision.
Banks are a slightly different entity... It wasn't long ago when bank employees were actually required to take at least 2 weeks straight off once a year. Of course, this wasn't for the employee's health, rather it gave the bank time to catch any sort of embezzlement or other such activities the employee may have been up to. These days there are more controls and technology has ended some of common ways to try and hide bad transactions (such as sending checks to the wrong processing center or structuring transactions such that they'll take longer than they normally would).
A lot of banks have removed this requirement now, but the culture of planning vacations remains in that industry.
After moving to the Netherlands, my wife and I were astounded and rather impressed by the extraordinary attitude towards holidays here. Every single person we know on our street and acquaintances we have met since being here takes nearly an entire month off during July or August. Now that is quite refreshing! People actually leave work around 430 or five in the afternoon. The one difference however is that everyone is usually at work quite promptly no later than 8 AM.
The minimum leave in the Netherlands is 20 days, four weeks. So that would mean that those people take their entire vacation in one go, not having anything (or barely anything) left for the rest of the year (eg. end of December, ....).
How many professional only have the minimum leave in the Netherlands? Most people I know in Sweden have more than the minimum after a few years of work.
Cant tell how common additional days above the minimum leave are in NL (you'd need to know these numbers). But even if you consider the usual five to eight days it would come as a surprise to me if it really was common to take off an entire month in one go as even then one would be barely left with any remaining days (as compared to none before).
Some people will certainly do it, but not everybody.
I've always been one to take full advantage of my vacation, since I don't define myself by my work. Everyone looks forward to the weekend, right? Then why not take a few vacation days to make your weekend longer, or 2 weeks off to totally refresh?
Downside is that one time I was "let go" while out of the country and told I didn't need to come back to the office. I guess sometimes the vacation days in your contract are more of a threat than a perk.
I'll stand up for the US system. I personally like it. I don't like "vacations". What do you really gain just spending a couple weeks elsewhere? I don't even particularly care for weekends.
I'd far rather be able to really focus on work, really getting stuff done, not have to deal with coworkers all being on vacation, saving hard for retirement or whatever, and then every couple years, go off and do something completely different (paid or unpaid).
And I'm certainly not saying this from a "this proves American workers are the most hardworking" junk attitude. I simply find life more enjoyable this way.
Then, that's my young, single self talking. Perhaps with a family moderation is more important.
EDIT: People are misunderstanding my post, assuming I mean I don't do anything but work. On the contrary I've been to 30+ countries, lived in 5, biked across Asia, spent a year teaching English in Korea. This is difficult with just "vacation time". PLUS this style allows me to be really focused on / interested in my work when I'm in that phase of life.
Good for you, and maybe you're an outlier, but everything we know about work tells us that this is counterproductive.
It's good for productivity, health, and well-being if people get to disconnect completely from work. As a company, it doesn't even make sense to have people work like you do, because they are more creative and productive if they do take time off.
The odd thing is, I don't see how someone can disconnect completely from work for just a week or two. I recently took a two-week trip to BC and even ditched my laptop for the 2nd week, but nonetheless was thinking about work a good portion of that time.
Do you really have zero interests than those met at work? Never want to see other countries, or at least other parts of your country? Never want to spend times out of the office in nature?
I am very happy I have six weeks of vacation and I have to take them or get written up. To me, there's more to life than delivering the next iteration of some product.
Exactly my point: On the contrary I've been to 30+ countries, lived in 5, biked across Asia, spent a year teaching English in Korea. You can't do this with "vacations".
I don't see why you can't go on vacation even if you take a couple months off on a sabbatical every couple of years. It's mostly about financial priorities, especially for most people on HN.
> I'll stand up for the US system. I personally like it. I don't like "vacations". What do you really gain just spending a couple weeks elsewhere? I don't even particularly care for weekends.
It's ok if you like it that way now. The problem with that much
focus on work is, that if the work is gone nothing is left.
The most extreme case is if people enter retirement and they literally
have no more meaning in their life, because they never learned living without work.
The Mona Lisa's not with it - it's very small, kept in the dark, and they won't let you near enough to it to get a good look. You really do get a better impression of it from reproductions.
Go to Glasgow instead and take a look at Dali's _Christ of Saint John of the Cross_ instead. It's huge and absolutely stunning.
Why all this downvoting of this comment? You may disagree, he may be an outlier, but it's respectfully stated, and does not imply this is a universal truth. There is more information in a viewpoint out of the ordinary.
>every couple years, go off and do something completely different
You mean, like take a vacation? You are saying exactly the same thing but with the time-scale different. I agree on that: work hard for 10 months, no days off. 2 months completely out of the office. But that assumes excellent health and no family.
One can do that when they are younger, don't have a family or other commitments that would make those sorts of trips impossible (from your edit). If you are unable to do that, would you then just work all the time until you retire?
That's a great question. Honestly I don't know the answer. I'm actually married now with two young kids in suburban America, and with husband and wife (her ideals are pretty similar to mine) not-quite-content, and hoping to figure something out.
My ideal would be to do something like http://technomancy.us/, one of the big developers at Heroku, who is taking time off with his family to go do missionary work in rural Thailand, teaching his kids electronics, and meanwhile supporting himself selling custom keyboards.
As a federal employee, I already know I would probably have a hard time adjusting to the terrible work/life imbalance common in American private industry. I don't think closing the pay gap (probably about $10k-$15k difference in my case) would change my mind much either.
I work a very honest 80 hours per two-week pay period, and use my 4 weeks of annual leave far removed (at least mentally) from the workplace. Seldom do I feel any push back on that, either.
I may be the only one, but I see a difference between "vacation" and "vacation days." It's been a long, long time, since I took a "vacation," where I had a week to ten days off. On the other hand, I use all of the 26 vacation days I get. While I take a few days here and there, mostly I take Fridays off and make three-day weekends. (Sometimes four-day weekends.)
Met a French woman who gets 4 months off a year. 4 MONTHS!!! Apparently 2 months is the minimum in France. I will note she hates her job (some kind of auditing). I don't hate my job but at the same time the more I hear about many European countries vacation policies the more I question the USA's typical policies.
WTF was this downvoted? What did I say that pissed people off so much they felt this was worth of a downvote?
First off 7 French natives have told me the minimum is 2 months. 3 work at Nintendo of France and brought this up in relation to their Japanese co-workers in Japan. Even though Nintendo is a Japanese company it has to abide by French laws for it's office in Paris. 1 works at a Nuclear Power Plant. She's the one that gets 4 months off a year. Yes, she actually gets 4 months off paid vacation. This is not a lie. 3 others are currently working in Japan, 2 in Kyoto, 1 in Tokyo, not working for French companies, frustrated at the lack of vacation relative to France. They might have been wrong but that's what they believe.
Second it doesn't matter if it's 40 days off a year or 25. That's still INFINITELY MORE THAN THE USA which is has a mandatory minimum of ZERO days off and still entirely makes the point that lots more vacation than is typical in the USA is at least something to be considered.
