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> Most senior employees are gone at least 5 weeks a year. Isn't this the case everywhere? I know we're a bit spoiled in Denmark with everyone getting at least
by mjn 14y ago
> Most senior employees are gone at least 5 weeks a year.
Isn't this the case everywhere? I know we're a bit spoiled in Denmark with everyone getting at least seven weeks off by law, whether you're senior engineering staff or a janitor (10 statutory holidays plus 5 weeks of movable holiday).
But I thought in the U.S., senior professional staff at least got 4+ weeks, and were encouraged to take it. When I was growing up (in Chicago) my dad worked for a big engineering firm, and while he started with only 2 weeks a year of vacation, it went up with seniority to a max of 6 weeks once he was at the senior engineering ranks. It was quite useful from a work/life balance perspective, since it enabled us to take family trips to relatives in Greece for 3-4 weeks at a time, without which I would neither know my relatives there nor be able to speak anything approaching fluent Greek. My brother works for a Valley hardware company and gets something like 4-5 weeks as well, so I thought it was still a fairly standard perk if you had an upper-middle-class professional job. In fact to me it's one of the defining features of being on the upper side of middle-class, that you can both afford and are allowed take a few weeks of vacation each year.
- incision 14y agoI realized I probably should have been more specific about that. It's not really the amount of leave that's a problem, rather how leave in general is used/abused to compound other problems in the government culture. Big project coming due in 6 months? Several people who should be accountable to deliver major parts of the effort are scheduled for leave on the due date. Need to backfill someone who will be gone for 4 solid weeks during a busy period? Sorry, you can't bring on a short-duration contractor, only FTEs are allowed perform this completely generic role. So you've decided to be a bold manager and take issue with any of this? The grievance is already in the inter-office mail. I have to imagine (hope) that where accountability exists, the bottom line matters or employees are invested producing something these things wouldn't occur. >In fact to me it's one of the defining features of being on the upper side of middle-class, that you can both afford and are allowed take a few weeks of vacation each year. You don't have to be upper or even middle class, even within the hierarchy of the organizational layers. It's often just a matter of having seniority within your job description.