5 ms·
At my last employer (a small startup), we had very clear vacation rules: - Every week, you track the hours you worked (honor system- we just filed out a spread
by fishtoaster 13y ago
At my last employer (a small startup), we had very clear vacation rules:
- Every week, you track the hours you worked (honor system- we just filed out a spreadsheet).
- You’re expected to work X - 4 hours a week on average (X being a normal work week, 4 being the number of vacation hours you accrue per week).
So, if you work X hours a week, you’ll find yourself with about 26 days of vacation at the end of the year. If you work long hours for a few spots and find you averaged X + 2 hours a week, you end up with 39 days of vacation. You could use your hours whenever you want (and even go negative if you didn’t get too crazy).
It set clear expectations, showed that people were expected to take vacation, and made everyone feel like they were entitled to their days off, rather than guilty. I thought it was pretty neat.
That said, we dismantled the system about 6 months after I joined because although most of us didn’t mind the hour tracking, a few people really disliked it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- udev 13y agoNumbers like 26 and 39 vacation days tell me that you are not in North America. Over here we are talking about 10-15 vacation days per year.
- yulaow 13y agoWell, in EU you have fixed vacation days _usually_ and you MUST take it, so it is possible that it is just a really good company in US
- philangist 13y agoWell it depends. A lot of startups have very flexible vacation policies. At my current job I took a 2 week vacation for the christmas season within my first three months on the job. I have a coworker who goes on 3-4 10-14 day long snowboarding trips per year. Our lead developer just took a month long vacation to France. The vacation policy is essentially that there is no vacation policy. You can take quite a lot of time off if you want, as long as you've been handling all your responsibilities and you give enough of an advanced warning to your team members.
- null_ptr 13y agoWhy would a small American startup not give generous vacation to its employees?
- fishtoaster 13y agoNo, this was in SF. I was just fudging the numbers a little: X was actually 50 hours (which I left out because it wasn’t particularly important to the story). So, if you work X hours a week, you get 4*52=208 hours of vacation. If X were 40, that’d be 208/8 = 26 days. Since it’s 50, it’s 208/10 = 21 days.
- fishtoaster 13y agoThat said, I'm now at an "unlimited" vacation time place (still in SF), and I've had no problem asking for time off. I took 3.5 weeks around christmas for a trip to New Zealand, and I'll probably take a week this summer to visit family on the east coast (in addition to a day here and there for local trips).