Ask HN: Can you take more than 2 consecutive weeks of vacation?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38166112

by xsoul • 3 years ago

34 90 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

For context, I work in a US startup. I wanted to take 3 weeks of vacation to visit my family on the other side of the earth. But I was told by my manager that I need to work remotely during 1 of the 3 weeks, in order to follow the convention.

Is there an unspoken rule/etiquette to take no more than 2 consecutive weeks of vacation?

3seashells• 3 years ago

Yes.

tecleandor• 3 years ago

Yes you can take them, or yes there is an unspoken rule?

abraxas• 3 years ago

Well yes I can but it is a moot point because my spouse cannot so the situation as a whole isn't any better than if I was limited as well

sethammons• 3 years ago

every job I've had it was a process to get more than 2wks at a time; it was fraught with peril. I only got it through once or twice and my manager was not happy with it. That said, I usually get ~2wks per quarter.

tayo42• 3 years ago

depends on the manager and company. before working in software Yeah i thought taking a lot of time in US like that was unheard of. That's also how i watched my parents manage their time. Working in software though, I feel like even up to 4 weeks has been normalized because so many people from foreign countries like India go home to visit family and the trip is a big one to take.

maxehmookau• 3 years ago

Yes. I do most years.

woofcat• 3 years ago

I've not heard it forbidden but mainly speak to your manager to ensure that things are scheduled well enough.

rs999gti• 3 years ago

Is there an unspoken rule/etiquette to take no more than 2 consecutive weeks of vacation?

No, as long as you give your manager the heads up with enough notice, so they can find someone to cover for you, you can use all your vacation in one shot.

Note, at least with me, this means no more vacation bridge days, and more consideration needing to head out early, etc.

Also, if we are at an unlimited vacation org, this means you only have 1-2 weeks of vacation left over.

cebert• 3 years ago

Is your company an “unlimited PTO” organization or do you have contractually guaranteed days off?

VincentEvans• 3 years ago

If you are asking if there’s a general unspoken rule in US that everyone knows but you are not aware of - no, there isn’t one that I personally ever heard of.

But it’s not exactly unexpected that you may need to negotiate something with your specific employer. It sucks tho.

ska• 3 years ago

Most places I've worked, there has been a written or unwritten (and, depending on jurisdiction, maybe statutory) assumption that you can take a week or two off without discussion (other than which weeks, naturally) but anything above that may need some discussion about project impact and timing.

It typically hasn't been a problem if there is lots of notice, but "I'd like to take 3 weeks off next month" is likely to end up with a bunch of back and forth at best.

My current place has a number of international hires, and has been pretty flexible about allowing large blocks of time to go "home" and visit, some mix of vacation time, unpaid leave, and remote work for 4+ weeks. But these have typically been planned many months in advance.

Random_BSD_Geek3• 3 years ago

What convention?

Your manager is a bad manager.

Sincerely, A Former Manager

brailsafe• 3 years ago

Managers will try anything they can to prevent you exercising your rights. While there can be scenarios that make it impractical to take n weeks off, convention isn't a valid one.

thfuran• 3 years ago

Yes, I can but I'm supposed to give two weeks notice if I'm doing so. (And no, I don't mean I'd need to quit).

figassis• 3 years ago

I can, but I don't abuse it. I only took it once as I was truly exhausted and really needed to decompress. My advice is make sure your performance is stellar and also make sure to leave your team in a good position to perform without you. Having a good manager to run interference for you while away is also important. Gladly I checked all those boxes. YMMV.

bklw• 3 years ago

I have to take at least 2 consecutive weeks once every year. Switzerland.

Faaak• 3 years ago

Same here in CH. And it's not uncommon for some people that have a lot of OT to take maybe a month straight (with a bit of advice in advance)

Rastonbury• 3 years ago

Europe's PTO is like another world, I recall emailing someone in the summer and the auto-response was like "be back in 2 months"

Ekaros3• 3 years ago

Same in Finland. 4 weeks is preferred, but for good reason employer can split that, but must always provide at least 2 weeks in row. So for regular worker 5 weeks over the year. With at least 2 of them being consecutive.

secretsatan• 3 years ago

Yep, sometimes it’s a little annoying but reading here i’m not going to complain too lodly

devoutsalsa• 3 years ago

This is why unlimited PTO is stupid. You have to get permission for ANY time off. Lame.

mlhpdx2• 3 years ago

Folks don’t ask me for permission for time off, they inform me. I ask if they’ve coordinated with their teammates, if that’s appropriate (sometimes it isn't, given a family event or the like, in which case managers and peers coordinate whatever is needed for the person to get leave with a clear conscience).

fnimick3• 3 years ago

This is not my experience, having worked at "unlimited PTO" companies for my entire career. You end up with people on the team able to take radically different amounts of vacation depending on the current projects, who is engaged in the mission critical stuff, etc.

The absolute worst position to be in is on a critical but non-visible infrastructure piece, where nobody outside the immediate team notices your impact, until it falls over and takes the entire business with it while it's offline. You end up without flashy deliveries to leverage as political capital to advocate for yourself, yet still with the downsides of having difficulty justifying time away due to business risk.

arcticbull2• 3 years ago

It has its pros and cons, and it depends on your employer. Your employer generally has to approve PTO even on a PTO plan that tracks hours. If you don't trust your employer to honor a reasonable PTO policy - unlimited or otherwise - then you should get a new job because there's probably lots of other problems.

I've been able to take blocks as long a 3 weeks off at an employer with an unlimited PTO policy, because I worked hard when I was there and my manager and I were on the same page. I told them when I was going and how long for, and they said nice, have fun.

Etiquette was to give at least 2x as much notice as the duration of the PTO. If you're going to take 3 weeks off give at least 6 weeks notice.

paulcole2• 3 years ago

Your employer generally has to approve PTO even on a PTO plan that tracks hours

They don't have to, they choose to.

We track days of PTO where I work and there's no approval process. You take the days you want to take and that's that.

It's the ideal way to do it IMO.

jejeyyy772• 3 years ago

Yep, unlimited PTO is a scam.

But, to make lemonade, I make sure to take 4-5 weeks of PTO per year, EVERY year. That way, it's actually a perk/advantageous over traditional PTO packages.

fnimick3• 3 years ago

How do you successfully advocate for that?

These experiences blow my mind - I have managed to take 4-5 weeks of PTO, total, over the course of a decade in my career at "unlimited PTO" startups due to pretty much always being mission critical, and even those took some real pushing.

marssaxman• 3 years ago

That's not been my experience, unless by "get permission" you mean "provide notification". I simply tell my manager when I'm going to be gone; the longer I'm going to be gone, the further in advance I let him know. That's it. I don't have to nickel-and-dime myself with PTO hours or keep track of them at all. I strongly prefer unlimited PTO to the traditional model.

dpbriggs• 3 years ago

I can do that without manager approval. I'm an SRE in Canada and accrue quite a bit of time off in lieu on my oncall shifts.

hotnfresh2• 3 years ago

Not exactly, but there's no guaranteed time off in the US at all (FMLA aside) and even mid-career office workers often only have three weeks per year (early-career workers often have two weeks, sometimes less) with the result that taking three weeks all at once is pretty unusual across most of the economy.

samsolomon2• 3 years ago

There's a lot of "it depends" here. As both a former founder and early startup employee these are the things that come to mind—

How far out did you discuss this with your employer? Were they aware of it when you joined? There's a pretty big difference if this is 6 months or two weeks away. Setting expectations go a long way here on both sides.

What is the size of the business? People are more critical the smaller the business is. The stakes are very different for a business with 10 vs 100 vs 1,000 employees.

Is the business cashflow positive—or near it? You said startup, so that makes me think they aren't cash flow positive. Three consecutive weeks is a lot to ask for a small business that isn't making money.

Essentially, the more stable the business is the less of an issue I'd expect it to be—given expectations were set in advance.

Random_BSD_Geek3• 3 years ago

This is unbelievable nonsense.

Your employees accrue PTO. If you can't handle them using their PTO, maybe you shouldn't have employees.

If three consecutive weeks is a lot to ask, what would you do when that same employee gets hit by a bus and is dead for even longer?

Oh right, you'd just replace them and the business would move on.

OP, this is the real answer to your question. The business doesn't care about you or your well being.

foota• 3 years ago

I don't think you want your boss to replace you when you go on vacation.

organsnyder• 3 years ago

The OP doesn't indicate how much vacation time they've accrued. Perhaps they get "unlimited" PTO, which makes things murky.

samsolomon2• 3 years ago

I gave a measured reply given what the poster provided.

"Unbelievable nonsense" is a pretty harsh response. If they are working for a 10-person business burning cash, that is very different than a profitable 1,000-person one.

The poster asked about etiquette. Personally, I'd be offended as a founder or employee at a 10-person company if someone asked for 3 weeks off at the last minute.

HumblyTossed• 3 years ago

This nonsense comes down to: Rule and Control. That's all it is. Employers think they're entitled to rule over the lives of their workers.

Absolute nonsense.

Clubber3• 3 years ago

Not to mention, just about every position in an early startup is mission critical. I'd say 3 weeks off would be fine in the company I work at, but I'd be expected to be contactable and available if an emergency happened. We're about 5 years in though. The first few years, I really couldn't take vacation other than a 3-4 day weekend here and there.

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

When I worked in academia, yes absolutely if the weeks aligned with breaks in instruction. So winter holidays, or pretty much any time in June, July, or August were fine for long stretches of PTO.

In the private sector, I think I took one two-week vacation. It was not a problem, but it had to be approved.

One company I worked with had a mandatory 8 week sabbatical after 10 years, and every 5 years thereafter. It had to be taken as a single block of time off.

jjeaff• 3 years ago

A company policy requiring large blocks of time off strikes me as a really good idea for companies that can afford it. The employees get time to decompress and destress thus making them more productive and creative. And the company is given a chance to figure out what it takes to cover your job if you were to leave. Like finding out that no one else has credentials to that one ultra important service that only has to be accessed every 6 months or so. Or learning that someone else needs to be trained as a backup in that one special thing you always take care of.

bryanlarsen2• 3 years ago

It's a common policy for financial firms. It's hard to cover fraud when you're on vacation

j7ake• 3 years ago

In Europe it’s common to take an entire month off.

hotnfresh2• 3 years ago

EU-wide minimum vacation allotment is 4 weeks, right? With some member states going as high as 7? Plus holidays (another 10 days, I wanna say, in the case of France for example).

The US has no minimum vacation time. Most folks go their whole career without ever seeing 5 weeks off in a single year. It's common for workers to start at 5-10 days. At the bottom end of the economic ladder, there's no paid time off at all, and if you try to take off a whole week off you might be told "no" with the alternative of "quit".

Ekaros3• 3 years ago

Depends by country. But 4-5 weeks after first year for example. And then depending on local customs you could swap some special pay for more time off... And then public sector workers might get even more time off.

And this is not counting any public holidays that might or might not fall on weekdays, which also depend on per country.

Not to forget that sick days are well sick days. So it could be if you get sick on vacation you don't lose that vacation time...

Sirikon• 3 years ago

I needed it once some years ago. I took a full month. No questions asked.

EDIT for context: Spanish consulting company

MDGeist• 3 years ago

At my previous company they created a policy where if it was more than a week or two you had to get permission from the CEO (company was a few hundred people in size). This was after one month where like 5 people all took 3 week vacations after direct manager approvals and it created some operational issues... This all struck me as a bit unreasonable though because it was not an unlimited PTO place at the time so the time had been banked.

makingstuffs• 3 years ago

Yes. I think I’m in a rarely lucky situation where my employer lets me save my holiday and sandwich it around the Xmas shutdown so I end up with a month off at the end of every year

Zolomon• 3 years ago

In Sweden it’s customary to get 25-40 days of vacation per year based on seniority, public vs private employers and other benefits.

Ekaros3• 3 years ago

Not in USA, but here I can by law take 4 weeks, not necessarily in one go, but it is more rare to split it up. And my bosses would not have any issues with that.

jpm_sd• 3 years ago

My experience in the USA - yes, this unwritten rule exists. Or maybe I've only worked in places that are too small (or too disorganized) to provide coverage for longer intervals?

I've only taken greater-than-two-week intervals off /between/ jobs.

purpleblue• 3 years ago

Your employer has the right to tell you how long you can take vacation for.

But she is lying when she says that it's convention to not take longer than 2 weeks off consecutively.

chunkymilk• 3 years ago

The only "rule" around vacation is the longer the vacation the more notice you _should_ give. I've had colleagues take 5-6 weeks off, but they let the team know 4-5 months in advance so it wasn't a big deal and we could work around it.

ender341341• 3 years ago

Yeah, I've had several teammates take a month-ish of to travel, most of it comes down to just giving a good heads up that it's coming.

I set up a shared team calendar and asked people to mark when they're off so others can be aware and try to minimise overlap (not that it's banned, just be aware and if you're like "well were going either this week or this" and someone else is already off one of those weeks strongly consider it a point in favor of the other).

BlackFly• 3 years ago

Local law for me is I believe twice the time off advance notice. 5-6 weeks would require 10-12 weeks of notice. In principle employer can refuse for important business requirements, you can suggest two alternative times and if they refuse all three you can just dictate when you will be taking holidays.

Asserting your rights can have social consequences, of course, but if you need to assert your rights... the real benefit of the law is setting the norms of how people behave.

mlhpdx2• 3 years ago

I think there is an understanding that more than two consecutive weeks has a bigger impact on peers than less. As much as I dislike it, I have to say “yes” that the bar is higher at two weeks. It’s not a prohibition, but a checkpoint perhaps?

macNchz• 3 years ago

How big is the startup? This conversation is going to be quite different at a company with 3 employees vs a company with 3000.

surfsvammel• 3 years ago

I have 30 days of vacation in my contract and I am free to use them whenever I want. It is also backed with the legal right to 4 weeks of consecutive vacation during Jun-Aug, a right that the employer cannot deny. Of course I live in Scandinavia. Sweden to be precise.

akmarinov• 3 years ago

Can confirm, I work with Swedish people and they all disappear come summer time, I see them again in September.

lervag• 3 years ago

I think these rules are more or less the same in Scandinavia. The Norwegian rules are well explained at Arbeidstilsynet [0]. Basically 5 weeks per year, 6 weeks if you are 60 years old or older. Of course, people may have more vacation per contract, but in general, you can't have less.

Most Norwegians take about 4 weeks of vacation during July.

[0] https://www.arbeidstilsynet.no/en/working-conditions/holiday...

willsmith72• 3 years ago

American PTO in my experience is nuts. It's full of unwritten rules and conventions.

Give me a fixed amount of leave, which everyone is forced to take, so I know where we're at and don't have to play your guessing games.

blibble• 3 years ago

it's an employee/employer relationship

what does your contract say?

it's that simple

(and if they don't respect the terms of their own contract then get out now)

Freak_NL• 3 years ago

I can and I do (software engineer, not on call). But in the Netherlands this isn't too rare. Three weeks is fairly common during the summer holidays actually. As long as everyone is a bit flexible with planning to avoid certain key-employees from being absent at the same time, this is just possible.

Earlier this year I took five weeks of unpaid leave to redress the work/life balance. Not a problem either.

The alternative is that either I get burned out or I leave for an employer who is willing to let me take holidays if applied for in a timely manner. I can assure you that option one is one that costs employers a lot more than just accepting that employees are not always available.

jkellermann• 3 years ago

As a German, I find your question is strange. And a Bit pittyful. I hope you can stand the Peer pressure and care for your wellbeing! Greetings fromm Bavaria

adverbly• 3 years ago

Depends:

How much banked vacation do you have?

How many weeks do you get per year?

How much notice are you giving?

Are there any major resourcing demands in the target time?

Are there serious conflicts with other co-workers?

How does your TC compare to the rest of your team and the industry at large?

Assuming favorable answers to the above, I've never been at a company which would reject PTO. Admittedly, I work at companies that actually understand that work-life balance is in everyone's best long-term interest, but Id say 75% of requests get approved without need for modifications. Probably depends a lot on industry.

kiviuq• 3 years ago

In Stalinist Communist Europe no biggie. I can take 4 weeks off if you want. No questions asked no eye brows raised.

frenchie75• 3 years ago

In the US, I would hardly be surprised. Working in France, I have 7 weeks of vacation every year (with 5 weeks being the minimum required by labor law for all full-time employees). In my company we're also required to take a "congé principal" once a year of at least 10 consecutive working days. As in most French companies, it's also pretty much the norm for people to take off 3 or even 4 weeks in July/August, I prefer to use mine over the course of the year though, unless I make big travel plans.

Tade0• 3 years ago

I'm not based in the US, but US companies outsourcing to my location that I worked for did find the concept foreign.

I make a point out of taking the last two weeks of the year off, but I could stretch it to three, because my manager takes this much, so it's not like he would be waiting for me with something anyway.

I'm also planning on taking a whole month off should I become a father of a second child. I took two weeks for the first one and in hindsight it was not enough. A (male) friend of mine took six and the only thing holding me back from doing the same are finances, since as a contractor I have a daily rate.

philomath_mn• 3 years ago

Another complicating factor is "unlimited vacation". I have it at my new gig and I think I probably have _less_ recourse than a person with an explicit "4 weeks of PTO" in their employment contract.

That being said, the company is really chill and every seems to be taking a good amount of vacation (and I told my manager I am targeting 5 weeks off per year and he said that is reasonable).

radus• 3 years ago

IMO unlimited needs to be paired more often with a guaranteed or even minimum number of weeks - at least if the intent is for employees to actually take their vacation.

bryanlarsen2• 3 years ago

Recommendation: If they're asking you to work remote, take even more time. IOW, rather than working 1 of 3 weeks remote, work 3 of 5. That's what I did this summer as part of a 3 person startup. It gave both my family and my company a good amount of time.

nathants• 3 years ago

resign or take unpaid leave and double the weeks. return to a higher salary there or elsewhere. creative policy compliance.

vermaden• 3 years ago

Yes. Why?

BrandoElFollito• 3 years ago

In France this is rather typical. 2 weeks are compulsory by law, some take 3, some 4.

mnky9800n• 3 years ago

I'm required to take 3 every July living in Norway.

nicbou• 3 years ago

In Germany you're required to take at least two consecutive weeks off once per year, and at least 20 days off in total. Most tech workers have 30 days off. People leaving for 3-5 weeks is pretty standard. I'm talking about a real vacation where employees are unreachable.

Sick days don't count as holidays. If you get sick on holiday you get those vacation days back.

https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/vacation-days

simonblack• 3 years ago

In many countries of the world, employees get up to about 5 weeks of consecutive paid vacation. Some countries also have a 'holiday loading' of some 15% on top of their normal pay level. https://www.australianunions.org.au/factsheet/leave-loading/

The US is an outlier with very little paid vacation. It seems that some people get no paid vacation weeks at all.

sireat• 3 years ago

I was "forced" to take 5 consecutive weeks of paid vacation this summer, because I had too many unused days from previous years.

The HR lady practically begged me to take the vacation.

This is in Eastern Europe.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 3 years ago

Yes 3, 4 you need some approval. I do take a total of 5 weeks of pto every year though (2 weeks winter, 2 weeks summer, 5 days spread through the year).

I can't take more than 2 weeks consecutive myself, it makes it incredibly hard to go back to work in general.

Ask HN: Can you take more than 2 consecutive weeks of vacation?

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