The corporate overlords don't have time for us to enjoy ourselves. Is there any other explanation?
Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?
81–90 of 424 posts
Re: Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?
#82[deleted]
I do respect your work ethic, but it really depends on what you do as to wether this is good advice or not.
As a creative type, I really wish I could just sit down and "Get idea's" and then create them. But the reality is that it just doesn't work that way.
If you are taking in the same sights, doing the same routine day in day out, you simply won't be as creative as a person who adds as much variety in their life as possible.
Even if you are not the creative type, please see also my other post here entitled "Sharpen the Saw."
With respect to your father, spending 4 hours in the car each day during your family vacation time together seems like a poor use of time. It sounds like he deserved a break.
Re: Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?
#83[deleted]
It may be different if you're building a business for yourself, but if you're building something for your family you better make sure you still have some time to spend with them!
I'm from the UK, but my wife and I live in the US. I get barely enough time to spend with her, let alone the rest of my family, who I get to see once every year if I'm lucky.
Perhaps in a few years' time all my hard work will have paid off, and I'll be wealthy enough to live across two continents. Realistically, it's dangerous to depend on this; you never know what's going to happen.
Re: Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?
#84There is a good article from another software developer around here who told his boss he was taking a 3 month vacation. He made the point the business needed him more than he needed it; he was a competent developer and could easily get work, didn't have any living/large financial dependencies. At first I thought it was absurd, but the more I thought about it, he was absolutely correct. Take a long vacation some time.…
My wife has freelanced for over 15 years (before I knew her) precisely because of this. She saved up a big stash of cash, set automatic bill pays for her rent and utilities and took a two-month trip to Paris.
You have to keep your expenses low (both at home and abroad) but at least you're not at work.
Re: Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?
#85Usually the only time Americans can take long vacations is between jobs. I wonder how many actually change jobs just for this reason. I asked for 4 consecutive weeks off to travel Europe once at a previous employer (I had worked there 5 years with no more then a week and a half off) and they denied the request. So I found another job and made sure I had a 4 week break between the two.
I've done this, though I didn't realize what I was doing at the time.
I was working for Sun Microsystems, which gave me two weeks of vacation time. Sun was doing a forced shutdown over the week of the 4th of July, which burned 4 days, and then there was the inevitable "shutdown" over christmas break, which burned another three days. This left me with 3 days of "elective" vacation time. A wedding took care of those.
I quit Sun, and deliberately took off 4 weeks before my next job started. Funny, when the 4 weeks were over, I was ready to go back to Sun. The job I had left was better than the one I was taking. I realized that I had just been terminally burned out. Maybe I should have called Sun back, we were still on good terms, but at the time, I didn't really realize this was an option... and this was the deep tech recession of the early 2000s (which accounts for the forced shut down in the summer), so they were trying to shed employees.
I wasn't a rock star, but I'm pretty sure I was valuable to the company. I'd spent almost three years writing code, learning the structure of sun's data warehouse, getting to know supply analysts, people in sales, people in manufacturing, and understanding the issues in logistics and how to write analytical apps to support these functions. Even if my hard skills could be replaced (they certainly could, by any Industrial Engineering major with intermediate programming ability), the new person would still take years to acquire all that domain and institutional knowledge.
This is why I do agree that it's nuts for companies to be so stingy with vacation time. An extra week or two a year would probably have kept me at Sun. I think the reason this inefficiency persists is that employers just don't see the connection. I didn't even see the connection, and I was the one who quit my job.
It could be that I'm more prone to burnout than most. Maybe so, but I don't think I'm an extreme outlier on this. I suspect lots of job-hopping and burnout does result from such low vacation allotments.
Re: Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?
#86[deleted]
Devil's Advocate.
Perhaps it isn't you that needs a vacation; it's your family. Or perhaps you've been enjoying your work a litte too much and your wife is lonely because you've been gone 60+ hours a week. Many people hit a plateau where building their nest egg begins to take precedence over the wants and needs of their own family. Wouldn't that contradict the purpose of building a nest egg in the first place?
You should relish on life experiences and memories. Don't let time pass you by. I take vacation because I enjoy it. I enjoy spending time with my family more than work.
Re: Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?
#87 It's no better in Canada the usual vacation time is two weeks with that increasing to three after maybe five years then after ten years it may go to four weeks but that's it it's extremely rare to see more than five weeks.
The years of service are calculated for full-time positions so if you worked at a company part-time for five years and then became full-time only then does the clock start to tick towards more vacation time.
In my job the summer is a busy time and vacations are blacked out from July to August the best times to go in a snowy country. The rest of the year the quiet time is used for projects which also mean no vacation.
Over six years each year I managed to get a week or two in, barely, but I've got 210 hours of vacation and 200+ hours of sick time (maxed out) that I can't use because I can never get time off. And I'm not allowed to take two weeks in a row either. Time to move on!
Re: Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?
#88The thing I find most interesting about this discussion is that we have not yet seen anyone from the US proudly claiming that by working harder they are more productive than the rest of us. I have seen similar conversations several times on various on-line forums in the past, and there was always a defensive/proud mindset from a significant group, even as those of us outside the US wondered if they realised how much their employers were abusing them.
Since the financial mess of the past couple of years showed that US productivity figures that seemed too good to be true really were just an illusion, I'm hoping that the mindset of the average US worker has become a bit more realistic and a bit less willing to accept (by international standards) abusively long hours and short vacations. It will be good for the workers, and I expect for their employers as well in the long run, since working with better rested and happier employees is one of the surest ways to improve productivity known to man.
Re: Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?
#89One result of this is that businesses chuck human redundancy out the window. Often there's only one person who can do a business critical task, and as they can't really be gone from work for that long, the business gets by. From an business uptime perspective, forced "downtime" of employees through vacation is actually a good way to force the creation of backup systems for business process.
There are a lot of companies that do force people to take vacations for precisely this reason. I also recall hearing at some point in time that a lot of financial institutions forced certain people to take time off,as a means to detect embezzling. I'm not sure if that's true or not.
Yes, that is true.
Re: Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?
#90They might as well call this article Why is America the 'no-union nation'?