Is 2 week vacation enough?
Is 2 week vacation enough for us who are working in America? It defintely is not enough for me, for sure.
I recently had a chat with some folks from europe and our conversation went towards vacation time here in america. Most of them had atleast a month paid vacation per year when they were working back in europe! And they complained about the vacation time here.
I think there is a strong point here, people here work real hard whole year and they only get 2 week vacation. I don't think with 2 week vacation you can relax and clear things from your mind to start everything fresh after vacation.
I personally think that not taking real vacation is some thing that has some serious effect mentally and physically, especially for people who are in software industry.
In general, here in america, people tend to not take enough vacation compared to any other place.
A lot of people i talked say they don't have time for it!
The main reason to work hard and make money is to have a nice life, if you don't have time to take some time off from your work to relax then doesn't that defeat the purpose?
French Leave and US vacations
Here in China, instead of four day weekends at Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day and Christmas, etc, people take two or three weeks off starting on May Day (the international worker holiday, studiously unobserved in the USA and overshadowed, for beer drinkers, by Cinco de Mayo), October 1 (the anniversary of the Communist takeover) and Chinese New Year, typically in February.
I took two weeks of pd hol in Oct and this was the first two weeks I've taken off in years since in America I worked usually as a consultant. I flew to Paris and took the train to the South of France and had a terrific time.
The budget Emirates flight was by way of the border between Iraq and Iran but nothing bad happened.
American programmers often, in my experience, will expand the requirements out of anger when they are forced to work long hours. The expansion and more complex code then become part of the delivered system leading to further scope creep and even longer hours.
Managers abuse these long hours by rejecting "elegant" solutions in favor of solutions that require hours of brute force labor.
For example, while it is a very good idea to do a complete build of a system under development from day one, this "elegant" solution's very elegance leads many managers and some programmers to mentally encode it as a "frill".
The encoding as a "frill" puts the male programmer in mind of lace panties, as something less than acceptable in a Real programming environment where what is operating is a binary opposition between the Real and the goofy rather than rationality.
The result is that come build time, the team has only a day to use let us say Installshield to bring together 1000 modules, with the result that Christmas is ruined or the programmer can't attend a planned weenie roast.
The overly cheap availability of work hours also causes "requirements" teams to spend TOO MUCH time "gathering requirements", a silly metaphor in which people self-measure on the number of incoherent and in some cases contradictory end-user requirements they can gather and the beauty of Visio documents.
Then the mere coders have too little time for coding, and are expected to encode the "requirements" brute force even when they are incomplete, or self-contradictory, or both.
Then, the amazing discovery is made, that the user's first order requirements have CHANGED...and that what she needed was not the encoding in concrete of today's requirements but a language for talking about change.
Throughout, there is an underlying contempt for labor and the presumption that we have no alternative but to fight for access to the tools of production.
Great analysis
That's a wonderful analysis Dan. Thanks a lot.
The whole reason behind my blog is that all my american friends look to me like an alien(which i'm, in INS language ;) ) from outer space when i take a long vacation(like 3 weeks or so). That surprises me a lot when i actually feel that "long" vacation as a very short one!
I think since americans are not used to having a long vacation, 2 week vacation seems much more than enough. But, as an outsider and used to more than 2 weeks, i can surely tell that 2 weeks is not enough.
For me taking vacation got to be real... no calls, no thinking about work, no worries about on-call etc. With 2 weeks, this is not going to happen.
Having a long vacation is definitely going to be a lot of fun and every hard working person in america deserves it more than anybody in the world given the fast track life here.
I know, i know, a lot of you say that more than 2 week vacation is going to be very boring. I personally think the reason for this is that american workers not used to having that kind of long vacation.
We spend so much money(and time) on cool things like big screen TV, DVDs, play station, games, etc to relax... but only a fraction of that money & time for vacation!
We, in this modern world, spend too much time with machanical things, should think about some real stuff for fun.
I have following things in my list for my vacation.
- A world tour
- Road trip to all the corners of america
- Go to a small villege and live there for a while, away from all the hi-tech world.
Do i have the chance to acheive the above in this life time? I'm really hoping...
I Don't Think So
I can't imagine any amount of vacation becoming boring. :-)
Can you achieve more than two weeks? Sure. At the company where I work, you can earn up to four weeks in about five years time. That's not bad at all. The trick is getting to take it all in one block.
Dan
Vacation Has a Whole Different Meaning for the Typical American
I have heard of these month-long vacations that are evidently common in Europe and elsewhere, and the whole idea seems very exotic to me. A whole month of contiguous time off! As someone born and raised in America, and one who has spent his whole working career in America, that idea sounds incredible.
I remember that my parents, who like many of their generation worked for the same company for many years, eventually were awarded three and four weeks vacation (I think my Mom even got up to five after twenty years), but taking more than two weeks of it all at the same time was unheard of. In my adult working life, I've never taken much more than a full week off of work at the same time. I've always spread my vacation out a little, favoring several long weekends instead of large blocks of continuous time off.
As far as I can tell, my experience is pretty typical in the US. If companies don't tend to allow people to take large blocks of time off, then it seems more normal to only get two weeks total for the year.
I think the American business system is set up such that it's pretty hard to take a lot of time off. Things are run very lean, and in many cases there just isn't someone else to do your job if you are gone a lot of the time--whether that time is all at once, or spread out throughout the year. If you are gone from your job, things are going to continue to move pretty fast in your absence (though at some companies where I've worked, it takes a month just to get an agreement on what color a button on a screen should be). Many Americans, even when they take a whole week off, will still take phone calls and check voice mail and email while they're "away" from work.
I'm no economist nor international expert, but I suspect that this evident difference between the US and Europe in the area of vacation stems from at least two things: one, in Europe there is more of an appreciation for the idea of slowing down and enjoying life such that policies like month-long vacations would tend to be more of the norm; in America, things have always been more about the hustle, the go-go-go, and the natural competitiveness and rewarding of efficiency that comes in a more purely capitalist system. There is an urge to keep moving on to the next thing, to pack a lot in to a little time.
And two, I think in Europe organized labor is stronger, and more socialist type policies tend to be in place, both in government law and coporate policy. When you have strong organized labor, you also have the ability to negotiate things like long vacations. Like I said, though, I'm no expert in these areas.
I've worked with many people from India who take a month or more off from work to go home to India for a visit. In the cases I observed, I think the employer went along with it because all of us were contractors (so the time off was unpaid) and because it made sense given how long and hard the plane trip is that far away. But a lot of the native US workers would express a little friendly jealousy at having so much time off all at once. :-)
Thanks for posting, pswar!
Dan