As a SCO Unix and MS Xenix developer, I remember having to write lots of nasty little programs in C to do stuff with it and its files, just to make it usable. It had a terrible trick of writing multiple documents to the same file.
My PTO is in addition to bank holidays, which I think is the equivalent to your federal holidays. A quick count shows that there are 10 bank holidays in the UK this year.
Whichever way you slice it, American workers are getting screwed.
And GP calling it "4 weeks" is, I think, a bit disingenuous given how those federal holidays are spread through the year and can't really be combined into consecutive weeks off.
That survey makes a lot of sense to me, as a Brit. If I don't take my PTO my boss's boss gets nagged by HR, so they nag my boss, who nags me.
Our PTO year runs from 1 April, so the only (unwritten) rule about vacation is that we should try to spread it over the year. This is because we're only allowed to carry over 5 days to the next year, not taking PTO is frowned upon, and HR don't want everybody to be using up their PTO at the same time at the end of the year.
A few days ago we had a Zoom town-hall meeting where our CEO thanked everybody for taking time off.
I moved from the UK to Finland, and while the overall process is similar there are some niggles.
Generally you'd have a similar amount of time off here, 4-5 weeks, and it would run April-April as you said for your own.
The biggest difference is that you must take two consecutive weeks at least once a year.
That said there are pluses I think I'm allowed to stay home to care for a sick child 11 days a year, paid. That's a nice bonus, and it has been useful as a parent. When our child was a baby, or toddler, sickness mostly meant that he stayed asleep all day and was lethargic and quiet. Now he's older there's no chance that I'd be able to work from home and take care of him, so those days come in useful. (Helps that I get my 11 days, and my wife gets a similar amount too.)
Otherwise it feels like most Finnish people take a month off in the summer, to the extent that a lot of shops/places in the city close down due to no staff, so there's often a bit of negotiation within teams about who can be away, to make sure there is cover. But it feels pretty relaxed and friendly.
> The biggest difference is that you must take two consecutive weeks at least once a year.
I had this in the UK when I worked in finance. As I recall the two-week rule was commonly written into employment contracts in banking. There was some FCA guidance around this, possibly in the wake of the Jérôme Kerviel scandal (I am not sure, it's been a while).
The idea was to make it a harder for a single rogue trader to perpetrate fraud as they would have to collude with someone to look after their books while they were out for two weeks.
Agree. It's unbelievable from a European perspective.
Here in the UK, I get 28 days PTO per year. I can carry forward up to 5 days into the next year. But once you've done that once, you're pretty much committed to taking at least 28 days off the next year, because it's not really acceptable (from a company perspective) to lose PTO. We're strongly encouraged to spread the time off over the year, and to use up our allowance. Anybody here that only took 10 days per year would be having a chat with HR about healthy work/life balance.
I genuinely struggle to understand how it's possible to have anything like an enjoyable existence with only 10 days off per year. I mean, that's all your PTO gone for only a single 2 week vacation. Not even a single spare day for a duvet day.
More like a one week vacation, if you're lucky. You're forgetting that most of us don't have separate sick leave so PTO has to get used for sick days, dr appointments, etc. My first company I worked for wouldn't let you take any time off unpaid until you were out of PTO, so if you got the flu and were out for a week, there goes half your yearly vacation.
I often feel the same - the thing that surprises me the most about American time off is people who say they're allowed XX days of sickness a year.
Sure if you're sick you shouldn't work, and on average most people are probably healthy enough that they lose 1-3 days a year, maybe a few people lose a week or two, but it just seems wrong that somebody could be fired for being too sick, or be forced to work because they've used their allowance.
In the UK I've been off sick for several months at one point in my career, and while I started to lose money pretty quickly at least I knew that I'd not get fired, and would/could return happily.
(Where I live now I'm allowed around 11 days, paid, to stay home to take care of a sick child. That's a pretty nice bonus, though I remember last year I was trying to count the days up to see how close we were .. covid must have used a week, twice, and then the standard child-sickness that go in waves at daycare/preschool/school.)
I could be wrong about this of course, but I suspect what you’re observing is people saying thank you as they’re leaving: e.g. getting off the bus, or after buying something, or after receiving directions
In the context of 'cheers' being a direct one-to-one replacement of 'goodbye'. (Or more precisely 'bye'.) If, in my local usage, there is any difference between 'bye' and 'cheers', it's that the latter has a bit more bonhomie about it.
In this context, I'm afraid, you are wrong. When I'm in the office, the last thing I say to everybody else as I leave is, 'Cheers.' I'm not thanking them for letting me into office; I'm saying, 'Goodbye.'
I'm perplexed as to why you're pushing this so hard. People who have experience of this are telling you something. But you, despite clearly not having the same experience, are telling them that they are wrong. Don't mean to be snarky, but why is this so important to you?
Next up, 'Do Midlanders really call each other mardy?'
yesterday after discussing this, I asked multiple people I know from across the country, including the midlands, and they all said that no, cheers is not something they've ever heard as goodbye. I stand by the fact that cheers means thank you/regards, and occasionally is used in place of or alongside goodbye when some kind of transactional behaviour has taken place
you're misunderstanding the nuance of it. when other people are leaving the office and they say cheers, they're saying a short form of "cheers for working with me today" more equivalent to "regards" than "goodbye"
Here in the UK, that happened to me on a roundabout. Elderly driver in front pulled out and then, for no visible reason, slammed on the brakes. I ran into the back of her.
It was deemed to be be 100% my fault. Here, if you run into the back of the car in front, it is always your fault. No exceptions.
It makes sense: you should always leave enough room to stop, so I couldn't really complain. But, if everybody did that on that particular busy roundabout, it would result in gridlock.
I've heard a story from a friend that was in an accident like that. A police officer who did the paperwork smiled and said "It's the most common type of accident - people just stop paying attention to the car in front that started moving, and develop sort of a blind spot to that".
I drive for several years, and can say my brain relies heavily on this sort of predictable stuff like "that car has free intersection in front of it, it will move forward".
Crashed at a intersection into the driver in front of me. Started driving, and i looked wethere there was traffic coming from the left, the other driver in front of me stopped for no reason. Still my fault, but in some situations, with multiple dangers, you rely heavily on the people behaving predictable.
In a country north of UK the law was once the same. People with worn down cars would find the perfect opportunity to slam their brakes, intentionally get hit from behind and claim insurance.
I wonder if the indigenous peoples of the Americas told themselves the same thing? Or the aboriginal Australians? Or the people of pre-contact Easter Island? I think the fact that those places are now known by the names given to them by their Western European 'discoverers' is a clue to how things went for them.
I don't think it was Firewire that kept it as a niche product. It was that iTunes wasn't initially available on Windows machines, and Macs were still quite rare.
I had a G3 iMac (Graphite) at the time the iPod came out. So I got one. Actually, I got three: the first died after a day, the second was DOA, but the third kept chugging away for about 3 years until the battery died and it was only usable when plugged in.
It's funny to remember how unusual the iPod was. People on the tube in London, which isn't known for conversation amongst strangers, would ask me what it was. Tiny, about the size of a cassette case, with that that amazing white face and silver case. It was like something from the future.
They were linked, though: it was unusual to have Firewire on a PC, so even if iTunes had had Windows support at the time I don't know that it would have made much difference. It was the combination of USB and Windows support that made the difference.
Said elsewhere in this thread, but firewire/IEEE1394 wasn't hard to find in a PC/laptop, it was Windows support at all for the iPod that changed things. Once Apple shipped the Windows version of iTunes they were off and running.
I remember at the time many of laptops that had a IEEEE1394 port had the small size one, not the full-size one that the iPod cable used. Also most desktops didn't have it onboard due to royalty fees so you needed to buy a PCI card. Not an insurmountable obstacle, but enough that you had to really want one to look past that.
When iTunes for Windows became available they had already launched the 3rd generation iPod which allowed for syncing over USB unlike the prior two generations. Firewire was pretty rare on PCs in those days too. Had they stuck with firewire only I don't think it would have taken off. Would people have bought and installed a firewire card for it?
As a SCO Unix and MS Xenix developer, I remember having to write lots of nasty little programs in C to do stuff with it and its files, just to make it usable. It had a terrible trick of writing multiple documents to the same file.