I’m so tired
I worked 82 out of the last 93 days. I’m exhausted.
what would you do on your days off, currently an unemployed minor and im wasting my life
Hobbies. Whatever you enjoy doing. Go camping, traveling, play video games, hangout with friends, go to the beach, swim, bike, run, hike. If you lack friends join social groups, meet ups, Facebook groups etc. Fishing, hunting, sports. Artsy things. Take a course you’re interested in.
Life is too damn short to not do things ypu enjoy whenever you have the chance.
I’m not good at hobbies, I think I’m so brainwashed that work has become my hobby. Except the work I do as a “hobby” is my previous job (in a different department at the same company) that I haven’t officially done for 3.5 years, they’ve hired 3 consecutive replacements for me, weird that they keep quitting cuz there is too much pressure to get 65+ hours worth of work done a week. I guess they must have real hobbies, family, friends… It’s been suggested, after the exit interviews, that I might be the problem and created unrealistic expectations for the role.
I need a real hobby, but I haven’t been able to find anything as fulfilling as turning on the work computer after hours and getting shit done when there is nobody about to interrupt, there are no actual expectations or requirements and then I’m actually told I’m appreciated! Hobbies take so much effort.
You are allowing yourself to be exploited for no additional benefit to yourself except for words. Your quality of life isn’t improving by any measurable means by being appreciated. Think about this. If you were on your death bed right now, what would you reflect on that you did in your life that you remember most as the most important memories and what would you regret? Would you think to yourself, yah that time I spent doing that work was a life well spent? Would you regret not doing more things that were for yourself and you enjoyed? Or spending more time with loved ones? What is the most important to you that you do with this life? Life is honestly short and can be taken away at any given moment. For me the most important is doing things woth people I care about and creating memorable moments. I will not value the time I spent at work when I’m about to die. I work in order to live. Not the other way around.
Hike, cycle, do some sport or hobby you like. If you don’t have that, try everything that comes to mind at least once and see if you like it. You’ve got all the time in the world to do so!
I usually just catch up on sleep and chores. Maybe play some videogames if I have time leftover.
Same, friend. Bone tired. Good luck out there.
Me too! Swimming and hiking for two weeks straight in northern Italy is hard! Mountains tomorrow again…
England: We had a really good deal going but we can’t have that because we are committed to racism. We hereby leave the European union without doing any research at all as to the secondary effects of our decisions.
I have quit jobs to go on vacation
Me too! It’s nice to have some time off before you start a new one
it’s not just europe, I live in Latin America we have 3+ weeks of payed time off, the us job market is the weirdo
I’ve always found the term Paid Time Off as a degenerative term. Like they are doing you some kind of favour.
It’s a holiday, please kill that PTO term.
The pto thing is because most office/tech jobs let you take unpaid time off too. Just means you won’t make your full salary for the year based on the number of unpaid days you take.
The fact that’s also a thing blows my mind.
We don’t have that option here. Between the holidays and things like special leave, I’ve never been not paid for taking time off.
You can take a years unpaid career break which is kinda cool as your job is guaranteed when you return.
Yeah it’s pretty shit. Since some places they only offer 1 or 2 weeks vacation a year if you want a longer one you end up needing to take the unpaid time off.
I don’t even know how anyone copes with that. I get 30 days plus public holidays.
That’s why they are the best country in the world and us lazy people are third world shitholes /s
The meme seems to imply that Europeans all get 3+ MONTHS off a year. How do businesses operate if they’re always missing a quarter of their staff?
Productivity and profits have steadily risen for decades while wages have hours worked have increased.
So business obviously were able to survive and thrive with more employees taking a larger slice of the profits. The businesses would be able to operate just fine.
The meme is clearly exaggerating for comedic effect. Standard is 4 to 6 weeks PTO across Europe.
Exactly. And the exaggeration is the same for the American part, I’m sure that even an American would take a whole half day off for kidney surgery.
Almost everyone has vacation in the summer (winter is cold and shit) so most office work slows down heavily during a few weeks and then picks up again during and after August…
Retail and stuff like that is obviously different.
Took my 3 weeks in July. It worked out well because our suppliers also slowed down significantly. The huge amounts of vacation the memes and braggarts claim just seemed ridiculous.
It was exaggerated for comedic effect.
Here we get 25 days (5 work weeks) each year by law. Some get more; I don’t know the average amount of days. Apparently you get 28 days if you don’t get overtime compensation.
In general 4 consecutive weeks are used during the summer months.
You also get paid more during vacation, for some reason.
All other EU countries have a minimum of 20 paid days.
You hire more people.
Sounds like one of those bullshit jobs. The further you get from actually making something the less valuable skilled workers are to production.
I’m an American with unlimited time off. Took 3 weeks to travel after 4 months at the company. Not every company operating here is a POS.
We did a year of unlimited time off. I took 2x1-week and 1x2 week and a few days here and there.
At the end of the year they announced no time off except Christmas and Thanksgiving days during Nov thru Jan and you can’t take more than a week off at the time.
They couple this with a company wide raise but if they don’t change the policy after the moratorium ends in January I think I’d rather earn less and have more time off.
Is your company the exception or the rule?
Not OP, but probably yes. Unlimited PTO is not uncommon in tech.
Of course if you try to do some shenanigans like taking two months off they will simply fire you.
From what I understood from my American colleagues, unlimited PTO is mainly a way for companies to stop employees from accumulating it and getting it paid out. So now not only can you not really take more vacations than before, but you also miss out on getting them paid out instead.
Doesn’t matter when generalizing. Many high tech/start ups operate in this manner.
Of course it matters.
Echo chambers dont like the truth. They like their meme.
It’s not an echo chamber. In a lot of Europe holiday time is protected by law. This is not the case in the US. Just because a few people like you get paid time off beyond what the law dictates doesn’t suddenly make everything even. You got yours, which is great, but what about the millions of others who don’t?
One of my current projects, the PM for the US company went off for maternity leave, and I was surprised she was back like a few weeks later. It’s basically a year standard here, and 18 months isn’t completely unusual depending on employer benefits for top-up on your salary.
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I’m happy you got yours
There’s definitely some startups and tech jobs in the US that operate on a more relaxed basis, but most startups in general fail and only exist because of the low interest rates VC firms can fund them with. A lot of the large tech companies are happy to outsource where it’s possible from a business perspective, to companies in places that allow for cheaper and more exploitable labor. Countless encounters with that in my career, this past week a Tableau support ticket that was first assessed by a woman working from home late at night in Bangalore with her kids crying in the background, and they didn’t even give her a proper headset. Whenever you get a support tech from a US tech company in another country ask about their work.
not as many as Walmarts that don’t
Yes, but were you paid during those three weeks?
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A one man fight is essentially banishment. Too many of our countrymen are brainwashed to believe that working yourself to death is a point of pride, and here we are. Many of us want better for ourselves and especially our kids, but bootlickers keep us all in shit city.
Not only that, the powers that are in control of the country have intentionally limited our ability to collectivize, they have reduced our wages as much as they can to keep us desperate, they have reduced our time off to keep us tired. They do not want us to fight and they have structured it such that we won’t until we are all entirely broken.
Work from home is an issue because we realized we can have lives again, and maybe we could even work less!
But then we have more time to focus on things that matter, like protesting and unionizing.
and ALL media is completely in the bag
You’re assuming too much of Americans. We exist in late-stage capitalism and are desperately trying to survive.
I’m in Europe, and work for an American company. After a few issues in production, they tried to implement an on-call requirement for employees to check the alerts during their out of work hours (5am to 10pm or something stupid like that). I just reminded them that my country has the “Right to disconnect” law, which protects us from having to work outside our required hours.
They changed it to volunteer basis. I refuse to volunteer (because my off time is my time).
Man, a lot of you Americans need to unionize. None of this happens at my work and it’s precisely because we’re unionized and have a contract that specifically says that our employer is bound by strict rules. Granted, we don’t get a month paid vacation, but we can’t be denied time off, can’t be compelled to be on call, can’t be forced to work overtime and we have PTO accounts, healthcare and a pension that get paid into on a weekly basis.
“but we get paid so much more” /s. I’ve heard this before from people in the tech sector, ignoring the fact that should the shit hit the fan we Americans have no social programs to assist us. I’d take half my pay to get what people in Europe are guaranteed.
Just to fight against the hive mind that America is a uniform hell scape. People from my team routinely dip with only a few days notice for vacations and sometimes because they feel like they need a day off.
Frankly I don’t take my PTO but that’s more of a personal problem than my work’s. I was a workaholic through college because frankly I’m not outstandingly smart.
In some countries, Summer is something you have - not just the name of a season you can see from your office window.
Please tell me
Which ones because certainly not my country?
Brazil, Spain, Egypt, Denmark, Argentina…
So unrealistic… No way the guy on the bottom got the time off to go to surgery.
Imagine how mad my former boss was when I was in the hospital for 4 days because the heart issues I didn’t know about were causing me to nearly pass out at work. Then I got a note that let me off for 3 weeks to let the new meds take effect before I went back.
Don’t get me started on how half ass the diagnosis ended up being either. Got a heart transplant 5 years later after seeing a different doctor.
I live and work in Japan, but I’m still in this picture and I hate it… Though my work-life balance has progressively gotten better. I don’t, however, let my subordinates do that; I want them to have real time off. If they answer a slack or something, it’s helpful, but I’d rather they didn’t think about work in their off time. I try to be the leader I wished for.
I still think of work in Japan as endless hours spent at your desk, waiting for your boss to leave so you can leave a bit after, with little recognition and complete loyalty (or at least feigned loyalty) to your bosses and the company as a whole. Is it still the case today?
Some companies are still like that. Moreover, some people are just like that… and that’s the crux of the issue. Social pressure is huge in Japan, so it’s hard for people who want no part in that to stop when others keep doing it (even if no one orders or even expects them to).
You actually have to go drinking with your boss after work, you dont get to go home until he does.
This was my father in-law. He developed sepsis from the foot they had to keep doing surgery on. On his hospital bed where he is hooked up to just about every machine possible, this man was on his laptop doing work and on a cell phone talking to this engineer and that engineer. After his foot was amputated, even on disability he was being called 24/7. He was the most important person in the region, he memorized every fiber optic line and location. His boss was treating him like shit to get him to quit, he didn’t like dad for some reason, so he pushed dad constantly and shamefully. Once dad died, they had the nerve to call us asking if he had any documents that could help them with a project, he was doing the job of 4-5 college graduates and they were barely managing. He only had his high school degree but the man knew his shit. He had an interview lined up at a new higher paying job, he was one week away, and he spent the last few months of his life crying from stress, hating his job, and just in near constant despair, the only thing that he was looking forward to was mine and my wife’s wedding. Corporate America is a vampire and not the sexy kind, the nosferatu kind.
Big part of me clearly knows there is no such thing as a binary right and wrong in life, yet… this is a crystal clear example somehow — and not the only one.
My boss is having his wedding tomorrow. He was supposed to start his vacation earlier this week. He definitely showed up to meetings I GUARANTEE he didn’t need to be in on the first day he was supposed to be gone. Man, we’ve been here longer than you. We can handle it. You’re awesome, but don’t let upper management bully you. Us senior devs sure don’t. Fuck em.
My boss assured me he couldnt make the client meeting last week because he was on vacation. So he phoned in on Teams from the boat dock where he was staying with his family.
And that was self imposed, hes the company owner! Some people just cant let go.
I used to be the second guy, and then realized the system I was working in. America can fuck itself (and it is), I’m off to Europe later this year.
Already chose a country?
Duh! Europe!
America bad! Europe good! I was really hoping we left this tired joke on Reddit.
