Comment by low_tech_love

16 hours ago

I read one sentence into this and knew directly that the developer must’ve been Swedish!

For people who aren’t familiar, Sweden takes summer holidays seriously. 25-30 days + public holidays is a normal amount of annual vacation time, and if an employee requests it and has the time available, it’s basically legally required to allow them to take a four-week contiguous summer break.

(See https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...)

  • Not only that but the vacation is real. If someone is off then you should not expect them to answer at all (because if you do you’ll get very disappointed).

    • This might not be true for Sweden, but Denmark have an interesting rule that makes contacting people in their vacation fairly expensive. If I'm asked to change my plans, my employer needs to compensate me financially. If you get a call and need to work for 30 minutes, then you are entitled to a full replacement day, not just the 30 minutes. For some jobs, interrupting people on vacation simply isn't allowed.

  • Ditto Australia: https://www.fairwork.gov.au/leave/annual-leave

      Full-time and part-time employees get 4 weeks of annual leave, based on their ordinary hours of work.

    • Sweden is fairly unique in allowing the employee to take a 4 week break. Is Australia the same?

      2 weeks is the acceptable limit in the UK for example (where also has 20-35 holiday is common) though if you can convince your boss otherwise, you can take longer, but most people can't

      3 replies →

  • I work for a UK company and most people take basically all of August off (I end up with two months of vacation days a year so I take August off and sprinkle some leave around the year) and I can confirm that taking a month off is great. You forget what it's like to work, really.

    • That’s great! It’s very much not the norm here in general tho, in my experience two weeks would be the max people would take off contiguously.

    • Wow literally never heard of people taking 4 weeks off in the UK. Is this a new thing to deal with child care in the summer holidays?

      Is this at the executive level?

Hahaha yeah same here! My $dayjob has offices in Sweden and their summer breaks are legendary. We also have offices in the US, and the culture shock with the Americans never gets old