You must log in or # to comment.
It’s kind of the same in Canada even if we have mandatory vacations. At some point could WFH and had about a month of vacation every year. I love bike touring and travelling in general, and one year I took about 10 weeks of vacation in total. My boss started to suggest that I could also bring my computer to other countries and work from there.
I must say it was tempting to continue earning money while being able to live in another country. I could have spent a few months in some places, instead of a week. But I wasn’t a fan of having schedules while “on vacation”. Also, more paperwork.
What you’re describing isn’t working on holiday but being a digital nomad, what your boss suggested. Friends of mine do it too. Go somewhere for 3 months, work from there. Usually in the same timezone or close to it and a cheap country so renting an airbnb isn’t too expensive. From The Netherlands there are many options. Friends of mine go to Portugal(-1), Brazil(-4), South Africa(+1), Turkey(+1), Egypt(+1), Montenegro(+0), or sailing on the Mediterranean.
I’ve heard of people doing that but I can’t understand how they can because my work would have an absolute fit if I took the laptop out of the country. I connect to the service through a VPN so I really can’t see what their problem is and the country I live in and the company I work for and even in the same country already.
It depends a lot on what you do and how chill your employer is. This one was an IT outsourcing company and I was taking support calls from multiple other companies. Officially calls were routed to an office with a call centre, and that’s what clients were shown, but most of us preferred to WFH. The clients obviously knew it’s outsourcing but sometimes their employees didn’t. Sometimes I had to make them think they were calling ABC Inc’s tech department. So the only “rule” was not to openly talk about it. We could be in “another building” but still be working for their employer. Just don’t say that the “other building” is your summer house. Being in IT with that outsourcing company have let me get away with a lot of things that normally wouldn’t be allowed if I would have been an employee of their clients.
I don’t understand your last point so this applies generally to employees working abroad:
Many companies use geofencing on their VPN to reduce brute force attacks. If a single employee works from country X they have to put that country on the allow list, increasing spam and attack surface.
There is also the major concern of security of the laptop itself. Police/border control might force you to unlock the laptop. You are basically adding nation state industrial espionage to the threat model. It could also just get stolen. Or you connect to insecure network infrastructure …
All this is a concern in your home country as well but most companies are aware of the risks in their own country and want to avoid adding the (unknown) risks of a second country.
My company allows working from any other country in europe for up to 3 months a year, countries outside of europe are fine too but you gotta do paperwork for those.
So a handful of colleagues travel to spain together each year and work from there for like a month. I haven’t gone with them yet, but it does seem like a pretty fun time. Apparently they found one specific vacation rental home that has a very good internet connection, and splitting the rent between them makes it pretty affordable.Much of the US doesn’t even have mandatory paid sick leave, let alone vacation.
EDIT: Americans do effectively get 12 weeks of unpaid leave, but only if they or a family member gets a “serious” illness. That only applies to businesses with more than 50 employees though (along with a few other caveats).
Lots of companies lump in PTO and sick time, so that’s sort of bullshit too.
“Getting” unpaid leave is a misnomer. The employee isn’t getting anything and they employer isn’t giving anything.
It’s a right. It is the right to leave without the risk of the employment agreement being terminated over that specific leave.
The employer ought to be grateful if an employee wants to return after being required elsewhere for personal reasons for 12 weeks.
What? I have 6 weeks and my wife 10 weeks of payed leave in the Netherlands. Nobody will expect anything of you in this time. Around childbirth you have 6 weeks as a partner, 3 months as a mom. All payed. Afterwards moms have about 3 months of payed leave, too. Then on top each partner has 3 months of payed parental leave that you can freely distribute over the first 8 years, your employer has basically no say in that. And oh yes, we have affordable public healthcare.
Just saying, in case you were considering…
In Texas, I had employers that counted use of sick leave against your attendance metrics, and would fire you if you used it more than 3 times in a given year.
In Canada you can get up to 16 months maternity leave. But the vacation is not as generous. I’m sitting at 3 weeks a year.
ten weeks vacation is a pipe dream in the states.
By law the minimum is only two weeks though. My contract gave me four weeks of paid vacation after a few years of employment. The other six weeks were just out of my pocket. I wasn’t paid and just took this time off. And that’s when my employer started to suggest that I could, maybe, work from remote places.
Honestly, working while traveling sounds like a dream. I guess it would only really work if it came with a solid reduction in hours though.
As a European my autoreply does have a line saying
If it’s really important please contact info@companydomain
Depending on the judgement of the colleague reading the emails sent the I might get a call
This. It’s not forwarded automatically, it’s up to the sender to resend or wait until I’m back.
A couple of months ago I was on annual leave and I set my auto reply to tell them to message my manager, but then my manager was on sick, so she said her auto reply to message her manager, except her manager was not available for some reason, so he said his auto reply to message the CEO.
One person went through the whole chain, and ended up asking the CEO for some payment schedules (which we’d already agreed but for some reason the client had forgotten), of course the CEO didn’t know so he dealt with it by ignoring it. So then I come back 2 weeks later only to find that the client is throwing a fit about being ignored, and now I have to smooth things over with the idiot. The thing is the payment isn’t due until next year, so he really didn’t need to escalate it, he could have just waited.
Business to business is usually fine, but when you’re dealing with small businesses, particularly family-owned businesses, it’s the same as dealing with the most awkward and entitled of customers.
Not from Europe but same, perhaps when I get back I will check your email
perhaps
I’m proud that I only have 76 unread emails at work. But I’m not going to bother reading them, and I’d feel guilty marking them as read.
I got up to 10,102 unread a while back before my friend begged me to mark them all as read
edit: to be fair Github spams me and my department doesn’t really email each other
edit 2: apparently I’m getting back up there with 494
Had a colleague with something similar, his philosophy was that if it’s important they’ll call him.
Yeah I’ve been living that way more than ever since work stopped allowing us to use email clients other than gmail’s web app. I used to get email notifications with thunderbird but now I check my email like once a week when I remember
The only emails I ever get really are Jira and Github updates along with meeting invites. The updates are fine but I’m already on top of those and then the meeting invites just show up in my calendar so I don’t really need the actual email for them
Just chuck them all into the trash folder.
This is the only correct way.
Credit: Sidney Harris
Hahaha this seems out of adhd memes, been in that situation
A January 1st I was in Miami and there was a cellphone store open. On January 1st. Why?
Because someone moght want to buy a phone. Idk I have no issues with stores having good opening hours and days. Germany for example is ridiculous about having shit closed for Christian holidays and shit. I just think you need to have the workers there voluntary with double pay and other perks.
voluntary
And that’s exactly the problem. It’s impossible to be voluntary if you have a power imbalance between employer and employee. “Hey, I need you to work this weekend” “But is Jan 1st, I can’t.” …. “Hey, sorry I have to fire you, you’re not a team player” People need money, they will subject themselves to this kind of thing.
Not fucked up countries have laws against firing for such shit. You can absolutely have this as voluntary and even desirable for some. A lot of people I know happily work during certain holidays since they get double pay, it is a slower day and it’s not a holiday they care about. So easy money for them for what they consider almost a regular day.
It’s pretty ridiculous to force all businesses to close for some Christian holidays as a measure of worker protections instead of having some actual worker protections.
A lot of people I know happily work during certain holidays since they get double pay,
In the US it’s usually just time and a half
The US gets a raw deal when it comes to workers’ rights in general. In Germany the situation is much better but they cling to the Christian traditional holiday thing and sometimes explain it as a workers’ rights thing when it doesn’t at all need to be like that. Honestly it feels mostly just conservativism.
Everyplace is basically open. I worked for a small bakery that really squeezed their work force into working holidays and overtime for little to no extra pay. I swear my checks reflected none of my “above and beyond” work
New year, new phone /s
I might be an American but when I am not at work do not try to contact me. I refuse to add any coworkers to my contacts unless I genuinely like you. But my bosses are a hard no, all unknown numbers are straight to voicemail. I will not deal with their bullshit on my precious time off, I’ll deal with you when I am supposed to.
This exactly. I don’t care what’s happening at work. If I’m not “at work” I’m not available for work at all in anyway.
