Quite funny to read about maternity leave being an extraordinary perk - 6 months paid is the statutory minimum in Ireland and it must start a reasonable amount of time before the child is born.
Is it also true that there is no minimum amount of annual leave allowance in the US? You have to negotiate it?
edit Not to suggest Ireland is ahead of the curve here, paternity leave does not exist whereas it would in, say, Sweden.
Many facets of US employment law are different on a state-by-state basis, so "The US sets no minimum/maximum for ..." can frequently be true but vacuous.
Broadly speaking, salaried employees in the US can expect a statutory minimum of 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave. Fairly few states mandate paid maternity/paternity leave. They're available at many companies as a perk.
Broadly speaking, Americans enjoy broad discretion in negotiating the amount and format of paid leave. By law and custom, the practical minimum is ~2 weeks plus holidays for most white collar workers. We historically do not have European-style vacations as an expected feature of the social contract.
Fair point. I wonder if the increasing number of us tech firms setting up in .ie (for whatever reason, being an Irish graduate I know it's not for the skills pool) find the adjustment difficult - 20 days minimum, 25 not uncommon, with the ability to carry some leave across years generally accepted.
edit Anecdotally, even companies based in the UK have had trouble with the difference in employment law when setting up (or wrapping up) here, though I would put that down to lack of diligence rather than any cultural thing.
Ireland has (or at least had as of a couple years ago) some sort of tax loophole that allows international companies to dodge paying some taxes both in their home country and in Ireland.
the increasing number of us tech firms setting up in .ie (for whatever reason, being an Irish graduate I know it's not for the skills pool)
12½% corporate tax rate. EU base. Less strict attitude towards EU data protection et al.
find the adjustment difficult - 20 days minimum
Heh, reminds me of someone I know working for an Irish tech company that was bought by a US company. They had to sit the new owners down and say "Yes, we are actually entitled to paid holidays. No, that's the law here."
Aye, pretty much (9-5:30 with flexible start time). Thing is, I would probably work longer hours voluntarily if I could telework - give over half my usual commute time to a little extra.
I work in Ireland too (I moved to Ireland 3 months ago) and I work 8:30-5 with flexible start time, 8:30-4 on fridays, and I can work from home some days as well.
Also - other places I have worked (NetApp notably) have had better benefits than the Google offers I have received. So don't read too much into the hype, there are several places that are on par or better when it comes to treating your employees well.
And yes, it is true that there is no minimum leave federally. I don't know about individual states. The Department of Labor is linked[0] on the wikipedia article about leave, seems to be an accurate source.
NetApp offers a $3000 401k match, whereas Google does $8750 (50% of maximum) with no vesting.
NetApp gives you 25 days vacation a year after 10 years, 15 days after year 2, 20 on year 6. You get 25 days after your 5th year at Google, 20 on 4th year, start at 15.
NetApp offers $5250/year in tuition reimbursement. Google offers $13,000/year.
In addition to all of these, it's well known that Google provides donation match to a charity, gym reimbursement, heavily subsidized massages, sick days as needed.
If Google benefits are hype, I'd love to see data that shows where other companies beat them out.
Glassdoor isn't a valid reference for anything (it's like a wikipedia page, except no one is trying to cite sources), and benefits are negotiable, including everything on that NetApp page.
Please don't misunderstand me, obviously Google is one of the better place to work these days. Their benefits are great, but it's not far and away best for every individual. Articles like this are marketing for Google.. grumble grumble link to pg's submarine article.
I posted that link only because it was one of many search results for "Google benefits" - I was a bit surprised to see that the benefits aren't posted anywhere on Google's jobs site, but the fact that they're negotiable probably is why.
Anyway, the benefits are confirmable if you just ask someone who works there - those are the baseline benefits everyone already gets just by signing an employment contract. While I don't doubt that this article is a plant, I was making a point that I am pretty sure their benefits are best in industry, and I haven't seen any evidence that there are any companies that there are, as you say, several places that are on par with Google across the board. In fact, when I've spoken with people, the number of companies in Silicon Valley that are even close (NetApp is certainly one of them) can be counted on one hand.
The Glassdoor article is consistent with my experience (except I think the 20 days of vacation starts on year 3, not year 4). Yes, benefits are in theory negotiable, but Google very, very rarely negotiates benefits - being a large corporation with a standardized offer process and a lot of bargaining power, they can usually get an applicant to take what they offer.
No minimum time off in the US. For most white collar jobs, 10 or 15 vacation days is typical (but many Americans feel pressure to not use all their vacation days). Some companies offer more, especially to employees with seniority. Government jobs tend to be nice about this, too. This is in addition to holidays -- about 8 or so per year is typical for these workers, I think (days like Christmas that most everyone in the company has off).
Those working blue collar jobs, however, aren't always so lucky. They might not have any vacation days or even holidays.
It's 28 days minimum in the UK[1] (for a full time employee) but these can include the public holidays (8 a year in England/Wales, 9 a year in Scotland and 10 a year in NI).
<generalisations follow>
In reality most IT companies give ~25 days and give the 8 public holidays off too. Longer service often gets you more days. I'm up to 27 days/year (plus the 8 public holidays).
Any reasonable IT company will also require you to take all of your holiday during the year, it's a manager's responsibility to ensure that his team are using their holiday. There's certainly no pressure to not use all of the days! I can carry over the odd day or two across years but generally not allowed to accrue large amounts of unused paid leave.
We don't have a concept of an allocation of "sick days" either, if you're unwell for a day or a few days you can self certify yourself off work sick. If you're ill for longer than a week the expectation is that you'll provide a letter from a Doctor explaining the absence. If you're ill frequently then the company will discuss it with you (and if you're pulling frequent sickies then that'll be dealt with as a disciplinary). I've had 3 days off sick in the last 5 years.
In Poland it's 20 or 26 days off, all state holidays are added on top of that (there are few days, probably around 8). All of those are paid. Except those one can also take unpaid vacation but that has to be negotiated with the employer.
20 days is until you have 10 years of work experience, but graduating counts as 8 years of experience so most people just have to work 2 years to jump to 26 days.
Your entitlement to pay and superannuation during maternity leave depends on the terms of your contract of employment. Employers are not obliged to pay women on maternity leave. You may qualify for Maternity Benefit which is a Department of Social Protection payment you have sufficient PRSI
Is it also true that there is no minimum amount of annual leave allowance in the US? You have to negotiate it?
Correct. Unlike the EU, the US has no minimum holidays. however ¾s or so of US employees have holidays. For white collar workers, you're almost certainly guaranteed holidays (from what I know).
Not to suggest Ireland is ahead of the curve here
I was talking to some Germans a few years ago. They were shocked to discover we only had 20 holiday days. You get 30 in Germany. They didn't know what they'd do with only 20.
Fun excersive: Look at the list of EU countries by how much paid holiday time they give. Look at the lowest countries. Then look at the countries that are being bailed out by other EU countries. :P
I guess it depends where you are in Europe. I'm glad I'm in the US and not in Hungary. http://andorjakab.blog.hu/2012/01/06/this_is_why_i_don_t_giv... Edit: I found it interesting that in http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/releasespublications/docume... on page 58, about 58% of sampled women in Ireland are in jobs classified as "low skilled non-manual" or "elementary" compared to about 32% for men in medium-to-large businesses, but 22% in small businesses. When your female employee might take 6 months off, paid while doing nothing useful for the company, it's best if the work they would have done can be easily (and cheaply, so that 2X isn't so much greater than X) done by another, eh?
Why? Europe isn't exactly a hotbed of innovation, economic dynamism or growth; and that is largely attributable to the socialist mindset that pervades much of Europe. Although entrepreneurialism is a word that originated in Europe, it is rather hard to find much evidence of it in any meangingful way.
No, but I am suggesting that, in general, free markets lead to growth whereas socialist experiments such as those in Europe tend to fail and lead to a variety of social and economic ills. One just look at the aging population, declining birth rate plus vast social security apparatus in some of these European states to see that they are heading yet again towards disaster.
It's not that you said it in a positive light. It's that you used it as a common noun. The term "free market" is only useful as a comparative, like so: "America has freer markets than India". This lets people know and contextualize what you're saying.
Otherwise, using the term just turns into a competition of politics between Republican shills (ie: you), minarcho-capitalist ("libertarian") ideologues, mutualist anarchists, and socialists on what it means to be a "free market", how "free" a market has to be to qualify for the term, and whether the relative "freedom" or lack thereof of a market matters at all.
I fall into that last camp. There are actually reputable studies showing that given 100% Free markets never occur in reality (perfect competition, perfect information, zero transaction costs were the definition they used), most not-completely-retarded allocation mechanisms other than those are more-or-less as decent as each other; there was basically a 3% allocative-efficiency advantage to the realistically imperfect market over the tested form of central planning.
A mathematician also showed that even perfect theoretical markets can oscillate neverendingly between multiple general equilibriums rather than ever converging to one efficient equilibrium.
In conclusion, stop using the term "free market" outside of meaningful context.
By forcing employers to pay women six months maternity leave, it means that the cost of employing a woman of child-bearing age relative to a man is much higher and hence, all things being equal, the economically rational approach is to discriminate against women in hiring and promotion. This is just one of the many unintended consequences of government interference; the other, of course, is the minimum wage which is a particularly nefarious and wicked concept that results in the unskilled being kept unemployed and economically disadvantaged.
Err, no. What I write above is well known and proven in several studies. Try reading Jonathan Gruber's (MIT) research, for example, into the effected of mandated maternity leave on female unemployment in the US states where it was introduced in the 90s.
Your attitude -- that everything that doesn't fit into particular economic worldview -- is a "troll" or an "April Fools joke" is unfortunate.
If I am an employer in a society where, for each birth, the government mandates six month minimum paid maternity leave. I am hiring for a particular role and have two candidates of equivalent skill with the only difference being one is female and of child-bearing age. Which would you hire? The female may get pregnant and impose two costs on my company: firstly, the cost of maternity leave and, secondly, the cost of finding and training a temporary replacement for a minimum of six months. The rational thing is to hire the male to mitigate this risk since the costs will be lower and productivity assumed to be higher over term of employment.
A better solution is for governments to not force such things but allow companies to negotiate freely with employees. Some may decide to offer extended maternity leave as a differentiator and to attract and retain female talent. But if they do so, they are doing so with coercion and for rational reasons.
I may be wrong, but I think you are double counting the cost of the maternity leave. The cost to the company is the cost of finding/training/paying a temp. The cost of paying the woman her salary while she is gone would have still occurred if she wasn't gone. Or am I missreading? You would include lost productivity due to a less effective temp worker I suppose.
My general response to letting companies negotiate freely is that it seems important, but potentially destructive at it's extreme. I think there should be certain minimum labor standards applied to all employers so that no one employer is at an economic disadvantage by treating their workers humanely. Regarding such minimum requirements including six months of paid maternity leave I'm not sure how I feel.
The issue with minimum labour standards is that you have the question of what happens to people whose value is less than the standard. If you have a minimum wage of five dollars, what happens to the person who, for whatever reason, only produces two dollars of value? They are unemployable and hence never enter the labour market. It would be preferable to let them work at two dollars because, over time, we know that their value increases. One can see this on a global scale in how traditional sources of cheap labour have become more expensive and more skilled over time.
Perfectly sensible for those who have no potential of achieving more but for others who do have potential it seems rather cruel to lock them out of the labour market. Unless an employer is atruistic, they are not going to hire such a person and thereby help them realise their potential because to hire them at minimum wage would result in a net loss.
Maternity Leave elsewhere is typically a government operated insurance program. They typically are not 100% salary, and the burden of paying the employee falls on the insurance program. Since we don't have an insurance program, paid maternity leave is a pretty big deal, as the company fronts all the costs, including the replacement/temp.
Many of the Irish and Swedish safety nests are not sustainable under the current economy and will eventually crash.
I love it whenever people bring up Sweden and don't realise that countries like Sweden and Germany can't sustain the benefits they give out. When I get older I won't have the same access.
Germany pays around 50% taxes, Sweden it's around 30-40% for software developer salaries.
Sweden had a deficit of 0.40% of GDP in 2011 (last year I have figures for), in that same year the US had a budget deficit of about 10% of GDP.
Furthermore, maternity leave and holiday time are neither expensive nor are they getting more so in the future.
What is more worrying in the long term are benefits associated with retirement because due to demographic changes that cost will continue to grow even as the number of people in the labour force stays steady or slowly shrinks. Those problems are not unique to Sweden.
Thank your making an informed statement about this. I don't think parent knew what he was talking about, his figures about tax rates in Sweden were far from accurate or knowledgeable.
Its like this in Germany (tax wise): (http://i.imgur.com/6oiGx5B.png) - the lower blue curve is the amount of tax you pay. The x-axis is the amount of money you get (on which you have to pay tax) and the y-axis is the tax percentage. This is for self-employed people only, regular employees will deduct 1000 Euros from the amount ("Arbeitnehmerpauschbetrag"). Other amounts such as the health insurance can also be deducted.
One side note: the link you have given also calculates health, pension and unemployment insurances. This might be confused with tax, but one should be make it clear that self-employed people don't have to have pension and unemployment insurance and health insurance is much higher than for regular employees. [But one can (in practice) get around paying for health insurance, but no sensible person will do that. - Nobody enforces that you have a health insurance if you are self employed.]
I am referring to the whole shebang. From what I know, pension and unemployment insurances are mandatory. Am I wrong?
Now, with pension and unemployment insurances, will the tax bracket be higher than 30% for 100k ?
You are right, no one sensible would go without the health care portion. But some people (moi) don't trust pension with governments. (Argentina, Hungary.. etc)
Now, if those things are mandatory, how much would be left of a 70k salary? Still on the 30%?
For employees, pension and unemployment are mandatory, correct.
Don't mix up tax and health/pension/unemployment because (that was the starting point of this thread) one can believe that if you say 50% tax these insurances might come on top of that.
Otherwise, if you want to know how much you will have on your bank account after getting 70k/year, your link was very good AFAICS. You will most likely get something like 40k out of it.
Nah I meant retarded. And people are right to downvote it, I shouldn't have used that kind of language. It only goes to pollute the message which was in essence that the religious grip in Ireland has been a very detrimental factor in the progress towards proper health care for women in the country.
The perks are an unmatched tool for building Google's reputation and attracting the best engineers to join the company. But once you've been there for a few months, you adapt - that's just what humans do. Pretty soon it all just feels normal and boring.
Case in point - "Noogler" is what a new employee is called. They would often wonder when you're no longer considered a Noogler, and the commonly-given answer was, "You're not a Noogler anymore as soon as you publicly complain about the free food." It usually only takes a month or two.
That's exactly what it looks like from the outside. But it isn't. It's just human beings adapting to their environment. This tendency is why maintaining a sense of awe and gratitude toward life is such a major component of spiritual thought.
but discontent is what drives the progress - people feeling satisfied all the time would basically not produce new stuff to fill the constant black hole of desire and wants.
i totally agree, and i furthermore think (but cannot prove) that the traditions of buddhism and confucianism that pervade asian societies to varying degrees may be responsible for their lack of entrepreneurial activity, which ultimately hurts their economies. buddhism encourages you to be satisfied with your life without desiring more, and confucianism encourages you to fit in rather than to stand out, which is why, for example, japanese companies very frequently hire CEOs who are foreigners - very few japanese people have the inclination to stick their necks out.
The maternity and paternity policies outlined are really great at Google, and isn't it fantastic they Google show such desire to keep their team happy, ultimately makes them all the more successful.
I think even more radical thinking on employee benefits is required in general by most companies.
Taking my own personal case, I am a software dude as is my lovely wife. We now have 2 young babies, to look after.
I like what I do as does my wife, but we are definitely not willing to outsource our kids upbringing to some random childcare provider, so the only choice is, one of us must leave the workplace....now both of us are highly skilled and experienced ( seriously) and I guess maybe if the projects were planned in such a way that smaller contributions could be made to them, then there might be a way for me or my wife to continue with our profession! If you get my drift...
You are saying the 5 day 8.30-6 expected working availability is not a logical thing in the modern world for skilled jobs where goals are more important than presence?
I think for what I do that is true, 8:30 to 6, 9-5 etc is' old hat, its not how software Dev works IMHO...
Especially since its very much an intellectual endeavour.
Alot of time is spent thinking about things.
Also quantifying software development on the basis of time is also a broken paradigm, everyone is different.
What I am saying is that if tasks could be so well planned and decoupled, that anyone could pick them up and fulfill them, that would be the way to go, like a service bus, each task/unit has an associated monetary value.
The end goal is that if a business is operating at capacity but needs more they could push a component request onto to the service bus and have it fulfilled by whoever, whenever ( within reason).
So I could join this service bus and pop some task off and code it, a bit like a software mechanical turk...and get paid and get some good karma points!
In this case, this is not the case. Bosch is a well known conglomerate in Europe and even during hard times, they really pay attention, respect and support their employees. They even do that outside of Germany, they recently closed car component production lines in France because it was losing money but they paid to get the factory refitted to now produce solar panels. They kept their employees and got them training to do the new job. It would have been cheaper to just close the plan fully and increase production in Spain or Germany factories.
This is because several of those huge German conglomerates are privately, often family-owned, with very little or no accountability to the stock market. They can afford to think long term.
It's also because mostly germans value quality over quantity.
They don't demand very high margins. They demand very high quality which ultimately brings high margins. Mostly their targets are about quality, not throughput.
I'd like to see a company like Google ditch the name 'Human Resources'. It's an awful term that, to me, sounds clinical and nearly offensive. Decades ago, that sort of department was once called 'Personnel.' I wonder why that name was let go?
It kind of boggles my mind that there are companies that don't treat their employees like kings/queens. For knowledge workers this should be an absolute no brainer.
Keep them as happy as possible and good things will follow. They will be pretty loyal (non-monetary perks build way more loyalty) and very motivated. I really don't get how anything else is a viable long term strategy.
Just a quick observation: there seems to be an awful amount of distractions on that cube. If that lady was actually programming, it would be really easy to lose focus.
I usually go for a very spartan furnishings. My computer, a few books, a clock and a calendar.
Funny, I tend to prefer clutter in my peripheral vision since it doesn't provide a single thing to focus on easily (like a clock). The only thing that bothers me is reflective surfaces where the highlights change as my head moves a little.
At one big company where I worked, I was ordered to remove a single punch card from the 70's from the wall of my cubicle. Why? Some executive was coming and they wanted the place to look soulless...I mean consistent.
I don't know about you, but I look at my screen when I'm programming. It really doesn't matter what's around me if I'm in the zone.
If I'm not, however, I like having things that speak to me around. (I also like plush animals as debugging partners. It's surprising how many bugs you find just by explaining what you do to a stuffed toy ;)
I agree, and would bet that the person in the photo is not an engineer. Engineers in Google have either two 24'' monitors, or a single 30'' monitor :-)
I hope these policies influence other employers to follow in kind (perhaps even outside of tech.) I'm skeptical that we'll ever see, for example, statutory parental leave in the US.
This would kill some smaller companies in the US. You can get away with this in larger corps since there is enough staff to fill in for parents. Even with the modest leave we offer at our campany, it was insane a few years back when we had a large "bump" in the number of new parents. Lost a few non-parent staff that got burned out covering for the parents and the attitude/entitlement wars that ensued. :(
Is it also true that there is no minimum amount of annual leave allowance in the US? You have to negotiate it?
edit Not to suggest Ireland is ahead of the curve here, paternity leave does not exist whereas it would in, say, Sweden.