In most cases is not like they (the Americans) have a choice to work less hours. Vacation time in North America is significantly under the European norm.
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Right. The articles aren't suggesting that Americans choose to work themselves to death, only that it's culturally acceptable. In most salaried office jobs you could set a hard stop at 5pm and refuse to answer calls on weekends, but you'd find yourself quickly replaced by someone who would. So you "choose" to put in the extra hours so you don't find yourself unemployed.
We have more (paid) vacation and more public holidays and sick leave is both paid for and not counted towards the vacation budget, and more maternity/paternity leave, and some countries have extra leave for things like family funerals.
It's not hard to "work less" like that.
I have all this things in the US. Sick leave is not counted in my vacation.
Maternity leave is much longer than paternity. And is paid for in full at my company for a time. FMLA allows 12 weeks total but it can be unpaid.
The main difference I've seen with the Europeans I work with is, they take big chunks off at a time in summer. They pay more taxes but have more time off. Most likely don't get full pay for Maternity/paternity leave.
It's great that you have all things things, but are they standard in the US? I think that's the main issue here, that as a baseline, europeans tend to get more time off.
I haven't seen any US companies offering 25 days of paid vacation a year, plus unlimited sick leave (doctors note required for more than 3 consecutive days), plus extra days off for personal emergencies eg children sick, death in family.
All the money in SV could never make me go there if I never have time to spend it.
A quick google search and I can't find many places in Europe that offer 25 days, not including the national holidays.
If I include national holidays I get 22 days off. No set sick days unless you're out for more than 5 consecutive days.
I'm not sure why you'd move to SV, startup life's seems like hell.
From Wikipedia[1], minimum annual days leave are:
UK: 28
Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden: 25
Iceland, Malta: 24
Portugal, Spain: 22
The EU mandates a minimum of 20 days, so all other EU member states have 20.
Of course, these are just the mandated minimums. Many employers will give more to be competitive.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...
8 of those in the UK are Bank Holidays. I'm not sure about others countries because I'm from the UK, but I think other countries get more "real" holiday days than the UK.
Most companies I've worked for offer a little more than the minimum, for example I get 23 days excluding bank holidays and that generally increases by a day per year you've worked at the company or something like that.
> A quick google search and I can't find many places in Europe that offer 25 days, not including the national holidays.
The legal minimum in Europe is 20 days' vacation plus national holidays. Competitive employers offer more.
6 weeks holiday in UK, Germany and Sweden is fairly normal. I don't know about the other countries.
google provides all of these benefits.
What would my commute to Mountain View be like? 10 minutes by train or bus, while living in affordable accommodation?
If only one of the biggest tech companies in the world had multiple offices.
I don't know about mountain view, but on Google's software dev salary you should be able to live within 10 minutes of pretty much all of their US offices. I know for sure it's possible in nyc.
At least in Spain, maternity is full paid by the state