USA Paid Vacations

mitakadai

I'm moving to the States in a few weeks, hopefully I'll be able to get some PHP work. What I'd like to know is whats the standard in paid vacations. The company I worked for until recently gave 20 days paid vacation every year plus a couple of extra days at Christmas for good behaviour 🙂 I've been told American companies only give 10 days paid vacation. Is this true, is it possible to negotiate for more paid vacation days. I've got three weddings I want to be home for during the year, if I don't have enough paid vacation days do companies allow non paid vacation days?

_SuperString

What you could do is get a job with lots of money so that you can afford to take unpaid leave !!

jstarkey

Originally posted by mitakadai
I'm moving to the States in a few weeks, hopefully I'll be able to get some PHP work.

It's looking a bit rough over here these days. Sounds like a pretty big risk. Do you have any leads?

Regarding vacation time. 10 days sounds pretty reasonable, but I'm freelance, so i don't get many days off - and certainly none with pay.

mitakadai

My wife has got a new job in Houston which is why we are moving there so I'm not going to starve. I'd like to get some PHP work which is what I've being doing a lot of for the last year but I can also turn my hand to user support/ networking or software localization so hopefully someting will turn up. I'm actually enjoying not working at the moment. We've been waiting for three months for our visas to be processed during which time I've had the chance to study more PHP (SMARTY, Classes, etc) and MySQL plus help out on some backend coding for a motor racing site. I won't be too disapointed if I can't find work for a while yet. Just finishing up the work on the motor racing site so if there is anyone out there who wants some help on a project I might be able to help.

Coming from a situation of having 22 days paid holidays a year to having 10 days doesn't sound to good. Maybe we should move to Germany, I hear they get up to 30 days a year paid holidays there 🙂