I worked at Atlassian, and my experience was that people were actively encouraged to take between 20-30 days off per year, and that getting vacation was usually a mere formality - telling your manager "hey I'm planning to take the week of so and so off, any issue with that?" I never had vacation or sick time checked, never had any denied, and I very much took advantage of the benefit.

Still, the manager does have to approve it, so I have heard stories about teams that are understaffed declining vacation when they don't have enough people to be on call etc. I don't know how that would work out differently if you did have accrual vacation though... somebody does have to be on-call. It's tough.

Unlimited PTO is part of his compensation package for working at this company, so while he didn't 'accrue' vacation in the traditional sense, he's still entitled to his PTO.

So in the end, it doesn't matter whether he accrued them or not, his PTO is his to use. And he was denied that.

He even stated that his manager was the one who stated to him that he had at least 20 days off:

> When I joined, my manager told me exactly how many days I have: "federal holidays + 20 days", which is considered "quite generous for the US" (exact quotes)

So it's not even on him that he thinks he's earned 20 days.

What difference does it make if he 'earned' his PTO vs using his 'unlimited' PTO? I don't understand why this distinction is being made in the context of the article. If it's just to say that companies can deny PTO because it's not federally protected, well, that's an even bigger problem. Maybe it should right? Either way it makes the company look bad.

Maybe Atlassian's side of the story doesn't actually look so good for Atlassian.

There was an entitlement for 6 weeks paternity leave and 6 months maternity leave, which is very good for the US.

But there is no accrual. I know that some people there had a really hard time with the idea of "unlimited" and felt that they could't use their time off if they didn't know how much they "really" had. The truth was you really had as much as your manager said, but this sucked for managers because occasionally someone would abuse it and try to just work 3 days a week, so they tried to give guidance. The standard guidance was "we want you to take at least 20 days off, and you should be fine up to 30, if it's more than that we might start saying no."

The person who wrote this post did not, and still does not, understand that this guidance is not the same as accrued vacation.

I don't know if OP had a particularly bad manager as that happens in any large company, but no one I worked with ever brought up any issues.

Atlassian does not have an “unlimited vacation” policy per se, but it has a “flexible, non-accrual, discretionary vacation policy” called “vacay your way.” Like unlimited it does not set an annual limit, but there are policies around how it is used, key being (a) it should be coordinated with manager (and your team) (b) no more than 30 consecutive days. Otherwise people are encouraged and do take random days off, go on planned one, two, three or four week vacations.

Prior to working here, all the places I had worked allowed me to accrue vacation, which I rarely used and cashed out when I left the company. For me, at the time, I thought it was fine. But when I joined Atlassian, i was looking for better work life balance, and I found it versus prior employers. I was very well aware that I need to use may vacation, because there is no cash equivalent. In fact, I tell all my coworkers to take vacation frequently even if you just stay home and play games all day… often times they are reluctant (American work habits are quite unhealthy). So in the years since joining, I have taken far more vacations per year without any impediment or scrutiny. My managers (had quite a few over the years) never questioned it and it took a while for me (personally) to get used to just taking breaks and going on vacations or just staying home… again, bad American habit of overworking and thinking I need to carry more than my load at work.

At Atlassian, my understanding is any employee can take off two consecutive weeks, and will talk to the manager if they want to take off more. Many employees take sporadic days off throughout the year for whatever reason, for kids, health, needing to just get away. I personally never had a problem in asking for or receiving vacation. The problem I usually see is people choosing to not take time off, and that leads to burnout.

As noted, Americans often do not take much vacation, and this is why there is a lot of discussion about accrual and cashing out. I think the program allows people to just take time off anytime for big or small reasons and not worry about counting the time off. It is very much about the freedom from worrying about if you have time to take, and the flexibility in taking it when you need it.

In the past 12 months, I have taken over 30 days off (probably closer to 40) without anyone batting an eyelash. Those days off were both planned vacations and random days off due to being sick, tired or some other person reason. I never needed to ask for the time off.

It looks quite generous by American standards (maybe on par with european), and I would say I was never able to take this much time off at other employers, unless I did not use it one year and had it roll over to the next.

In addition to vacation time, Atlassian does provide other generous leave:

During COVID we also have a nice benefit for all employees globally to take up to a month off due to stress of the pandemic, no approvals needed.

I have seen friends and coworkers use the generous parental/maternity leave which is very generous for Americans. I don’t know all the details, not having a kid born while working here, but it is something like maternal (child bearer) is 26 weeks, parental (spouse) is 20 weeks, both at 100% base pay.

We also have have paid leave to care for a family member for 7 weeks at 100% base pay. Something I also have not needed (thankfully) but know others have needed.

So I honestly do not understand all the scrutiny over Atlassian vacation and leave policies. It is not quite “unlimited vacation”, it is “vacay your way” and it is pretty fair and flexible.

I get the OP had their own unique circumstances, but it does not reflect my own experience (obviously) and of those I work or socialize with at Atlassian. I sympathize for them and wish them and their spouse the best.

- https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/resources/perk-and...

Hardly casual. The theft is thoughtful, deliberate, careful, and strategic.

The only thing they care about is money. They'll never stop doing business with China until it stops making them money.

Western business and the ruling class that are in bed with the said corporate world.

Highly centralized (command & control) and mercantilist systems tend to do well in the short term, but struggle and founder in the long term. In contrast, more chaotic, free market economies tend to look messy in the short term, but achieve amazing, spontaneous order over time.

That sounds like a prayer to me.

What evidence is there that China can't win? How are you certain that authoritarian regimes can't both gain and keep dominance over timescale of decades or centuries?

Consider that the dominance of democracy is a relatively short term thing on the historical timescale. For the vast majority of human history, civilizations have been ruled by authoritarian dictators. The rise of China could just be reversion to the mean.

I don't want totalitarianism to win. But if we just complacently assume that it won't, doesn't that make the worst case scenario much more likely?

Authoritarianism always comes with a top-down execution structure, which optimises for cost-to-execute but not cost-to-transform.

When the need-to-transform exceeds a certain value, it would either have to re-adjust its internal structure or it will crumble (as the cost skyrockets) [1].

Interestingly, the same applies to compiler design, as well as any software systems when viewed at the right abstraction.

And from a functional programming perspective, it is also the principle that underlines the famous Alan Perlis' epigram "LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing" (which outlines the importance of compiler optimization such as in tail-end recursion.)

[1] We're already seeing this in China's aging population crisis (thanks to the one-child policy introduced in 1980 [3]), and I doubt Xi's banning of private tuitions [2] would help (if we take his policy at face value).

[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-24/china-ban...

[3]: fun fact - this policy had affected many people including myself in a deep personal level. By law I am not supposed to exist (I'm a Gen Z born in China illegally as a second child (after my parents bribed the hospital, and afterwards we still had to pay huge fines)).

To your footnote, I’ve read that the one-child policy in China was not strictly enforced outside of major cities, and resulted in many children born in the countryside essentially “outside of the system”, not having access to education or healthcare… I wonder how much of it is true.

Intriguing! Sounds like we'll end up with something hugely team-players-dependent. Also removing lead dev dependency is an interesting take. (I had at most worked with 2 devs in a project so this is definitely something to keep in mind when the team scales up.)

> I’ve read that the one-child policy in China was not strictly enforced outside of major cities, and resulted in many children born in the countryside essentially “outside of the system”, not having access to education or healthcare

Maybe not that many. But definitely not a phenomenon unfamiliar to the city dwellers (esp when there had been a huge rural-to-urban migration from 2005~2018)

At one point they did (unofficially, I think) relax access to education and healthcare. Ultimately every actor in the societal chains of command would try to milk out from the perpetrators as much as possible (in the form of bribes/fines), until eventually very little can be milked and then things became cheaper (or close-to-free).

Democracy isn't assured, we could easily vote it away in the West. But there is definitely a pattern whereby enormous cutting-edge economic growth seems to require relatively free societies. To make a long term bet on an authoritarian approach in a world where those societies exist, that seems like a very risky thing to do.

Economists expect China to overtake the US economy in size by the 2030s. This can obviously either accelerate or decelerate and there will be hindsight reasoning in any case. Nevertheless, I don't see any of your narrative based arguments substantive.

Have a little faith. Our system shouldn’t win just because we are using it. After all, our core beliefs are that it is a better system, not just through our pure force of will.

The OP is right, much of China is is still undeveloped and their policies short-sighted and naive. In fact the whole government is so sensitive to face-saving that it screams insecure teenager. Getting worried they might be winning and that we must start to take alternative measures just legitimizes their tactics.

The GDP of the Soviet Union never exceeded that of the United States at any point.

If the GDP of China exceeds the United States in the near future (which seems quite possible), how does that fact reconcile with your analysis?

I find the government of China to be morally reprehensible. However there are plenty of cases in history in the real world where that which is morally reprehensible prevails, at least in the short term.

If they prevail in the long term, then we might need to revisit our morals.

If China collapses in two hundred years due to it's moral failings, that will be no more comfort to us than the United States collapsing might be to the indigenous tribes that used to live in North America before Europeans arrived.

It worked for the greeks. It worked for the mongols. Arguably it worked for the spanish and british.

I dont see the free market holding back authoritarian takeovers. At some point the west will wake up but when they do, is it too late?

What makes empires different is that they extracted the riches from lamds abroad, thru violence (stealing) which often meant war, murder, and pillaging. Usually this was followed by slavery. Slavery itself was often transactional consequence between to original human traffiker and the idiot buyer.

The US was a global power before it went on military adventurism. It can be argued whether the US could have become a world power without slavery, but that line of question can be leveled to any other country with significant power today.

The US became a global power and incredibly rich , in spite of its government only deciding to stick its nose abroad starting around the 1960s.

The US may have done pretty dark things abroad in the last 50-60 years. But thats when it really starts. And by that time, we had already a monopoly on world power.

If anything, the US has proven that it's technique for stealing to keep its advantage has been incredibly ineffective and downright inept (cuba, vietnam, arguably Afghanistan)

This is unlike china, that steals as a matter of national policy, and its stealing its way to the top

1. What the United States has is not Capitalism - it's a badly broken Capitalism. The power of healthy oversight and regulation has been decimated by shocking amounts of money which, now, thanks to the same corrupted system, is mostly "dark". We are not exactly in an oligarchy, but we are very close.

2. You can think of China as a team. They still, as a whole, unite around their national and strategic interests, as a nation. We, on the other hand, wonder about which country owns this or that particular Congressperson, and wearing a mask as a health measure for the greater good of the country is bloody murder.

How is this going to work?

There's this common trope, but there's two parts to IP; infringement and enforcement.

The British didn't enforce their patents. They could have, but they didn't.

Colonialism ended.

The west was not light years ahead of, say, India, when it was first colonized.

In the process of colonizing it, India's industrialization was stopped.

Countries didn't somehow fall into 'developed' and 'undeveloped' buckets by divine fiat. The latter tended to be invaded by the former, with the occupiers focusing more on wealth extraction, than development.

Once that parasitic relationship has been broken, a large number of developing countries have started moving towards prosperity. Some slower than others, to be sure.

During colonization, GDP, productive output, life expectancy, and quality of life in India plummeted.

I mean, you can, but your speculation is as good as anyone else's.

In the late 19th century, Russia still had serfs, and Americans practiced chattel slavery. By the mid 20th century, both of those countries built the atomic bomb. A century is a very long time to make accurate alt-historic predictions about.

Colonialism in China ended in 1945, a generation after the Qing dynasty. That time period was not a great time to live there, between the Japanese occupation, the civil war, and the country being split amongst a gaggle of warlords.

Whether or not the country would have developed without all of that is an open question. But if we were to ask whether not all those things were preventing development, the answer is 'Obviously, yes.'

But people care primarily about their economic well being, and whatever system delivers it is what they'll be happy with. There are no huge movements calling for democratic reforms in well off non-democracies like Saudi Arabia, or the Gulf states. And even in democracies like Hungary or Poland the slow slide to a more authorotarian government hasnt got the majority of people worked up, as long as their personal circumstances arent too badly affected. Democracy is only that thing which is demanded when they want to change their circumstances for the better, otherwise its forgotten or undermined when the good times are rolling.

Will China win? No I dont think they will, they dont have the ability to change course peacefully or quickly enough under an authorotrian system. They let momentum carry them in straight lines until they crash into a wall. Our problem is that we're stuck with a rich and technologically advanced threat that we built. Trump for all his faults did the right thing by starting the economic war with them, Obama was quite happy to let the status quo of technology, capital and job transfers continue unabated.

But we havent learnt our lesson and we risk making the same mistakes with India. The western nation are looking for another low wage, low cost manufacturing base, and they're going all out on India. But we can see the authorotarian and less democratic direction the government there is taking everyday. Yet all our major tech companies and planning to build and invest in capacity over there. Until we end up with another rich and technologically nation that isnt a friend of democracy.

Imagine driving a car with misaligned steering that pulls sharply to one side. You could do it, but it would get tiring, and it would feel dangerous to go on a long road trip because if you lost focus for a minute you could crash.

My own experience with mental health issues is that it feels about like that.

I guess.

I don’t have a deep understanding of depression, except that it is a very real and difficult thing that many people struggle with. So let me caveat that first.

But I have to say, my gut reaction is that it’s rather sad to take a worldview that makes things so dire as to say one’s own depression and the apparent increase in depression around the world is entirely due to the politics you oppose.

To me this reads as the tragic consequences of ever escalating polarization. Instead of seeing the politics around you as merely diverse ideas held by your friends and neighbors, you see it as something more like a species differentiator - and “they” are in control. Well, yes, that would be dire.

But out in the real world it turns out the vast majority of people on the right and the left are not so far out to the wings of their ideology, and that if they sat down over a nice meal they could have a great conversation and really enjoy each other’s company, perhaps even learn from each other and positively influence each other.

The political world around us is indeed depressing, but I would argue we shouldn’t wish that we could get out of bed so we can “throw a brick through a window,” but perhaps instead so we can work toward understanding and reconciling with our neighbors instead.

> It would be an offense to say, well, it’s just politics... to understand depression through political frames does not mean that the problem of depression can be immediately solved by political means. There is a horror to depression that cannot and must not be translated too quickly into the sphere of politics, regardless of our critical and revolutionary aspirations.

The article is suggesting we should eschew the hyper-individualization of our understanding, diagnosis, and response to depression—and do so by contextualizing it within the political economy in which it lives. It’s a call specifically to not reduce it to chemicals, subjects, and personal responsibilities—and, instead, recognize the impacts of capital, structures, and collective responsibilities which capitalism (and the defensive and capital-protecting ideology and politics it gives rise to) wishes us to ignore. This is the capitalist “realism” the author states runs in tandem with depressive realism—that there are no alternatives, that there really is nothing to be done about the current state of affairs.

The article is calling attention to the possibility—no, the need—to reject this false narrative. There are alternatives, but, the article suggests we instead find comfort in increasingly diagnosing and pathologizing what could be normal effects of capitalism on those who live under it. Instead of recognizing the ways in which our social, political, and economic structures impact subjects, we instead say it’s the subjects who have a chemical imbalance or defect:

> In this way, the diagnosis provides momentary meaning to meaningless misery. The suffering gets a name and a cause: a lack of serotonin. But this cause has causes which in the diagnostic system — and in the capitalist world as a whole — remain undiagnosed and untold.

Whether or not you agree with such a possibility, the very question is, I think, provocative and worth considering and discussing.

What I find “crudely reductionist,” in the article is the very idea of “capitalist realism,” and the idea that some notion called “capitalism,” can be the cause of all depression.

Are we to think that depression did not exist in the Soviet Union? Or perhaps in the mercantilist kingdoms of the colonial era? Or perhaps not in the Roman Empire? Or what about ancient China or India?

There’s some irony in saying “capitalist realism tries to fool us that this is all there could ever be,” when the article itself is declaring that capitalism (or any -ism) can only be some kind of evil force which naturally causes depression.

It doesn’t read to me like a thoughtful scientific article, but like a religious text decrying another religion.

I find the real world is not nearly so black and white. Certainly the “capitalism” as practiced in the United States is far different than that practiced in Norway, as well as the statist system in practice in Cuba and currently falling apart in Venezuela.

It’s hard for me to see this author as doing anything other than taking a victim mentality and trying to prescribe it for everyone else, laying Universal blanket blame on the authors preferred heresy.

> What I find “crudely reductionist,” in the article is the very idea of “capitalist realism,” and the idea that some notion called “capitalism,” can be the cause of all depression.

No, that’s your same reductionist interpretation of the article’s complex claims. You’re just re-stating your initial reaction to the article, while saying it’s what the article is arguing.

The article does not argue or suggest that capitalism “can be the cause of all depression”. Instead, it argues that, because capitalism is the political economy within which our current notion of depression is framed, the act of individualizing depression, while ignoring extrinsic factors as potentially causal and/or contributory, is something we should reconsider.

> Are we to think that depression did not exist in the Soviet Union? Or perhaps in the mercantilist kingdoms of the colonial era? Or perhaps not in the Roman Empire? Or what about ancient China or India?

This is a rather disingenuous bit of whataboutism. The article made no such claims. Given the article’s actual claims, I’d wager the author would suggest we should be looking to the social, political, and economic structures of those specific societies and systems to better understand and contextualize the depression that undoubtedly did exist.

Again, you’re being extremely reductionist here—you’re attempting to turn the article’s grappling with a complex problem, and attempts to contextualize it within the social, political, and economic structures in which it arises into some form of Universal Theory of Capitalist Depression. That’s your argument, not the article’s.

There’s some irony in saying “capitalist realism tries to fool us that this is all there could ever be,” when the article itself is declaring that capitalism (or any -ism) can only be some kind of evil force which naturally causes depression.

The article doesn’t quite declare that. That seems to be your own reaction to the article placing capitalism and the material conditions under which it subjects people (and the impact that may have on mental health) under its microscope. However, this irony you seem to see is quite unclear to the point of not seeming ironic at all.

> Certainly the “capitalism” as practiced in the United States is far different than that practiced in Norway, as well as the statist system in practice in Cuba and currently falling apart in Venezuela.

The author points this out directly on multiple occasions. The author is primarily concerned with Danish society, but alluded to the great differences in the US and elsewhere, and wonders aloud about what impact the different material conditions in which people live might have on their mental health individually and collectively.

> It’s hard for me to see this author as doing anything other than taking a victim mentality and trying to prescribe it for everyone else, laying Universal blanket blame on the authors preferred heresy.

That seems to be your interpretation, and clearly explains why you’re so completely missing the article’s point. The article is directly arguing against the hyper-individualistic pathology of depression as it exists in current discourse. The article is suggesting that what we call depression could very well be a normal reaction to the material conditions within capitalist political economy. If it is, the article thinks, that’s a game-changer.

It really sounds like you’re offended by taking a critical look at capitalism, as if you believe capitalism (or any other kind of ism) does not engender social, political, and economic structures that both serve and reinforce it—or that humans might not have universally positive reactions to such structures and conditions. From crippling, life-long reliance on debt, extreme competition, increasing inequality, and social expectations to be always happy, coupled with always laying the blame for failing to navigate such structural pressures directly on individuals, the author suggests perhaps we should be careful about absolving the structures themselves of any responsibility for their impact on people.

Again, it’s fine to disagree with the author’s conclusions. But I think you should be engaging with the strongest version of the article’s arguments, not reducing them to overly simplistic forms that make it feel easier to dismiss without consideration.

This is incorrect. However, you may find this portion of the guidelines for comments enlightening:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

For what its worth I upvoted your first comment because i agree, and downvoted your second for complaining about votes

I see it also says don’t comment on votes, which I hadn’t noticed before. I would go back and delete that comment but then your reply would make no sense, so oh well.

Thank you for posting your explanation and helping set me straight on HN etiquette, I appreciate it!

I certainly don’t mean to say people should shed their ideas, or that we should be starlings that flock together.

But I do think it’s important to see humanity as one species, one people, who have most things in common and thrive by working together constructively.

That’s why I feel it’s important to seek to understand the people who see the world differently than you, rather than just exist in blind opposition to them.

When we let our ideology define who we are it becomes a religion, and world history has plenty of examples of people taking religious ideology as a reason to blindly oppose and eventually wage literal war on “the other.”

Meanwhile, healthy mutual tolerance comes from seeking to understand and then arranging life in such a way that each person can have their own ideas and worldview without needing to quash the others.

To me that feels like just a description of liberal philosophy, so it’s surprising I most often have this conversation with friends leaning far left who are so angry they are thinking more in terms of how to wage a war than how to find a workable mutual tolerance.

Better for the slaves to sit down and write complex analyses on what is wrong about slavery and bicker amongst themselves about the details (I joke)!

But anyways, obviously most 'leftists' wouldn't equate slavery with their own situation, and I'd argue most of them do want to go as far as possible through understanding and conversation. But to some degree I'd say that's the basic point of view.

Reasoning from this perspective, wouldn’t this require a society that is more collectively and communally-oriented that one based around extreme competition with each other as the means of survival?

I don’t see how you resolve this antagonism in a society like the US, where failing to ruthlessly compete against others can mean losing healthcare for your family and children, slipping into homelessness, etc. Obviously, other countries mitigate this more with robust safety nets, but you seem to be mistaking a symptom for a cause.

> Still, recent textbooks have come a long way from what was published in past decades. Both Texas and California volumes deal more bluntly with the cruelty of the slave trade, eschewing several myths that were common in textbooks for generations: that some slave owners treated enslaved people kindly and that African-Americans were better off enslaved than free. The books also devote more space to the women’s movement and balance the narrative of European immigration with stories of Latino and Asian immigrants.

> “American history is not anymore the story of great white men,” said Albert S. Broussard, a history professor at Texas A&M University and an author of both the Texas and California editions of McGraw-Hill’s textbooks.

So, in short, all the textbooks are moving toward a more multicultural worldview and ideas traditionally associated with "the left," but California is moving that direction faster than Texas.