This tech CEO pays his employees to travel during their vacations

Getting time off can be difficult. Getting time off at a tech startup or company can often seem almost impossible.

Bucking that trend is Basecamp's CEO Jason Fried, who not only gives his company's employees three weeks of paid time off each year, but lets them travel for part of it on the house if they've been working for over a year. This perk is called the "Basecamp Holiday Gift", and those who haven't yet completed a full year of work still get a free night on the town.

Basecamp's benefits were announced alongside other perks that most people working in the tech industry, or anywhere else, would be right to envy. Here are five of the highlights.

• Four-day work weeks from the beginning of May through the end of August.
• A $100 stipend for healthy activities; gym membership, yoga, etc.
• A $100 message stipend so that you can "stay loose."
• A $1,000 Continuing Education Allowance. The courses you take don't have to be relevant to your job.
• 16 weeks of paid maternal leave, and 6 weeks of paid paternal leave.

On top of all that is a non-formal benefit, which is Basecamp's encouragement to all workers to keep their work hours to 40 hours a week, saying: "We don't want people working more than 40 hours a week in any sustained fashion (we even built in a 'Work Can Wait' feature in Basecamp 3 which turns Basecamp notifications off after work hours and on weekends)."