I should take more vacation. Mostly, it just doesn't occur to me. I take a day here and there as I need to, a week for xmas, and that's usually it. Every other year we'll do a week or 2 of foreign travel. I should really just take more days here and there.

When we had our son, I had 2 weeks paternal leave. I decided to take it as every friday for 10 weeks. My theory, and my wife agreed, was that it would be more useful for her to have sort of a complete day off once a week than to have me underfoot for 2 weeks. They changed the policy after that to require you to take it contiguously. Kind of a shame.

In my first job I was the only employee for a while and I had an agreement with the company to work 4 10-hour days and take a day off once a week. I liked that a lot. Of course, I basically used it to work another job (I was a photographers assistant - I was trying to figure out if I wanted to get an MFA). I often worked for the photographer on weekends too.

For me it's primarily financial. I'd love to take 3+ weeks off. But unless I'm going to be traveling or visiting family, I get bored and would rather be working. My large debts are now paid off as of a month ago, my fiancee just got a raise, and we're looking to move somewhere more affordable in the next couple months which means I'll probably be able to start taking more time off.

For other engineers here I think it's confluence preventing people from taking more than 2-3 weeks. We're also a fairly tight knit group and there's a pretty constant stream of "urgent" work to be done so there's some social pressure to pitch in which results in taking less time off.

I can't really speak for other groups though I suspect it's that high cost of living in the bay area makes going anywhere challenging so they just end up working rather than sitting home or whatever.

At a prior job, I got sick of working there, and got sick of listening to all of my miserable coworkers. I walked into the managers office and told them to find me a replacement, I'm quitting in 4 weeks.

Later that day, they pull me into the conference room and tell me that leaving isn't a good thing, they are growing yadda yadda yadda. I told them that everyone is taking a lot of time off to go the doctors lately, and to be honest, I don't want to work with a new crew of people. Even though we all wish the other would get ran down by the blue line (or have the same fate as the decapitated dog that was down the street for 6 months), I still had a ton of respect for my coworkers intelligence and work ethic.

What would it take? they asked, and I said.... well the argumentum ad absurdum of "employees at Walmart get paid vacation and health insurance, yet we each generate millions of dollars and don't even get heat," doesn't seem to be going anywhere, so I put the demand that everyone in my department get PTO. We each got 5 days, only if we worked there for a year or more, then 5 days each year after, use-it-or-lose-it.

It's likely that fellating the entire management staff would have been quicker, but I did get the first PTO I ever had in my life. I made the most of it, using it during the week between Christmas and New Years. It was glorious, but honestly, I'm not a tourist type and was getting over a major sickness, so I ended up going home a day early.

In case anyone wonders why I discourage $10 / hour office jobs, it should be known that this is an incredibly tame story.

Have a verbal (as well as email) job offer from a large non tech company. They said they would send me a written contract Monday morning. Sent them an email Tuesday morning, it is late Tuesday night and no response.

Last Wednesday I had an interview and same day offer over the phone from fed gov for a paid internship. Asked them to give me a few days to think it over and they said sure. Was going to use it as a backup in case the full time job fell through.

Now I am at the point where I am worried that the full time job falling through and that if I hold out too much longer the paid internship will also fall through. Suggestions?

accept the internship and if the full time spot comes through, back out of the internship.

a business would not hesitate to make that decision and neither should you

This is the correct answer. Who cares about quitting an internship anyway. Happens all the time for much less good reasons.

The fact that the internship is with the Federal government concerns me. I don't think I would want to burn that bridge.

federal gov't likely doesn't work that way, though. They're not just 1 person at HR who will see your name later and be like "He burned us once, **** him forever!" Way too big a chance for them to take being sued over.

afaik, they have to consider every applicant equally

got the email that i'm accepted into grad school today.

also had what seemed like a very good in-person interview.

Will know more soon, but man there's a couple options open now, seemingly

Unlimited vacation is a concept for A level performers who can get their work done. I would not worry about this, you aren't on this level.

NB: You posted about being rejected from one of the companies that does this.

Mihkellllllllllllll

This may be useless to post since it's so hard to change, but it baffles me how you guys only take 2-4 weeks a year. Back when I was playing poker I was tired after 6-8 weeks of grinding (keep in mind I never played weekends), in need of a mental break. I always took about 12-13 weeks off which was probably a bit more than optimal but not by much. I can't imagine <8 weeks tbh. Looking back on poker, I'm very much on board with the "if you're working a lot you're not working intensely (focused) enough" crowd.

^ Yeah, shaking my head every time vacation is discussed itt. There's a minimum(!) of 30 days paid leave + 13 public holidays here, which means about 7 weeks off. (Sick leave doesn't count towards that.) And my friends in IT actually still often go for shorter work weeks / additional vacation instead of pay raises.

Lol you - no one at Netflix takes those kinds of vacations either.

All unlimited vacation does is make it manager's discretion instead of based on some accrual numbers HR has. It's just accounting shenanigans...

You seem like a very self-aware person who is able to accurately gauge their own abilities and surely speculate on the vacation habits of companies that you've never worked for that are publicly well documented.

Or maybe you just steal code from your company and post it on Github in a failed attempt to enrich yourself.

Maybe both!

Anyway, Netflix has a pretty well documented history of the unlimited vacation policy which some people actually take. But hey! You're the expert!

shots

Ban this guy ffs

poker is just so much more mentally demanding than this type of work. I think that should be obv but just to clarify, poker required total concentration and a ton of effort to remain focused and sharp. I could only play about 20 hours of poker a week on average.

office jobs are quite easy to just cruise through. you can take breaks whenever you want, and just cruise through at half effort when tired.

jesus man, thats a pretty serious accusation

Thremp,

You should exercise a bit more civility if you want continue posting on 2+2.

yeah I guess that's kind of the point, if your job is effortless enough that you can do with 4 weeks a year it might be time to go find a new job (or change the current one), depending on your career and life goals and the type of person you are (i don't see jungle taking 12 weeks a year off)

I don't think the reason poker players often took so much time off is due to how intense it is. Sure it requires full concentration to multi table effectively. But the real drain is the cumulative stress. You've got to contend with a lot of randomness in outcome that leads to many emotional highs and lows coming at you very quickly.

Where with programming the only real stress I have happens due to deadlines.

also let's be honest, most of the good pro poker players I've known could be described as smart lazy people (not a dig btw!). sure "really hard worker" is accurate for a few like leatherass but in general, they're people who've chosen a career specifically to avoid hard work.

That's an accurate statement for programmers too