[lsc]

so, there's what, 11 standard paid holidays, so 30 days off would be 'four weeks of vacation' - The set of people who make more than a million dollars a year who can't negotiate four weeks of vacation... I think is small.

There's this persistent myth of the driven executive... I mean, I guess it's possible that other fields of endeavor are different? but everywhere I've worked? the more they pay you, the better they treat you, the more vacation you get, and ultimately the less you are expected to actually work.

[totalZero]

Would you please consider that not everyone works in the same field as you?

I worked on a trading floor with a trader, early 30s, very profitable and well respected. Took a week off to go to the Mediterranean with his girlfriend (from what I hear, he proposed to her on that trip). Had his mandatory two-week vacation the next month. While he was away on that two-week vacation, I heard several people, including the group head, criticizing him behind his back for taking so much time off -- despite every trader on that floor having four weeks of vacation, two contiguous weeks of which were mandatory.

Just because something hasn't happened in your own experience, doesn't mean that it doesn't happen in other sectors. This guy was the right-hand man to his boss and he still got criticized for taking his mandatory vacation.

I once took a single day of vacation to finish moving into my new apartment, and I was made fun of publicly and criticized for it by a number of semi-senior people who weren't even in my chain of command.

Not every company has a culture of asynchronicity, and not every career path offers a healthy balance of work and life. There is also a difference between having vacation days, and being able to take them without hurting your reputation and compensation.

If people are depending on you to be perpetually present, prepared, and profitable -- whether as a trader, an executive, or any other role -- there's social pressure to minimize vacation. And that pressure is amplified in the culturally dog-eat-dog industries, I reckon.

[lsc]

compare this to your average retail job, where not only do you get zero paid vacation, and you get your schedule, if you are lucky, a week ahead.

As far as I can tell, this holds in the middle, too; I do okay, but I don't get paid like a very profitable broker, and I don't get four weeks vacation (not usually, anyhow... it is pretty easy for me to quit and get another job, of course, but that usually results in less of a raise than going from having a job to having another job.)

My point is just that there's a pretty strong correlation between getting paid more and being treated better in other ways. It's not an absolute correlation, certainly; but the fact that the man had four weeks off and had a job to come back to, I think, supports my assertion more than the fact he got criticized for taking it all at once detracts from it.

[chii]

> the less you are expected to actually work.

if you're talking about actual time spent working, may be. But the output for an expensive person needs to be high. Granted, how does one measure the output of a typical multi-million dollar CEO on bottom line performance (vs just good general economic conditions)?

[lsc]

Yes, time spent working is exactly what I meant.