[president_zippy]

This is great advice in general: establish personal boundaries early and stick to them. I never had a problem with vacation time or sick time, but I've had problems with this one asshole at my current job. I managed to fix that problem coworker eventually, but it would have been easier to just stand my ground the first time he was disrespectful.

For some reason, PhDs think they can treat every coworker without a PhD like a grad student, and that they can treat grad students like crap. I took a significant reduction in pay to work for academia thinking I was going to work in a great environment working on finding cancer cures alongside good people. At the end of this year, I'm leaving to finish some post-bacc classes and never working for a nonprofit again. Not just because of the culture, but also because I'm sick of working in a low-accountability environment where incompetence is tolerated and people optimize their work around visibility rather than things that really make the world better.

I know from experience that the private sector has just as many perverse incentives and just as much dysfunction, but at least I'll get paid 2-5x as much and retire sooner.