On: We’re all paying for someone else’s 4-hour work week, not ours

[dopidopHN]

I switched job recently, very nice compensation package. Whole shabang. 3 weeks vacation.

Being relatively senior, I asked to receive less money, and more vacation.

It was a very, very hard negotiation to go to 4 week of PTO while reducing my yearly salary by the equivalent of 40H*MyRate.

What's bug me the more in this context is how insane people think I am to ask for more free time. I don't count my hours outside of vacation. I do what I'm supposed to do and I enjoy it.

But once in while. Once or twice a year, I want to be away from any type of technology and fuck off in the woods.

It should not be that hard.

Plus, preventing me to do that will just hast my departure from the company that apparently can't suffer a employee being gone 1 more week? Nobody is irreplaceable, and if someone is, that person is not doing it's job and should be replaced.

Edit : to your question about having less than 5 week / year. I think my quality of life has vastly decrease, that my mental health as well, and that I missed a lot of bonding with my wife and children. As a result, I will gladly go back to a french level of financial compensation to get those benefit back.

[ric2b → dopidopHN]

> It was a very, very hard negotiation to go to 4 week of PTO while reducing my yearly salary by the equivalent of 40H*MyRate.

Simple, because the value you're providing is much higher than your salary, so reducing your output costs more than the savings in salary paid.

Now if your output is actually linear with hours work, that's another story.

[akvadrako → dopidopHN]

What country are you talking about?

The best way to get more time off is contracting instead of being salaried. You don't need to ask for less money, so it's a simpler transaction to negotiate.