Reply to Month vacation

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "Month vacation"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DH works for a Swedish company on the US side, but they have no problem with us being on European hours.

I work for an American company but my boss is Greek and he goes home to Greece for a month every year.

My best friends husband is high up at a major corp and he is originally from Prague and when he got the job offer, he negotiated that he could work abroad whenever. Wife works in a school so she has summers off. They are currently on an 8 week trip. Right now, they left the kids with the Prague grandparents and are in Switzerland just them to.

It works if people make it work![/quote]

I'm the PP who posted about my parents being abroad during the summer while in grad school. I'm thankful that my job allows me the flexibility to work from home a lot and also do things like volunteer at swim meets, but saying that "it works if you make it work" is pretty short-sighted. It obviously just works for certain types of jobs. I get 3.5 weeks of vacation I can take whenever and a bunch of other holidays (including 1 week between Xmas and NY), but there's no actual way for me to get another week of vacation for another few years. I tried to negotiate this and couldn't. I mean, yes, I could get another job, but it's not like there's someone just out there handing out jobs with extra vacation time. Jobs with "unlimited PTO" can also kinda be a trap, where people are actually expected to always be reachable. Sorry for the whining, my point is just to be kind to each other. This is something people have strong emotional responses to.[/quote]

I'm a PP and I don't think it's short sighted. Sounds like you have a job with pretty standard PTO. If you like the job you are in and want to prioritize that over greater flexibility, that's your choice and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. If being able to take multi week trips abroad was a top priority for you then you'd be working towards that whether that is through job searching, earning some more certs or degree that would yield more flexible jobs, starting a business, or moving towards consulting/freelancing in your chosen field. There's options for everyone. Yes, it make take time to work towards it, but for people who highly value flexibility and travel then they intentionally find jobs that align with that.

Also, there's a VAST area between the black and white 2 weeks PTO and unicorn job that lets you work from anywhere. There's jobs that allow you to WFH, work from anywhere for X number of weeks per year, submit a request to work from anywhere, be temporarily laid off for X weeks, etc. Everything is negotiable but people often only negotiate pay rate. I understand where you are coming from and that was us 2 years ago. Since we made the conscious choice to value location independence, I started a small business and DH moved to an international company that is permanently WFH and comes with a WeWork membership so he can work anywhere there is a wework. We've gotten very involved in the home exchange and world schooling communities and you'd be shocked how much easier many people have found it is to get flexibility. Sure it takes stepping out of your comfort zone, changing things up, getting out of the complacent cycle, but totally worth it![/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics