What is more important... Salary or fringe benefits?

Khane_sl said:

They don't deny me the vacation time. They just call me all day long with issues while I'm on said vacation. If I turn off my phone and e-mail they won't discipline me, I'll just have a metric ton of shit to deal with when I come back.

Mostly because of issues with other downstream processes and people trying to "fix" stuff with a hammer while I am gone, causing more harm than good.

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Heh, you should take 40 weeks of only working 4 days if you don't plan on going anywhere. If you have a big family you might want to save some of those vacation days for funerals. Sounds depressing, but not every employer thinks about that stuff. Buddy of mine in his mid 30s has already hit 9 funerals this year. No more time off left or available bereavement.

Well if it was as simple as returning a call or email it wouldn't be a problem. There are times where I literally spend a full 8 hours fixing things that someone who was trying to help me broke. It's not that big a deal. I don't typically take week long vacations. Usually just long weekends here and there. I'm single and have no kids. Vacation days usually mean golf for me. When I do spend a full day it doesn't count as a vacation day. I make it sound worse than it is.

It's really hard to take 8 weeks of vacation when you don't value the time away all that much. I have no obligations outside of work so my life is pretty stress free, I don't really need a "getaway". I kind of view vacations as a waste of money since I don't really have someone to spend them with at the moment.

I was really just trying to impress upon people that sometimes benefits really are "too good to be true". It's better to take the tangibles (i.e. salary) because you know exactly what you will get.

Alright people are focusing on the wrong portions of the message I am trying to convey. So let me lay it out.

I make 130k/yr. I have great benefits, I work 15 minutes from my house, I get 8 weeks of vacation. My company would never require me to forfeit vacation nor would they ever deny me vacation requests. They also would never discipline me for ignoring their calls and emails while I'm on vacation. My personality, and the way I was raised prevent me from ignoring my responsibilities.

I could ignore my co-workers requests for help without fear of retribution, nothing would happen to me. However, I respect and like my co-workers and their jobs depend on my systems. Unfortunately nobody else has the time, even though 2 people were trained, to really learn the applications and software I am in charge of. I am not going to ignore the people I respect and like who's jobs depend on my systems if something goes wrong. This has nothing to do with me working for "the man" and being held down by his oppressive thumb and everything to do with the fact that I am not an entitled little whiner who has an axe to grind with "authority". I am good at what I do, a lot of information flows through the messaging software I govern. It's not their fault they don't understand it as well as I do and can't triage small issues (some of which don't actually need triaging) when I am away.

This doesn't usually happen when I take a day or two. It usually does happen if I try to take a week or two. It's not a big deal to me. Again... for the 5th time... I was just using a fringe benefit I receive that I can't take complete and full advantage of (which is well above average anyway) because of other circumstances as an example of why people should be wary of "intangible benefits" when deciding on a career move.

I am not stretched thin in my normal day to day routine. I realistically do not need another resource in my department. It just so happens that when it comes to BizTalk, able and intelligent .NET developers get themselves into trouble because BizTalk is quirky and not at all what they are used to dealing with. It's a side effect of the software I work with.

Not this extreme but yea, this!

Cutlery_sl said:

Yeah, you need to stop giving a shit.

The most important lesson you can learn in life is that your employer doesn't give a fuck about you, there's no reason for you to give a fuck about it when you're not working. I recently told my boss he's not allowed to talk to me when he's not paying me. I'm not saying you can get away with that, but if you think that they give half a shit about your life while you're spending every waking moment worrying about theirs, you're dead wrong.

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It's not your fault that your company put all their eggs in one basket by not having anyone else that can perform most of your job duties when you are gone. What happens if you get some major illness or injury and have to miss a month of work, would the whole place just shut down? That's their problem, not yours. Take all your vacation and don't think twice about it. No one else there is fretting about their coworkers while they are on vacation, I guarantee it.

If everything goes to shit every time you take a week or two off, then they aren't running their business very well.

Khane, to me it reads you get 0 days of vacation. You're just switching to telecommute for up to 8 weeks.

You can also be certain that your attitude is well received by your bosses. But not in a positive light for you, but rather in a worst case scenario you're a guy who won't stand up for himself and therefore that's where they can save money, and they do by still only having you in that dept.

I didn't mean to make it sound like that. I get to take a legitimate 5 weeks of vacation when all is said and done. It's just hard to get that last 3 weeks in, but that last 3 weeks is... above and beyond in my eyes anyway. I was using slight hyperbole to prove a point that sometimes you need to be wary of promises. Salary is never a promise, it's tangible. Fringe benefits can sometimes just be smoke and mirrors. It's actually not really the case in my situation. My job is pretty posh.

When I take a week of vacation. A day or so of it is usually taken back due to having to help out. Not the whole week. However, it does mean I feel bad if I am somewhere that doesn't have internet access. But that's more my personality than a requirement from my superiors

Once I reach a certain salary I would rather have more flexible time off and other benefits than more salary. I move from job to job a lot because of the nature of my work, once you fix it you normally move to another company, some places get it and some don't. Some think they can throw money at you and it will fix everything. I normally get a company truck, a take home company truck is a bonus I would rather get than a little extra money. Flexible time off during the week is worth more than additional salary once I reach my salary goal. The big one to me is being granted more authority to actually fix the stuff they hire me to fix which basically boils down to hiring and firing.

Khane_sl said:

"You don't want what you've never had".

Water coolers and free coffee are things that if you've never had you don't really care about it, because you don't even think about it as you said. Once you've been at a company that offers it, and move to a company that does not, it becomes a supreme annoyance. Enough to leave a job? Probably not. But incredibly annoying and something I would definitely complain about.

I'm not arguing that the other perks you mentioned are a lot more meaningful and rewarding, but it's the little things that usually send people over the edge.

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I never once got butthurt over having to pay $5 a month for coffee, I was working to move up in the company and get the real perks. At one point, I was driving around vehicles worth $60k, they paid my car insurance, gas, and maintenance. That ended up being like a $1,200 a month perk. You don't get that as a cubicle drone, you've got to earn your way up.

Arguing over $5 a month is for the cubicle drones, and not the upwardly mobile.

Khane_sl said:

I didn't mean to make it sound like that. I get to take a legitimate 5 weeks of vacation when all is said and done. It's just hard to get that last 3 weeks in, but that last 3 weeks is... above and beyond in my eyes anyway. I was using slight hyperbole to prove a point that sometimes you need to be wary of promises. Salary is never a promise, it's tangible. Fringe benefits can sometimes just be smoke and mirrors. It's actually not really the case in my situation. My job is pretty posh.

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It's pretty much accepted that if you are making six figures, don't expect a full vacation. At least that's how it was everywhere I've worked. As the saying goes, "There's no escaping voicemail." It's just the way of things. At that rate, they seem to think they can't run the business without you.

I believe it's something you accept once you get out of lower level positions. It comes with the territory.

I'm on the cusp on a six figure salary and when I'm on vacation, I'm on vacation. Shit has to really go down for me to interrupt my time off.

I make six figures and I take actual vacations. Sometimes they are "on call" vacations and sometimes they are actual vacations. On some of them I am available to answer the phone. We have other project managers that can normally pick up a new job but often aren't up to speed on one I'm currently on so I have to answer questions. On the other hand I have gone on actual vacations with no phone, often I go backpacking for weeks at a time and it didn't matter if they did call there would be no way to answer. It mostly depends on where we are at in a project. I was actually scheduled to take a vacation this next week to attend the College World Series, but a plant explosion here pretty much cancelled that as we'll probably be on site all next week.

OUAriakas_sl said:

The funny thing is that when I got to the six figure level I realized that my job isn't just something I do just to pay bills and make money but somthing that I take pride in doing well and truly want to give back to the company that employs me. It becomes more about the long term picture then the day to day grind and I realized that taking that hour of calls/emails on the morning of my vacation days not only allowed my team limited access to my skills while I was gone but also allowed me to enjoy my vacation that much more knowing that when I got back to work it wouldn't take me a week of double duty to get caught back up on everything I had missed. I have also found as I get older that I am a staycation kind of person and even then after 4 or 5 days of waking up late, video games, and slacking off that I really just want to get back to ding something that matters a little more to my plans and goals for the future.

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When I worked for someone, I didn't mind it. But I would limit the work to when I wanted to do it. I'd just tell the boss I had plans with the family, but I'd get to it later in the day. So I might do work at 5pm on a given day, after I was already good and bored. Now that I'm self employed, I still only allow myself one full week to ignore the phone and work (Christmas to NYE). I don't really take vacations much, I just go somewhere for the weekend. Like now, I'm knocking off early and going to spend the weekend at a resort.