I initially had a very positive outlook on my future with EventMobi. I received an offer of employment and was actually very excited about the opportunity.
They only offered me 2 weeks of vacation + 5 sick days and I requested this get bumped to 3 weeks + 5 sick days. Honestly, I would have accepted the offer even if they said no.
However, my request prompted a 4 paragraph response from the CTO explaining why he cannot approve my request for extra vacation days. As cited, he explained:
-- We don't encourage our people to work overtime, and your current company offers unlimited vacation because they want you to work crazy hours (which was not true, the company I worked for at the time did offer unlimited vacation but also discouraged people from staying past 5)
-- If I wanted to reach the next pinnacle of my career, shouldn't I want to spend more time at work? Since you want to advance your career, you should want to work as much as possible and 3 weeks + 5 sick days is too much time to take off if you really want to distinguish yourself professionally.
-- We actually bumped our sick days to 8 days instead of 5, so if you stay healthy, you can take those as vacation days instead, so that brings total vacation days to 18 days.
This long response is what ultimately prompted me to decline the offer. If he had just said no, they could not accomodate my request, I would have accepted.
However, his explanation did not align with my core beliefs:
Vacation days and sick days are not interchangeable. You cannot call 2 weeks + 5 sick days to be the equivalent of 3 weeks vacation and then claim to be matching the industry standard.
My desire to have 3 weeks of vacation does not reflect a poor dedication to my career. There are 52 weeks in a year, most of them are spent at work, 3 weeks vacation cannot and should not affect my career advancement in any way.
Incorrect assumptions about WHY my current employer offers unlimited vacations makes EventMobi look petty.
