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Comment by wg0 | Hacker News Reader

You can't leave your desk whenever you want. And when you leave your desk, you've always this social/peer pressure to ensure there aren't any complaints about you being frequently away or for longer, for example.

That's not freedom. What's not freedom isn't richness. The attached price tag doesn't matter.

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It is the other way around, as part of a large company you can take 2-4 weeks' vacation without any material impact to your career or companies' performance not so in your own startup. In many cases you can take 1 year sabbatical and join back where you left, with a startup you are tied to weekly and quarterly result.

Really depends on industry.. maybe at FAANG that is normal, elsewhere - no. I've worked almost 20 years now and haven't done a real 2-weeker vacation in 5 years, and probably won't again for a while. 4 week vacation is practically unheard of, as is sabbatical.

Of course being a small business owner is not really compatible with 2-4 week vacations, BUT.. you are empowered to make that decision. Maybe you just drag your laptop with you and stay reachable / keep things moving along, but from whatever sunny location you've decided to holiday.

Not much different than my last 6 day vacation where I had my laptop & work phone, and checked in on any urgent fires every morning & evening back at the hotel...

Im pretty sure the 500k employee at Google is vastly vastly more free to leave his desk than the small business owner making that much.

There's a wide range of workloads for small business owners. Sometimes a strategy finds a market and after significant effort to get to capture customers, doesn't take a lot of work to maintain. Others might be pulling 80 hour weeks for $40k/year

That's 100x more true if you're a business owner. You can't take simply time off whereas as a employee you can

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