This is what I wish I had known in high school, college, and during the first 5 years of my career. I learned it along the way, maybe had a bit of exposure to it early on, but not enough substantively (and some not at all) to make some different choices. I may have done everything the same, though.
Basically: Some career fields, and certain types of employers, are highly-demanding and behave as if they own the souls of their workers.
Some are more rigid on schedules and time off. Some are prone to time-off cancellations.
If you need specific time-off dates, rather than just scheduling around the work flow, this information matters. A lot.
Choosing your field of study & work, and the kinds of employers you want to approach, is the way to set up a life with the level of control over personal time that suits you best. Or, you can be unaware of these trade-offs, and/or “doing what you love”, pursuing certain talents regardless, and risk being scheduled right out of a personal life.
People often hold idealized visions of how companies work. Then they meet reality. Companies are like people – a mess.
Examples of things to know …
Publicly-traded companies and sizable private companies are highly likely to be our-way-or-the-highway environments. Their priority constituencies are their investors (shareholders) and the markets, often even above their customers. They have legal and other requirements that must be met. Employees are there to serve the company interests. That’s what they hire people to do. They assume that applicants know this.
Such companies usually pay well above scale and have excellent benefits. They also have expectations in return. And less flexibility for individuals.
Management positions, aka responsibility for people & things – Depending, this can be an anchor chain to the job. It’s not the routine tasks, it’s the big unexpected stuff with consequences that demands your immediate attention, even during PTO. That’s why they have managers.
Accounting, finance, including A/P, A/R, etc. – Predictable closing schedules, but horse shows, weddings and other events may unhappily schedule right over closing. During the ‘critical periods’ you virtually have to be hospitalized to not be present. (Even then they will be on the phone with you.)
Any job with hard-and-fast calendar schedules is likely to have conflicts with horse and personal events that schedule over the critical work periods.
[Early career when I was in grad school, a final exam was scheduled on the night of closing, when we had to be present to review prelim results. THAT WAS AWKWARD AS HELL. It was the only interference from school, so I managed to live through it, barely.]
Marketing, communications, promotions, advertising, etc. – You’d think you could plan and work ahead in these fields. But, notoriously dependent on other people and service providers, who are notoriously late, and don’t always deliver what was asked for. Unpredicted schedule adjustments are a stressful part of life.
Any job with high dependencies on others is subject to schedule changes due to the lacking performance of said others, that can affect date-targeted time off.
Manufacturing – Rigidly scheduled, then starts to miss the targets due to … anything. Those with more time in it could say more.
A group or company with a tendency to miss production target dates can be prone to last-minute cancels of time-off to push production.
Computer & technology - Depends on task and work group. Some are constantly on impossible deadlines. Some are tied to the physical infrastructure, the server banks, network traffic, etc.
Company infrastructure - servers, networks, etc. - if something goes down and there isn’t a ready fix, time-off can be truncated or canceled. Network jobs – beware of geographic regions where snowstorms or tropical storms are common.
And so on. This is the kind of information I wish were far more available to people as they are choosing their career field.
Re expectations for PTO: Do not expect to have coverage, someone who can do your job if you are away for a longer period. The jobs are complex, layered, nuanced. You need time in the job to do it correctly, not just a few hours of “and then I do this”. The best you can hope for is that someone at least has access to what you access. Workers don’t have time to do two jobs anyway, their job and someone else’s.
Management talks about cross-training for coverage. But there isn’t staff time for competency to be achieved (and maintained). I have never known coverage to actually get done, anywhere, beyond the routine ‘right now’ tasks. People can criticize and judge management for this all they wish. It changes nothing. You come back from PTO to a stack of undone work.
BTW – Managers are not default assholes, stupid or incompetent. They are human and are surviving the situation that they are in, just like everyone else. The better that employees understand the structure of the workplace and the humanity of the managers in their world, the better they can ‘manage upward’ and get more of what they want.
Jimmy Yang explains it below “In America, we’re supposed to do what we love!”, and his dad explains it differently … 
https://youtube.com/shorts/bIPl8TDtJzE?si=HmWcvtl99VhRdFEP
) would also need to schedule an additional day of PTO after a travel show (or travel of any sort) to rest in order to not be miserable the first day back at work.
). Sometimes they are serious about giving the heads-up, in order to scare off bad fits and cut down on ‘hiring mistakes’. Sometimes they are clueless, lying or don’t care.
