This works for some businesses and not for others. Most successful YC companies, for instance, cannot simply shut down for the entire month of August. In others, teams are so tightly coupled that the business wants vacations as synchronized as possible. It all depends.
The important thing to remember is that there is almost always some degree of freedom withheld by vacation policies. It's not especially productive to reason about vacations as if absolute freedom of scheduling is a sacred principle. Some businesses can come closer to others in providing freedom, and if that freedom is especially valuable to you, you should adjust your compensation expectations accordingly.
But remember the iron law of supply and demand. If a company provides a benefit (say, "months of paid vacation any time of the year on no notice"), and the market values that benefit, candidates will factor that into their compensation negotiation and the salary the company needs to pay for a given level of quality will decrease. In other words: you're paying for the vacation policy one way or the other.
(This is a subtext to the constant jealous comparisons between European and American vacation policies that tends to bug me.)
The important thing to remember is that there is almost always some degree of freedom withheld by vacation policies. It's not especially productive to reason about vacations as if absolute freedom of scheduling is a sacred principle. Some businesses can come closer to others in providing freedom, and if that freedom is especially valuable to you, you should adjust your compensation expectations accordingly.
But remember the iron law of supply and demand. If a company provides a benefit (say, "months of paid vacation any time of the year on no notice"), and the market values that benefit, candidates will factor that into their compensation negotiation and the salary the company needs to pay for a given level of quality will decrease. In other words: you're paying for the vacation policy one way or the other.
(This is a subtext to the constant jealous comparisons between European and American vacation policies that tends to bug me.)