HN user
Surprised to see this on HN, but glad that he still has influence outside the traditional comic book set. Moebius was an inspiration to me back when I wanted to be a comic book artist. I still have many of his graphic novels (and took my HN username from one of his works). To say he will be missed is an understatement.
I worked at a small company where I was paid hourly and didn't even have paid vacation. The upside was you could take as much time off as you could afford. The downside was I couldn't afford much, though I did come into a little money from an outside project and managed to take a nice 4 week vacation. :-)
I think a hybrid of that approach could work, where you get X weeks of paid vacation and can take more as unpaid leave. That way, everyone gets the benefit of being encouraged to take a certain amount of time off, and those who want more can have it without other employees feeling like people are cheating the system. However, I asked about this at my current job and was told that unpaid leave was "strongly discouraged". I think there's also some risk of being seen as "not a team player".
But I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who would rather have more time off than money.
It sounds like you didn't study CS or another technical field in school or you would have known you weren't a math/logic person already. I'm curious, what got you into programming (other than that there are a lot of job openings right now)?
Regardless, it's pretty common for your first job in any field to be less than ideal, so I wouldn't write off programming just yet. On the other hand, if your company is large enough to offer opportunities to work in other areas, you might dip your toe in and find something you like better without having to look for another job. Desire for change happens to everyone after a while, even if we enjoy what we do.
Contracts are useful for spelling out the rights and responsibilities of each party so there are no misunderstandings later. But I agree with you, if the person you're contracting with doesn't want to pay you, you may well waste more than the contract is worth trying to get your money.