IB in the US - how many days off per year on average?

Given there are 8 bank holidays a year in England, you could just use a whole four days of your holiday allowance and do the same.

As for less vacation, it becomes pretty normal. I have a pretty flexible schedule, but I really am not that keen on taking huge amounts of vacation. I always used to struggle with using them when I was in the UK.

Very interesting thread to go through, and many interesting facts & opinions in there indeed. I have worked in Europe through the "crisis period" for an american bank. And have thought several times about shifting to NY, after all we are an american bank, so it should be easy enough. But always the one thing that stops me is the vacation policy. Here I get 5 weeks a year off, and everyone is encouraged to take it. There is just about no one in the team that leaves un-used vacations at the end of the year and it is perfectly acceptable to decide out of the blue to take a week off and go driving on the auto-bahn ... which is a bit I really love. In the US however, firstly the vacation policy is tiered and linked to your seniority, you don't get enough vacation allocation anyway and the worst bit is that at less than 5 years of experience level, you seldom get to use all of your vacation anyway.

I just refuse to live life like that. What is the point of all the money, if you have no time to travel and spend it I say ! Though I do believe it is this stringent vacation policy that makes all the people in NY assume all the days before 3-day weekends are half-days when they really aren't (this is something so irritating when you are in London, feels almost as if the NY guys are dying to take time off and at any excuse would just take a half day and run) ... Pre-bank weekend working days in London are not half-days ... so if thats something which you like, NY might be the place :d

You may have 10 weeks off, but no one likes it when you take that time off consecutively. I have never been away for more than 2-weeks in the near decade I've been working.............

There is this picture in my head in which
IB - Hours and hours of number crunching and monotonous repetitive work
MC - Solving new puzzles

Although I do know that this is not entirely true, I still find myself leaning towards MC. Would glady do 80 hours of solving new puzzles than 100 hours of repetitive work..

And many people agree with you. You just make the trade-off of lower earnings potential. Years 1-2 out of business school you might not see a huge difference in pay (maybe $20-30k in banking's favor) but when you start hitting the VP+ levels the pay in banking takes off exponentially compared to consulting. Goes back to that lovely work/life balance that is a different priority for everybody.

There is this picture in my head in which
IB - Hours and hours of number crunching and monotonous repetitive work
MC - Solving new puzzles

Although I do know that this is not entirely true, I still find myself leaning towards MC. Would glady do 80 hours of solving new puzzles than 100 hours of repetitive work..