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Comment by ghughes | Hacker News Reader

I'm highly suspicious of "unlimited" vacation or leave policies because the line between reasonable and not is still there, it's just way less visible and ultimately arbitrary, depending on your management chain and workload. I can't wait for this fad to die. Let's just have generous, well-defined leave policies that don't put the onus on the employee to figure out what is OK and what isn't.

"Experience shows people perform better at work when they’re not worrying about home." People also perform better at work when they're not worrying about repercussions for being seen to abuse their "unlimited" leave.

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Working at a SV company that recently instituted an unlimited vacation policy, I can't agree more.

This is probably an indication of other issues, but half of the team didn't realize there was a new policy, one team lead thought the guidance was "generally, this means about 3 weeks", the manager thought "generally, this means about 2 weeks", the actual policy states "generally, this means about 4 weeks".

It apparently simplifies things from a financial standpoint - not having PTO on the books, etc. but I'm of the opinion that it's a very anti-employee policy.

Edit: I very much agree with the "unlimited with a minimum" concept mentioned in the sibling comment. Without something like this, it's hard to see the policy as a real perk.

"the actual policy states "generally, this means about 4 weeks"

Sounds like they should just make it 20 days.

Agreed. I'm not sure if similar "unlimited" policies typically give a "generally this means" kind of statement, but it seems to nullify the point of such a policy right off the bat.

Netflix employee here. I've been at a company that changed vacation policy to unlimited from 20 days [Nvidia] and now at netflix which has the freedom and responsibility culture and unlimited vacation policy quite established in the culture and it's a different experience. During the interview I asked our VP what he thinks of the unlimited vacation policy and his response was along the lines of `When I got back to [far away country] to visit family I can't just go for a week, it takes me 2 days to get there and the rest of the week to recover, and again on the way back, so I take the whole month`. Having been here 2 years now, I can tell you it is quite common to take long vacations at netflix and no one has blinked an eye or tried to make me feel guilty when I take them.

My experience at Nvidia's was more like what you describe, where my manager said that even though the vacation policy was unlimited now, he thought it would be unfair to others if I were to go over 20 days, and it was always a guilt trip taking a few days off.

Why not just give everyone 6 weeks vacation a year, like a civilized nation, and meter it to avoid politics?

Because US policy is generally pretty worker hostile and few (definitely some) employers have any motivation to change that.

"not having PTO on the books" inherently makes it an anti-employee policy, since the employee no longer will receive anything upon leaving. In theory it could come out better for the employee, because they may get more vacation time than they would otherwise, but my experience has been that unlimited vacation means less vacation.

> since the employee no longer will receive anything upon leaving

Even when it replaces non-reimbursable PTO (i.e they already would not recieve anything), it feels lame.

In California there's no such thing; Vacation and PTO is earned as it is accrued and must be paid upon separation. Sick leave specifically does not fall into that bucket, but lots of places use a single PTO bank as the combo sick/vaca bucket which makes it all payable.

(I mention CA because that's where Netflix is HQ'd)

I think unlimited with a minimum is really the solution.

Without a minimum people are reluctant to take time off from what I've seen and read.

I agree.

Though, where I work we have unlimited vacation and there definitely seems to be peer encouragement to take _more_ vacation, not less.

I'd expect it to work much better when there's an unlimited vacation policy from the start and the founders make a determined effort to push the culture in that direction.

I've seen places that have that minimum be mandatory. As in, if you haven't taken a vacation by a certain time, they will insist, even go so far as restricting access until the vacation is over.

The great thing about a mandatory minimum (never thought I'd be saying those words), is that it doesn't allow someone to over work themselves into a frenzy, making everyone else look lazy, while simultaneously burning themselves out.

At my previous employer, this seemed to be the case in our UK offices. 30 days a year, mandatory.

that's sort of just a UK minimum in general, IIRC (fwir, at least 20)

In countries where vacation time is mandated by law, restricting access during vacation time, and ordering the employee to enjoy the vacation before its expiration date is common practice.

An employee who fails to take vacation on time or goes to the job during vacation time is actually a liability to the company.

It's also a somewhat hilarious contrast to those companies who take away your vacation time if you don't use it within a certain time period (often just 1 year).

"It's also a somewhat hilarious contrast to those companies who take away your vacation time if you don't use it within a certain time period"

This is pretty standard in the UK. If you're a permanent employee, your annual leave allowance (e.g. 4-6 weeks of holiday) covers a period of one year. If you don't take that leave during the year, you lose it (you're unlikely to get paid for the untaken leave).

Some companies may allow you to carry over some of that leave to the next year (e.g. a week) or may allow you to "sell" or "buy" some extra leave. However, this normally needs to be done at the start of the annual leave year so requires some pre-planning on the employees part.

It also tests your office's bus factor.

Couldn't agree more that a realistic minimum, with some sort of "teeth" would be a great means of preventing burnout (and other issues that arise from unhealthy work/life balance).

Company I work for (Rubicon Project), uses a different approach that is still pretty effective (in my experience, your mileage may vary) - in addition to unmetered PTO, they provide a week off for 4th of July and a week (or two, depending on how calendars fall!) for Christmas/New Year. This way, even if you take no vacation time, you still get at least 2 weeks of downtime where the company basically stops, aside from keeping the lights on functions.

Plus in some jurisdictions you have to track unused vacation days and either pay them out or bank them.

We have a 10-day minimum here at Khan Academy, with unlimited PTO. It's also communicated to us that the average is 20-30 days.

Or maybe it just should be a mandatory minimum number of hours of which PTO should be used either yearly or quarterly (with exceptions)? Unlimited seems a bit odd to me if you have people who often take as much PTO as they can then they're not really working are they? Just an open question.

I'm highly suspicious of "unlimited" anything. In practice the term usually means "there is a limit, but we won't tell you until you've almost reached it."

Or worse, "there is a limit, but we won't tell you until you've gone over it and now there are marks in your file against you."

Or "there is a hidden limit we as employers have and there is another number that all of your co-workers have for you."

I'm suspicious that they don't specify how much vacation you get so you can't "cash out" the vacation time. I too have an unspecified amount of PTO at Adobe. Recently people have been cracked-down upon because they were taking a month off every year to go visit family back in India (without doing any work whilst there).

They cracked down when they got people using the benefit as advertised? Adobe is striking out all around these days.

Agreed. I'm a big believer in set vacation days. However I think untracked sick and personal days have merit. If you need to go to the dentist or stay home with your kid, do it. Similarly, I like core hours when you're expected to be in (crucial for meeting planning), but still have the flexibility to come in late or leave early.

I interned at Daimler-Benz in Germany. We had a 37.5 hour work week and "flex time" with core hours of 9:30-4:30. My boss made a big deal of explaining that, unless we were at a test track, that we were expected to abide both the core hours and 37.5/week. Core hours were 7hrs/day.

That meant we could work our 30 minutes flex per day in a totally flexible fashion...

I agree. My wife has "unlimited" vacation but taking even a single day raises eye-brows. A generous policy with an expectation to use the days is way better. This isn't even close to unlimited since I believe there's a 1 year window.

There might be a parallel with credit: Back when the maximum credit card interest rate charged in many states was limited to 18%, credit card companies tended to charge right at that, whereas when it was unregulated the interest was lower. [1]

You can look at a vacation cap as the same thing, where having a cap really can cause people to use more than they would if it were just whatever they could negotiate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_ceiling#Price_ceilings_t...

The biggest problem with "unlimited vacations" is that companies that offer these kind of policies cannot organize and compute their employees' workloads without using an arbitrary number of holidays, which will probably be set to the minimum.

Your manager will give you yearly (or quarterly) objectives with 10 or 20 days of vacations in mind, so if you use your right to unlimited vacations to take more than that, you will most likely be off your target, and that will be reflected upon your pay raise at yearly review time.

A fixed (and high) number of holidays is the only way to go.

I'm split on the whole unlimited policy myself. Mostly because I've known people who have sneaked out of work early or sneaked in late. Maybe that could be classified as separate behaviors, but what prevents someone from doing the same thing on this sort of policy? The honor system? I have no doubts in a small firm it would work out because you notice, but in a big company I can't see this working out so much.

It's a tool, which can vary in effectiveness depending on how it's used, which ultimately ties into corporate culture. Unfortunately, I suspect that in isolation an unlimited vacation policy doesn't generally promote a healthier corporate culture so it's not as advantageous as it may seem.

Are you an AT&T (or other) customer? Confused about the meaning of the word "unlimited"?

Just take it at face value:

    adj. not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity, or extent.

Why must words always have a hidden, contradictory meaning?

At least with things like internet use, I can mostly just pretend it's truly unlimited. What I want to use when it's truly unlimited is typically within the actual limit.

But in this case, it clearly does not actually mean it. Oh, I have actually unlimited vacation at my Big Corporation job? I guess I'm never going in to work again! Except we can be pretty sure that 12 months of vacation each year is way beyond the secret limit.

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