Unlimited Vacation and Other Forms of Guilt-Based Management | Hacker News Reader

Unlimited Vacation and Other Forms of Guilt-Based Management

mfbt.ca

32 pointsmiraj13 comments

I'm inclined to believe the claim that "unlimited vacation" was originally a way to get around having to compensate employees for unused vacation days when they leave the organization.

For publicly traded companies the PTO which has not been taken is actually on the balance sheet as a liability. If that corporation moved to an unlimited vacation time they can make the balance sheets look better. Also, most companies would make people get paid out if they hit the cap. A good amount of people weren't taking vacation and took the extra pay checks.

A big tech company changed the polices when I used to work there for the aforementioned reasons.

In addition, there was also the, "The company is closing down during the week before New Years so that you may spend more time with your family."

Which is a not so clever way of clearing vacation off the books also.

I will no longer work for companies that play similar games.

I urge others to consider doing the same.

I think there's also something to the idea that it was a way to guilt people into work/vacation bleed-over. ("I'll just answer these emails on my day off because they are 'urgent' and because I can always take an extra vacation day later.")

I also got the impression that for some companies it was their founders' means to a loophole for remote work for themselves without instituting an actual remote work policy beneficial to lower staff, because who is going to tell a founder that they are taking too much vacation time, especially when they seem to be working the whole time? Whereas a lower staff member would easily be guilted out of taking anywhere near as much time to work remotely outside of the office. That's certainly something I think about every time I see a company mention unlimited vacations but not a robust remote work policy.

It's better to give a generous fixed vacation allotment - then everyone knows where they stand and what's expected of them. Maybe even combine it with conference allotment, if there are conferences your employees really want to go to, but not to staff your company's booth.

I get six weeks vacation per year, and therefore don't mind spending one of them helping out with a conference I love.

However, there are no rollover days, and my manager would catch hell from the works council if I hit November with four weeks still available for the year - unless I already had approval to take December off from earlier in the year.

Edited to add: I live in Germany, and my employer has a contract with IG Metall, the big metalworkers union, and six weeks vacation was part of that deal.

What are the other forms of guilt-based management?

Flexible working hours and/or free meals, with a work culture that has people working long hours?

Scrum, particularly the daily standup, burn down charts, and retros

Horrible, infantile practices that somehow became "best practices"

I recently worked at a "no vacation policy" aka unlimited vacation company. Anecdote is not data, but here are my experiences:

- Like many startups, people did not take much vacation.

- It was probably cheaper and certainly easier for them not to reimburse you for unused vacation.

- When in my second year I proposed taking a second trip (two weeks off total) I could sense the disapproval. I'm a reasonably senior person and taking two weeks off a year does not seem like that much to me.

- Vacation was sometimes the precursor to giving notice. People knew they were leaving, so it became safe to take a vacation and then give notice at the end of it.

I would avoid companies with this policy.

'patio11 put it well: "Suppose your company offered 'unlimited salary'." Makes it pretty clear the social pressures that would show up.

Some do... in the form of scaling bonuses based on peer review, overtime used by salaried positions, and overall contribution to the company. Essentially a pool of money is set aside based on how well the company performed for that quarter. That's your "upper limit" just like there are 365 days in a year for vacations.

What about the idea of mandatory vacation? If a company gives you 2 weeks, you must take it. If 2 weeks before the end of the year you have not used it, you can't come in then.

> In 2008, when you’d have been among the first companies to try [unlimited vacation]

Nonsense; I had this in 1997 and I think it was "far from unique" even back then.

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