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Comment by chris_7 | Hacker News Reader

> fixed PTO

Why on earth is this a downside? "Unlimited vacation" is a scam.

If you ever wanted confirmation of this, suggest to your company that instead of "unlimited vacation", which is really vague and hard to understand, the company give 8 weeks vacation that doesn't accrue or roll over year to year.

That's what we did, at my partnership. Except that was 1998-2006 and we only provided 5 weeks that don't roll over. I used 4 weeks one year. The rest of the years I barely got over 3. Personal choice though.

Interestingly, that's not legal in California. Vacation is a form of earned income, and must accrue and be paid out at separation. (You can cap accruals, but vacation accrued must be paid, and can't expire.)

There's a legal workaround to that, though: reduce the next year's vacation allotment by the amount of unused vacation the previous year. Raytheon uses this trick to implement their use-it-or-lose-it PTO policy.

Do you think it would survive a legal challenge?

Even if it doesn't, do you have the money to pay the lawyer(s) enough to get it that far? And is it something you care enough about that if you were offered $25k to drop it, you would reject it?

It should be noted that unlimited vacation is not expressly legal in CA, it's just never been challenged.

See, people say that, but I have yet to see that in practice. I worked at a unicorn with an unlimited PTO policy and it worked out very well for everyone. It was very comforting to know I could just tell my manager "hey, I'd like to take 2 days off next week to go on a ski trip, is that cool?" and not have it count toward a timer.

Is it possible I would have gotten more days under a fixed policy? Maybe, I didn't really count and neither did they. But who cares? It's not like x amount of vacation days makes me more relaxed, it's knowing that I can take one that relaxes me.

Having fixed vacation days kinda stresses me, as now I have to worry about not using them all throughout the year, or have to worry about not wasting them.

Bottom line, I think successful vacation policies depend on company culture, not fixed or unlimited days. You can certainly have fixed days and still have a culture that frowns upon using them.

IMO, the amount of vacation you're actually permitted to take culturally is completely orthogonal to the vacation policy. I've worked in places with a fixed # of vacation days where it was absolutely unacceptable to actually take those days.

Yeah, been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Bad management. The "unlimited" vacation policy is a trap, too. I don't go to places that offer that, it's a litmus test. Nowadays I do contracts and it's such a simpler model--you get paid for the hours you work and don't get paid for the hours you don't work. It's perfect for me.

At least in that case you get the days paid out when you leave.

Any days you accrue past the cap disappear though.

If you accrue 15 days a year, work for 3 years, and never take a vacation day, you are paid for 3 weeks and lose 6 weeks of compensation, almost 4% of your pre-tax total over that period (assuming no raise for simplicity).

I'm a fan of unlimited vacation with a 2+ weeks mandatory per year.

Yep. Fix a number and limit the number that can carry over, so that people actually take a vacation and decompress.

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