Ask HN: How well does unlimited holiday allowance work in practice?
Asking from the point of view of the employee: how many days a year do you actually take as annual leave? Please provide company name or country if possible. Asking for a friend.
I don't want to mention my current company to keep my anonymity but we currently have unlimited vacation and at least for my team it's going great but it's mostly because of our direct manager who encourages us to:
a) track and document our work so that when someone leaves on vacation the sky doesn't fall b) take as much time as needed to unwind
I personally took about 6 weeks of vacation (double the amount of policy based vacation I got at my previous company) in the past year and things at work have been stellar. We delivered, kicked ass, whatever you want to call it and with zero guilt. But my company is well known for great work-life balance.
However, I can't say the same about other teams where peer pressure keeps people in their seats.
I am personally very cautious about 'unlimited vacation' plans because if you do a game matrix you'll realize that it's skewed against the employee and you'll end up in a better place only if the stars align just right. If they don't you'll end up working way more and either you'll never have 'approved' vacation by your manager or you'll never ask for it because passive-aggressively the culture frowns on 'slackers' who take time off.
If vacation time matters to you (and It definitely should) before accepting an offer I would ask the hiring manager for the actual number of business days the team members use for vacation. If he/she brushes it off or is handwavy like 'nobody keeps track' (somebody ALWAYS keeps track) then stay away.
This matches my experience. I disliked unlimited vacation because my manager at the time was a massive workaholic overachiever and I felt guilty taking any vacation. I usually ended up at ~2.5 weeks a year because I traveled overseas and traveling to the other side of the world for a week was not feasible. I felt like 2 - 3 weeks was typical for most of the people in the company. Some people would do that by just taking multiple very short vacations throughout the year, which seemed like an awful idea to me.
Even in the groups with good managers, you were one re-org away from a bad manager and vacation time going away.
If you have a good manager and work in a place that has accrued PTO, I seriously doubt the manger is going to care if you take some extra personal days throughout the year and don't record them. So you get something like unlimited vacation with the nice guarantees of accrued vacation.
One thing I did notice is that it seemed very hard to get more vacation as a more senior employee.
I think it's less about flexibility for the employee and more so they don't have to keep everyone's unused vacation on the balance sheet and in the bank. Also they don't have to pay out that unused vacation when you leave, so if you're tracking it yourself, try not to "accrue" a lot of vacation. The reality of "unlimited vacation" means you will probably take around the same amount as someone at a traditional setup, but it will be more frequent shorter vacations and you're less likely to take like a month off for a big summer trip.
I've also seen this system (perhaps inadvertently) take advantage of people with workaholic tendencies or people that tend to feel a lot of peer pressure to support the team, and "unlimited vacation" can mean "no vacation" for some folks.
If a company truly cared about their employees, they could always just double the accrual rate of paid time off.
What you describe is essentially how it has been for me. I do not have a significant other, or family and feel a lot of responsibility to help my team. Though the past couple of years my manager had heavily encouraged me to take vacation. So near the end of the year I would take off every Friday until the end of the year and take off the week between Christmas and New Years. Stuff like that.
Be weary of unlimited vacation if you're anything like me.
At previous company we switched to the 'unlimited holiday' policy, I asked my boss what the real limit was and she said if it was anything over 27 days (the previous amount before being 'unlimited') then the manager would have to sign off on it, which basically wouldn't happen.
I'm experiencing a similar thing at my current job where when I asked what the office hours and lunch hours were I couldn't get a straight answer, it's kept intentionally vague so that when it gets to 5 you don't go 'well I'm off home, bye!'
If you have PAID vacation, that you accrue, then that's something you get, regardless if you take it or not (of course there are usually caps on how much you can accrue). If it's "unlimited", I guess that means there's no accrual, and if you take no (or minimal) vacation and leave, your vacation benefits were effectively reduced.
I think "unlimited" vacation is a gimmick to sound generous. If you want to offer a generous vacation policy, then stand behind it as an actual paid benefit. Offer it as paid vacation, and if the employee doesn't take that much while they work for you, then hopefully they use that banked paid time to take a break between jobs.
At this point in my life, I've decided it's worth using all my paid time off and requesting some unpaid time -- so I'd prefer whatever unlimited means.
This only works with the right manager and proper managing up. It keeps the team happy so the manager is willing to bend the rules a little or look the other way. Also, one bad coworker can screw it up for everyone so we kind of make sure we’re not keeping track of each other.
In my opinion, why not just be way more generous in how much PTO time employees accrue? If European companies can still function with employees taking up to a month off why is it such a big deal to be generous in this category?
Here in the US, people would still come into work sick anyway to prove how much of a hardcore workaholic they are, but still...
Actually, it's even better at my employer. When I feel like a cold is coming on, I just shoot a e-mail to my manager and stay home. I only have to submit a doctor's note at the third day of continuous absence. The manager does not get to argue against your staying home, although I guess that question would be asked if one would abuse this policy. Managers are generally supportive of the policy; they don't want sick people spreading their diseases to their colleagues.
Sick days could be "verified" by presenting a doctor's note when you come back to work, or unverified, although you could only take up to five unverified sick days per calendar year.
If you should use no sick days in a given calendar year, regardless of doctor's note or not, you would earn an additional vacation day for use in the following year.
This set up a perverse incentive -- suppose you get sick, use some sick days, and bring back a doctor's note with you for it. You've lost your free vacation day for the next year, and you still have 5 allowable "unverified" days. You may as well now just "call in sick" on a few Fridays here and there to fill out your unverified sick day allowance, and give yourself some three day weekends.
In many places it is 6 weeks annual leave.
The problem was that it was not clearly defined across the company how much vacation was too much or too little, and even if you hear one thing when you get hired, a reorg can put you under someone with a totally different viewpoint. Meanwhile, in companies I've worked without unlimited vacation, it's clearly defined how much vacation is too much, because you can't use more than your bucket.
My first boss was the one who hired me into the company, and when he called me to present the offer, he told me that as a European he felt people in the US don't take enough time off and he wanted us to do 4-5 weeks a year. At one point mid-summer he told me "I don't think you've taken enough time off, it's slow next week, so go have the week off and take your kid to the pool a lot."
That boss left the company, and I got reorged into a team that was pretty much the remnants of a startup that my employer had acquihired. The company was pushing this team to develop and release a particular new product concept ASAP, but giving minimal staffing to do so, so it was constant lowgrade crunch the whole time. The manager (and former founder of that startup) was also still operating in startup-hustle mode and setting the sort of example that while you technically get time off, you'd best not be taking a whole lot.
I worked under each boss for a year. Under manager 1 I took 4.5 work weeks off in 12 months. Under manager 2 I took 7 days off in 12 months.
Not a lawyer but I imagine that companies don't provide more guidance on _minimum_ vacation time usage, because maybe that could be construed as a bucket, and would put you back under the idea that in certain jurisdictions (California included) vacation accruals are viewed as compensation duly earned by the employee but not paid out yet. Avoiding having to carry that as a liability on your books and pay out when people separate, as I understand it, is the primary purpose behind unlimited vacation policies in the first place.
Some of my colleagues weren't very proactive about it, so after a couple of years, the manager started assigning folks a week off here and there if they hadn't taken much vacation recently. I think something like this is a good idea.
I'm now at Tanium, and they have unlimited / self-directed vacation, but I've only been around for a few months, so I've only taken a day or two off.
They told me that most folks take 4~5 weeks a year here also, and I have seen a couple colleagues take vacations where they were wholly unreachable for a week or more.
My first job out of high school did not have unlimited vacation, but I took the month of August off (unpaid) my second year there - that was nice.
Is that unusual? When I am on vacation I never check my E-mail. They could send a text but that never happens.
When it comes to making a phone call people become a lot more realistic on what is 'urgent'
1. (Uncommon) People take off during crunch time
2. (Very common IME) People take off en masse during lulls, leaving a skeleton crew to handle blowups.
3. No vacation payout during layoffs
If you do 1 just to get out of work, you're a crappy coworker. People do 2, to be team players, but it can result in large waves of low staffing. 3 is a natural result, which is a major financial downside - the upside, of course, is that you can take much more vacation, and many do.
Even with the above, I like it. You can take mental health days and deal with family issues without that feeling of "begging for forgiveness"
Good coworkers work so that crunch time never comes up. Crappy coworkers shame others who refuse to participate in unhealthy work/life balance.
This is a very bad argument. The launch of a product is a critical time, whether you like it or not.
Edit: Replaced crunch with critical, I don't think I understood the meaning of crunch.
If expectations have been set that you can take vacation whenever you want (even during a crunch on a project that you're leading) without consideration of the business needs, I'd suggest that's a big mistake.
We disable publishing to production during end-of-year holidays to minimize risks of outages (though of course you can break the glass in case something does break)
I work at Uber, in San Francisco.
However, once you reach 4 weeks (160 Vacation hours) you have to get VP-level approval to take any additional time off. And the vacation hours tracker resets at the end of the Fiscal Year.
So, basically, unlimited means 4 weeks per year tops, and you have to get it approved in advance. I don't really care for it.
Same thing with open offices.
In fact whenever you see companies praising something so much trying to convince people it's such a wonderful thing, follow the money and it always leads to something that is only good for them and that's just their propaganda machine trying to get everyone to repeat it.
My contract gives me 6 weeks, which is pretty standard in Denmark, and fairly standard in Europe. I use all 30 days, every year. I spread it around, not more than 2 weeks at once, but others take 3-4 weeks off during the summer.
I can only see one comment (praneshp) where more than 30 days has been taken, and many where 4 weeks was the unwritten limit. There's no country in Europe with less than 4 weeks holiday entitlement! [1]
(If I'm sick, that's separate, and has no effect on my holidays. Except if I'm sick on holiday, then I get the holidays back to use some other time. I would need a note from my doctor to do this.)
Has anyone worked in Europe and then at an American company with the unlimited vacation policy, and taken more holiday than they were previously entitled to in Europe?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...
That would be a dream. I don't know anyone who enjoys this much time off (other than people running their own shops/startups)
Frankly, I really like it this way. I would not like to go back to tracking vacation/sick days, check-in/out times, WFH, etc. I appreciate the mutual trust the team has that people will work hard while in the office and stay away enough to sustainably enjoy life and remain productive.
I'll add that I only think this sort of arrangement works if there is strong trust and leadership is a top-down role model in taking off time responsibly. I've never been asked to take time off, and I don't know that anyone has, but I've also never been asked not to.
That said, I can also see this not working if you're shy about asking for things that aren't explicitly handed to you, then this system may not work as well. I'd be curious if anyone here has felt that way? :)
We all know that "unlimited" does not really mean unlimited. No one is randomly taking off for 6 months to go walk the appalachian trail or whatever. So what does it mean? About as many days off as you would have had under a typical plan? Maybe with a few extra? But no one is really quite sure. So different people will inevitably have different interpretations which leads to bad feelings when one person takes 10 days off a year while another takes 25.
It also puts managers in an impossible situation when people complain. They have no rules or guidelines to point to in order to enforce any sort of standardization. After all, it says "unlimited." What are they supposed to say to the person who takes off for an entire month one summer while everyone else is hard at work pushing that new release out? We have enough guilt conscious style management as it is. There is no need to add more.
There's also the issue that if you aren't tracking days then exiting employees don't get paid off for unused days. I consider this a real problem as well.
I know it screams "we're a big company" but just suck it up and acknowledge reality. Past ~50 you are a big company. It's high time you act like one.
Ultimately paid time off is a form of compensation. Would you accept this sort of loosey-goosey attitude about how much cash or stock you are being paid? Probably not. So what is different about PTO?
Last job (Godaddy in sunnyvale, one of the nicest places I've worked in) didn't have any tracking. For 3+ days you emailed manager and team. Current job's the same, except you enter 3+ days in a software. At both places, I took ~20 days to go to India, and another 20 days at least rest of the year. More importantly, my manager can expect me to take a day off after a long night of pages.
At previous jobs, the 20 day India trip had to be reduced, or some unspoken agreement with manager, because I had 15 or so vacation days. I'm too spoilt now to handle that shit again. I haven't come across a mandatory minimum, but I take off a healthy amount anyway and I'm unimportant enough that the team can make do with 10 months of me.
I think the best way to stave this off would be to have a mandatory minimum time. Eg, we have unlimited PTO but you have to take at least 4 weeks this year, or n days a quarter, or something like that.
Not sure if it's legal to do that.
edit: another point that someone else brought up is that you can take sick/mental health days often and with ease. This is very true, and is a benefit I've enjoyed a lot.
Its just better to know for sure what PTO you are entitled to in your employment contract. Would you accept a job without knowing what the salary was? Keep in mind that vacation days are something that you are EARNING in exchange for your work.
It really makes sense -- you wouldn't leave it up to your line manager to decide ad hoc "well that daycare for your kid is too much for you so I won't approve," your salary is your agreed-upon compensation.
This was exactly my experience in two very different environments with an unlimited vacation policy - one start-up, one large established company. The overwhelming majority of people took less vacation than what is typical at most tech companies and a handful took quite a bit more. The latter handful tended to be strongly correlated with people who were underperformers and the underperforming was, at least from my perspective, not due to less time but more down to a mix of general attitude and motivation. The former majority tended to be worried about perception and/or unsure of what was appropriate and thus tended to take less vacation than they otherwise would have.
What I notice is, people are looking to book 5, 10 and 15 days off and especially at the end of the year.
It didn't take much thinking to realize that "unlimited vacation [as long as your manager agrees]" is purely a way to screw the employee (who regresses to the mean of however much time they tend to habitually take off per year (having subconsciously ignored that they won't be repaid in cash for those lost hours of time off when they leave their company), but now additionally "has to beg" for time off rather than the time off being something they've earned) while also removing the liability of the accum'd PTO they owe employees from their books.
The claimed justification that "tracking PTO is an added accounting cost" rings totally hollow: all employers I've worked for in my 20 year career had automated systems in place to track this info; in my current gig I'm still required to enter my hours worked per project every week into the same old automated system (into which I used to also enter PTO consumption), so it's not like they lack the systems to track this information with minimal effort/overhead.
As another comment mentioned: this and "open office" go hand in hand: IMO the employers all get together (AEA? etc) and learn about the extra-normal practices of the "edgier" employers, select those that save the employer $$$ (regardless of consequence to employees), and adopt = normalize them (while marketing them internally as modernity incarnate: "this new system is SO MUCH BETTER than the way things used to be back in the bad old days; don't you agree?").
Company I work at doesn't seem to notice/care if people take off 35-40 PTO days, not including the paid holidays they also provide. Not many do this, though. Most people take 15-25 PTO days. Only one other person I know takes 30+ like I do
What's your rationale?
Out of curiosity, are you an engineer?
As to your last question, yes.
Ultimately I've taken 3 days in 7 months and am trying to swing a 3 week vacation in September.. we'll see, I guess. It makes planning a bit difficult any time you need extra approval for 'too many weeks' in a row. But I've always been a big believer in taking lots of vacation.
I probably average 15-20 days/yr, with some guilt after the first 10 - which I wouldn't have if more PTO were explicitly allocated; but my boss seems fine with the amount I take.
Reference: small to medium companies in the US.
My point of reference is when I had my first job with "we don't count your hours, you just need to do your job" I still kept mental tabs on my hours and it took years until I really didn't care anymore and just eyeballed it. (How can you even tell when "your" work is done? Especially if you work in sprints or with a kanban board)
The first one not only did I end up taking less vacation then I would of, I actually had my manager get mad at me for using more than two weeks of leave. I no longer work at said place for a myriad of reasons.
The current one is pretty good. I definitely need to be proactive about it, but I've never been denied or guilted. Last year I used a bit over 3 weeks (so about normal for my field), but this year I'm planning to use a bit more because I have a few different places I'd like to visit. It definitely took me some mental effort to get past my natural tendency to avoid taking off.
It's not that I don't WANT time off - it's that I'm afraid it'll backfire. I'd take months, if I could.
In practice the "unlimited vacation" seems hard to scale beyond a small team, though in that case it can be made to work. It relies on trust, which I'm skeptical would scale to hundreds of people.
That said while you're small I think teams can get away with it if management lead by example and actually take good chunks of vacation.
edit: Check out mrguyorama's comment. They said what I was trying to say in a much better way.
If you want actual unlimited holiday, become a contractor and get used to taking as much unpaid time out as you like, provided you can afford it.
The difference IMHO is that companies that paid out unused vacation time when you left no longer need to.
https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Deci...
I would still expect that that is not generally the case.
could you put an average # of vacation days on that?
Overall bad.