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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

This can also be achieved without political action.

E.g. in 3 last companies I worked for they have an unlimited vacation policy. It is not required by any legislation, but it's somehow in vogue now, I heard about many companies doing the same.

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Unlimited vacation is a scam, where people end up taking less vacation either through fear, or pressure from peers and management. MANDATORY vacation is what should be the policy. You MUST take all of your vacation, no buy backs, no coming to work. The corporate world will amazingly survive without your presence, I promise.

My old job required me to take a minimum block of 2 weeks of vacation every year.

However, I don't think it was for altruistic reasons. In New Zealand, if you don't take your leave it accumulates. You could take no leave for 3 years, and you'd have 12 weeks of annual leave accumulated.

I've heard that a lot of financial companies require staff to take at least 1 block of leave per year, during which they are forcibly offline and their work is covered by a colleague. If someone is hiding something in their numbers, having someone else take over for a week or two is a really good way to uncover it...

Then if you resign without taking a single day of leave in 5 years, you receive 6 months of pay checks at once.

Which is why they want you to take your leave. It becomes a liability to the company to have that much owing.

Yeah, they would have forced me to take it, but I was the only person who knew how to keep all their legacy systems stable. I eventually managed to upgrade all of them, and resigned a week later after only taking about two weeks of leave over 5 years. I got a very nice final check out of it.

I just asked about it in my current company.

They said that taking 2 weeks as a single slab is OK at any time, taking more than that requires a bit of coordination and paperwork. Taking smaller pieces along the year is trivial; I did it many times on a reasonably short notice.

That is, sometimes it's not a scam.

If it is not enforced by law, it can be taken from you at anytime, and interpreted in any way the company sees fit.

Your vacation time is whatever the company is required by law to pay out upon your separation from the org. Anything above that is “graciously” provided to you, at their discretion.

It's written in a contract between me and the company, and cannot be unilaterally changed. The language is pretty clear, and matches the company's actions. It's not "graciously provided", it's contractually obligatory.

You're trying to remind me that the company is not my friend, it's a machine. I fully agree. But certain things, like not making me leave the company just to have a 3 months of vacation, are just profitable for the company. The same way paying me my salary is profitable for the company, and they won't cut it unless things would go really bad for the company.

> it can be taken from you at anytime, and interpreted in any way the company sees fit.

I worked at a company with a not-unlimited vacation policy and this is roughly how shutdown periods worked anyways. You were forced to spend vacation or take the period unpaid. Unfortunately they rarely seemed to be communicated more than a couple of months in advance..

Taking unpaid leave works pretty well in New Zealand.

A few years ago, I interviewed with a company that did both: unlimited PTO with an enforced minimum.

> The corporate world will amazingly survive without your presence, I promise.

I wonder why do they pay me so much for my presence then.

Because you provide value, even though you are replaceable at the drop of a hat and can backfilled by others while temporarily on vacation.

Make no mistake, you’re out the door the moment you’re considered to no longer provide value.

Backfilling is of course doable, though not as easy; maybe it's because neither me nor those who I backfill hold junior positions.

> you’re out the door the moment you’re considered to no longer provide value.

I'm totally fine with that. My job is not my family. I'm not my job. I always keep a healthy distance.

Unlimited vacation is in vogue because it allows a company to avoid accruing a liability for unused leave.

Were those small companies? Where they software (or some other digital work) companies?

We live in a world where companies go to extreme lengths to screw their employees over - everything from paying for overtime to healthcare. It might not be easy to change their mindset.

But I do agree it would be nice if good changes like this are achieved voluntarily, and not through legislation

Some small, some big. Yes, they were software companies.

Indeed, where workforce is hard to acquire, companies' best interest is to make it comfortable for that workforce to work. Where the workforce is abundant, there's no such incentive. This can be inside the same company, e.g. I bet Amazon has different conditions for its senior-position software developers and junior-position warehouse workers.

Which is exactly why it must be codified into law (versus “This can also be achieved without political action.”).

In addition to the other issues brought up, if you're the one constantly taking vacation, despite all of your other work being top-notch, you may be looked over for promotions/raises/etc.

It does sound like your company is trying to do well by it's workers, so hopefully they'll not be giving into that bias.

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