Ask HN: What's your experience with “unlimited vacation”?

"Unlimited PTO" or "Vacation Freedom" or whatever cool term some people person wants to stick on it... it's really only as good as the company culture, boss and you make it. It's truly a combo of all three and people often forget that last one.

I've worked in several companies now that offer unlimited vacation. At first it was very strange to me and to be honest I didn't really utilize it properly at first. As I got older and wiser, I've been better at using it ... and also been at companies that were more vacation friendly.

If your boss is all for you taking the time off that you need, because your boss treats you like a fully grown adult capable of doing your work... you're gonna have a great time. If your company culture doesn't look at you like you have 3 heads for taking a half day off, you're probably good to go. If you remember that in order to enjoy the "benefit" of those vacations is to actually take the time off... then happiness is.

Most of the time when talking about unlimited PTO vs regular, people hammer on the point of "unlimited PTO = no money when you leave". For those people who want to work at a company for 366 days straight, get their 1yr cliff options, quit, take a month long vacation, get a new job...repeat. Then for them, they are totally correct, the pay out is good. However if you get smart about actually USING your vacation periodically, then who cares about the payout?

IME it's a marketing scam, for 2 reasons (at least where I am - CA, USA):

1) Peer pressure from your boss(es) and coworkers who will tell you "now's not a good time to take time off" - it's actually never a good time for you to take vacation, work will keep coming through the pipeline, deadlines will be scheduled, and you'll continue to feel pressured to not take a vacation, no matter how hard you've worked or how productive you've been. Has happened 3/3 times I've had a job w/ "unlimited PTO"

2) Employers use unlimited PTO policies as a way to not pay out PTO when you leave your job. With fixed PTO, employers have to pay you for that time if you don't use it when you leave. With an "unlimited PTO" policy, there is no longer any "leftover" time you get credited for. In conjunction with point 1 above, this ends up saving them money.

For CA: "Earned vacation time is considered wages. Vacation time is earned as work is performed. (Cal. Lab. Code § 227.3; Suastez v. Plastic Dress-Up Co., 647 P.2d 122, 128 (Cal. 1982).)"

PTO laws by state here: http://ask.legalsolutions.thomsonreuters.info/cc-nto-vacatio...

I had a job where we had our normal PTO, but at the same time, my immediate boss allowed us to take PTO without removing it from the official system. In this sort of arrangement you tend to respect the business. You don't want to abuse the system and ruin it for yourself or anyone else, but you also aren't getting screwed over by the lack of saved up PTO when you leave. It's strange but it was by far the best way of dealing with this that i've ever seen.

What ultimately occurred was when people went on a real vacation, they used their real PTO. for all the other life stuff like dr's appts and sick days and whatever, those just got ignored. this is how it should be. trust your employees people.

sorry it doesn't answer your question OP but hopefully any HR people reading this will see how they can modify the policy to help everyone.

Never took a job with "unlimited vacation" but had interviews with a few of such companies. Right now, I get 4 weeks off with unlimited sick time.

So during interviews, I asked them about "unlimited" vacation policy and how many days they took off last year. It is almost always less than 20 days. When I asked them why they didn't take more days off and that I got 4 weeks of vacation plus a few days of sick time off. They usually make up excuses like it was unusually busy year, don't feel the need for more vacation, or it is still more than most people took off last year.

Or sometimes they are honest and say that they feel guilty asking for more time off, hard to get approval for 3rd week off, they rather have fixed number of vacation and not feel guilty about using all of it.

I recently took a new role and talked to a couple of companies that offered "unlimited holidays".

After talking to them I came to the conclusion this is something that looks nice on paper but is actually doing you a disfavour. Because if you take up on the offer and take substantially more holidays then the rest of the team you'll look bad. And if you take fewer holidays you are losing your rights.

In my opinion, if a company wants to be generous, offer generous fixed holidays so I can take them without feeling guilty.

(Funnily enough, those companies were always against remote work. For me that is contradictory, you don't want me to work from home but be off instead?)

We have it at my dayjob employer. It works out OK. The way my manager put it to me, is that "unlimited vacation" just means that "nobody is counting how many days you take". Basically, as long as your manager approves your request, you're good. And I've never had a request declined.

I don't count my off days either, but I usually take 3 weeks (all total, including company vacation days) over the Christmas Holiday season, a week (again, including vacation days) over Thanksgiving, a week over the 4th of July week, and one or two random sick days / mental health days / whatever, throughout the year.

Note that this is a big international megacorp, not a startup, so YMMV.

Definitely seems like sort of a scam to me... I mean why wouldn't I just use all the vacation time? The company would use all of my hours working if they could...

I'd rather things be straight forward to be honest.

I ended up taking less, was just looking at this today actually.