This, combined with colleagues visibly taking advantage of the time off available, helped ensure a healthy approach to unlimited time off.
Thats doing it right. Or pay people for the vacation time they don't use.
As a result employees can't just bank their vacation hours and get a big payday when they leave. It tends to only take a couple years to get up to the max, and you end up with "use it or loose it" pto.
From the business perspectice services rendered previously is "nothing", because you can't get any more value from that
Which is why employers almost always cap in some form or another; the exact mechanism is partially determined by state law.
I worked for a company once that, during a bad spell, eliminated an accrual cap to encourage people to bank vacation. The result was that a not small number of people who weren't really into taking vacation just let their balances balloon. The company eventually forced people to work down their balances.
This is is why it's important for team members to explicitly encourage each other to take breaks and vacations. I've often told a coworker, "stop working! Take a long weekend!".
The best UPTO environment I've ever seen had managers who asked about time off in one-on-ones and pushed people who said "none" to take more. It also had a lot of acceptance for 'aimless' PTO; justifying your trip to the Andes is easy, but people take PTO more consistently if no one's expecting a better story than "sleep late and run some errands" or "play a new-release game".
Also once teams and management get used to people taking time off, the business processes also become more resilient to people missing for a week or two and taking PTO becomes less of a problem for everyone. Suddenly someone missing for a week is just not a big deal.
It occurs to me that Google somewhat famously adds artificial downtime to their services to make sure no one is relying on 24/7 uptime. I don't want to reduce people to server-equivalents, but I'll bet high vacation rates are a pretty good way of making sure no one relies too much on individual knowledge. Even from my personal experiences, lots of things get documented when the person who knows them well is heading out of town and there's a sudden scramble to formalize that knowledge.
I'm exactly opposite, and had no problem taking PTO when I worked at a company with an unlimited plan. Now that I have limited PTO again I hoard it and take less time off.
I don't feel inconvenienced when others take PTO, and I don't expect my taking PTO to inconvenience them.
"Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that through an approval process, offer it! But don't say it's unlimited, because it isn't. And if you don't want one of your business perks to be pointed out as fraudulent, don't advertise it as such.
A poorly codified policy is an implementation problem, and will be a problem for both limited and unlimited PTO policies.
> "Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that through an approval process, offer it! But don't say it's unlimited, because it isn't. And if you don't want one of your business perks to be pointed out as fraudulent, don't advertise it as such.
The entire point is that the employer doesn't care how many days off people take each year. Employees can be responsible for deciding that for themselves. Some people don't want that extra responsibility, and I'd agree that they probably won't like unlimited PTO policies.
It would be ludicrous to outlaw unlimited PTO policies just because some people don't like them.
The entire point is that the
employer doesn't care how many
days off people take each year.
I don't know how many times I need to repeat this, but if your company doesn't communicate expectation it's a problem with the company, not with unlimited PTO policies in general.
I also disagree that my comments haven't been helpful. There's a difference between the concept of "unlimited PTO" and any particular implementation of it, and it's important to know where a problem is coming from. Perhaps there should be regulations around it, but getting rid of it entirely, as suggested elsewhere in this thread, isn't the answer.
We wouldn't ban all cars because one brand is unsafe, so let's not get rid of all unlimited PTO policies just because some companies do it wrong.
Great observation! Statistically, there are more anecdotes in this thread with employees with negative experiences with good ones. I think that's a great starting point.
If I take one day off 30 times a year nobody raises an eyebrow, but if I take 30 days off in one go it might.
I can appreciate this opinion if you've had a good experience with an Unlimited PTO policy, but regulation isn't for the best experiences. Unlimited PTO is an HR/Marketing dark pattern.
EDIT: > It's disappointing so many people want to ruin things for everybody because they've worked at crappy companies in the past.
@jlarocco: I am disappointed you prioritize protecting your arrangement than the well being of others at crappy companies. As I mention in my other comments in-thread, you can still arrive at something similar to "Unlimited PTO" while still instituting regulations to prevent worker abuse (minimum PTO days issued + a process to request additional days). I do not understand the disdain for regulation that simply enforces what is being offered.
Say I booked the entirety of June off this year. Are they still cool with that? How about if I also decide I'd like July off too. That's an extreme I know but there's a limit somewhere.
FWIW we did have somebody take an entire month off to visit family in China. He was responsible for tons of code and functionality, and it worked fine because management knew about it and planned around it.
If you can't handle the responsibility, don't ruin it for everybody, just go work somewhere else.
Only ever worked at UK companies where we get 5.6 weeks PTO as standard. Never had a request denied as long as I've given 2 weeks notice of a long'un
If you requested your 5.6 weeks off all at once and over an go-live date that you were 100% responsible for, you might receive a request to see if you could move those holidays a bit later
In a strict PTO environment that would have been almost impossible for them to do.
Some people are going to respond and be upset that they want to work exactly 8 hours, get exactly 41.5 hours of PTA and get paid that way. That's fine, although I hope they are giving the company back money for browsing HN.
I on the other hand like the freedom and flexibility that unlimited PTO provides along with a flexible work schedule. Do I end up working more? Probably, but I have way less stress. I much prefer working that hour on a rainy Saturday instead of the beautifully sunny Friday.
Our European team colleagues? Not so much.
Current place I work has unlimited PTO, and I really like it. You do need to be careful not to fall into the trap of not using it, though.
Then there’s still normal vacation trips to consider.
I can easily see myself using 40 days of PTO in a year.
It seems to me like it would be fair for companies to offer unlimited PTO as long as employees can cash out unlimited money when they leave. But for some reason, this is not often offered.
As I mentioned upthread, I've never had a job where I didn't work when and how much I wanted, go into the office when I felt like it, etc etc. I'm subject to the same pressures you describe, but it turns out they're really easy to handle: keep a rough eye on how many hours you're working.
The other day they had a rare beer release I wanted to go to in the middle of the day, on a Friday. I didn't have any meetings, so I "WFH" and worked 3-4 hours that day and spent the rest of the day drinking and getting dinner with a couple funemployed friends, including checking my email and responding to important ones for a few minutes every couple hours during the workday. I could've (and have in the past) written off those four lost hours of work as coming out of my effective productivity, but since this is a new job and I'm trying to hit the ground running, I just made it up in dribbles of an hour or two over the next week.
The dirty secret when people talk about being pressured at work is that 90% of the time, your employers are relying on you to do the work of pressuring yourself. If my employer wants me to work extra and go above and beyond, I make sure that it's explicit and metaphorically "on the record". Pulling all-nighters during crunch time or forgoing vacation for a long time should be banked as something you can draw on, giving you cover for taking a longer vacation or working shorter days after crunch time.
It's really up to you to set your work life balance, and the fears most people have about the consequences of doing so are largely (but not entirely) illusory.
The one major caveat here that I haven't ever had to face is if you're both at an abusive company and highly replaceable (eg feel like you couldn't get a similar quality job). In this case of effectively having a better job than you'd otherwise get, the power dynamic is markedly shifted and employers can get away with a lot. The only saving grace in this situation is if your more in-demand coworkers have healthy attitudes about work/life balance, since it's hard for management to crack down on individuals in a way that's perceived as unfair.