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A bit of a tangent, but I don't consider "unlimited time off" a perk, at least not automatically.

A guaranteed amount of time off means the company has to pay me for unused vacation if and when I depart. So for those of you who are offered unlimited time off, get a guaranteed and generous minimum, in writing.

After all, if it's unlimited, they shouldn't mind putting "a minimum of four weeks a year" in writing, should they? If they won't, they're probably going to shame you into working all the time and then won't pay you for the vacation you didn't take.

I completely agree with you. It is a ploy to keep accrued vacation pay off the books and keep capital efficiency high. You obviously can't take 100% vacation time, so it's not unlimited.

It's nice not to stress about PTO balances, though.

Exactly.

> You obviously can't take 100% vacation time, so it's not unlimited.

This is the part that gets me. Everyone knows that it is limited, you just don't know what the limit is until you hit it.

If vacation were truly unlimited, sure, it would be a perk. Absent that, knowing what the limit is is a perk.

Companies where vacation time is close to zero will also say they have "unlimited." Always ask the interviewers how much vacation time they took specifically. In my experience they'll try to tell you how "someone" took 4 months of vacation but then omit the fact that no one else has taken more than 4 days and median is 0.

> A guaranteed amount of time off means the company has to pay me for unused vacation if and when I depart.

This must be a California thing. It's not generally true in most states.

And in a lot of companies, even when they specify an amount, it is a "recommended" amount. My company, for example, says 3 weeks, and many managers follow this religiously. But when you read the actual rules, it says that 3 weeks is the guideline, and not a promise. This is also used as an argument against giving 4 weeks: "3 weeks is just a guideline. You can work out more if the manager agrees."

Yeah, and most companies only let you accrue a certain number of hours of time off, typically somewhere between 100-200 hours from what I've seen. Once you hit that limit you simply don't get any more time off. Your boss won't let you take a vacation until next month? Too bad, sucks to be you.

Thankfully the way my current company handles this is about as good as you can get - they cash out balances that are too high a couple times a year at prespecified dates.

Where I work, we are given a generous amount of annual leave, and it's great. It ensures that you can essentially take a holiday whenever you want, and I find myself with days left towards the end of the year. The company also hardly refuses time off requests.

Compare that to the startup I used to work which had an "unlimited time off" perk, it was always a struggle to get actual time off, we were always rushing to get things done, or it was a difficult time, or another engineer was already on leave, it caused more stress than anything else.

I'm all for just giving a generous amount of annual leave, in my contract, with remaining days paid out.

>As a prospective remote, I don't care if you pay +20% in SFC. I am in another place, and if you can outbid my next best offer by 10% I win.

No you don't win. If you leave 100K on table, you lose.

I don't want "a good salary for my area". If I'm entrusted to deliver a million dollar feature for a Bay Area company, I want the max payout for that responsibility regardless of whether I delivered it from Iowa or Vietnam.

I want to have options for my family, for myself. We want to travel the world, own a home in a great neighborhood with great schools, have experiences that few others get. And you don't get those options in life with being content with "a good salary for my area" and then denying yourself coffee from Starbucks because you're still living on a budget.

Well, I started out by agreeing with you. For lots of reasons I won't go into, local cost of living adjustments are a bad idea and employee comp should be as flat as possible. International complications can make that tough but I'm ignoring that.

But in a very fundamental way, I disagree with you. The reality is that you as a job-seeker have options and constraints when you are looking for a job. If a company isn't willing to pay you what you'd get if you were in Boston, but you aren't willing to move, then you have an impasse. If another company is will to pay that, then you take that offer. You have a set of offers and you take the best one available - not one that measures up to a hypothetical ideal.

You may want things, but that is totally immaterial to an employer. It depends on how valuable your skills are and how rare they are, regardless of location.

If you want to participate in profit, then you need to become capital, not labor. Labor sells itself in a competitive market. Prices will be determined by what other, comparable labor is offering itself for, not the value created for the company.

You need to read this:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

If you are calling yourself and marketing yourself as "labor", you have already lost the game.

Last I checked, patio11 is now working as a regular employee with standard salary and benefits.

I'm constrained in my ability to talk about particular negotiations but, to the limited extent that HNers are taking direction from my life decisions, I'd advise you to assume that my negotiations do not frequently include "I consider myself basically a commodity fungible with a few hundred people you could source today and so I guess I'll take whatever the standard offer is."

Hey Patio11, huge fan of your work :)

If you don't mind me asking, how did you learn to negotiate?

Any resources you could recommend?

He doesn't negotiate. He generates unreasonably large amounts of leverage and uses it against his opponents.

You might be thinking "hey, wait a minute, that sounds like negotiating!". Well... You have to have something to negotiate with.

So the question is how can you generate leverage?

Lucky for you he has written an entire blog post on the subject: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

I have followed a lot of your work. But I cant agree with all of your advice. I have been earning several 100Ks of salary since many years at FANG companies, possibly more than you. The biggest leverage for me has been from having multiple offers and performing well enough in the technical interviews to get an offer at an appropriate level. Me thinking of myself as a unicorn/laborer played no part in it. I just don't see you highlight any aspect of this in your advice.

I am familiar with patio11. I would classify the lead gen system he's set up with his website as capital, not labor.

Also, FWIW: of the vast multitude of ways in which programming creates value for companies, probably only a tiny minority of them lend themselves to the kind of contracting arrangement that he describes. All other programming gets done by labor. Which means that most programmers are labor. How you decide to describe yourself doesn't change that.

i don't have time to read this article to get to what i infer is some discussion about capital vs. labor - it hasn't shown up a few pages into the article - so i'll just reply to what you said outside of the link.

the idea that "woke labor" is non-labor is hilarious. first, this isn't possible for the vast majority of people who actually provide value to capital - you know, the people pouring coffee, or stocking shelves, etc. try being "woke" about your value at a grocery store and let me know how it goes.

second, once enough of your class is "woke" you're back at square 1, trying to beat up people below you to pander to capital. (aside: this sort of "get yours and get out" is emblematic of america generally, and not flattering imo)

that the game is stacked against those who labor is more of a pathological outcome of labor not being very powerful. this is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. it's a bandaid over cancer.

fix the system: organize.

It does work that way long term. Local employers start raising salaries to outbid remote employers. Then remote employers have to raise their offers. Rinse and repeat.

Source: remote worker for over a decade residing in a relatively cheap country

Unlimited time off just means no guaranteed time off. It discounts the benefits provided because it's bullshit. All time off is at the discretion of the employer so literally it's bullshit. But figuratively or symbolically it's also bullshit. Say I want to take 5 weeks off a year. It's hardly unusual or a massive amount. I bet most companies with unlimited time off would not let me. It's a ploy to hire people who are too naive to know any better. So yeah, anyone who understands this scam would say that unlimited time off is a net negative for benefits. Absolutely.