It's not unlimited, and you shouldn't start off your employer-employee relationship with an obvious lie. Set a policy and make it clear that you are exchanging x dollars for y amount of work.
Most companies that I’ve worked at which had this type of vacation policy had a directive for managers to ensure that every employee took at least 3-5 weeks of vacation every year (the minimum varied with company). It wasn’t always successful but that was the objective. More than that was fine too.
One of the original motivations behind these policies was the burst-y nature of some types of engineering work. Companies wanted to allow engineers to take 2-3 months of paid vacation after a relatively intense 12-18 months with few breaks working to ship some product. Giving people multiple months of vacation is surprisingly difficult without also running afoul of other legal and accounting complexities around vacation time in various jurisdictions. The “unlimited / discretionary” policy is essentially a loophole in US law that originally allowed managers to reward people with large amounts of time off. It has been generalized, and has other accounting benefits, but this was the original use case.
In the U.K. the rule is you accumulate holiday but all employees MUST take all their holiday before the end of the financial year. Employers must give at least 5.6 weeks of holiday to each employee, however can give more (either as a fixed amount or unlimited amount). There are some rules that let you roll holiday over to the following year in some circumstances to allow a little flexibility, but in general the rule is you have to take them.
Legally employers must ensure that all employees take all of their 5.6 weeks of holiday, so it’s not a “use it or lose it” situation. Employers also cannot pay their staff more to have them work during their holiday, it’s got to be time off (up to 5.6 weeks, any holiday over that point is discretionary).
Because of this, all employers will pressure employees to take their holiday ASAP because if everyone postpones it you will have everyone off in the last few weeks of the financial year.
In practice the actual baseline offered in many jobs seems to be five weeks, plus bank holidays.
Employers can dictate exactly when you take all of your holiday allowance by law, it’s just that this doesn’t happen in reality. Similarly they can force you to work bank holidays.
It wasn’t passive aggressive at all and now I sit here one my hands waiting to accumulate enough pto to take an extended break.
I am fairly certain that they would have had an issue with you taking 52 weeks of paid vacation time off per year. The actual policy number is somewhere between 2 and 52.
I agree that 2 weeks of PTO for an employee per year is too little, but I think we are talking about different things.
I was happy taking a Friday off here and there when I needed and taking weeks off when I moved. This was in addition to my regular vacations prior to the pandemic.
Everyone anti-unlimited PTO seems to be completely missing the forest for the trees. It’s nice to be respected and trusted to do your work. It’s also nice to fuck off whenever you want.
The argument here is that of course you can’t take a year off and reasonably do your job. Well; we all knew that already.
Genuine Unlimited time off creates an environment of respect between the employee and the employer. If I do my job; I can take some time off. You can’t really do your job if you’re never there, so I don’t get your point.
What does it mean to "do your job"?
At every place I've worked there was an infinite amount of job to be done. If I were to take 4 months off I would do less of it than if I've taken 1 month.
So that just shifts the conversation from "how much vacation you have" to "what amount of work is considered enough". Which doesn't seem all that different to me, or at least it would not have been at any place I've worked at.
also some people (like me) just don't take a ton of PTO. I look forward to cashing out the max accrual at my final salary whenever I end up switching jobs. unlimited PTO essentially penalizes people like this.
Maybe somewhat of a hate the player situation. It can be done right and I’ve seen it- and I miss it.
I typically do one big road trip for ~2 weeks and then a week randomly through the year plus random days fishing, doings tuff with kids or just taking a break from work.
I could never do that having to accrue