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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

> Yea, I'm sure the new CFO starts with 2 weeks vacation, too.

LOL

I would add that if the company has "unlimited vacation time" it's really important to press and find out how much time people actually take. I like to ask for averages or how much time <executive not doing the interview> has taken off in the last few years.

That'll tell you what the limits really are.

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"unlimited vacation time" is just really an accounting hack. It allows the employer not to have to track that stuff and on your way out, owe you nothing for vacation time. It also allows them to say, well, it's unlimited, take it when you want; then the only option to take time off is around federal holidays. It's basically a scheme to rip you off....

I've had unlimited PTO at 4 companies and 3/4 were truly unlimited. I've taken an international trip for 14 days every year + 5-6 days off for 3 days weekends + any fat hoidays like taking off Christmas eve. I'm sure there are shit companies but it seems like most companies respect it.

I feel like the onus is on the employee to ask off. Most people are just too afraid or too much of a workaholic to take off.

Uhhhhh... so you took under a month off? That's not a strong argument. If unlimited is actually unlimited then I would be taking 2 months a year at least.

I have no need for more than that though. I could take off more if I wanted but I'd just be bored. lol

Yes, we have about 8 weeks off in France by law. I feel it could be 12 or 15 and it would be great (what children have at school, at least)

Yeah I was thinking to myself, people in Europe get 5+ weeks off per year so if my employer is saying unlimited then I would be crazy to not take at least that much time off. Then again maybe this guy just loves working but I definitely prefer being paid to not work.

That's a very important point. My company has always had unlimited time. We just had an announcement from our HR head that managers are going to start making sure you take at least 2 weeks a year, ideally in a big block. I've never had trouble taking my vacation, but I'm really pleased that we're going to be enforcing a minimum, to help folks who are more hesitant to take theirs.

The legal minimum in the EU (and many countries) is 20 days.

I've seen this enforced once, and everyone was amazed that our colleague hadn't used the minimum 20 days. (We had 30 days according to our contract, but the requirement was for him to take 20. The other 10 were up to him.)

Yeah, I think the average European probably takes more time off than even Americans that think they take a lot of time off.

We get 32 days + public holidays, so you could take something like 7 weeks off with careful planning. Most people do. Because most people do, it isn't looked down upon at all.

A friend at a US firm said they told him if someone could take 3 weeks off then clearly the company didn't need them and there wouldn't be a job to come back to. Here it wouldn't be anything unusual at all.

i remember years ago my wife's friend (we're in US, she was in the UK) commented about how crappy US 'vacation' policies were. She'd been at a place for ... several years, and now had seniority for... at the time it was 11 paid weeks off. It seemed a bit excessive, because it didn't include some national holidays as well, so... basically she had > 3 months 'off' every year. The biggest problem she/they had was trying to figure out stuff to 'do' during that time (visited us in the US for a bit). I think another issue was trying to coordinate her 'time off' with her husband (IIRC he 'only' got 8 weeks paid vacation).

This is good for the company, too. It's a form of fraud detection. When employees take two weeks away in a block, the company can more easily detect ongoing fraud or other funny business going on. That's how a French rogue trader was finally caught:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444914904577615...

Yeah, my mom works at a bank in the US and within her department they have to take off at least 2 weeks consecutively and only that one person in the department can be off during that time for just this reason. They use it as a yearly check to make sure there is no fraud going on.

We have unlimited vacation time I have taken 4 days holiday and 6 days sick leave in the past 12 months (4 days because i was on my ass with the COVID vaccine doses).

I would have normally taken at least 20 days holiday but it seems pointless to take time off to sit at home and do nothing.

This year i have 2 weeks in July and 2 in October and a week for thanksgiving and a week for Christmas.

Take a break!

I took 26 days leave last year (4 pre-Covid), and carried over a few extra. Even with Covid, there were opportunities to take trips locally, or just have a day out of the house with no obligations. I used a few days to work on hobbies when friends were working.

When it's use-it-or-lose it (or, in my case, use-it-or-be-forced-to-use-it-in-crap-weather-December), why work?

Uber had/has unlimited vacation time. When I worked there I took no less than 6 weeks a year and one year took 8 weeks. The formula is one week every quarter and then 2 weeks at Christmas. That already brings you to 6 weeks.

Yup I have interviewed at a lot of companies with unlimited time off, every single one of them seems to have taken less than 4 weeks off. This is what I get at my current company with no unlimited vacation. And at our company, sick time and mental health days are separate and not counted against your regular PTO.

In California at least, if you have X days of vacation time and you don't use it in the year when you leave, they have to pay you for these days. If it's "unlimited" time, you get bupkis.

thats the rub, the companies dont need to pay you on exit and they can manage against the average they would have granted in the first place and prune employees taking more. net win.

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