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Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

> What do we do? Well, root out the real causes of burnout. If it’s not those top workplace issues, it may very well be the burn of extended, heightened stress. For employees surveyed, flexible work hours and mental health support were more popular than even a four-day work week or unlimited PTO. The point then is lots of professionals like their actual work, they just don’t like the restrictions and environment. Give direction, let them do the work. Remove barriers.

PTO and a healthy work environment are both good.

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Unlimited PTO is crazy to me. It takes the principles of spelled-out employment terms and throws them in the trash.

The "flexible hours" policy was bad enough at my last job. Wildly varying interpretations between different managers and department heads under the same roof.

My last job implemented an unlimited PTO policy. In 2020, I took about 7 days off, and worked at least 20 days on weekends. With the increased responsibilities, there just wasn’t any time that was good to leave… until I left for good. It was definitely a factor in my current burnout.

The funny thing was before the VCs bought the company, I had two weeks but in practice could ask the CTO for as much time as I wanted. But unlimited PTO functionally meant negative days off, because performance would decrease when you left. Setting a minimum PTO might help.

Yeah, if I ever start a company, mandatory vacation will be a thing. If you don't use up your 4 weeks of vacation before Thanksgiving, don't come to work for the rest of the year. Don't worry, there will still be work when you get back.

Another thing I like are company holidays. When nobody is working, there is no email / code reviews / Slack to miss. That's a real vacation!

There's industries where mandatory vacations (or "Required Absence") are a thing - in finance it's not unusual to be required to take at least one two-week block each year. It helps reduce bus-factor (if you can't afford to lose this person for two weeks, he's a risk), and helps prevent embezzlement because most schemes require constant baby-sitting.

Yeah, I've worked at such a bank. The consensus was that we would all use "cron" to embezzle.

That'd be awesome, personally. I'd fail to use my 4 weeks every year, and always get December off, which is probably the most requested month for vacations.

If you want that policy to have teeth, maybe end the "year" on a month that few people want vacations, like February. (I'll pull that out of my arse, but it's less than December, I'm sure.)

That would cause them to actually schedule their vacation when they can use it and enjoy it, instead of sitting at home for a month with nothing to do when it crept up on them.

IMO, at least.

It really does need to come from leadership. The last 2 places I've worked had basically no work after Thanksgiving and much of leadership did take off basically entire month of December.

Also we recently started having an occasionally Friday that everyone takes off same time. You don't have too but to make it easier that people who are often quite busy have an opportunity to not feel like things are getting behind. Over 90% participation(100+ people) in our group mental health day.

The same thing happened to me. Unlimited PTO is a scam.

> Setting a minimum PTO might help

This is how it has to be implemented in EU countries, so in general it appears to be (in Ireland, at least) the statutory 20 days + whatever.

People have told me that they've taken up to 8 weeks. But I've never ended up working at any of those companies so it's hard to know if that's true or not.

Do people not just start taking forever PTO, a week or two at a time, instead of quitting?

Or take a sabbatical or maternity/paternity leave and just never come back?

"unlimited PTO" is a scam in most cases. I interviewed with one of these companies a few years ago and told them that from my freelance experience 8 weeks per year is the sweet spot for me. The manager got really quiet and the interview ended quickly.

I now have a contract with fixed 4 weeks off and everybody takes their time. The people I know who have "unlimited PTO" mostly take off less time. I have never heard of anybody taking way more than 4 weeks.

It's basically the same unbalance as some companies having flexible working hours which means you are expected to work overtime during crunch time but when things are slow you are still expected to put in at least 40.

There's a lot of companies in the world where "vacation" is offered, but the managers will many times terminate those who take it. All it takes is for one or two employees to be terminated after just getting back from a vacation to send a message to the rest of the employees.

The right to use benefits has to be enforced by the CEO. If people aren't using their vacations (and effectively losing them), then that sets the culture off on the wrong foot from the start.

Some companies I've been at swung in the opposite direction and I was really greatful for it.

E.g. At Microsoft you have a max amount of vacation days that you can accrue before they start expiring, and managers get dinged whenever their directs have expiring vacation days. The result: Managers would encourage taking vacation

Yes, I absolutely agree with that, and that takes leadership to prioritize your employee's benefits at the same level of deliverables.

It's easier to think that employee vacations are worthless as a manager since it doesn't actually contribute to any direct profit. But if you're an employee, and that was a selling point of joining the company, it certainly sucks when the promise of vacation could never be materialized -- because work was apparently too important.

Some people add negative value and it’s sometimes not clear until they step away for a couple of weeks.

I disagree. Either you know what's going on in your directs, or you don't know. If you don't know, you shouldn't be a manager, nor should you enjoy the salary premium that a manager gets.

Unlimited PTO means there's nothing to cash out at the end of the year if you took 0 days of PTO.

It also reminds me of the old negotiating tactic - never be the first one to offer up a number.

There's a different school of thought on negotiating tactics that says you definitely should be the first to offer a number, because it anchors the negotiations.

I can see both to be honest. Especially if you don't 'know what you're worth' in a given market, letting them make the first move at last has a chance that they won't offer you 50k for something hey are prepared to pay 250k for. Potentially they will start off with 150k and you're gonna be happy with it, because you undervalued yourself at 100k. Luckily you didn't say that but took the 150k offered!

If you know you're worth at least 150k, asking for 200k can anchor the negotiations in your direction as long as you don't overshoot what they were prepared to offer by too much (which might just kill the negotiations altogether). You might just walk away with 180k and you feel good because you got 30k more than you thought you might get and they feel good because they got you 'cheaper'.

I have no way of knowing which strategy actually works out better, as its hard to do a controlled experiment here :) Also you probably have incomplete market information and it might be hard to know how incomplete it is.

Flexibility is a multiplier to the existing work environment. Flexible work hours and unlimited PTO make an already good environment better, and make bad environments miserable. Rigid rules for when you're working and when you aren't working is a great defense if your management is going to push you to work as much as they can so you should be wary when job hunting if they are "flexible", but flexiblity can be great too.

It's really great - when it works. I have worked at two companies with this policy - only in one of them I took (rather could take) 4-5weeks off every year.

Why not both? 4-5 weeks is pretty standard for a professional job in NY.

The passive-aggressive lie that is "unlimited PTO" is part of the growing toxicity of startup work environments.

To me, the most important part of unlimited PTO isn't the "unlimitedness" but the fact that it's not something I'm having to log in a system. It's that usually I can just take off a Friday or a Monday here and there without any issue as long as I give a bit of notice.

My company just got rid of unlimited PTO for all the reasons people say they hate it - they didn't think people were taking enough PTO for their health, it was used unfairly, etc... Functionally now though, I have to file paperwork with 3 different groups to have someone approve even a single day off so they can make sure I'm not going over the number of days off that I have in accordance with my level and seniority. Thankfully my manager has essentially told us they don't care and we're still on unlimited because they don't want to do the paperwork either.

It's not to say that "unlimited" can't be toxic, but it's easy to forget how onerous other systems can be, which can lead to you taking less time off in the same way. One of my friends is the junior on their team on a fixed PTO system and is being forced to take nearly random days off now in order to have any at all because they didn't get their holiday plans in as early as their more senior team members, so now they're stuck with the dregs. Toxic cultures are gonna be toxic. The framing just changes the mechanism.

> It's that usually I can just take off a Friday or a Monday here and there without any issue as long as I give a bit of notice.

I have fixed number of days but still can essentially do this.

> Functionally now though, I have to file paperwork with 3 different groups to have someone approve even a single day off so they can make sure I'm not going over the number of days off that I have in accordance with my level and seniority.

This sounds odd. Why can't you just have a system that tracks number of days and as long as you have the number of days 1-2 days shouldn't be an issue at all. I don't see how switching from unlimited to limited made this approval business necessary at all.

I'm sure it's possible to have a system where this is easy, but giving HR more things to track to prove their value to the company does tend to make no incentive for them to make it trivial. I'm sure systems exist for that that we could buy, but we didn't, so we don't, so someone's got some ad-hoc something in some Oracle DB somewhere, and now taking vacation is an added hassle for my already overworked manager.

Then really it's a failure of management at your company, not the limited vacation system.

Sure, but so is letting "unlimited" just turn into looting by the privileged or some sort of toxic "my manager won't let me take more than a week off". Which is what I've been getting at. People love to condemn Unlimited PTO as some sort of toxic trap, and it certainly can be, but it all comes down to if your HR department is competent and cares. If your management is bad, having fixed PTO isn't going to save you from them.

That's just because it's more common the case that employees get screwed by the company than other way round. One easy way to make unlimited really unlimited is by having a reasonable number of mandatory days off like 4 weeks. Then I'll believe unlimited PTO.

I'm not asking you to "believe" in anything. There are just some companies where you can take 4-6 weeks off and some companies where you can't, and which one you're in depends on which team you work on and who your manager and HR rep is more than what they claim their PTO plan is.

I hypothetically have almost 5 weeks of days off at my current job and between not having much vacation options because of pandemic and not wanting to just be lazy at home, I haven't used most of it. Should someone from HR just tell me I'm not allowed to work in December now?

Yes, but HR is sadly considered a cost centre, so that failure of management is sadly quite common.

Why don’t they call it something else then? Maybe “Flexible PTO”? I really don’t like the “unlimited” part of the name. It feels confusing / misleading to me.

Probably because "unlimited" is the relevant part to the part of the company that cares - HR. If it was limited, it would need to be tracked. I get the objection to the fact that you can't literally take 200 days off or whatever, but that just feels like pedantry when at this point the colloquial meaning of "unlimited pto" is fairly clear.

The colloquial meaning doesn't seem clear at all. Am I OK taking 2 weeks? 3 weeks? 4 weeks? 5 weeks? 6 weeks? 7 weeks? 10 weeks? Which is it, precisely? At what precise number of days does it go from being "a reasonable amount" to "lol are you nuts?"

I mean, the answer there is "it varies" and "it depends". Probably something around 3-5 weeks. If you need a precise number to feel ok about the situation, the colloquial meaning is going to be enough to tell you you shouldn't work there. I get what you're asking for, but you're essentially just complaining that it's not Static Days PTO, which is a fine opinion to have, but going "I don't think X is clear because it's not Y instead" isn't really a thing.

You can dislike what is meant by "Unlimited PTO" and the fact that it's not clear on how many days you can take off, but that doesn't mean it's unclear what Unlimited PTO entails.

That's actually a good point. Maybe it should really be called "take-what-you-need untracked PTO." That conveys the point that nobody in HR is going to keep track of how many days you take off, and that you're actually supposed to take those days. It's too awkward to spin well on the company's jobs page, though.

In reality, the only person who has unlimited PTO is usually the CEO, because he's the only one who can afford to get away repeatedly.

Depends on the company!

If it's inauthentic though, employees can smell it from far away.

I have no doubt it's meant in good faith at many companies, but it's almost sure to be used unfairly. A lot of people, especially folks who don't feel safely part of whatever in-group, are going to be hesitant to push that policy, especially because being on vacation can be an imposition on your coworkers.

I suspect you could implement the same policy in practice with less social anxiety by mandating N weeks of vacation and allowing additional time off upon request.

Truth is it could be hard to take vacation in a toxic company irrespective of whether it's clearly laid out or not. A lot of startups are toxic - intentionally or unintentionally.

Mandating vacation is a good idea when they really mean it. Use it or lose might work. Fixed days with payout if you quit or an option to cash out works too - companies carry it in their balance sheet and encourage days off as a result.

In my experience limited PTO leads to burnout more often because employees could get paid more by taking fewer days off since their PTO is paid out when they leave. So some employees choose to continue working because they feel bad taking time off that technically decreases their potential pay.

It's always inauthentic, as otherwise people would take all work days off, never show up again, and collect a paycheck in perpetuity.

This is a business transaction. "Unlimited PTO" literally means free paychecks.

Sure, that's a literal definition of unlimited.

In reality, I've seen it implemented as a "take what you need" policy. Unlimited in that sense means there is no upper bound. Managers are trained to push people who are trending under 5 weeks per year to take more time off. Some people take a lot more than that. Work still get done and people seem happy to do the work. Sample size = 1 employer. Inauthentic?

Restrictions unfortunately play a large part, e.g. changes to Production can only be done by request.

Requests then take weeks to be completed even though the actual work involved can be measured in minutes

Another core issue for me is the ratio between challenging tasks and more simple tasks.

There should always be a few tasks to work on that are challenging, otherwise procrastination sets in which can turn into some form of burnout if nothing is done.

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