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Comment by donretag | Hacker News Reader

Let me pile on here: unlimited PTO is a joke

I once quite a job because they did not want me to take off for a week during Thanksgiving because of a deadline ... in January. Never took a vacation before that. Never again will I settle for unlimited PTO.

Every time I have ask during interviews with unlimited PTO companies about how much PTO an average employee takes, they never have an answer.

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Why do you think unlimited vacation was the cause of that?

Companies with set amounts of PTO can also deny your vacation request.

The advantage with companies with set amounts of PTO is that they end up either needing to roll those hours forward into the next year, pay them out - or look like a total ass and expire them (often a combination of two or all three). When you have a fixed amount of PTO there's more clear accountability about where unused hours go and, potentially, you can reclaim missed vacations in the form of an end of year payout that compensates you for the lack of a vacation.

It’s about normalizing vacation, and having a minimum means you’ll take as much time off as anyone else on the team.

Unlimited PTO means take as much as you want, but you have to have excellent social awareness to not damage your standing.

Oh gods - I've never worked at a place with unlimited PTO and that sounds miserable. I'm a highly visible employee who fields a lot of questions from junior and intermediate folks - taking a three week block off always means the other very senior dev needs to shoulder the load (but we're on good terms and happy to see each other balance work and life)... more senior folks would be less able to take vacation due to how much more visible their absence would be.

It should be ok for absences to be visible. And if they are more than just visible, you have a bus factor problem, and past a certain company size that's not something you should have.

But if it's a question of balancing your standing then it's all about visibility. If I'm off in a corner working maintaining some legacy system as a team of one that has somehow failed to be replaced in twenty years then I could just continuously be on vacation - additionally voluntarily taking odd working hours (like working 8PM-4AM) would also make it much less obvious that you're snogging vacation... except to the management team which usually can't comment on things like that except to consider firing you.

I haven't done it for a while but I've certainly taken off 3 weeks at a time previously. And if you count a combination of work travel and PTO, I did it last about a month before the pandemic hit.

And as others have noted, taking multiple weeks off is quite normal in Europe.

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