I prefer what my employer offers: 30 days paid holiday plus the ability to sell days back to the company.
That can be very helpful when your pay dates don't line up right due to how different companies handle pay.
That’s the challenge this aims to solve. There’s nothing wrong with either approach, and “shaming people into not taking vacation” works either way.
Plus, there are other benefits to the employer, like not having to pay out banked PTO to employees who leave.
Unless it comes with a mandatory minimum, unlimited PTO is a negative for me.
1) Having a set number of PTO days can also often come with pressure to not take them. When I worked at Morgan Stanley, you got vacation, but taking it made you look bad.
2) Plenty of HR systems support unlimited vacation; ADP and Gusto both do, at a minimum. My company used Gusto, and the acquirer used ADP; both had unlimited.
3) Mandatory minimums are a fantastic idea, and it's something we implemented as well. Agreed there.
Whether PTO usage drops dramatically when unlimited is entirely dependent on how the company treats unlimited vacation; if they encourage it, that isn't true. Also, the flexibility of being able to 'not run out of sick days' and take a longer vacation during the holidays, etc., is something that all of our employees greatly appreciated.
Point is: just like anything else, it can be done poorly, but that's not as a result of it being unlimited.