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Comment by vkazanov | Hacker News Reader

At Bumble we have:

- an unlimited PTO (you'd have to explain going beyond, say, 4 weeks, but otherwise working)

- mandatory 2 payed weeks off (1 in December and 1 in Jun)

- mostly remote using the "office-hub" model, only requiring presence when necessary

- every 2 weeks there something we call a Focus Friday, when nobody can contact you and you are free to concentrate on things you want to work on.

This covers all offices, i.e. Texas, UK, Spain.

Pretty comfortable, I'd say. I don't feel I need more time to restore some energy.

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Clearly it's not unlimited. On the one hand if your co-worker takes 4 weeks off then you'll feel cheated if you take 2. On the other if you take 4 weeks off you have no way of knowing if that is frowned upon. This seems like more stress than it is worth.

Unlimited without pay and no need to turn up when you get back from leave either.

I'm glad that you're happy with the system, but I'm not satisfied with your comment. In my personal experience, people with "unlimited vacation" tend to take less overall vacation than I do, on a mandatory vacation time per year.

> (you'd have to explain going beyond, say, 4 weeks, but otherwise working)

Unless "I'd like to take a 5-week vacation" isn't enough explanation in itself, it clearly isn't working. An employee shouldn't have to justify _why_ they want to go on vacation.

In my experience, the conversation goes like this:

Me: I'd like to take a 5-week vacation

Manager: Why?

Me: I haven't taken a long vacation in about year.

Manager: Sure thing. Approved.

This is what happens and it's better than dealing with accrued PTO where I have to keep track of the days off. I'm sure companies are doing this because they've done the math and see that on average people take less time off with UTO. But if you have a good team and good managers then it isn't difficult to take time off.

Additionally, in the accrued PTO case, if you end up taking 5 weeks straight with absolutely no justification and your manager isn't good then there's probably a chance at retaliation. In either case, it depends on your relation with your manager.

I do agree that mandatory vacation is probably the best however, it's extremely rare in America which is where the unlimited vacation trend has started.

But do you get a reminder if you don't take holiday? In most of Europe, companies don't only have to offer a minimum of 4-5 weeks PTO per year, they also have to make sure employees take at least the majority of their vacation days.

I dislike unlimited/untracked/open (whatever buzzword) PTO. I feel like I have to beg for time off, so I end up taking very little and burning out. Even when I'm sick, I feel like I have to justify why I cannot work. I guess it's better than the places that only give you two weeks vacation/sick leave. I'm having some serious Europe envy right now. They seem to take vacation time seriously.

I've been at only one company where "unlimited PTO" was really treated close to that way. There were offices in San Francisco and Paris, and the CEO was French (and based in the US).

The US office had untracked PTO, and from the get-go he would let the Americans know that the French office had around 7 weeks time off, and that they'd use it, so they should as well.

He took essentially the month of August off, which did help establish that 4 week vacations were "normal".

> help establish that 4 week vacations were "normal".

I (an European) always took this as granter yet considered it crazy people have as little as just a single month of vacation a year. It's been just recently I found out this isn't even the case in the USA where people normally have just 2 weeks. This scared the heck out of me. Why even live at all if all you have to live is 2 weeks a year and you have to sell the remaining 50 weeks of your life time yearly? I would rather commit suicide.

Because anything better would be SOCIALISM!! /s

In America, our government and media are all controlled by corporations, so there's a massive propaganda machine that tells the population they need to be workaholics if they want a chance to be wealthy.

Also, employees have no leverage. You can't decline a job because they only offer 2 weeks PTO when everyone else also only offers 2 weeks.

People that push for a culture shift for more PTO are shouted down as being lazy, and the propaganda machine screams about how bad small businesses would be hurt. The machine LOVES to talk about small businesses, and people fall for it.

>you'd have to explain going beyond, say, 4 weeks

This is less than the PTO mandated by law in many European countries. Hardly unlimited.

Important to know Europe doesn't calculate time offs like the US does. In the US, if you take 4 weeks off, it's 20 days PTO. In Europe it's 28-30.

Which countries do it like this? At least at where I've worked in the UK, only the days where you would've normally been at work are counted.

In Sweden and Denmark as well, it would be calculated as 20 days assuming a standard Monday to Friday office hours job. I'm also curious to know where the parent poster got the 28-30 days calculation from.

Agreed, I have never heard of this, I’m pretty sure it would not be legal in the UK

I’ve managed team members in many European countries; we only count days you’d otherwise work. (We do have one every 5 year sabbatical program that is “4 weeks, and if there was a company holiday in that stretch, you don’t get an extra day”, but otherwise, taking 4 M-F stretches is 4x5 = 20 days of PTO.

Based on the downvotes and replies, I'd say this is not true.

You're wrong for the case of the Netherlands and Belgium.

Can't really cover the UK, only offering 20 days PTO without explanation is illegal in the UK, the minimum is 28 days (not including bank holidays). And it's very restrictive compared to most European countries anyway. Seems crazy that this is competitive in the US. Then again, salaries are much higher in the US.

"in the UK, the minimum is 28 days (not including bank holidays)".

I had to double check this as it doesn't match my experience.

Yes, it is a minimum of 28 days, but that can include Bank Holidays (normally 6 days, though we have extra "Jubilee" Bank Holidays this year), so in practice it's 20 days plus Bank Holidays minimum.

0: https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights

It's normally 8 days of Bank Holiday in England - New Year's Day, Good Friday and Easter Monday, the two May holidays, the August one, then Christmas and Boxing days.

In the UK the mandatory minimum is 20 days paid holiday (plus the ~8 public holidays per year).

In Spain 22 days + public holidays.

That's the minimum, many jobs give more, e.g. 28-32 days + public holidays. (On my last job in Britain it increased slowly, when I left I had 33 plus the public holidays.)

It would be informative to see if the people in Britain and Spain take more holiday than those in Texas.

The legal minimum (!) in Germany is already 5 weeks of vacation. It’s clearly not unlimited if 4 weeks requires justification.

In fact, this doesn’t really sound attractive at all. At my current employer I work 32h/week, get 6½ weeks off (+ bank holidays), am entirely remote, and every Wednesday is entirely free of meetings.

> mandatory 2 payed weeks off

Mandatory PTO is the best. That way you don't have fomo, no pressure to work whole on vacation and no catching up to do when you're back.

I'd like to work somewhere with more mandatory vacation.

“Unlimited PTO” is a scam. If it’s truly unlimited why not take 52 weeks off per year?

Cause you’ll get PIP’ed because your production will be non-existent.

You're still expected to get a certain amount of work done.

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