Do you get unlimited vacation though like Salesforce employees? When I worked there nobody worked those days anyway. Will this really have an impact on when people take time off?
It really depends on your customer's needs; slack going down for a day or two over the holidays is unfortunate but not the end of the world. Salesforce going down could, I imagine, easily cause massive financial losses.
I'd like to think it should be easy enough to put people on emergency call rather than forcing them to put 8 hours of butts in seats for no reason, but apparently that's not how Salesforce wants to roll.
A rota is the positive affirmation that employee X will be here to support the team versus the negative one that well person X can’t not be here, because they’re the last one to take PTO.
Hahaha. Unlimited vacation actually means vacation only when your manager feels like it - which could be less than you'd get under a fixed vacation allotment. Many such cases.
When something sounds too good to be true, it is.
A coworker that typically holds the heavens up like Atlas felt like he's burning out, so he's about to take 3-6 months off to do yoga in Switzerland or something. Everyone's happy for him. It sucks for project schedules I'm sure, but it's better to take a break and come back fresh than burn out and leave. Another coworker just came back from a 3 month sabbatical, and her fresh mental state will be a great productivity boost.
I just spent a week on a family vacation, then another week volunteering at a solar car race, and then another few days visiting family. I was looking forward to actually getting some focused work done this week, but now I'm out sick and only have the mental capacity to read HN and sleep. I suppose I feel about as productive as I usually do, since I can still respond to people on slack all day!
a) sour grapes
b) people being unwilling to admit that they prefer paternalism instead of being capable of making their own decisions about how to balance work and life
(FWIW for me, making my own decision looks like "4-5 wks per year, not including a handful of ad-hoc 3-day weekends throughout the yr")
Are there other benefits or forms of comp where it's preferable not to agree on amounts beforehand?
To an extent I've been very blessed in my career, and I've always been able to accept new jobs based on my fit with the project and the team. I've also had success negotiating compensation to serve my interests. I've never seriously factored in vacation days into any sort of comparisons. I've never found myself in an environment where my manager had any expectation of proscribing when I should take time off. On the contrary, every manager I've ever had has been wholely supportive whenever I've taken time off. I think a large part of that comes down to my attitude and work ethic. I've certainly become spoiled, though. Unless my situation changes drastically, I wouldn't consider working somewhere with less flexibility than I currently enjoy. I would work for less compensation if it was the right project, though.
Ive seen this a million and one times since I started working in tech, including my nontech friends being blown away by the perks of Google and concluding that they must work me like a dog (I worked a hard 35 hrs/wk at the time).
...that unlimited PTO can't be accrued, and is usually still subject to approval to use like regular limited PTO, which makes it an easy mechanism for arbitrary favoritism by managers without the fallback that if your PTO isn't approved you at least keep and accrue your balance which can be used later in your career or cashed out, and which the company then has an incentive to allow.you to use to clear the liability from their balance sheet.
The theory is you can "take what you need" so long as you're getting your work done. In practice, company culture of course dictates what's considered reasonable, and as best I can tell it is highly variable between companies.
At my "unlimited" place, it seems like 3 weeks is considered reasonable, especially if split up. But I know someone at another company who has had trouble getting more than a week for a couple years running.
It also means if you are not meeting expectations, you’ll probably self-select to get zero time off.
Engineering pays well because you are supposed to work magic. If you can’t produce the magic then the dark clouds gather quickly. The elite sports team analogy is a good one. Keep up an unlucky run of bad games and you’ll get benched then sacked.
I don’t condone any of the above but this is the mindset of “unlimited PTO”. More so than that which I’m seeing others describe, here.
I thought it was because you have to pay people a lot to spend time around engineers who say things like this.
Here I am just programming… I totally skipped magician school.
Log data from each request. Map reduce it into an SQL table. Render the statistics with a JS graphing frontend. Use a pub/sub to update everything in real time. It’s all just plumbing but the overall effect is of something much more.
To an outsider, that is the magic. Software engineers know better — it’s all very well taking a design and implementing the vision but what is much harder is coming up with the design and idea in the first place. Some days you’re on fire implementing component after component without ever really having to rethink anything — you got the interface right first time, or you understood the problem well enough to keep a component small enough without it creeping into multiple areas of concern.
Some days… weeks… it is far from clear what to do next. You know you need to migrate this performance critical code that exists verbatim (copy and paste!) in these two repositories and instead turn it into a single first-class dependency which implements the compute using a GPU instead. Some of the infrastructure of the original code is written in Python. Some in bash. It was written with no thought for making factoring easier and the whole project is in use in production already.
When you’ve got a mental model of what to do you can churn through this kind of work in a week of intense coding. When you have no idea where to start things can feel very hopeless.
If you’re just programming then you’re probably very smart and able to figure these things out without breaking a sweat, or you have a tech lead who nudges you in the right direction with calm competence that belies the fact they wake up at 4am every other night to reach for a legal pad to sketch out yet another potentially doomed idea to reduce technical debt that literally never sees the light of day.