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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

I am so opposed to these type of programs. All they do is benefit the company through removal of a liability in terms of PTO hours from the company books. The workers are very likely to face social pressures when taking time off when it's viewed as an approval bestowed by management and not an entitlement inherent to the agreement when you started working. I don't have any hard data to back this up, but my personal intuition suggests this will result in companies saving money because workers will take less time off and won't get paid out for remaining balances when they quit. This is a very worker-unfriendly policy and in a just system would be illegal.

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I agree. It also makes it harder to compare companies because it moves an explicit benefit “X days PTO per year” to a vague one “well, it’s whatever days your manager feels like approving”.

As a manager I’d also hate this - it’s another thing that I would have to keep track of and weigh. I don’t want to have to discuss with people about how much PTO is okay! That’s something somebody else should decide!

If a company really wants to give people flexibility they would give X days of paid vacation plus as much unpaid as your manager will approve. Best of both worlds IMO.

Addendum: The company I work for has a “once in a lifetime opportunity” policy where if you want to do something special, like climb Everest or take a cruise around the world or whatever, they’ll work with you to figure out how to make leave work for it. It’s not actually once in a lifetime either, the policy says once every five years or so. I like that idea a lot, even if I’ve never used it.

> As a manager I’d also hate this - it’s another thing that I would have to keep track of and weigh. I don’t want to have to discuss with people about how much PTO is okay! That’s something somebody else should decide!

It's so easy though, just default to yes. Is there a critical deadline coming up? Are they productive and focused at work? Then just always approve.

That's the approach I've taken and it has worked out really well. As long as they're getting their work done, I'm not concerned with how much time they're taking off.

How about 8 weeks per year? Or 10 weeks? Would that be fine?

Absolutely, and as a result the manager gets glowing reviews and can also justify an increase in headcount which will improve their status in the organization.

I think your implication that there is some unspoken upper limit is valid, but as long as said upper limit is more than what you would have gotten for vacation days (8 weeks, or 40 days, seems way beyond the normal amount. Microsoft started at 15 days.), there seems little reason to complain. I don’t think you would find anyone willing to allow 364 (modulo weekends) days off each year even for the best employee, so of course it’s not truly unlimited.

If the corporation shoves enough "critical work" down your throat, a manager will not be able to say yes. So the corporation is in control of the amount of time off by setting unrealistic deadlines / workloads.

No, if you are a manager it is your job to keep your employees productive, happy, and fruitful by approving and encouraging ample rest time and pushing a message up the chain that you don't have enough staff to meet expectations.

That's for sure true. "Unlimited" vacation only works if the company has a good WLB in general. At a company like you're describing, having defined PTO days doesn't always help that much either.

I'm a manager with discretionary time off. I default to yes and then push back on deadlines if the PTO means we can't make it. So far it's working.

I think there was actually a harvard business review study or something that proved this accurate. It saves the corporation money, and actually makes people take less time off.

Either because the 'forcing mechanism of use it or lose it' is gone OR the social pressure like you mentioned.

Yes, I recall reading the same thing many years ago too. IIRC the results were specific to the United States and it was posited that this might be due to differences in US employees views towards work. We tend to overwork ourselves whereas some of our EU or non-US counterparts don't do that as much.

Yes totally fair as well.

Other countries also have rules for things like "every employee must be able to see a window" and whatnot.

Is it only me (I am in MSFT) or does it force some people into board-game resources mindset instead? I have a bunch of accumulated vacation that will now be paid out, cause I would let it accumulate before when I didn't need it - it just sits there after all. I don't really need a little more money, but I do value extra time. Now I feel like someone is going to play captain in Puerto Rico and burn my stuff - I have to use it or it's gone, so I'm going to track it myself and make sure to try to take my N days ;)

If the company has good work life balance, it's great. We have unlimited vacation where I work and it's actually fantastic. Most people take 4-6 weeks off. Personally I take 8 some years. It's so much more relaxing to not have to track time off or worry about allocating enough for periods like the holidays in addition to vacation. I've never had more than 20 PTO days at a company I worked, and often had 15 to start, so this is way more vacation than typical.

This highlights an implementation detail.

Some companies do unlimited vacation like this. It's a perk.

Other companies use this to be restrictive on the vacation people take. It keeps more people working more days.

This speaks a lot to company culture.

It can be hard to figure out which is which for the company before getting hired though. Asking about programs that encourage PTO is a good way that I've found to suss out these types of details.

My current job offers a few "extra" things on top of unlimited PTO like during the summer, a $100 bonus if you post a pic of some activity you did on PTO (literally anything, and can even opt out of sharing if you are so inclined) or more recently, a "competition" for the best use of PTO. I think someone reading a book in a hammock won.

You could ask what's the average PTO taken. HR should know this and if they need to check, take it as a bad sign.

I always ask about work-life balance when I get an offer. Companies so far have been pretty honest about it. There's really no point in hiring someone who is not going to fit with the work culture.

Yep - my (somewhat dull and conservative) employer did this as well.

I was cynical, but year later I'm pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong - I think we collectively all took 15% more holiday. Not a mind-boggling change, but not the "we'll all be bullied to stay at our desks" result I'd anticipated.

Anecdotally I think the largest change is people get less precious over guarding their holiday as a precious resource, even if they've no idea how they'll spend it. You finish your week's work on Friday morning? Ask if anybody needs anything from you and then just take the rest of the day off. No compulsion to find some busy-work and protect 4 hours of vacation.

IMO these policies should be banned at the Federal level. I worked at a company with such a policy previously, I ended up only taking 3 weeks of vacation over the course of a 2 year stint. As it turned out, other coworkers would take 6+ weeks per year. There was no canonical guidance on appropriate PTO.

In a large company, this will translate to some managers granting excess PTO for retention purposes - and other managers burning people out. It's also an effective ward against parents and others with responsibilities which do not align with whatever the delivery of the month is.

I think we first mandatory PTO at the federal level before we can ban "unlimited" PTO.

We can do both at the same time.

I'm sympathetic to your frustration, but this seems like an argument you could make about all kinds of things. If you work at a company with unlimited snacks, some people will munch all day and get most of their calories for free, while parents and people on diets have to eat elsewhere and will only have snacks once in a while. If you work at a company with unlimited breaks, some people will take 10 breaks a day while others will be pressured by their manager to take only 1 or 2. It can't be the solution to say companies have to strictly regiment every employee interaction so they can make sure it's fair.

You can have minimums and optional maximums. We have minimum breaks in most states, companies should be obliged to have a specific minimum in their PTO - otherwise it can easily be false advertising.

I'm the weirdo that actually loves this. I always feel compelled to hoard limited resources, including vacation hours. I'd estimate that I take 100%-200% more time off when I have "unlimited" PTO. When I'm working against a bank of hours, I tend to never use the full amount, just in case I might need it. With unlimited PTO, I'm much more likely to take random days off that I need, in addition to the week or two here and there for family vacations.

I think limited rollover is a preferable solution if companies need to get PTO off the books - if you can only bank 4 weeks of vacation the maximizing strategy for people like you and I will be to bank it and then take the rest.

I work at msft and have never had pressure to not take time off. In fact I have been reminded by my manager to do it because its tracked and you lose it at some point in time. Without the tracking people that generally don't take time will take less and people that take all there time will take more.

It depends very heavily on the company management.

At both my current and last employer, we had unlimited PTO and employees were encouraged to use it, the only requirement being that they get their work done.

At my last employer, most people took 8-10 weeks off/year in the U.S. office and 12-16 weeks off in our European offices. At my current employer, people average 4-8 weeks and people who don't take at least 4 weeks off a year are gently encouraged to spend more time away from work. In both cases, PTO is not discretionary except where the employee's job specifically involves working on-site for a specific project or event and PTO would overlap with that period.

Our company has discretionary time off. I can't speak for other managers in the company but in my own role as manager I actually lecture my people if they don't take enough time off. I don't know if my frequent encouragement on the matter is the cause but it seems to be that no one is viewed poorly by their peers for taking time off.

This is just one anecdotal example though so it's hardly proof that these programs work. I'll just say that if the managers set the culture appropriately then it can work.

It depends, you just need the right culture and management which respects and trusts the employees.

I love it, and my manager has never rejected a PTO request, it’s just a formality. I took more than the UK standard 25 days in my first year and we haven’t talked about PTO once.

In fact, sometimes people say stuff like “oh I’m gonna go to $place for two weeks and I’ll just work in the daytime and vacation in the evenings and weekend” and management will actively encourage just taking the time off and enjoying it, coming back refreshed instead.

While I agree with most of the rest of what you said, and I generally don't like these policies:

> won't get paid out for remaining balances when they quit

You can just change the company handbook to say that unused PTO is not paid out, I don't think any state (fact-check me) requires you to pay out unused PTO (you're required to follow a policy fairly, so you must pay it out if the handbook says you pay it out)

MA requires PTO up to some number of days to be paid out.

I guess this still applies even with an "unlimited" policy though.

yeah, this isn't just generosity, this is a legal requirement that the 'all you can eat' policy is trying to avoid

My previous company recently changed PTO policies, and the result was that it depended on your state. My memory is a little fuzzy, but it basically went something like:

In some states, all PTO was immediately removed from the bank as of the change date and those folks immediately moved to unlimited.

In MA, removing accrued PTO wasn't possible, but it was possible to rewrite policy to disallow carryover from one year to another, so people MA stayed on the normal plan until Jan 1, at which point they'd have 0 PTO due to nothing carrying over and they'd be moved to unlimited.

In CA, neither option was allowed, so folks remained on the normal plan until Jan 1, and then were paid out for unused PTO and then moved to unlimited.

The concerns are valid, but I find setting a "suggested minimum" amount of PTO (in my case, I suggest 1 week/quarter on average) and _actually taking time off yourself_ helps model better work/life balance. If you have "unlimited PTO" but the high status people never take PTO, you effectively have no PTO at all.

> All they do is benefit the company through removal of a liability in terms of PTO hours from the company books.

They also facilitate hard to identify discrimination, including on prohibited bases, and enable social pressure to reduce total time off taken.

And none of those effects are accidental.

In Italy it is required by law to take PTO if you have a "permanent" work contract. You can monetize part of the PTO but the biggest part must be used within a certain time limit.

I think it's a good thing but we pay it with our lower average salaries.

We are getting back to labor rights of 19-th century with no guaranteed vacation time. Then it was between you and your manager or company owner of how much PTO time you get (if any), and 21-st century feels the same.

It depends on company/team culture. I've used a similar policy to take 40-50 days off per year and got great feedback on my leadership and contributions in the past. People on my team took similar amounts. Everybody was happy with the policy, except people who never took vacation and had months of PTO accured.

As somebody else in the thread wrote, it's really hard to know what the culture is like when evaluating a new job, unless you are very upfront regarding your expectations with your future manager.

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