Microsoft employees are getting unlimited time off | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft employees are getting unlimited time off

theverge.com

17 pointsdustedcodes26 comments

"Unlimited time off" is quite the spin on what is better termed "discretionary time off."

Under traditional PTO arrangements, your PTO is an entitlement. You are owed it; it is part of your compensation.

Under "unlimited time off," your vacation is subject to the discretion of your boss.

But wait!, you say. Traditional PTO was subject to your boss's discretion as well!

Not quite. The scheduling was subject to mission requirements. The entitlement, however, was not. If your boss never let you take your vacation days, they had to pay it out to you. That's no longer true.

Not only that, I believe it’s an extremely bad look if they never let you take your full entitlement for the year, after some back and forth on the scheduling part

Absolutely. Under Traditional PTO, PTO that isn't taken becomes a payroll line item that is measured and accounted for. Under Unlimited PTO, no such metric exists. I believe we all know what happens in large organizations with regard to the priorities given to things with metrics versus things without metrics?

It's also illegal to refuse it in some European countries. A company may refuse certain dates but the employee must be allowed to take the holidays somewhere in the year and usually in one or more big blocks too.

Another important detail: Microsoft doesn’t have to keep cash on hand set aside to pay out accrued vacation.

I personally always liked “unlimited” time off, but I also recognize that I was a beneficiary of a highly unequal system.

You have to be in a role that’s highly in-demand to truly leverage the benefit. I never felt like I couldn’t request time off because I knew nobody in their right mind would fire a decent performer in my field.

That same concept doesn’t apply to the people in other areas like support or more junior roles, or just low performers in general. Your vacation benefit shouldn’t depend on your performance as taking time off is a proven performance enhancer.

The only way I would advocate for unlimited time off is if it comes with a minimum usage guarantee/requirement.

Done correctly, this is great for employees, their morale, and their productivity.

I have seen it done at a number of companies. The only two I ever saw it done correctly were a less than 50 people consulting firm I worked at called MCCI (led by a bona fide genius named Terry Moore), and third-hand at a statistical analysis firm called SAS (known for many best practices at the time).

Put another way: In theory this will work, in practice theory often doesn't.

What I have usually seen is some combination of:

* Workers are informally racked and stacked according to the time they take off

* Workers get pushed to meet deadlines and PTO necessary for physical health, mental health, or to meet family commitments is denied until the deadline is met

* Burnout rates increase

* Worker churn increases, due to the above

That said, Microsoft has innovated in a number of ways and seems to be a decent company to work for now (depending on the team), from what I hear from friends. I hope they implement this well, and it serves as a blueprint for others.

Because we should all be able to stay home and recover when sick (and not infect others), and we should all be able to take a mental health day when needed. There will be people who abuse it, but that will wind up fairly obvious and those people can be fired after sufficient documentation of poor performance.

I disagree that it would be obvious. In many cases, it could be really hard to tell. Also, supposing someone has a mental health problem, and actually does need tons of time... is that abuse? How do you handle that, and who gets to decide?

I'm sure it's against "the rules", but I don't mind unlimited pto when your manager doesn't care if you track sick days or half day appointments, etc. When it's only planned vacation (and company is not a sweatshop) it works out fine.

> Done correctly, this is great for employees, their morale, and their productivity.

IMO, the "correct" way to do it is to establish a minimum amount of time off.

I think it's reasonable to require people take at least 15 days of PTO, with at least 5 of them taken as a consecutive week.

I also wonder if releasing statistics on how much PTO people took would help?

Having accrued PTO essentially solves this problem. Either you take your assigned leave or if the business requires you to skip your vacation they can either give you an extra payout for it or they can let you roll PTO over into next year.

In practice this mostly results in employees using all of their leave in a given year.

It's a mind game, really.

If you give people 4 weeks PTO, they'll take 4 weeks. If you give 6 weeks, they'll take 6 weeks.

If you give "unlimited", then they'll take 3 weeks because they're afraid of looking like they're abusing the benefit.

Unless they're ok with you taking three years off work paid, it's not "unlimited". And honestly it shouldn't be legal to call it that.

Really what has happened is that vacation has changed from a guaranteed X days per year to 0 guaranteed days and only at manager discretion.

I've worked at multiple "unlimited pto" companies and my experience has not been this at all. Unlimited PTO = we won't babysit what you do with your time as long as you pull your weight.

But that’s also the problem. When you need the vacation the most because your work performance is suffering and you’re stressed out because of it, you’re least likely to take the vacation due to social pressure.

“Unlimited vacation” is a bad deal because of that. I basically burned out at my first job and didn’t take vacation once because I always felt behind on a team of three devs that never was caught up.

I can see unlimited vacation working in less dysfunctional jobs though, but everything works better in those. The more dysfunctional a job is, the more you need to be able to reach for the vacation lever.

Good point, and I think that's valid. I would say that it's not a bad deal, but it's probably as good as your manager. Sorry to hear about your burnout.

In other words: we expect you to deliver 100% of the time at 100%+, constantly, throughout the year. So if you take vacation, you better work your ass off when you come back to make up for it. That's the difference from normal PTO.

With normal PTO you are still expected to pull your weight...

Not for the time you're on vacation. Explicitly, no one expects you to "make up" for that time, and you might even get a few days or so (depending on your vacation length) to ease back in.

I've personally never had this experience at the unlimited PTO companies I've worked at, but I have had awful experiences with PTO at the start of my career when every company had fixed PTO. I really think it all depends on management.

> And honestly it shouldn't be legal to call it that

For general clarity: it's the Verge who is calling it "unlimited". Microsoft is specifically calling it "discresionary". It's not great reporting.

Important clarification, thanks. I'm ok with that terminology and it aligns well with the idea that this is more about limiting vacation and eliminating accrued leave payouts.

Translation:

Microsoft HR/Finance just discovered they won't have to payout/account for unused PTO on layoff/resignation in most states with this one weird trick.

^ this. Had the same arrangement at Dell; never used much of it, if any at all.

Has anyone who works for an "Unlimited time off" company ever tried to reduce their work week to a 4-day week or only a 5 hour work day + taking consistently 30 days off vacation during the year?

That would be what I'd consider a true "we believe you are most productive when you take the time off you need" policy. I have been a 4-day work week employee for some years now and I've never been more productive in my job. Yet, I somehow get the feeling that "Unlimited time off" companies would very quickly make sure this is not possible when employees would actually test the policy.

Yes. I was in the habit of not taking weeks off, so I started taking Fridays off during the summer/fall months. It worked out fine except that I missed out on many social (still online) events that tend to happen on Fridays. So I tried taking Mondays off but that shortened my working week too much and taking a week off when my motivation runs low is what I do now.

I've had "FTO" (Flexible Time Off) at 2 different companies now, including the one I'm at now. I personally like it but when I discuss it with friends I get mixed reactions.

> Microsoft will no longer require US employees to formally record vacation

I wish. I still need to track my days off because I work in the agency world and there's client billing involved

The following are some negatives you'll hear people say about unlimited time off, some valid, some are just opinions/speculation without any evidence.

- You no longer get paid for accrued and unused PTO days when you quit a job. Not all employers did this, but it's a definitely a thing. So some see switching to this system as benefiting more the company than the employees.

- Rewarding people with more days off the longer you were at a company gets thrown out the window. A previous company I was at converted to FTO and some long-term employees were pissed because of this. They felt their commitment to the company was ignored and discarded. They felt there was no reason to stay at any company long-term anymore.

- Depending on your manager, they can decline your vacation day requests without a second thought because they no longer feel they are limited and important. I have never personally experienced this, and I don't think I knew anyone that this happened to, but this is a valid concern I guess. I guess this is already an important thing in positions that require coverage while away.

- Unlimited days does not mean you can take a month off (again, depending on your company). Both the companies I worked at (one currently at) have a limit of how many consecutive days I could take off. 14 days (not including weekend/holidays) is my max.

- Depending on company and/or state (like CA), there's less urgency to "use it or lose it" and some people say that you actually take less days off than before. There will always be outliers of people who take more days than before. In 2022 I took 16 vacation and 4.5 sick days. So I averaged about the same amount of days off I had at non-unlimited-days companies. So there is some (anecdotal) validity to this. In 2023 I am going to try to take more vacation days off because I want to truly take advantage of unlimited days.

- If there's an employee on a team that takes more days off than others, animosity can build towards that member by other's who feel they are doing more of the work. Again, this is speculation and I have yet to see this happen in real life, but I've heard friends say this before.

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