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Comment by freetime2 | Hacker News Reader

On paper I’ve never used up all my PTO, even though in reality I was probably taking more time off than I was allotted. None of my managers have ever cared, and one of my first managers even explicitly told me not to bother reporting PTO (“you can get a nice check when you leave for unused PTO”).

Obviously this varies from place to place, but I believe the practice was pretty widespread in silicon valley at least. And this was one of the justifications for companies moving to “unlimited” PTO policies - employees weren’t reporting PTO diligently, and they didn’t like having to pay people out when they left.

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IMO its the only (shitty) justification.

Unlimited PTO is a scam.

Hard disagree. Everyone's mentioned the toxic workplace thing, so I won't bother, but I will say that I loathe having some limited number of vacation days per year that I have to ration out like a starving orphan with a slice of bread.

Do I skip the 4th of July beach trip so I can have an extra three days around New Year's? Should we leave on a Friday to visit the grandparents, or should I save that day in case I need it in the fall?

And in December, suddenly half of my coworkers realize they have two weeks left to spend 9 vacation days they didn't think about, that won't roll over and get paid out - and now, it's me and one other person having to split the on-call shift to cover.

Give me unlimited PTO. I'll fight for it in a toxic workplace, and/or get another job.

There’s a fix here: a minimum amount, which you can exceed. Just because some accrues doesn’t mean the org can’t be flexible above that.

You'd think, but we went from 'unlimited' to .. maybe that, but nobody will say what the definition of the term we use for the 'above minimum' is. Frankly I'd rather have it fixed at any positive number of days above the current contractual amount than have this ambiguous, stressful, manager-dependent, inherently unfair non-quota.

I'm in Canada, and that's how the unlimited PTO work here. Because there's a legal minimum by law (afaik), we track PTO and how much balance we have. And they have to pay if you have a positive balance - in case you weren't taking the PTO.

I hear you, brother. It's not my situation now, but I have had years when I would go in to work feeling awful so that I could have a day to use when my child turned up sick.

Give me unlimited PTO.

You realize there is no such thing, right?

I turned down 2 consulting offers because of unlimited PTO. One person I knew who worked at one place said it as impossible to get more than 4 weeks and most people got 3 based on metrics.

Took a boring corporate job with 25 days plus a lot of extra time for sick family, 3 months of paternity leave, and lots more holidays.

Indeed it is a scam. Biggest problem with unlimited pto is that managers don’t care until you take what they feel is a disproportionate amount of time off. With a fixed number of PTO days, managers can tell you take time off , so they don’t have to pay out at end of fiscal year for unused days.

That money doesn't come out of the managers' paycheck; does it even come out of their budget? Do they care?

Real PTO is a liability that shows up on the company's balance sheet. I'm sure they care if their manager tells them, "hey we need to reduce the amount of outstanding PTO and your department is dragging us down, fix it".

At least at my job it “comes out of my paycheck” and “budget” because my employees bill their time and all my KPIs are based on yadda yadda so yes short sighted managers could see it see it taking from both. Personally I’m not a numbers person and would rather concentrate on having a good team and producing a good product and let the numbers do what they do. I don’t even look at PTO requests and just approve them.

I prefer unlimited PTO. I can see toxic workplaces making it worse than the alternative. But I’ve only worked in places where it was no issue for me to take 4-5 weeks off per year on their unlimited vacation policy.

Well, yeah. Everything is easy in a functional workplace. You can even have de facto unlimited PTO while not having it officially.

Official Unlimited PTO is a scam because of how easy it is to abuse in toxic workplaces. It’s a shortcut for saying there’s no minimum and you can take vacation when everything is caught up (nothing is ever caught up).

I was lucky enough to work at copy.ai as they were defining their PTO policy and got the CEO to agree to unlimited PTO along with a minimum of 3 weeks.

This is the best way to do it. The biggest blocker to folks taking advantage of the unlimited PTO is "my peers aren't doing it", which required PTO circumvents neatly.

And forcing people to take PTO (especially in 2+ week chunks) is also a good thing for the company: it helps the company identify and fix single points of failure in their employees skills and knowledge.

And for those of you who are lucky enough to to currently have non-toxic workplaces, are you sure management changes or business needs wont change this in the future?

A toxic workplace is a toxic workplace, whatever PTO you have.

A toxic workplace can make fixed PTO just as miserable as unlimited PTO if they want to, and vice versa

Exactly. Sure, take your PTO, just get three approvals first, use this broken online HR web site to make sure payroll knows, and confirm that this is your cell phone number just in case we need to reach you. Oh wait, no, sorry, that date range is our really busy season, no big deal, don't worry the Grand Canyon will still be there next month.

4 weeks leave is a legal minimum where I live and public holidays come on top of that (12 per year).

Many employers give 5. It accrues if you don’t take it.

So why not just call it "Our lovely 5 week vacation policy?"

Do you actually prefer the gratuitous cognitive dissonance of calling it "unlimited" when everyone knows it isn't (and everyone knows that everyone knows, etc)?

Does 4-5 weeks mean 20-25 days? If so that's pretty much 'statutory to bog standard' in the UK, which aiui is on the low end of Europe.

> take 4-5 weeks off per year

how do you come up with this number though. If its a set number like that then why not make that official PTO.

I take off when I want time off.

If it's a set number then usually you need to worry about how many days you have accrued. So you are not able to take 1 day PTO until you've worked for a few weeks. Or you might have trouble scheduling time off early in the year having used most of your allowance around the holidays. Unlimited means the system is flexible.

yes but how did you come up N weeks number though. That was the problem i had with previous jobs with unlimited.

I just took off time I wanted off and ended up taking 4-5 weeks.

Honestly as a software engineer I feel like my days "on" are close to many people's days "off" anyway. So days off just meant I could travel.

If it’s unlimited PTO, why not take 52 weeks off a year?

I got a job offer from a company that offered unlimited PTO a few months back and wish I had accepted and then given that a shot.

Edit: If you’re downvoting me because “of course unlimited doesn’t mean unlimited”, you’ve just stumbled across the reason why unlimited PTO policies are nonsense.

“Of course it’s not unlimited, you’re going to retire some day!”

Unlimited PTO is fine. I've had it at 3 different companies for the last ~10 years with zero issues. It's toxic work culture that is the problem.

Well who cares if it's toxic. If your PTO was truly "unlimited" you could take every day of the year off et voila... no toxic culture for you at all.

Oh right, it's not actually "unlimited" by any definition of the word because you'd be fired ten times over for taking all the year off.

"Unlimited" but with huge restrictions, like cell phone data. Except worse, because now it depends on how much your boss likes you.

Ok so sounds like your anger is directed at the wording itself. Think of it as “discretionary PTO” then.

That doesn't make sense. If you are fired one time, you can't be fired the other nine times unless you were rehired[1]. What you are saying is a contradiction.

1: and it is not likely you'll be rehired if you haven't done any work

It's also true that he can't possibly take the entire year off as PTO, because he'd be fired before it's allowed to happen. So taking a full year PTO is already a contradiction.

Then in classicial logic, a contradiction can imply anything: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion Therefore he can be fired 0,1,2,10,100,1000 times, with all those possibilities being true simultaneously.

Highly entertaining! Hahaha

Completely agree. It really means “take less vacation than your boss”

It isn't exactly a scam. But the of needs to be enforced. My wife's company has a lottery for people who take at least three weeks of (she gets unlimited pto) Where it can be a scam is when you request it and get rejected.

> Unlimited PTO is a scam.

People who think of their time off in terms of monetary value often see it that way, but if the problem you're trying to solve is less like "how to I maximize the value I accrue from this job" and more like "how can I make time for all the things I want to do with my life", doing away with the nickel-and-diming scarcity feeling which comes from rationing out and accounting for a limited number of PTO days can make it much easier to actually use and enjoy time away from work.

If that is the case then, as others have pointed out, a minimum required vacation policy is the better solution.

In contrast, my first SWE position out of college adhered to PTO allotments and I accrued 6/8 of a day off each month I worked. Then, my father died, I missed a couple of weeks, and spent several years in time-off debt! Three hours south of SF.

Conversely, I just came from an employment situation with unlimited PTO. After an especially long project, I took three solid weeks off to recover. This gave the CEO pause, but it was in alignment with our policy, I was grateful, and, I think, the company benefitted significantly from my efforts while I was available!

No real point to make here, I suppose. Just sharing a varied experience.

Which company, if you could share?

This kind of empathatic, humane management is quite rare.

I have seen that the manager lets it slide but behind the scenes "keeps record" and it shows up in your performance report. This usually happens when the manager is under pressure themselves and needs to find a scapegoat. Who better to scapegoat that the undocumented PTO taker.

This is my experience as well. I worked at 5 different companies in my career and at 3 of them nobody cared about reporting PTO. Now we have an “Unlimited PTO” policy and everybody on my team takes roughly a month off every year and nobody cares. This is in NYC. Not Silicon Valley but it seems culture is similar.

I'm left a bit confused here about your interpretation - or at least those of your managers.

When we're talking about this "nice check when you leave" - what does that money represent? If you are taking more time off than your official policy it isn't compensation for working more hours than expected.

Some companies pay you for your unused PTO when you leave the company.

If you aren’t reporting your PTO, your “unused PTO” doesn’t go down and you can still get paid for it when you leave.

Yeah, I get the mechanism of what is going on. I'm more interested in why all the parties involved think doing that is justified. Why do people think they should be given a lump sum when they quit. Do they see it as linked to leave somehow? Is it just custom to have a goodbye gift? Do they see it as a bit dishonest but an open secret? Or is it an implicit right?

I would say it was an open secret that was a bit dishonest. It’s a little thing that managers can do to keep their employees happy that doesn’t come out of their budget. And in addition to providing a little bonus compensation, it also eliminates a somewhat dehumanizing aspect of having to ask for permission and track time away from the office.

This was many years ago, but I still remember when my manager came by my desk and said “don’t ever submit another PTO request again. I trust you to take as much personal time as you need and still do a great job.” It made me feel valued and respected, which to me was a lot more important than the small cash bonus when I finally did leave (I eventually left when that company was acquired and found that the new company did not value their employees as much).

that's where unlimited vacation days come in. You don't earn them, so you don't get them when you leave. That's the point of unlimited PTO. Remove the liability for the company.

If companies cared about getting employees to take time off, they would force a minimum. "Take 4 weeks off each year, and if you don't we will turn off your access card and vpn access in December."

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