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Comment by lisasays | Hacker News Reader

Then why not just offer 15-25 days of explicit vacation? That you can, you know, actually use?

Like a decent, healthy, civilized company. That doesn't try to mess with its employees heads (quite so blatantly and needlessly).

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In some places if you have vacation days in your contract then the company is required to pay you out remaining days that you left unused.

It winds up being cheaper for them to offer Unlimited Days* because then they don't pay out un-taken days.

* Subject to manager approval of course. I strongly suspect there is still a target number of days allowed for each employee based on their place in the org, and requests for days past that number will usually be denied unless there are extenuating circumstances.

Exactly, that's why companies offer unlimited rather than a generous amount.

I worked for a firm that gave 30 days of PTO a year (in addition to holidays and whatnot). They budgeted it as an expense and planned accordingly.

It would be interesting to see what "unlimited" vacation giving firms budget and plan for as a liability.

If the goal is high employee morale, then they should budget and plan a very high amount. If the goal is to "benefit signal" to pretend they have good benefits, then they will only budget a low amount.

They plan zero. Unlimited PTo relies on the rest of the business processes to regulate behavior.

For consultants, %. Billable will dictate your unlimited PTO. for widget making, quotas will work. For project assignments, expect tighter deadlines.

Company culture will dictate usage and accounting gets to remove the liability.

> It would be interesting to see what "unlimited" vacation giving firms budget and plan for as a liability.

“Unlimited” (=non-accruable) PTO isn’t a liability, that’s (from the firm’s perspective) the whole point of using it.

Yup. Changing jobs and I’m expecting to get 400 accrued hours paid out from my previous job.

Have you never taken a vacation?

Of course I have, but not a whole lot. 6 weeks a year builds up over five years.

>In some places if you have vacation days in your contract then the company is required to pay you out remaining days that you left unused.

So? They should factor that in as a business expense, like your regular pay.

If you take no vacation days and end up getting paid 100% of them, it should be accounted, and if you do take some days, then the company can have that money.

Unlimited pro is basically an accounting trick as it reduces your liabilities. The employment terms dictate the outcome.

Sure. I'm just talking about the origin of the unlimited PTO trend since you said the origins were about convincing people to use less PTO. There are a lot more companies offering generous fixed PTO now, and that was partly to compete with unlimited.

If you're a consultant, it's basically a meaningless offer as you're still X% billable.

If there's some other can ncrete metric, infinite PTO just means whoever already has their privileged position.

Even better, why not offer unlimited vacation combined with a set minimum number of, say, 25 days vacation everybody should take?

My place switched to unlimited, when pressed they stated you're required to take 10 days.

Prior to this, they had seniority up to 20 days based on number of year.

This was absolutely about removing liability from their books. And sold purely as a "look how ESG we are"

The law should kill the seniority thing for vacation days too. Perhaps make them stick for a year (to avoid somebody being hired and then living after 6 months 20 days of which are paid vacations), but then everybody should be offered the same number of days to take annually. After all they've worked for the same number of days in that year as any older employee too.

And some of those newer employees are older (in age) than younger employees with greater seniority.

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