I'm a hardware engineer so remote work isn't very important for me. I don't really want a full lab at my home. Other things are nice but pale in comparison to having good work, good coworkers, good boss, and management I can respect.
In my company it means you can take the time off whenever you want, but we are understaffed, so if you take time off the whole project will be stopped and we won't raise money. But of course you can take vacation as much as you want.
So for the last 2 years I have had max 3 consecutive days off (and only once). I will never buy bs "unlimited PTO" again.
But yeah, I started sending my CV already.
I'm curious what you mean by "owning" your time off. I wonder if this is moreso a problem with how unlimited vacation is sometimes implemented than the idea of unlimited vacation itself.
If that's not fine, then it's not actually unlimited, and you have to guess where the limit is - so you can't really be guaranteed a certain number of days off.
Though I guess an org could still set a minimum and then call it unlimited, though in practice I expect that that minimum is basically also the maximum.
Like GP, I'm strongly opposed to "unlimited PTO" policies. For the few devs and workers that are helped by it, I think there are too many cases where the ambiguity and uncertainty makes people take less PTO than under a fairly generous, spelled-out policy (and there is usually no accrued balance to be paid out if you leave having taken less than the normal amount).
I won't go quite so far as to say I'd quit if my company made the transition, but it is a strong negative if that is on the benefits docket.
What do you look for in a 401k?