How we handle time off

These policies are BS, what they really are is the unlimited right to negotiate for vacation time. They are also frequently chosen because they mean employers don't need to cut employees a check for vacation time not taken when they leave. When I left my last job which had this policy I asked for a check for vacation not taken, and was told that one reason they chose that policy was that they wouldn't have to cut such checks.

Any reasonable employer can make exceptions to a fixed vacation policy for things like sick leave, if an employee gets layed up for a month after a car wreck they can choose to pay them despite the policy.

Either type of policy can be interpreted generously or not, but with fixed vacation policies there are at least limits on how poorly you can be treated, and you know it up front.

Unfortunately, there's another side of the coin. I have worked alongside a couple of groups with a "take whatever you need when you need it" vacation/sick day policy. Either by choice or by necessity, they're disgusting workaholics without exception who routinely grind for 10-12 hours a day, every day, for months, fearing the work that will accumulate if they are home sick for a day or away for vacation for any period of time. They don't get paid more for working late. When I asked, they seem to each take one 5 day vacation once per year.

The saddest part of it all is their personal lives-- the wife of the boss of that group refuses to vacation to anywhere with any kind of internet access because she knows her husband will work instead of be mentally there with her. The other employees are single and friendless outside of work.

I'd very much prefer a more relaxed and less exploitative vacation/sick day system, but I think that a large cultural change has to happen in the US first. We don't have the luxury of the philosophical position that work is an intrinsic good-- the real consequences of this position are pretty brutal, and evident everywhere. Once we accept that work is value-neutral, we can start to be more relaxed about how much we actually have to work, and when we actually work. And we might just be a bit more relaxed about staying home when we're sick, provided that we understand our work is rarely more important than our health.

That said, I vastly prefer it to the alternative.. Just want to encourage teams that go down this road to not use these vacation policies as an accidental excuse not to pay attention to and discuss time off and whether it's working out for everyone as well as you'd hope or expect!

[1] My first exposure to this sentiment: http://www.amazon.com/Up-Organization-Corporation-Stifling-S...

[Edit - Just feel the need to plug harder - Seriously, go read Townsend's book. Published in 1970 and it (unfortunately) still reads incredibly forward thinking. It's basically Rework , written 35 years ago (with only respect to JF and DHH, I really enjoyed Rework as well).]

Focusing on 'what needs to be accomplished' is a great idea, in theory. But in practice, only management has any reasonable way to compare how much people are actually getting done. Those being managed cannot take any time off without at every step wondering 'Am I taking too much time off? Did I get everything done they wanted done?'

I have no doubt that it's possible to create a culture in which unlimited vacation time can work well, but the rule is not the solution, and the culture would work with or without it.

When I left my first job that had a generous but still limited vacation policy, I got a nice sized check paying me back for my unused vacation. I never felt like I was restricted from taking vacation and I definitely liked the money that actually ended up paying for the week off I took between jobs.

At my previous employer, we had a four week vacation policy, and everybody took their four weeks, and the more senior people made a point of it. To a great degree, this culture has to be instilled from the top. If the guy with the corner office isn't taking his vacation days, nobody will feel comfortable doing so.

Vacation times aren't mandated in order to manage employees - they are are mandated in order to give them authority and to require their managers to manage around their employees vacation time. By providing the employees express, written authority to override their managers, they force vacation time to be addressed.

So, yes, this is kindergarten, and yes, be happy that the overall system is set up to mandate vacations. Otherwise, there will be no vacations.

I think this strikes a good balance of establishing a culture of taking vacation while allowing people to take off the time they need.

It's hard to have a non-policy policy because people are so different.

I do agree with the article though, because I feel like the 8 hours a day, 5 days a week "norm" for knowledge workers is kind of silly. You're probably getting 5 hours a day of really productive time. The other 3 hours they are banking/scheduling/handling the business of life or taking a mental break.

Factory shift work is probably better suited to the structure described, but that work is quickly becoming extinct.

The key point in the article is that you have to talk about it openly, and don't shame people in to not taking time off.

Sometimes (especially with client facing roles) sound judgement is the most important characteristic of an employee. If they don't get mental breaks every few months, they might show poor judgement.

The fact that pre-college schooling has attendance rules is irrelevant; in that situation, pupils are minors and therefore the school is (in the USA at least) legally responsible for them during the school day (in loco parentis).

With work, the company is paying you in exchange for your time. You've agreed to come to work every day, and the company pays you a salary in return. A vacation policy is a negotiable benefit for the employee, just like anything else in your compensation and benefits package. If you have a no-policy vacation policy, you are basically at the whim of your employer (some handle these non-policies well, others not), but if you have a real policy, you are entitled to take those days, just like your health care, paycheck, retirement contributions, etc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/01/unlimited-vacation-...

We have "unlimited" sick time, but the manager gets to decide when too much is too much. When the manager decides you used too much then it is unpaid leave. It works ok most of the time, but the company will force you to short term disability after being out a week.

I am a bigger fan of PTO. Lump all vacation, sick and holiday into one big number and let me deal with it as I see fit. That way I know everyone is getting a fair shake.

I've been working with "unmetered" vacation for 3 years now and I've taken more time off than I ever did when I was earning 30 days a year of PTO.

EDIT: The reason I ask is I'm curious to know if the pressure to bill by the hour is as powerful as working to "build the next feature" for a product. The customer is different in each case. Does this make a difference?

For a significant portion of those people, offering that kind of flexibility would be a disaster, because they would see it as carte blanche to do as little as they could possibly get away with doing, with as many days sick or on holiday/vacation as they liked. These people aren't motivated by the work they're doing, in any meaningful sense, and they would just as well not be doing it at all if that option were presented to them.

Sure, you could say "don't hire those people", but larger organisations need lots of bodies to fill often quite dull jobs, and you can't really afford to treat those people "as adults", whatever that means.

Um, no. This is not universally required. I once answered an email about an impromptu afternoon meeting from a beach in Mexico - a quick phone call sorted out the one pressing detail, and the meeting was just rescheduled.

We work in a pretty great industry, so might as well optimize for it.

It turns out we quintupled the number of sick days for the same period as the year before. Draw your own conclusion, but I say workers cannot be trusted to manage this themselves.

It might work in a shop of 5 - 20 folks but at we are and over 10 times that, it is untenable.

It's pretty amazing to me that people tolerate the evolutionary step backward between college and the travails of an entry-level grunt in "the real world".

One really disgusting trend that's coming along is pooling sick days into vacation, which is of course never advertised when people take the job. So they think they're getting 3-4 weeks of vacation but they're actually getting less. I worked at a company that pulled that bullshit once, and because no one took sick days, the result was that everyone had a constant cold for 5 months out of the year.