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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Even worse is the new trend in technology companies to eliminate "Set Vacation". It used to be the case that you felt "obliged" somehow to take your 10 days of vacation a year, because you saw it piling up. Even better, if you were laid off, you could get the vacation in cash, and that helped when you were cut off without a job.

But now, a lot of technology companies are saying, "No Set Vacation - you need to negotiate with your manager if you want some" - which, in my experience, has resulted in a lot of people over the last two years taking zero vacation. It's not good for them. It's not good for the company. About the only people who are happy about this are Finance who no longer have to carry that liability on their books.

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This is sometimes called -- in one of the most Orwellian coinages in the industry -- "unlimited vacation days."

I was very wary of the "unlimited vacation policy" at my new company and asked about it during interviews. Most interviewers agreed that it could cause people to not feel free to take vacation, but that the company really meant it and there wouldn't be negative consequences if you took vacation.

Fast forward to 6 months into the job and I've taken days off for long wedding weekends and have some more extended travel planned in the future.

I agree that "unlimited vacation days" can be a red flag, but it really just means to be more curious and thoughtful about the culture during the interview process and find out what it really means.

I've just accepted a position at a YC startup with "unlimited vacation days". The founders seemed genuine when they said that as long as your work is getting done, it wasn't a problem.

I still agree that it causes ambiguity about how much time off is "too much".

Same here. I wish they would give a target number of days to shoot for. I've even asked and I always get wishy-washy answers.

My guess is that its to preserve cash. My current employer gave me 5 weeks/year, little of which I've used, and they're going to have to pay out almost 8 weeks of vacation on my last day next week. At my current rate, its a significant amount of cash.

If you're a startup, that can be painful to cough up.

This is why employers should force their employees to take those holidays.

Apologies for the side-track, but I once had a boss offer to give me "unlimited vacation days" as a colloquialism for firing me after complaining when he took away some vacation days company-wide. Good to see the phrase has evolved.

I recently joined a NYC company with "unlimited vacation days", and they do actually mean it. I mentioned this very trend when I was interviewing. They responded by saying they expect me to take AT LEAST three weeks of vacation a year.

Now, some of my coworkers are workaholics and won't take that much. But I have had success in just saying "I want to take these weeks off."

I dislike seeing this sentiment all over HN just because it isn't as absolutely true as everyone wants to believe.

I work for a company with unlimited vacation, and in my first 10 months working there will have taken ~3-3.5 weeks of vacation days cumulatively that I probably wouldn't have if I had to conserve a limited set of days. Nobody has given me crap over it, nor have I felt pressured to not take those days. It's just a matter of having a company that actually wants reasonable work-life balance for their employees.

15 days vacation isn't unheard of in the tech world.

Sure. My point is, I would have saved much more days because "what if I wanted to take a week in August before my days roll over?" Maybe that's just my personality type.

I agree, in a similar situation. However I think it takes someone who is confident enough to take those days off. I'm sure there are people in both of our organizations who would take more if someone told them they have X numbers of days to take before they lose them.

I agree, I was super skeptical when I started with my current employer due to this policy. I cynically assumed it was intended to somehow deter me from taking any vacation. Then I took quite a bit of vacation and got absolutely no pushback.

I think that our relationship with vacation has to change to one where we consider it a vital part of being a professional. When that attitude shifted for me, I became a pretty big fan of the unlimited vacation policy.

I figure that the worst case scenario, I'll get denied the vacation and I can choose if I want to move on or stay..no harm done.

I'm talking about the average/majority case. I also have a colleague who managed to talk his way (after completing a major re-architecture of our product) into a 3 month paid vacation. He gave his notice 2 weeks after coming back from that.

So - if you are a high performing individual, you can make it work for you, but for a lot of people, unlimited days morphs into no days.

But - I think your kicker really captures the impact of this policy "t's just a matter of having a company that actually wants reasonable work-life balance for their employees."

After my employer was acquired we adopted the new owners' "unlimited" vacation policy. I have heard from a manager in another part of the business that her staff now take less holiday, but for my team I'm making it clear that I wish them to take at least 20 days off per year. That's 5 days more than we were officially allowed previously. I figure that if they go around claiming vacation is unlimited they don't have much choice if someone holds them to it (and 20 days really isn't that much).

The ironic part about this is that companies think this is a benefit to the employee, when in reality this seems to be a classic example of the psychological anchoring bias that influences people to take LESS vacation. For those who aren't familiar, this is a well established psychological heuristic that says our decisions are heavily influenced by some 'anchoring' information, in this case, the number of vacation days allowed.

I'm heavily paraphrasing Kahneman here, but numerous experiments have shown this effect in a variety of ways. Perhaps most counterintuitively, in an experiment where an arbitrary limit was set on the purchase of soup on sale, the amount of soup people bought was twice what was bought when no arbitrary limit was set. I'm not aware of any empirical studies examining this with vacation days, but anecdotal evidence like this seems to support the influence of this effect. I'd be extremely interested to see the data on the number of vacation days taken by employees at the no set vacation companies vs. others.

Right, so this policy should come with a minimum number of days per year, instead of a maximum. Maybe some days roll over a year, but not too long.

My experience with "Unlimited Vacation" was bad. I took maybe 3 weeks off over 1.75 years and always felt bad about it because there were others who never took days, though some later burned out. I get the idea, it's actually a nice idea, but you must have a culture around it that supports the idea or it won't work.

On the flip side of that coin, I've watched people take 1-2 months of vacation within their unlimited vacation policy.

It really depends on who you're working for.

Yep. I didn't take 1-2 months last year, but took over the standard 15 days most people get. This year will be the same.

>>Even better, if you were laid off, you could get the vacation in cash

Even better, in a few places you don't have to be let go encash leaves.

My last company had a leave encashment policy. I remember, I hadn't taken a single leave in 5 years. I knew many of my senior colleagues hadn't taken one in 7+ years. When the mandatory leave encashment period arrived, we ended up with a quite a good chunk of cash.

After that the leave encashment policy was amended by the then CFO, realizing what had just happened. The new policy was designed to have a concept of 'leave expiry'(If you don't rest, may be you don't deserve rest in the future).

I guess the new CFO's now realize, 'leave expiry' policies force the other kind of culture- where every one wants to take leaves which now forces the people who other wise don't take leave to take it, because no one wants to 'waste' leaves.

So the most obvious solution is to put in a 'unlimited vacation'. So that the onus of leave is on you and your manager, if you there is ever a free time in your project you can have that vacation(Which will never come to pass anyway). This way you neither have to pay leave encashment nor have employees who enjoy full benefit of leaves. Instead the company as a whole now has lesser employees taking fewer leaves.

And here is one the major reasons (besides visas, health care etc.) why I would never and for (almost) no amount of money work in the USA.

I'm certain the productivity and quality of live of many if not most people will decline over time without sufficient time to relax and focus on non work related things. Especially in high-tech/creative/innovative field I never understood how this is not understood by some people /companies.

I suppose this depends on the company. My firm recently enacted this policy, and it's worked out great. Everyone is taking a lot more vacation, not less. People don't come into the office when they're sick any more. When the company trusts its employees and wants them to have a good quality of life (because this makes for happy, productive workers), this policy works.

> "No Set Vacation - you need to negotiate with your manager if you want some"

No set vacation means no vacation quite often. Institutional ideology works on unwritten rules. So officially yeah leave any time that's cool, un-officially if you leave and Joe Smith here is working nights then well guess who'll get a talking to be about lack of motivation and performance.

I think the best policy is generous vacation time (4-5 weeks) and being forced to take it. The whole saving for a mini-retirement is problematic. Also I have noticed most people don't recognize burnout. So that forced time to rest and do something else is more beneficial than it appears on the surface.

EDIT: To add. I am becoming more convinced that vacation policy is one of the best proxies that show how much companies care about their employees' well being and happiness. Now, don't get me wrong, I am not saying companies should do that. It is up to them. They all will say the do though, but that is one metric that shows if they really do or not.

Is there no legal requirement for minimum number of days off?

Is there no legal requirement for minimum number of days off?

It depends on the nature of the employment. A few occupations (notably in banking) have MANDATORY days off. (Forcing bankers in certain categories of jobs to take vacations is a good way to detect long-term embezzlement schemes.) But there are definitely programming jobs in the United States in which the company says, "You can take time off whenever you like," which in practice means "You can take time off whenever the company isn't in crunch time," which ends up meaning never. Freedom of contract and flexibility in working arrangements is the hallmark of the United States economy and indeed is one of the reasons that the United States is as wealthy as it is--people choose the trade-offs they like among many possibilities.

The banking example you cite are voluntary industry practices or self-regulation, not legally enforced.

No, there is not.

Nope, no minimum vacation time.

Also, to save you a few years of surprises, here are some other factoids:

there's minimal healthcare, likely to be canceled by the next president

minimum wage is the equivalent of 5.33 euros and for waiters its only 1.57euros

Payday is not mid month but well after you do the work.

You can be fired at anytime without any waring for any reason from most jobs. Frequently a security guard will escort you out of the building.

But on the upside:

There's a death penalty in 3/5 of the country

The notion that the world is 6000 years old is sometimes taught in school.

You can buy a gun instantly in most states.

We have a per capita GDP almost as high as a northern European country.

We may not be socialist. Well, ok, some people say we are so never mind.

The US is one of (or the only?) industrialized nations to have no legally mandated amount of paid time off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacation_time#Statutory_Vacatio...

Welcome to America! Land of the Free!

Unions get a bad rap, often well deserved, but they were created to solve this problem, among others.

Where I work is transitioning to this style. It's not affected me, yet, but for the employees who have been moved over to the program thus far I've gotten mixed reviews. One told me they were able to get the time off, but were told to make sure to maintain access via email.

That's not vacation in my book. When I leave for vacation I don't touch anything related to work. With vacation time, I just request it and as long as there are no conflicts the time is mine to use. I have no responsibility other than not being at work. I worry I'll lose that disconnect with 'unlimited vacation.'

I'm starting to believe this complaint just stems from people that don't actually want to take vacation and are just upset because they don't get an extra fistful of cash.

I work for a startup with unlimited vacation and know several others that do as well. Anyone who wants to take a vacation can take it at almost any time and for weeks at a time - no questions asked. The only time I've ever seen any conflict is when there was a major release planned at the same time as the beginning of one vacation, in which case the employee just pushed it back a few days.

I've made an interesting observation in my team when I worked at companies with "no set vacation" policy: I've always had some people who never took vacation and I've also had other people who wanted more vacation time than one would expect. There was no middle ground.

You know, for all these horrible employers, who is it that is loaning them money to start these businesses? How are they able to persuade others to loan them money to start this madness?

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