Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy | Hacker News Reader

Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

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675 pointsmichaelochurch329 comments

I've said it before and I'll say it again, unlimited days off (or "open") and zero days off are identical.

If you have unlimited vacation people are inclined to take less and people respect the vacation you take less ("as you can always take more!").

Here's a study[0] (PDF) called "Overwhelmed America: Why Don’t We Use Our Earned Leave?" It is biased (travel association) but interesting nonetheless.

According to this study[1] you need at least ten consecutive days of leave to "de-stress" from work. Short vacations aren't as effective as long ones. In "europe" a two week vacation (10 work days) is common/standard. As opposed to American's "long weekends."

A lot of these "unlimited" places have a "as long as your work gets done" policy, meaning you can take tons of short days off or afternoons off, but almost no extended holidays (e.g. travel abroad, out of state, etc).

[0] http://traveleffect.com/sites/traveleffect.com/files/Overwhe...

My friend works at a company with unlimited vacation and they pay you $1000 for every full week you take off.

Your normal pay + $1000 or just $1000 ?

In Sweden you actually get a ~12% higher pay during your vacation.

Do you know why? Is it just to encourage people to take more vacation time?

Don't know, it is generally mandatory to take 4 weeks, where you can't be denied taking 3 weeks in a row in the months June to August.

I think the idea is that you should be able to spend while on vacation... but not really sure.

I've no idea about Sweden, but one theory could be that you spend more money on holidays. You are eating out, you're spending money on accomodation.

I also do not know why but I've read about encouraging people to take days off has effects like people who are ill taking care of themselves and not spreading a cold around the office and ruining the whole work place attitude.

This is why in sensible countries sick days are not subtracted from your holidays.

I don't know about Sweden but in Finland we get a nice bonus after you come back from your vacation.

This was introduced because in the 1960s and 70s a lot of skilled workforce (several %, tens of thousands of people) emigrated to Sweden, in particular to work for Volvo, Saab and other industries. Workers had their full (4 weeks or so) summer vacation and then left for Sweden, where they were offered a house, a car and a relocation package.

This pattern kept repeating for a few years, so to counter the wave of emigration, the after-vacation bonus was introduced.

As weird as it may seem, in Mexico we have the same deal, although if I remember correctly, by law we get a 25% extra pay on vacation days.

Some places use this as a benefit to lure employees. For example I worked at a place where I got 75% extra pay on vacation days.

The downside is that getting more than the minimum mandated by law (6 DAYS a year) is not that common. For example, for that place that gave 75% extra, I had I believe 10 (or 12) days a year, and it was actually above industry standard.

Edit: To answer one of the posters below, I believe someone once explained to me, that at least in Mexico, the extra pay is supposedly to make it easier for families to actually go out of town and spend money, so it becomes a factor that helps drive the economy. I.e. if you have vacations but no money, then you won't spend anything and ultimately won't take vacations. This way you get vacations and also have money to spend during those days. At least that's how it's supposed to go.

http://www.logicmonitor.com/about/jobs/

Paid, paid (paid2) vacations: We’re so serious about you being recharged that we go above and beyond your regular paid vacations; you’ll get an extra $1,000 when you take a week off of work and fully “unplug” (no work, no exceptions!).

Depending on your base pay, I guess it could be around 8-12% for most developers.

Full Contact does the same thing: employees get $7500 to go on vacation, but only get it if they actually go on vacation.

https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/paid-paid-vacation/

I'm curious to read about what it means to "de-stress" from work but I think you forgot the [1] citation.

Maybe this is not common, but if I worked at a company with "unlimited vacation", I would definitely take extended vacations occasionally. I think as long as you timed them appropriately and gave advance notice, you could easily take a week or more off.

Wow, so in Silicon Valley a week is an 'extended vacation'! I used to think that meant a month or more. How fast the world is changing.

It is compared to a "long weekend" as described in the parent comment. Although it would be nice, taking a month off every year would be grail-status vacation time for a US employee I think.

Also, I don't work in Silicon Valley.

Huh. My vacation started at a month when I joined. But I usually take it a week at a time. And I work in the US, for a Silicon Valley company.

which one?

I work for a Boulder tech startup with an unlimited vacation policy.

Last year I took a month in Japan and South Korea, I just returned from two weeks in Tokyo, Taipei and Hong Kong. I also spent two weeks in Europe earlier this year, plus some odd long weekends and a planned week away around Christmas. I think my total for 2014 comes to around six weeks.

We also have a policy of working one month a year remotely from anywhere and the company pays part of the expense. I'm heading to Hanoi next year to take advantage of that. Our CEO/co-founder took his family to Australia for a month.

An exception? Probably. But it works for us.

as an european, i'm envious.

Well, here in Uruguay, you have to take 10 days minimum, at least twice a year.

Plus you get close to a week off a few times a year (Easter and Carnival). So a week is nothing special here :)

It has a silver lining: it forces the company to plan for backups and make processes more explicit.

Color me envious. I currently get 10 paid vacation days total per year.

Twenty years ago, back in England, I had 5 weeks of vacation and standard public holidays. I moved to the United States and after twenty years I have "progressed" to zero vacation days and all public holidays as unpaid time off.

You won't stay envious for long if you get my paycheck :P .

I'm currently considering a move to the U.S. (the grass is always greener on the other side).

In large parts of Europe, 3+ weeks contiguously is the norm for summer vacations.

Thanks for the link to that study.

In "europe" a two week vacation (10 work days) is common/standard. As opposed to American's "long weekends."

To that point, if you've ever wondered (as I have) about the differences in philosophy on the topic of vacation between America and Europe, you may enjoy this paper [1]. It attempts to examine those differences. It's entitled "Europeans Work To Live and Americans Live To Work (Who is Happy to Work More: Americans or Europeans?)."

Interesting paragraph: "This is the first study to test empirically whether working more makes Americans happier than Europeans. This study suggests that as the number of work hours increases, Americans become happier about life than Europeans. The purpose of this study was to document this relationship. More research is needed to find out why working more makes Americans happier than Europeans. I just note here one possible explanation: Americans may work more because they believe more than Europeans do that hard work brings success."

I'm American, and I love taking time away to recharge. I'm fortunate enough to be able to completely break away and unplug. I don't work while I'm on vacation, and I don't check email either. Again, I'm quite fortunate, as I know a lot of people simply can't do that for various reasons. I do wish our culture placed more emphasis on the importance of down-time. It just makes so much intuitive sense to me, and my personal productivity seems to corroborate the intuitive feeling that I have about the topic.

[1] http://people.hmdc.harvard.edu/~akozaryn/myweb/docs/final_wo...

- - -

Edit: Here is another interesting article on the topic. "Reluctant Vacationers: Why Americans Work More, Relax Less, than Europeans"

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/reluctant-vacatio...

> This study suggests that as the number of work hours increases, Americans become happier about life

This makes sense. From a very early age, Americans are inundated with the idea that their worth is tied to if they work hard and have a job. Those that don't have a job or those that aren't perceived as working hard are below them. The worst thing they can say about someone is they are lazy.

I work from home 2-3 days a week. My in-laws believe I goof off and play games (which they also disapprove of) or watch TV all day. Nothing will dissuade them of that belief unless I change to working at the office for long hours.

My husband and I work from home, and my inlaws can't figure out why we also send our toddlers to daycare.

> their worth is tied to if they work hard

The stress being on working hard. Efficiency is less of a priority.

I think for many Americans, work is life. You get up, you spend an hour in the commute to work, you spend your 9 hours at work, you spend some more because overtime is expected, you commute home, you watch some reality television and go to bed.

At work you have made friends, you spend time browsing the internet, following up on your hobbies, etc. This is where life ends up happening. 8 hours consumed by sleep, or the avoidance of sleep, 3 hours in the process of getting ready and getting to and from work, 10 hours of work. When you're at home you're too tired to do much in the way of hobbies, so instead you do the few things that you're not going to get away with doing at work, maybe you have a drink, play video games, watch TV. But hey, maybe your work has a facility to let you play video games and watch TV anyways when you're working overtime. So instead of getting home and doing things for 3-4 hours, you stay at work with your coworker "friends" and spend your time knowing that if you want to take a break, there is a break room right there. You don't use it for those 4 hours, but you know you can, you know, if you weren't so busy, or if you really need it.

Contrast that to somewhere like Germany, which is where this article was written. Work days end early. The culture in Germany is not to live at work. Work is for working. You come to do a job, not to have interpersonal relationships with co-workers. The average work week in Germany is the lowest of all OECD countries at 25.6 hours per week according to a 2011 study.

I think the reason that Americans live to work is not because of something specific to Americans, but rather that workplace culture demands that Americans spend so much time at work that their work BECOMES their life. I mean, if you are working 80 hour weeks and commuting, and actually sleeping, it's impossible to have a life outside of work, but we need to have a life, so that life takes place at work.

So when Americans work more, they see their associates more, they are in the environment that they're most familiar with, they are basically at their home. On the other hand, when Germans work more, they are away from home.

I guess the question is which is better for people, and which is better for industry. Germany's industry is doing well, and I think that with shrinking demand for human resources, a more efficient, but shorter individual work week is a better long term scenario. It would be a big cultural shift for something like that to happen in the US though.

> Contrast that to somewhere like Germany, which is where this article was written. Work days end early. The culture in Germany is not to live at work. Work is for working. You come to do a job, not to have interpersonal relationships with co-workers.

Apparently I need to move to Germany because this is exactly how I work and like to work.

It's true for most of the world, actually.

Most of europe anyway. Not so sure about e.g. Asian countries, especially the poorer ones.

I came to say exactly this.

I'm an American, and this is true for me.... /but/ -

It's true because I wanted it to be. I look around at my artistic friends, and I see that they live what they do, and I wanted that. It only works because I (mostly) love what I do (and the stock); so now, "work-life balance" means finding things I want to do that don't have anything to do with work, rather than making sure I have the time to do them.

To reiterate: Working more generally makes me happier because I'm doing something that I love, and that I can take (some) ownership of.

On a somewhat related note, one of the things that irks me the most (working in Germany) is that I have to take a 30 minute break after 6h of work and another 15 minute break after 9h and can't work more than 10h without someone signing off on it. I can't even opt out of this.

This seems totally broken, especially since you are not technically supposed to take other breaks without signing out of work. As someone using the Pomodoro Technique I just don't fit into the system. I obviously don't consider those breaks as work-breaks but rather as stuff that makes me more efficient overall and thus benefits my employer greatly.

It blows my mind that there's even work time regulations in pure "knowledge worker" fields. I tend to trust people to be interested in optimizing their workflows however they see fit.

Note: 40h is the standard work week here, we get 30 days of paid vacation (which is handled very differently in the US).

Surely you could go self-employed with contract in the same company. This way you can follow your own path while everybody else can use what os provided by the law. You would also earn more per hour to compensate for holidays you would normally be entitled to.

You can't self-employ in Germany without actually working for more than one company. (It was abused too much to get around employee protections.)

There are lots of ways around this, including just forming your own company and then exclusively working for another.

It is still abused in many ways (for example Rossmann chain), not only in tech sector - you can always work through an agency).

that 30 minute break after 6h of work is other wise known as Lunch :-)

Yeah that's obviously the reasoning behind it however the specific structure with the forced 15 minute break as well has lead (unintentionally I assume) to a structure of work 9h on Monday-Thursday and 6h on Friday for most employees. So basically everyone generates roughly 2h of OT every week then takes a Friday off once they hit 6 (or saves up).

And I tend to eat a "power breakfast" and smaller snacks (apple etc.) during the day so I can live with a later lunch break. However if you don't check out after 6h the system automatically checks you out. So technically you can't just take the lunch break after 7h (you can take it after 5h).

In practical terms it's a nonissue really but the overall design just upsets me for some reason :D

er that's a tea break and these sort of breaks are supposedly for the blue collar workers (eg working on the line at audi ) if your salaried you are supposed to be adult enough to manage your own time.

> This seems totally broken, especially since you are not technically supposed to take other breaks without signing out of work.

That really depends on your employer. Plenty of companies have Vertrauensarbeitszeit (~trust-based working time) where nobody writes down when or how long employees worked. However, it's usually seen as a bad thing because people tend to over-correct on the breaks they took and under-correct for the overtime they worked.

In the EU, all workers are entitled to minimum 4 weeks paid time off per year. If the employer is able to control your time, then that doesn't count as holidays.

I think one of the most important points in the article is that forcing people to take vacation, and encouraging them to be completely unavailable, means that the company must learn how to survive the absence of a team member. It forces you to reduce the bus-factor, and this is critical.

I ask my team members to take at least 20 days off per year (we also have an unlimited vacation policy) and I'll be using this argument to encourage them to switch off and enjoy their breaks.

In general I would agree, but I think you've gotta be careful that doesn't come off as "we need to make sure you're not a vital member of the team".

How do you do this without creating a bloated organization?

For example if you have 20 team members and expect for 2 to be gone for some kind of vacation at any point. When all are at work you have a 10% inefficiency.

I wonder if it would be more effective to have have stretches of intense work (4-6 months) with long rest periods (1-3 months) between. This would minimize the operational switching frequency, though it would take longer probably.

I manage a software engineering team, and there's always more work to do - we have a big icebox full of things we wish we could get done. I imagine this is pretty normal in my field, and I can't imagine that we'll reach a point where we're overstaffed when people aren't on vacation. For other teams it may be the case that you end up overstaffed; I don't have much experience outside of my field.

I, personally, like your suggestion of stretches of intense work followed by long breaks, but I think that the reality of family life, hobbies, interests, and other commitments make that pretty unrealistic to impose on a team. You'd also have to be very committed to making sure that the work periods are strictly bounded, and it could be very tempting to slip and say "just another few days" / "just another week" and end up working to breaking point.

Edit: Grammar

If a company only has 10% inefficiencies, they are doing a fabulous job.

Most companies probably have 50% of their workforce surfing the web at any one time.

Well the former is structural, the latter is behavioral, so there is difference in kind. Said another way, you can't get work from a ghost, but you can find incentives/realign people so they are more productive.

> but you can find incentives/realign people so they are more productive.

By giving them more vacation maybe?

I was thinking more along the lines of having them do work they are interested in/care about.

Or quit thinking of them as resources or machines that were advertised to you as 100% efficient for 8 hours 5 days a week and realize that the 2 hours in a given 8 hour day spent reading HN or browsing YouTube _are_ part of the 100%. No one can walk into an office and be at 100% efficiency within microseconds. Windup and spin down time is part of the cost of running an organization. Not only is there windup/spindown at 9AM and 5PM, but at 12PM and 1PM, and probably at around 3 or 4PM in addition.

If someone is only putting in 2 hours of efficient work a day, then maybe you should start thinking about shuffling them within or out of the organization depending on the position and level they're filling, but asking about 10% inefficiency due to "missing bodies" is equivalent to complaining about getting shorted a penny from the barista. It's literally pocket change, get over it.

If you ask them, most developers will have something about the current codebase they would like to improve, or a 20%-like project that might improve the products. You can have them do this during times of over-availability.

Inefficiency in the short term, yes, but it still leaves you in a position where a single surprise (an accident, a firing) can erase _all_ the efficiency gains.

It's the same way that buying extra hard drives for backups is "inefficient," since you rarely use those drives, but still far more efficient than recreating all of your lost data from scratch.

I like the idea of personnel redundancy, but my guess is employees don't like that and it's not really best for tackling tough problems because you increase your workforce 2x.

Why would you need 2x redundancy?

Surely in a team of 10 developers working on the same thing, if one quits the others can take over the work, just with a schedule slip?

You are conflating hours with productivity.

Let's assume that no engineer is getting less than 2 weeks of vacation off a year on paper. Most of these articles are written by people giving 4 weeks of vacation. So we're talking about the difference between a 'stingy' vacation policy and a generous vacation policy being 2/52 weeks in the year.

If people gain more than 4% productivity by avoiding burnout, you net win by giving people more vacation. I would argue that net productivity gain from letting people de-stress is way more than 4%, though I have no numbers to back that up.

Agree 100%. I am talking about giving people 1 month off per year. In those cases, how do you maintain efficiency without bloat?

How are you defining efficiency? Do you think it smart to have all of your staff 100% working at all times? What happens when new work comes?

What's wrong with bloat? Isn't profitability the goal, not efficiency? If it's best achieved by having more resources so you continue to be profitable when one resource is unavailable, then have more resources. This is as true of hard drives and fire exits as it is of employees.

Expanding on a point by brational, see Tom Demarco's book Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency. It makes the argument that if your goal is long-term profitability, you must have some excess capacity in human resources at all times. http://amzn.com/B004SOVC2Y

Slack is a fantastic book. If you're even the least bit unclear about why/how TFA thinks that minimum vacation is a good idea, then you'll find this a fantastic read.

I've also learned to appreciate slack when learning about Kanban:

http://www.everydaykanban.com/2012/07/27/slack-is-not-a-dirt...

I was expecting some kind of subgenius material. Please tell me JR "Bob" Dobbs is at least mentioned.

The only way to be able to quantify "10%" is if you have the ability to predict the future perfectly. If you don't have any stockpiled bandwidth you will have big issues if anyone leaves the company for any reason, and you will also not be able to easily take advantage of any unexpected opportunities that come your way. I wouldn't call it a bloated organization, more like a flexible organization.

That mean's it's NOT bloated. If you have a bus factor of 1 anywhere, that means your organization is in pretty significant danger. People die, get sick, quit, or otherwise get unable-to-work'd ALL THE TIME.

No mechanical system is ever exploited at 100% capacity. The elevator in your building never has to carry more than half of what it's absolutely capable of. Any kind of building is built with materials that can withstand a lot more than the average load. Your computer never has to work at full capacity - I doubt the CPU's temperature ever reaches past 70C, far from the ~100C at which it can still perform reliable calculations, but also well clear of the ~105C at which the magic smoke escapes.

Smart people don't exploit systems operating at their absolute limits.

Just to be that guy ... it actually _increases_ the bus-factor (which is good). The _higher_ the bus-factor the more people you can loose before your company goes under.

Pedantic niggling aside, I completely agree this is a huge benefit to the organization.

At Trulia we have an unlimited vacation policy and it really does work for us. People routinely take extended, foreign trips of two or more weeks. This year I will be taking 4 weeks off in total, 2 on proper vacation and one week each with my family and my wife's.

So take this as an anecdotal data point. Oh, and come work for Trulia, we need great iOS and Android engineers desperately.

> This year I will be taking 4 weeks off in total

So...basically a standard amount of vacation?

I love the sound of unlimited vacation as a perk, but I'm worried I'd just get fired for "abusing it". I'd probably take something like 10 weeks/year

I don't find 4 weeks to be a "lot" of vacation time, but I think the hundred million workers or so who have 2 weeks or less every year would disagree that 4 weeks is "standard." On top of that I took 2 weeks of remote work.

That said, if you're an awesome engineer (especially mobile -- Trulia has about a dozen mobile apps to build out), and you want 10 weeks every year, lets talk. I don't hire for the mobile teams so I can't speak for them but I am certain that would at least love to talk to you.

I'm not actually a mobile dev :/

But you've highlighted the problem I have with "unlimited" vacation. If I have to negotiate for 10 weeks, then I don't have unlimited, I have 4 weeks with possibly some extra but I don't know how much extra until i'm told off for taking it

No negotiation is required. The policy is 'we don't track vacation days' and that would be just as true for you looking for 10 weeks as it is for me who took 4. I'm not a benchmark-setter (or follower) I just happened to take 4 weeks so that's what I shared.

That said, you can't expect it to be considered in a vacuum. If you want to take 2.5 months of vacation, your work does need to be unimpeachably strong, and your dedication needs to be obvious to your teammates.

I realise it wasn't your main point, but can we stop with this trope of remote work being like a holiday or somehow worth less than in-office work.

If you don't think the flexibility of remote work is valuable, try giving it up?

I think that depends on where you're from. Being in the US, my first job gave me the "standard" 4 weeks off, and I thought I was being spoiled by it. My current company only gives us 2 weeks off(ok, plus a week for Christmas but I only sort of count that..), and most people I know only get two weeks.

How big is Trulia?

I'm asking because I can imagine that vacation dynamics have a lot to do with company size. So maybe we can get a better idea.

I think many companies dive head first into unlimited vacation policy without really thinking things through. I had a job where we had it and it somehow worked (despite the CTO's inability to follow any kind of project management structure).

Our PTO's were scheduled ahead which was policy. So if you took a two week trip, you filed it three months in advanced. You let your team, your PM, and business know you'll be out of town so they can manage expectations (e.g., less work). Our sprints were based on how much work we can do based on the existing resource. My team had a team of 3 so we never scheduled PTO's were two or more people were off for any prolonged period of time. Sometimes schedules collide, but we do our best to be transparent about big trips so that we can all plan accordingly.

You know, it worked well. I'm glad it worked well for you at Trulia (which, btw, helped me butt loads when I was shopping for a home, so thanks!). I'd work for you guys except I'm not a mobile dev, I like where I'm at, and I'm not looking to move. :)

Is that likely to change since Zillow doesn't have that policy? They did just buy you guys, right?

The biggest part of unlimited vacation is really the culture of your company. If your company is filled w/ workaholics who look down on taking time off, it won't work. I'm an engineer at HubSpot and we have an unlimited vacation policy and for my team, it works great. Everyone is great about taking time off, we are happy for people when they do, and everyone gets their work done and is responsible. Everyone trusts each other on the team and things work out fine.

More than the sheer # of days for vacation, having the flexibility to take a day off to hang with the kids or make a spontaneous trip to Iceland (happened for some coworkers) is pretty awesome.

I actually just went through my calendar and counted about 31 vacation days. I'm surprised I took so many but never did I feel like I was shorting my team in any way and felt any guilt for it. This includes a 10 day trip to Europe and basically all of Christmas -> NYE off.

Most seem very skeptical and cynical of unlimited vacation, but it's more about the culture than the policy itself.

Totally agree. In our case, we have people who are workaholics, and our solution was to make them take at least 2 weeks/year and make sure that people are taking breaks when needed/wanted to spread the culture that while work is important, this is your life, enjoy it. Having outside of work hobbies is extremely important to a healthy you.

To be fair in most big tech companies people take all of Christmas->NYE off without reporting it as PTO. Unless your manager is literally nazi, marking it as WFH and sending a couple emails a day qualify as doing work.

     > Everyone is great about taking time off, we are happy
     > for people when they do, and everyone gets their work
     > done and is responsible

Can you put that in to numbers? Is the average amount of holiday people take really ~ 25 days a year, with some people taking more?

If not ... how can it be a better system than everyone just getting 25 days off?

As someone who works for a company that offers unlimited vacation, I don't think its as cut and dry as you make it, although I see where you are coming from.

I think the success of unlimited vacation really depends on the company, your manager, your peers, and you. That is a lot of things to get right, but if everything works out, I think unlimited vacation is really great. At least for my team, I think everyone shares the feelings that vacation is important, and people are good about taking it.

As you say, I do end up taking a lot of random days off, but that is in addition to longer vacations. I think thats the real advantage to unlimited vacation (when done correctly). If I want to take a random day or two off to take care of a backlog of errands, I just do it without a second thought. I don't have to worry about all these randoms days eating into my 1-2 week trips I have planned in the spring or fall or the 2 weeks around the christmas with my family.

Having said all that, this is my perspective and I am sure that there are probably people even within my own company that don't feel this way. The idea of a minimum policy sounds interesting. I wonder if that would lead to some people taking less because its tracked, but with other people taking more because they don't feel pressure not to.

An idea might be to track until the minimum has been met, then no more tracking after that.

problem with minimums is people like myself and certainly countless others will forget about it till end of year, then take off the entire month of december because they "must".

That's a problem with management, not with minimums.

Only in the sense that literally any problem at a company is a problem with management.

Have a "vacation year" that ends in August then.

Did you ever counted how many days off you do end up taking, and how many consecutive days off?

I would say this year would probably be around around 4-5 weeks, with a 1 week and a 2 week break mixed in there plus a bunch of random days off.

This is a ways off, but in Jan 2016 I will probably be taking even more, because I have a 3 week long trip with my wife to visit her family in the Philippines + plus typical holiday time off and random days off.

I found that communication in projects and time-off is important. A company I worked for had unlimited PTO and it worked because we all planned accordingly. I took a three week trip to Europe in 2013, no one else took anything more than a day off when I was gone. My other colleague took a three week trip early in 2013, I didn't take any time off at all.

When we can, we also managed remote work. So I would go back to Chicago for one week stretches to hang with my family but I would work during the day. Even though it was a trade off (work remote or wait until another time to go back) it wasn't nearly as bad. We also communicated with business when we would be gone which really help manage our backlog.

As a team we communicated our time offs to each other. LIke we would go into each other's office (since my team was small, there's three of us) and have discussions as to when we would be gone so we each knew and expected it. It also helped us manage our sprints.

Unlimited PTO requires a bit more dancing and managing than having it tracked, but honestly, the pain is worth it. I never had to worry about being sick because if I'm sick, I'm encouraged to take time off to get well. It made it less stressful and, coincidentally, could de-stress faster in my vacay than I did when I had limited PTO.

I do think it comes down to culture.

At work (http://cafe.com/careers), we have unlimited vacation that I've definitely been taking advantage of. In addition to not worrying about random days off here and there (which have easily added up to a week or two a year), I'm completely comfortable taking off to Shanghai for a month.

> According to this study[1] you need at least ten consecutive days of leave to "de-stress" from work. Short vacations aren't as effective as long ones.

That can't be true across the board. I haven't taken a vacation in 3 or 4 years by that definition. And frankly, I feel fine. I work with awesome people solving cool problems and love what I do. I've had friends tell me I should take a vacation, and my response is, "why?" I enjoy my time at the office and I enjoy my leisure activities away from the office. I typically work more than 40 hours, but it doesn't matter. Sometimes I'll put in 12-hour days for awhile, but I always make sure to get some recharging time. The longest "vacation" I've taken in the last 4 years was something like a long Thursday - Monday weekend. Those leave me feeling plenty recharged and ready to get back. I can even get that from a lazy Sunday where I just stay home and relax.

If a billion dollars dropped into my lap tomorrow, I probably wouldn't do much differently. I might think about taking some time off, but I'm working on things I actually want to accomplish. Even if I did just take off on an extended vacation, I'm pretty sure I'd want to get back to my current job before too long. Part of me might want to work fewer hours since I wouldn't need the money, but that would probably slow down my rate of progress on the things that I want to accomplish.

The fact that you're an outlier doesn't mean that the findings of the study are invalid. There are lots of people who are genuinely good at their jobs, but who would do something completely different with their lives if a billion dollars dropped into their laps. Those people stand to gain much more from a long vacation than you do.

Yes, I realize that...hence my first sentence "That can't be true across the board." But people tend to cite these things like they're a fundamental truth about humans. I think the generalization is less useful than it might seem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy

Why don't you take two weeks off just to see how you feel when you'll be back ?

And I hope you don't have a family.

Yikes, I burned out something fierce after a year of solid Mon-Fri 12 hours days - just started my awesome December vacation and I'm loving it. Starting 2015, I'm aiming for a 30 hour work week at most. I'm assuming you don't have a family?

> That can't be true across the board. I haven't taken a vacation in 3 or 4 years by that definition. And frankly, I feel fine.

How do you know you don't feel much less fine than you would with an otherwise-similar job and occasional 10 day leaves? Being accustomed to something as normal doesn't mean that it doesn't make you feel substantially worse than you would in some other situation.

Agreed. If you're serious about letting people take vacation, give six weeks. We've seen in this very thread that "unlimited" just turns into the 2-3 weeks you'd get anyway.

> unlimited days off (or "open") and zero days off are identical.

I get your point, but that's clearly hyperbole. If you're given zero days off, and you take a day off, you get fired (or at least disciplined).

A bit hyperbolic sure, but not that far off. If you're given zero days off you will "get sick" more often, or whatever politically/structurally acceptable way to take time off.

Which is remarkably similar to what happens at a lot of "unlimited vacation" companies anyways - you take time off only when it can be "justified" beyond reproach.

And if you have unlimited days off, and your superior refuses to give you a day off and you take it anyway, the same thing happens. And in some company cultures, just asking for vacation gives you a bad rep, because you're not dedicated enough to the company.

The solution at my office has just become that nobody asks anymore. Who wants to be the first to stick out their neck?

Unlimited vacation doesn't work. Where I work, all it resulted in was our project manager taking a week off at the same time that us developers were pulling 10pm nights and coming in on that weekend to get a feature done that he had promised an unrealistic deadline for. God help us if one of the people who actually builds things had wanted a vacation during crunch time. In 14 months of working there full time, I've managed to take 6 vacation days, and that's more than what most of the dev team got.

Then again, that's what you sign up for when you work for a startup with a culture that values time at work above pretty much everything else. The only dev who got a real promotion in that time was the guy who pulls 10 or 11-hour days every day, to prove his 'dedication' to the company. And no, he hasn't taken any vacation either.

What country do you work in?

> In "europe" a two week vacation (10 work days) is common/standard

In some countries (at least France and Spain) there's a minimum 30 day vacation by law, it's pretty normal to take a whole month off.

Having X number of days off for vacation per year is an explicit contract. Company culture can still be broken enough to not allow you to use those days, but in most cases the expectation is that the vacation days you've been given are yours to use to the fullest (making reasonable accommodation for scheduling, etc).

"Unlimited" vacation is an implicit contract. You can take off as many days as is considered acceptable by the company or team culture. This number is not something you can know before you start your job, and it is something that can change as workplace culture evolves.

The "unlimited" part is also a load of bosh. If the company culture isn't completely sick nobody is going to begrudge you using up your X vacation days per year. But if you take more vacation than average at a place with "unlimited" vacation you run the risk of looking bad and suffering attendant consequences. (I hate that "looking bad" is even a thing apart from actual effectiveness, but unfortunately it's something we still have to worry about...)

Of course the other reason for 'unlimited vacation' is so when an employee leaves, the company doesn't have to pay them for unused vacation days. Huge red flag when a company has 'unlimited vacation'

... unless you just take vacations normally. Then perhaps you have already taken your vacation when you leave, and the company is out that work. It cuts both ways.

Until I left the US every I worked operated on the basis of accrued vacation. The day you started you had 0 vacation days, after 6 months you could use half your annual allotment, etc.

I admit I don't know how my vacation schedule works, officially. I just take time off and inform HR. They do whatever they do.

My previous company ran a PTO system and advanced the entire balance on 01JAN every year. There aren't many, but they are out there.

My current company does this. In addition balances have to be used by the end of the year. People are encouraged to take their vacation, so this leads to a lot of people taking random days in December off. As a result you can't get a damn thing done in December.

I can't help but think that a system where accrued days expire after a certain amount of time or you can't carry more than a certain balance would mean that people's vacation time would be spread out more. As a result I could actually get some stuff done now that requires coordinating with people. I'm not sure if there would be a cost, however, in not being able to get stuff done at other times of the year.

err no in that case you normally reduce your final check pro rata ie if you leave half way through the year but have takeb 75% of your leave you owe the company and vice versa

With these kinds of policies being more common in young companies, I highly doubt that paying back unused vacation can have any significant effect on normal operations. In the other case there's also generally limits on how much vacation time you can build up, generally taking a couple years of not taking vacation to max out.

IANA Financial person, but... it does go on the books as a debt. I'd be highly interested in someone in the know putting some numbers up, but at my office I know of many people who have several months of vacation saved up (because seemingly people tend to under-use their vacation time). If that company is looking to get bought out, it must be relevant to at least some extent.

At my previous company, they specifically created a policy of no more than five days of rollover vacation from year to year specifically because of an on-the-books obligation of a couple million dollars (500+ employees) due to accrued vacation. Later, they changed that policy to NO rollover without VP level approval (e.g. honeymoons). In states like California that have strong employee laws they had to force all California based employees to burn down their accrued vacation every three months. Quasi-ethical and possibly borderline legal but that is what you have to do when employees hoard vacation under the mattress.

> With these kinds of policies being more common in young companies, I highly doubt that paying back unused vacation can have any significant effect on normal operations.

It has an effect on the balance sheet, since vacation time accrued but not used is a liability; in companies whose operations are labor-heavy, and that have high-pay workers, that's may be a concern, especially when seeking investors, since concrete current liabilities can weigh heavily against hoped-for future returns.

We should have no sympathy for 'balance sheet' or accounting reasons for anything.

Regardless of how much vacation time is on the books as a liability, the company's cash flows are exactly the same.

> We should have no sympathy for 'balance sheet' or accounting reasons for anything.

I don't see what sympathy has to do with it. The state of the balance sheet is a concrete concern for investors, and therefore for companies seeking investors, independently of whether you have sympathy for it or not.

> Regardless of how much vacation time is on the books as a liability, the company's cash flows are exactly the same.

Possibly, but so what? The statement of cash flows matters, of course -- particularly in the short term -- but investors care ultimately about value, not cash flow. (After all, borrowing money produces a positive cash flow the same as selling product does, the difference is that the former also accumulates liability.)

Sympathy may have been a poor choice of word. What I meant was: accounting considerations should not have any bearing on how companies treat employees. Especially when the 'accounting' is not something that actually affects the money coming in/out of the company.

The liabilities may matter to investors, but that doesn't mean that they actually affect the business. If I have all of my vacation days left or none, there is zero impact on the the company's business. Value is not effected at all.

> The liabilities may matter to investors, but that doesn't mean that they actually affect the business.

If they affect investors, they (1) effect the current owners, serving whose interests is the whole purpose of having a business, and (2) they affect the company's ability to secure financing and the terms of that financing, which affects every aspect of its business.

So, no, you're just plain wrong here.

> If I have all of my vacation days left or none, there is zero impact on the the company's business.

It has exactly the same impact on a company's business as any other debt, which is substantially more than none.

> The liabilities may matter to investors, but that doesn't mean that they actually affect the business. If I have all of my vacation days left or none, there is zero impact on the the company's business. Value is not effected at all.

That's completely untrue. If you are billed out at some rate X, then having 2 weeks of vacation coming up this year directly impacts future value vs having 0 vacation days. That's X * 2 * 40 hours of future value. It affects value in the same way that any debt affects value.

Right, but if I'm understanding all this correctly, unused vacation time exists as outstanding debts that can be called in as soon as an employee departs.

In theory, that could be enough to tank a company that otherwise might've (somehow) survived the departure of their employees.

It's sad that works in the US.

Here in Australia you have to give a full time employee a minimum of four weeks (paid), which accrues if unused. So somebody at a company with unlimited vacation would be no worse off of they never took holidays than someone who worked at a company with the regular 4 weeks.

I'm an Australian living in Japan. I moved here 2 months ago.

Most Japanese get around 3 weeks of annual leave per year - but each day expires after 24 months.

It is quite common for leave to expire.

Here in Uruguay, if you don't take your leave, the company has to compensate you (pay it as an extra worked day). Same if they fire you.

Time to move to Australia or Uruguay!

Or Denmark

Here in Brazil, if the company let it expire, they have pay you the double.

> Most Japanese get around 3 weeks of annual leave per year - but each day expires after 24 months. > It is quite common for leave to expire.

Japan has the same problem as the US in this case, your worth is tied to your work, the more it appears you're working hard, the more worth (and self-worth) you feel you have.

I am Australian working for an unlimited vacation company in the US. Knowing that vacation days won't be paid out if I leave the company helps me to remember to take days off.

With unlimited time off there's no longer any reason to stockpile days for that giant trip I keep putting off or to think of vacation days as being money that my employer owes me.

Before leaving the US I had 6 weeks annual leave, 4 rostered days off, 13 public holidays and usually a few extra days of stand down when the office was closed over Christmas (call it 50 days off).

Even coming from that I don't feel worse off now that I have unlimited time off.

IIRC, the company doesn't have to pay you for unused vacation days even if you don't use them. It's pretty much at the discretion of the company.

It depends on the State the employee lives in

In CA, this is definitely not the case. A company must cut you a check on your final day that includes everything owed to you, including unused vacation days.

Or they can cut you a check that doesn't include everything owed to you, but ask you to sign a long agreement, buried within which is an assertion that the company has paid everything it owes you.

Since you need this check, you wouldn't get your vacation days.

Anyway, while I agree with the red flag concern, I don't necessarily agree that companies have unlimited vacation in order to cause you to take less. Esp in the startup world, esp at early stage, I don't expect to see this sort of intentional subterfuge - esp because of how it could backfire. I do think a minimum vacation policy makes more sense and allows, esp in places like CA where vacation is earned wage, and unused vacation is paid out at the end of the year, to manage the way vacation is counted.

I also think a company with mandatory vacation should consider allowing people to take at least some vacation in the form of a bonus. Maybe they have a spouse who doesn't have as flexible of a schedule or just really enjoy their work. I don't think this should be an option for founders, however, and I think it should accompany a discussion, because it doesn't work for most people.

> Or they can cut you a check that doesn't include everything owed to you, but ask you to sign a long agreement, buried within which is an assertion that the company has paid everything it owes you.

You can write any old thing you like and get someone to sign it.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's enforceable.

Writing unenforceable clauses into fine print -- that you know are unenforceable -- is a legal bluff older than keeping records on clay tablets.

If you don't sign that agreement, then they need to pay you what they owe you. That's the law.

Usually the way this works is they give you severance, which comes at a price: you won't sue them for any reason whatsoever.

I'm assuming that most of the companies offering this 'perk' are tech companies in CA

Nope. I was at a stodgy defense contractor in CT and they paid out vacation when I left. It's pretty standard at established companies. Small companies might skirt it, but it's definitely the right way to do things. In contrast I left a VC funded tech startup with "unlimited vacation" and we never even talked about paying for unused vacation.

Most tech places to my knowledge pay out unused vacation days (and not just CA).

Check your employee handbook.

There's a pretty simple "hack" around this problem: use them all as you're leaving. If it's paid vacation, you'll get paid for the days.

Doesn't help if you're fired, of course.

It depends upon the state. Some states, CA and IL for example, treat vacation as earned and owed, yet unpaid compensation. Because of this, it represents a liability, so it's got to be shown as such on the books. Which is also another reason why you see CA companies adopting "open vacation" policies, it takes that vacation liability off the balance sheet.

Other states view vacation as just an agreement between you and your employer. You basically agree that there are so many days you don't have to show up to work and they'll still pay you. That's it.

In the past I worked remote for an Atlanta-based company, and their employee handbook stated that they will pay out vacation up to a maximum of 40 hours. Anything in excess of 40 hours you had in the bank, you forfeited. I lived in a St Louis suburb in Illinois at the time, and as an Illinois-based employee they paid me my full vacation bucket when I quit.

Similarly, a friend of mine worked remote for the same company, but lived just across the river in Missouri. When she left, she got her vacation capped. MO and GA are among the states that do not view vacation as earned compensation.

Not only is vacation time treated as earned and owed in Illinois, the offers of the company can be held personally liable for the funds in the event the company goes out of business and does not pay this out. This applies even if the company is in federal receivership. I know this from first hand experience having worked with the Illinois Labor Board to resolve a matter.

And how you accrue vacation at a company. I gain something like 6 or so hours every 2 weeks. Before I started I let them know of something I needed to be at in my first few weeks and their response was "That's OK, you can just do unpaid time".

Other than not paying me if I leave mid year, what other reason could there be for crap like this?

Yeah I don't understand this one. If you're going to give someone 4 weeks off (which is extremely generous in the US) just give it to them at the beginning of the year.

Some places let you take the vacation before you accrue it but if you were to quit before earning enough to cover the days you've taken you owe the company money.

This doesn't detract from your main point, but...

4 weeks off is not necessarily "extremely generous." It depends on whether that includes holidays.

You might say that of course vacation days don't include holidays, but I know of several small tech/biotech companies that just give X total days of paid time off, usually 25-30. You can choose to take those PTO hours on holidays or not, which is more flexible I suppose.

However, depending on the state and industry, there are 10-15 normal holidays every year. So, that 4 weeks off might really only equal 1-2 weeks of vacation, not so generous.

Pray they don't start including weekends in the total.

I get 20 actual vacation days. I think maybe 8 recognized holidays and 2 personal choice holidays and I think another 2 holidays that are chosen by work site. So I get 30-32 days off per year which is pretty generous. For most people I know you would need to work 15 years before you earn even 4 weeks and that is usually the max amount. I'd say it's common for most white collar jobs to give you 2 weeks off until you hit 5 years then you might earn another week.

Or just take your vacation right before you leave...

Seems like a good opportunity to test the limits of these "unlimited" vacation policies.

It's gob-smacking that more folks here don't realize this. I would be very leery of working for a company with an open vacation, both for the reasons laid out in TFA, but also because it's a signal of pretty cynical management.

I like this idea of minimum vacation. Most companies I've worked in use vacation days as some sort of reward for sticking with the company for X number of years (i.e., "When you hit your 5 year anniversary, you get an extra 1.5 days of paid vacation. Won't that be nice!"). And when I say paid vacation, I really mean PTO with no separate 'sick leave' days. Which means people show up to work sick.

Funny enough, the company I work for was recently bought, and in the interests of making things 'uniform', we were forced to adopt the purchasing company's vacation policy, which meant an across the board cut in everyone's PTO hours (to include folks that negotiated additional vacation days when they were hired -- those agreements were declared null and void). Apparently the execs thought the hit to morale/retention was worth the 'cost savings'.

On the other hand, I once interviewed at a company with an 'open' vacation policy and was immediately suspicious of it. My first thought was "I'm guessing people don't take much vacation?" That didn't go over so well with the interviewer.

It's nice to see an employer that treats vacation as a means to increase employee productivity and retention (burnout prevention, etc.), rather than as a pure cost to be minimized as much as possible.

Hmm is that not a breach of contract could in a tech company lead to an exodus of staff.

You shouldn't be surprised at the number of execs who don't really care. at. all. about attrition, and who are clueless about what motivates engineers.

I wouldn't :-) but that just means you competitors just got a free shot at your best and brightest.

The really clever ones volunteer for redundancy and the pay off and then go and work for a competitor.

I really like the tone of this post. It makes me think that this person is trustworthy and I'd be glad to work for him.

I wish my company had such an open communication!

> A company has to learn how to function when people are on vacation and unavailable, however important their role is.

Yes, this is essential for having a viable company. If the company grinds to a halt without person X, the solution is not to get rid of person X's vacation.

Also, in finance, required vacations are often a compliance aid. If someone is running a scam, it tends to need near-daily tending, and it will explode when they are out for two weeks (unless they find a co-conspirator).

Wow, remind me never to work in finance, too much paranoia for me (though I do know it's justified a lot of the time- I taught some IT folks at a bank once and they told me about a branch manager who went on holiday and forgot to turn off his automated money siphoning software. That was the only reason he got caught)

I last moved from a shop with unlimited PTO (where in practice people settled around 4-5 weeks per year) to one with 15 days per year. Quality of life is noticeably worse with the limited PTO, and people tend to hoard their days because they're scarce. Travis's tracked minimum vacation sounds better than either of those policies.

I'm at a company where you start with 14 days of PTO per year, including sick time. It was a huge shock coming from college, and it's the main complaint I have about my job. It jumps up to 19 after two years.

I honestly think 20 days PTO is the bare minimum for a decent work-life balance, and even that isn't all that great. If I were changing jobs, I'd actually be willing to exchange salary for extra PTO, if the default PTO were less than 20 days.

As a graduate student, I feel that (at least within my research group) there is this "unlimited time off" policy, but in the end it's not really taken advantage of very much and it certainly doesn't take any stress away from work. Even this holiday season, I'll be taking a week off from work, and I always phrase it as "I promised my mother I'd be home for at least a week".

The minimum vacation policy sounds like an interesting alternative, but I'm not sure it could fit within the academic community. Any professor has the power to instate such a policy, but at any given moment there's an "important" project that rests on one or two people working hard to get results. Often, in academia, you have those people that are precisely the kind that will work hard and get shit done, and honestly I can't imagine there being an understanding of "minimum time off". It's more convenient to the professor and the ambitious PhD student/post-doc to have the "take time off when you want" policy, and let the unwritten rules and undertones dictate when you should take time off (e.g., when you just finish a project).

I know the article wasn't trying to apply things to academia, I just thought I would consider it in that light.

I would think that in academia a minimum time off policy would be great: depending on where you are in the project, sometimes stepping away from a problem can lead you to the solution.

I see a lot of people saying that they would "never work for a company with unlimited vacation." I also understand their reasoning and have seen similar examples.

At DataRank we balance this with a small amendment. It's unlimited vacation but you MUST take a minimum of two weeks off. We are also very flexible about remote work. If you feel the itch to travel to Japan for a 2 week vacation + 2 weeks working remote, go for it. If you just feel burned out and want to watch Netflix at home all day. Go for it, just let someone know.

You can also view it likes this.

In the end of your life when looking back at it. You can think of asking two questions of yourself.

Did you wish you worked more hard days for your company? or Did you wish you spent more time with family and gaining new experiences?

Obviously you will need to find a work / life balance but if you only work/play hard you might regret it later and you cannot get lost time back.

If I worked somewhere that had an unlimited vacation policy, I think I'd probably stop working on Fridays all together. An unlimited vacation policy could be an open invitation for a 4-day work-week (or 3 day or 2 day...)

We have an unlimited vacation policy and no one has taken more than 20 days off in a calendar year (not including holidays). That being said, I'm at 18 and only started in September.

It's expected that you don't abuse the policy. While what constitutes abuse may be a line that needs elaboration, making your standard work week 2-3 days under this policy is not a gray area.

Which is exactly why these policies suck. It's "unlimited" but it's implied that you don't take too many days. It's like the comcast of vacation policies.

That's what the minimum days you must take is for. If the company culture is right, it's a liberating policy. At my new job now it feels like I'm spending a precious commodity instead of booking vacation feeling like reprieve due in the wake of hard work or payoff.

Oh I agree. I like the idea that the article was talking about. I'll be interested in seeing how it works out. It reverses the stigma to almost be where you'd look bad for not taking enough time vs taking too much time.

It never works out that way. I worked at a company with very limited fixed vacation. We got 10 days a year, but 4 were required to be taken between Christmas and New Years, which really meant you had 6 days to use at your discretion. There were ways to squeeze some extra, but at best you got 2 weeks.

My wife was in a similar boat and switched to a VC backed startup with 'unlimited vacation'. I remember high fiving about it and thinking THIS IS AMAZING.

Fast forward one year, she had taken 3 days off in the entire year. The next year when she actually went to take a vacation, her boss asked her "oh didn't you go to that island last year?". The fact that she took almost nil vacation the year before was not remembered. You can imagine she left very soon there after.

We have grown up a lot since then, and would never get suckered into that situation now. But it happens. When your boss never lets you take vacation, 'unlimited' vacation is 'no' vacation.

I think a 4 day workweek should become a thing. I am more than happy to put in extra hours monday through thursday so I can have an extra day for the weekend.

I don't think you should have to put in extra hours to have the extra day on the weekend. We should have moved to a 30h workweek years and years ago.

Mandatory vacation is not only a good idea, it is a security feature.

When one employee takes over another's "world" within the company, it is very likely that they will notice if the employee on vacation has been embezzling, defrauding customers, etc. In the financial industry, this is not only good practice, it is a regulatory requirement. People who do not want to take vacation are seen by auditors as highly suspicious because that behavior often indicates a desire to cover up fraud.

I think pairing with frequent rotations is going to be more effective, but most shops don't practice pairing.

This is a great post. At Sourcegraph, we had a similar realization, based on our own experiences.

We wrote a blog post about it and it got picked up by the BBC:

https://sourcegraph.com/blog/mandatory-vacation http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20140903-relax-or-else

What I found to be even more relaxing is if all the employees of a company are forced to take the same time off ( 2 days to a week) and other flexible time off where the employee can choose his own time.

Then, there are no email or updates to come back to...

From my point of view, that's the way it should be. At my company we make you take vacations. If by the end of the year you have plenty of days left you tend to take a long christmas/new year's break... and in some exceptions move a couple of vacations days to the next calendar year.

The unlimited vacations days, in my eyes, creates considerable pressure/anxiety on workers. If you are in the US and want to treat employees, just go for a fair number of paid vacations days like in most European countries... Germany, France, Austria, Spain, Italy, etc, all have approx. 28 days...

Sounds like a mature way to run a business. Where do I sign up?

Why do companies even try out these weird policies? They've gone from having unlimited days (then admitted it was a mistake for 2 whole years) and are now blindly trying out another unusual strategy. I don't see why they don't just offer a standard solution which seems to work for most companies, instead of trying to be extremely controlling of people.

I don't think these are weird policies anymore. I work at a major software company and one year ago, we went from having a set of number of vacations days to an "unlimited vacation" policy. Many companies are already doing this or following suit.

In California at least, I suspect this has something more to do with accounting than experimentation, i.e. the companies don't have to have on their books the money owed if people were to leave without using all their vacation.

While that liability is nice, I think the world is better off without it. If people know they can't take their vacation with them, they'll actually take it when it's appropriate.

The liability situation is a lose-lose one. You take less vacation because you're comfortable you'll get it and the company gets a liability on the books because you work too hard.

Without the liability, you'll see a lot of people take vacation during layoffs though.

> Without the liability, you'll see a lot of people take vacation during layoffs though.

Not necessarily -- quantitatively unlimited vacation doesn't mean that the vacation can be taken without management approval of the specific timing, it just means that its not held to a fixed limit.

A minimum vacation policy is the same as a normal one. You just don't have to get special approval or get your pay docked if you go over.

Uh, having 20-25 (almost mandatory) days of per year is implemented by law here in most countries of EU. How is that a "wierd" policy?

(By "almost mandatory" I mean that at least here, you must use up your vacation days until end of next year.)

20 days is mandatory where I live and I don't need to take them all if I don't want to (they still accrue). I get along just fine.

Laws in France state that employers have to make sure every employee takes at least 2 consecutive weeks (ie 10 work days) between June & September. So, yes, mandatory.

Taking vacations only outside summer is forbidden in France?

No, they have to take at least a summer vacation. They get another 5 or so weeks off to use during the rest of the year

That's an infantilizing policy. Why should the government decide when you take some of your vacation?

It's the result of populism, not government scheming

No. The whole is 4 or 5 weeks.

In the US that's weird because the mandatory days off per year are 0. A good amount for most people in the US is 10 days per year (or two weeks). I get 4 weeks which is pretty great but many of the people I work with end up not taking all of those days or taking days and also working on them due to culture. It's ridiculous.

I think the US is the only country with a 0.

> In the US that's weird because the mandatory days off per year are 0.

Only if you assume that a nation-wide law is the only condition under which non-zero vacation days will emerge.

Most people get some time off but a significant amount of people still get no time off and work on holidays.

5 days is pretty common actually (the week between Christmas and New Years).

I don't think the traditional model (in the US, at least) is an ideal solution. MasterCard recently aired a commercial taking advantage of the fact that Americans have so much unused, paid vacation time each year.

The only way for us to come up with a better solution is for people to test things out.

What is "extremely controlling of people" using their current approach? What is "extremely controlling of people" using their previous approach?

given is a .de maybe authorities got wind of what was happening and thy had to change to avoid "legal entanglements"

There's a major problem in the US when it comes to PTO. I don't think you can really fault people for trying to work it out a bit better.

PTO is a bit pathological at my current company, for instance, and if I could change anything about my job, it'd be this. But I've found this is representative of a ton of jobs in the US.

First, basically everybody works when taking PTO. The founders work full-time when they take PTO, but just from home or the beach or whatever. Regular employees, with a few exceptions, don't work that much, but are generally expected, via some unspoken convention, to be available for any emergencies and to reply to emails and bug reports, etc.

You have no separate queue of "sick days". So you definitely don't want to use all your PTO for actual vacation time, because then you're in a pickle if you actually get sick. Or what if you have kids, and your kid unexpectedly gets really sick? You have to use PTO for that. There's nothing quite like using PTO when you're sick and still being generally available for emails and emergencies.

Mandatory vacation time would set a precedent of not being afraid to take true vacations during which you truly don't work.

I disagree that the standard solution works. At least in the US, the standard solution is to offer very few vacation days, compared to other countries. And with the presenteeism work culture, you can't even get people to use all their vacation days. So I'm not surprised companies are trying out new policies.

Mandatory vacation is hardly weird and is recommended in several high-security jobs and industries.

I agree. This policy certainly sounds better than the unlimited policy, but it's still fairly silly. Will they actually fire or discipline someone if they take less than the minimum vacation days?

We have an unlimited vacation policy at Adzerk and I try to lead by example by taking at least 2-3 weeks off a year (especially in the summer). We also try to encourage everyone to take at least one solid week off a year and it seems to work pretty well.

I think that's the real issue with unlimited policy - if the leaders don't take vacation no one else thinks they can.

"At least 2 weeks off". Isn't 2 weeks the bare minimum?

Not in the U.S. At a contract packaging / manufacturing company I worked at, you received only one week (5 business days) of vacation after your first full year of employment.

I'm also in the US, and I receive 15 days of combined vacation and sick leave. So one bad flu can wipe out your ability to take an extended vacation.

Or, alternatively, you take only a day or two when the flu is at its worst, then come into the office to stare blankly at your screen and drool on your keyboard, whilst getting your colleagues sick. Yes, stupid policies tend to incentivize people to do stupid things.

You should have personal illness / sicktime in addition to vacation. If you don't ... that's sleazy.

I literally just walked out of an HR meeting where they brought in a lawyer to discuss questions like this and no vacation time is not required by US law (our company has roughly 4 weeks of vacation a year). In NY there is a minimum of 5 sicks days per year for employers with 5 or more employees, but again that isn't technically vacation time.

I like how you imply that 2-3 weeks is a long time, plus longer than your colleagues. This makes an unlimited vacation policy completely pointless if you ask me.

2-3 weeks is a long time in the US. I get 10 days off a year, many people get less. Federally mandated vacation is also not a thing here.

It escapes me why anyone would voluntarily move to the US to work.

Two or even three weeks seems very unhealthy to me:

- You need a longer break to seriously disconnect: at least two weeks.

- Around Christmas/New Year you probably want to be around family and friends: one week.

- At least a week distributed over the year to do something fun with your kid, visit that distant friend, etc.

Maybe it's because I come from Western Europe, where getting 5 weeks (25-30 days) off in total is pretty normal. But I cannot imagine not breaking yourself at some point with only two weeks of vacation.

Also, as siblings say. This 'no upper limit' makes no sense. If you give e.g. 25 days people know that that's their right and are more likely to take it then 'it's unlimited, but all the good workers take only 2-3 weeks'.

I phrased it poorly - we get off the week around the holidays as the company closes down. I also take probably another week off for random days here or there.

You serve ads. That's necessarily high-availability, especially around Christmas, when people are trying to grab eyeballs. If the company closes down, who's making sure everything is all right? Or maybe your stuff is that reliable? That's pretty impressive.

It is pretty reliable, but we also have alerts to let us know if there are problems and support staff work out times to be available.

Some people in the US get no paid vacation at all and work on public holidays.

Back when I used to work at a pizza shop, the only two days a year we were closed were Christmas and Thanksgiving. Easter day was a half-day. Nobody was allowed to request off New Years or the Super Bowl.

Is 2-3 weeks off a normal amount of time in the US? I get 28 days off per year in the UK, which is around the standard amount.

> I get 28 days off per year in the UK, which is around the standard amount.

28 is the legal minimum in the UK, however that includes bank holidays. You probably actually have 36 including bank holidays

It is also worth pointing out that the American posters are only referring to discretionary vacation time. Most US companies have eight or so fixed holidays in addition.

In Europe we very rarely count public holidays in vacation time - you can generally assume that most of the numbers listed in this discussion from Europeans is discretionary vacation time that comes in addition to 8 (UK) to 15 (Finland) or so public holidays (though not all countries mandate time off or time in lieu for public holidays).

I'm in the UK, and have 25 days discretionary holiday, plus 8 days of public holidays

Outside tech (which is dripping with privilege) it's common to have 0-2 weeks of vacation in the US. There is no legal minimum, and I've had jobs offering 0, 1, and 2 weeks of vacation. In some cases you can take time off and simply not be paid for it.

Not only that, but many employers aren't required to offer maternity leave (let alone paternity leave). My wife has had to combine accrued vacation time, sick days, and unpaid leave just to get to six weeks of maternity leave.

That's pretty crazy. Do many companies actually tend to provide maternity leave as a benefit?

It makes a bit of a joke of gender equality in the workplace, IMHO.

U.S. employers above a certain size are required by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to provide some unpaid maternity/medical leave. Small employers (such as where my wife works) are exempt from any requirement, and it varies according to the employer and what the job market requires (i.e. not much for most fields). Also, part-time workers receive absolutely zero protection.

The United States is incredibly backward in this regard (among many others). Combined with our lack of support for childcare (tax breaks are meaningless when you're not making enough money), it's no wonder that we're well behind most of the rest of the world when it comes to workforce participation rates for women.

In my experience, most white-collar jobs tend to provide two weeks of paid vacation, a week or so of personal/sick days, and—if they're generous—some [mp]aternity leave (I get one week at my current job). Due to the labor market, tech jobs tend to be more generous, but even the most generous policies by US standards tend to fall short of the minimum required policies in more enlightened nations.

Many companies do provide maternity leave, many (but fewer) also provide paternity leave, but companies below a certain size are not federally required to provide either (though I believe there are some arrangements where you can take unpaid maternity leave but legally can't be fired during your maternity leave).

It sounds like you're thinking of the Family Medical Leave Act, which doesn't apply to everyone.

When my daughter was born I chose to stay home for 2 weeks to be with my new family. I was working a shit job without PTO and ended up having to take out a loan to cover living expenses for the missed time.

The whole thing still leaves a bitter taste for me... Paternity leave would have been a great relief.

>Outside tech (which is dripping with privilege) it's common to have 0-2 weeks of vacation in the US.

I have to disagree. Maybe outside of white-collar work. But "tech" is not all of white-collar. Most people who work in offices for big companies get good vacation time.

Yes but there are still a lot of people who receive no vacation time and there is no law saying that employees have to get a minimum amount of time off.

I disagree as well. Of course, "good" is subjective but this doesn't look great: (from http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm) Table 5. Average paid holidays and days of vacation and sick leave for full-time employees in small private establishments, 1996

                                               Professional,                            
                                      All        technical,     Clerical    Blue-collar 
         Leave category            full-time        and        and sales    and service 
                                   employees      related     employees(2)  employees(3)
                                                employees(1)

Paid holidays................... 7.6 8.5 7.7 7.0

Sorry, I didn't catch that this data is for small establishments and you specifically said big. I can't immediately find this data from the BIS so disregard it if you like.

For professional, technical, and related employees, it looks like starting at two weeks and moving up to three or four after some time is the most common, which agrees with my experience.

10 days is the normal amount of time as a new employee, not including bank holidays. Often increases with tenure (rather than seniority).

Some companies are more enlightened than others, however.

(Broadly) there is no legal requirement for paid holidays in the USA. About 25% of employees don't get paid holidays. The USA is shockingly backward compared to EU when it comes to employment rights.

How is taking 2-3 weeks off leading by example? Compare with the situation here in Sweden: 5 weeks of vacation is mandated by law, and it is very common to have an extra week or two in addition to that.

Also, the employer is mandated to accept that the employee take four weeks of contiguous vacation during summer (these weeks are included in the above).

Reality check: over here in Germany, the legal minimum is 24 days per year. As a developer, you wouldn't take a contract below 28 days (but you also won't be offered one). 29-30 are common. My previous company allowed an additional ~5 days of unpaid leave, which many took.

Sorry, but your 10-15 days are insane.

Contractors in the US generally get 0 days of paid vacation. You either work or you get paid nothing since the contracting agency only makes money if you work.

Well yeah, it sucks. I thought that was the general consensus? I would have killed to move to Germany before I finally managed to get to Ireland.

We also close between Christmas Eve and January 2nd so that is a another week that is mandatory off for everyone.

I meant 2-3 weeks in a row. Last year I took off 10 days to go to Europe, then another 2 weeks in the summer. Plus the random day off her and there and the week in December and I will probably have taken 4-5 weeks off total for the year.

Another upside is forcing the company to learn to run without its founders or other key employees for a meaningful period of time.

This forces good processes to be put in place, and is an excellent fire drill in general.

Talking fun, I think it would be fun for a company to run a bus factor fire drill from time to time -:just point to one employee and say "Bam! You're hit by a bus, leave the office now here's $2K, come back next Thursday. No email, no remote working and no phone contact with anyone from here."

I wonder how many companies (let alone startups) could deal effectively with this situation.

A chaos monkey that takes out personnel instead of servers. I like it.

I really like this idea! Wonder how I could convince my day job to try it out.

I jokingly refer to Unlimited Vacation Policy as Guilt Driven Vacation Policy. IMHO, it is a sham so companies don't have to take liability for accrued vacation time on their books. While I commend Travis for coming up with a workable solution wouldn't it be easier to just say: "Everyone has 4 weeks vacation, use them!".

Isn't that exactly what they did? Everyone has to take 5 weeks minimum, and on top of that you may take more if you want/need.

"We tried something that didn't fit our culture, and it didn't work."

Taking less vacation time is not necessarily a bad thing. For myself, not having to meet a minimum quota means I enjoy the vacations I do take more, since I take them when I need and want instead of mandatory ones. It means, as long as I'm feeling good, I can keep the momentum up.

The bigger problems is that employees didn't respect others' vacation time. Or their own, for that matter. That is a cultural problem, and a change in vacation policy won't help (much). If you want the people in your company to be happier with their time off, work on respecting it.

  "The guilt of taking time off takes over, and you "just check in" or promise to be available if anything comes up."

That is, to me, a sign of an unhealthy culture. Fix that before trying yet another vacation experiment.

It sounds like having an open vacation policy is what leads to not respecting those days off in others. Also, what the leaders do, the staff generally do.

It sounds like a healthy place to work to me. I'd love to work there.

What you're proposing is unlikely to work in many environments. Even in the best of environments, where trust and respect course through every coworker interaction, people will still be looking to their coworkers (especially their superiors) to get a feel for how much vacation time is acceptable. In fact, companies with exceptionally strong cultures may be worse, as people really won't want to be a burden on their coworkers by taking more vacation days than average.

This is especially true for anyone with any sort of leadership role—whether it's an official senior position, a mentor, or just someone who is known for being a model employee. Your own behavior serves as a model for others, and no company policy is going to tell people any different.

I work for a small nonprofit organization with an extremely dedicated president. She's been very gracious with the freedom she allows her employees (though the official policies could be better), but I'm always wondering if she thinks that I'm actually working hard enough—not because of anything she's said, but because she puts in a ton of hours. I know many of my coworkers feel the same pressure.

If you're forced to take vacation time even when you don't need it, then try to find other pursuits—personal projects, reading, volunteering—that are still "work", but of the unpaid variety. Take the time to catch up with friends and family (especially if you have kids). Vacation doesn't just have to be about traveling and/or resting; it can also be an opportunity to catch up on other priorities.

I definitely agree that people in any form of leadership role serve as an example. They do on many more things than just vacation time. In general, that's one of the ways to influence culture, by being the best example of it. Conversely, if you don't act as an exponent of your own culture, it breeds a "do as I say, not as I do" atmosphere, which is just as negative as not trying to fix your culture.

I also agree that people will look at their colleagues to know what is 'acceptable'. I don't now if that is inevitable. If it is, that makes the example roles all the more important to guide that. If your president would take more vacation time and worked the same hours as everybody else, the pressure on you would be lifted. I realize that might be difficult for her to do, but that is the effect it has.

My problem with forced vacation time isn't the lack of work, it's that I don't need it. I already pay close enough attention to my work/life balance, so when I do take vacation time it's on my own terms. Being forced to meet a quota just means it feels like I'm wasting days that I could be productive doing the things I'm actually being paid for.

Incidentally, since I've become a freelancer my vacation time that I actually want to take has gone up a bit. The situation is far simpler (either I'm working and I get paid, or neither), and not having to go through any official process or multitude of forms, means it's much easier to take the occasional day when I want it.

"Being forced to meet a quota just means it feels like I'm wasting days that I could be productive doing the things I'm actually being paid for."

But surely if you want to get your work/life balance right, you would naturally end up taking ~25 days off a year without feeling like you're forced to? I guess it varies from person to person.

It does vary from person to person, and from job to job. For me, it's less than 25 days, on average. Others might need much more. I won't judge anyone for taking more vacation time, and I'll respect it as best I can. I just like having the option of not taking time if I don't want it :)

> That is, to me, a sign of an unhealthy culture. Fix that before trying yet another vacation experiment.

And one way to fix it is to give everyone lots of paid time off.

Is it? People will still feel guilty when taking time off, and it's possible that forcing people to take time off means the vacation time will be even less respected. "I won't bother that person, they'll need the time" vs "they're just making sure they meet the quota".

But should time off happen only because 'they need the time'? How about having it so people don't get to the point of needing time off?

Oh absolutely, I consider any time you take to stop yourself from needing more time off to be 'needed'. The goal is to stop long-term accumulation of stress, not to remedy it when it gets too bad.

"unlimited" days off are nonsense. Can I take off 365 days a year? If the answer is no it's not unlimited. There's a limit, you're just not specifying it.

I have a feeling this only works in places where you can be fired for performance reasons.

Sure, but my point is if you can be fired for taking too many days off, it's not unlimited. It's limited by the amount of work you're expected to reasonably do, and that's decided by your boss and colleagues. Except now instead of having a hard number where you know you are safe, it's completely subjective how many days off you can take.

If anyone wants to read more about unlimited vacation policies, here are some of the previous HN threads on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125973 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4874743 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613526 . The last contains comments about the Jacob Kaplan-Moss essay that was mentioned in this thread's link.

I'm glad to see someone trying this out. It's something I've been wondering about [1], and it seems pretty uncommon. I'll be looking forward to seeing how this works out for them, and any other companies that are so inspired to try to improve the status-quo.

Frankly the American culture of working continuously seems like a negative to employee and employer both--and even if it were only a negative to one, it would be something worthy of change.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053580

My job went from 20 days paid off per year where we accrued hours per pay period, to an open vacation policy. The company did this because of the cost of having to keep money saved up to pay out to employees who have saved up their vacation hours.

Like the article describes, most people including myself took off less time. I know for myself I felt guilty and didn't want to be seen as taking advantage of the new open policy.

I'm going to talk to my new job's management and ask them to setup a minimum vacation day policy.

It's like all these high-powered technology executives never opened an economics textbook.

The company I work for has open vacation and it works out fine. People take a few days, a week here and there and it winds up being 4-5 weeks a year. This is in the US. I'm sure there's no big payout for unused vacation when people leave, but no big deal. When you're sick, you stay home, when you need time off, you take it. The CTO and upper managers are all coders and have worked hard at maintaining a good work culture.

very good. Except "now has a required minimum of 25 (paid) vacation days per year, no matter what country they live in." Well no. If they live in the UK for example they have a mandatory limit of 28 days not 25 because it's the law.

But is that an enforced minimum? Is an employee required to take that many days off work? Because that's the distinction being drawn here.

In the UK you cant normally be forced to take leave its up to the employer how they handle overages some have use it or lose it some allow a carry over.

Apart from the finance industry where for some staff I think its mandatory for anti fraud reasons to take at least a two week block.

Yes, it is. And, just, seriously, what sort of a society doesn't mandate holidays?

A society that's not into proclaiming mandates.

No, you are not required to take them,but if you don't the company has to pay you the full amount for those days(so in effect, if you don't take ANY holidays during the year, you will get an additional 1-month's salary at the end).

I think you are talking about 25 days they can choose. In the UK you have 8 days that are Bank Holidays and National holidays. So this is a 33 day holiday policy.

Well the 28 day limit covers public holidays as well, maybe they mean in excess of public holidays and therefore cover pretty much every country everywhere?

".... and you "just check in" or promise to be available if anything comes up. You respond to just one email or just one GitHub issue."

When people need to be "available" while on vacation it usually means that there is way too much dependency on that person or insufficient knowledge-sharing. It shows the glaring holes on what's being hacked together and where systems can strengthen.

I definitely saw the "being totally unplugged" problem both previously when I worked at Microsoft and now when working at Mozilla. It's arguably even worse at Mozilla with the shift of many people (myself included) to IRCCloud, which is a wonderful service but turns what was supposed to be an asynchronous, loose availability chat system into a realtime, all-hours interruption mechanism.

Genuine question: how do companies/teams that run services deal with peak vacation periods? E.g. Christmas holidays. Even if everyone wants to take the last two weeks of the year off, you have to have someone keeping the lights on. Also, what happens if a high priority problem comes in? Are the team leads/managers careful not to schedule work around the holidays?

I am on vacation next week but am still the primary on-call.

I will take pages if I'm available or pass/escalate to the next guy if I'm not.

Since I'm on vacation it's understood to be a best effort.

Normally I would switch with someone but it's a busy vacation week so we just figure it out.

I took a two hour call the morning of thanksgiving, for reference.

> I am on vacation next week but am still the primary on-call.

Whatever that is, it isn't vacation.

It's like the difference between vacation and prison. In both case you are away from home.

Do you at least get compensated for on-call?

That sounds like a shitty vacation combined with doing a bad job at being oncall.

I imagine by offering more money

I would gladly work on christmas for 2x pay (especially if I had unlimited vacation I could take at other points)

and if something does go majorly wrong over christmas, your clients will probably understand

We have an open vacation policy for 2014, and I will take the last two weeks off (I've taken off about 5 weeks so far this year), but I will be available if need be. I don't mind, I don't expect any issues, and even if there are, it's not like I wouldn't be called in if I had a limited number of days off (which will happen next year).

Many companies in Europe pretty much shuts down during christmas period and often during specific weeks during the summer. You'll have a skeleton staff to deal with operational issues etc., but that's it.

Some key people will typically need to take turns taking time less time off in some types of companies.

Year-end change freezes are common in anything oriented at businesses.

In general, busy vacation times are claimed as first-come / first-served. It seems like that would screw some people, but in practice, it usually works out, since the only people who want to take the whole holidays off are people who are travelling, and that is generally 50% or so.

Someone needs to be available to cover issues but they should also get paid some type of bonus for working on a holiday in my opinion.

Ask in advance what people want, balance things based on seniority, past holidays, etc.

Also surely most people will answer their phone in case of an emergency, if nobody abuse it. I remotely fixed bugs in cyber coffees while traveling in Australia years ago. Nowadays you can practically work with only your smartphone on hand.

Interesting take on paid time off that I've never seen before. Will be looking forward to the update on how this works out.

I would go even further and postulate that lack of rules about who is in power kills societies. Many equate "lack of rules" with "freedom", but it's a problem. People without conscience will freely abuse the lack of rules or start to fight with each other, while the good people will get screwed. Eventually, the good people, who usually just want to do the work, will get unhappy and leave.

This applies not only to vacation, but to governance as well. So called "consensual democracy", where there is no hard and fast rule about who has how much power, has the same kind of problem. The most important thing about democracy is that it is very specific - everybody has the same amount of power. That discourages political fights, because you cannot (without explicitly changing the rule) accrue more power. In my opinion, many institutions (for example Wikipedia) suffer from this problem.

This is a bunch of leftist FUD to be honest.

Read up on libertarianism. You've even managed to get the definition of "freedom" wrong. Lack of rules? Are we using arguments from decades ago? It's lack of rulers. There's never a lack of rules because we all understand natural law.

>There's never a lack of rules because we all understand natural law.

No we don't.

More to the point, I can guarantee that not everyone agrees with your understanding of whatever 'natural law' is, or with your inalienable right to exercise that view in their presence. Not even Libertarians agree on that.

It's not something for which there is "my understanding" and "your understanding".

It's obvious stuff. If you punch someone in the face you can expect retaliation. If you trade with others you can expect peace for the duration of that contract. And so on.

I'm not saying there's a list of the natural laws that I imagine people know of. There's no list. There's only the obvious stuff. Obviously I'd have to retaliate if I thought my life were in danger, and obviously I'd do my best to keep alliances that benefit me. Others will do the same. It all ends up working itself out. No need for a Hammurabi.

Even the most barbarian, uncivilized tribes have had a shaman or chieftain and a set of principles to follow and taboos to avoid. Arguably (since I Am Not An Archaologist), Hammurabi's insight wasn't having laws, but writing them down, and abstracting the force of law away from the immediate will of the god-king.

Natural law, like the survival of the fittest?

Like, if you initiate aggression, you can expect aggression in return. In the same way that you would defend yourself if someone attacked you. Those self-reflective thoughts we all have.

So here's a slightly different view from someone I know -- they are slotted X number of vacation days, but actually need more.

He is divorced, and his kid is across the US, so he ends up using all his vacation to see his kid. Now he is left with nothing to take a real vacation with his current spouse, and they both really want to.

He should perhaps look for a better job?

There are a few people here commenting about how their employer's unlimited vacation policy allows them to take two weeks vacation and then work remotely for a week or two extra. That's great, and it's good to see companies allowing it but remote work is still work, and it certainly isn't a vacation.

Many people are working remote by default* and already have to fight certain perceptions that they are just sitting in their pants, watching tv, and eating chips all day, and it certainly doesn't help when others liken working remotely to being a holiday.

It's definitely a good thing that more companies are opening up to remote work and trusting their people to get things done without being watched over, let's not perpetuate this idea of it just being a bunch of slackers that do it.

* including me, obviously, and hence this response.

As a counterpoint, most investment banks enfore a mandatory 10 working day break where all remote access capabilities are disabled (including blackberries).

This is less out of altruism, and more so that any untoward activities can be uncovered whilst the person is out of the office.

This is less out of altruism, and more so that any untoward activities can be uncovered whilst the person is out of the office.

I'd love to hear more about that.

That's pretty much it. It's a compliance-type regulation. The idea is that if you were, say, hiding a $3bn loss in an obscure book or something then it is more likely to be discovered if you were out of the office and someone else is trading/covering your books.

You can read an article about it in the WSJ here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100008723963904449149045776154... or google for "Take Those Two Weeks Off —Or Else" and click the top link.

Here's an example:

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/easy-street/credi...

Everyone has at least a two-week period every year when they are completely cut off from the job. If you have been doing something off-the-books, that's enough time for it to explode. Or, if the auditing department suspects you of something -- or even if they don't -- this is the natural time to bring in forensics to dig through your books and figure out exactly you've been doing.

It's not as important in non-finance, but it can still have some use. I know of at least two cases where a sysadmin was on vacation and then outsiders were brought in to find all the backdoors he had installed.

There have been many cases of people in finance being able to cover up significant losses of company funds (through bad trades or what not) or a long period of time simply by understanding the front/back office systems.

If you force people to leave (and cut off remote access) they are unable to maintain the pretenses required to cover up these losses, and can help drive exposure of foul play. At a minimum you'd need two people 100% in on the cover-up which reduces the chance of it happening.

I don't think I see a single negative comment here about long vacations, so allow me to play devil's advocate. (These questions don't necessarily reflect my own opinions.)

1. If this is such a free lunch (employees are both happier and more productive overall), then why isn't lots of vacation offered everywhere (in the US)? Can it really be the case that the vast majority of US companies are too short-sighted to make a policy change that would be in their own best interest?

2. If, alternatively, more vacation is really good for employees, but slightly bad for employers, why doesn't the labor market adjust? In this case, you would expect employees to offer to work for a lower salary in exchange for more vacation time.

> Can it really be the case that the vast majority of US companies are too short-sighted to make a policy change that would be in their own best interest?

You can ask that about anything. Are the U.S. banks really so short-sighted to offer absolutely crap person-to-person transfers and get undercut by any number of hacky startups? Were the U.S. car manufacturers really so stupid? Are California taxpayers really too short-sighted to realize how Prop 13 hurts the state? The entire federal administration in lead-up to the Iraq invasion? Etc, etc

I don't disagree that bad decisions are made all of the time, but the questions is how the same bad decision can be made everywhere in a competitive marketplace. You've given a couple of good examples where the answer is government: banking is highly regulated, so breaking into the industry is tough, and the big U.S. auto companies actually would have gone out of business and been replaced without a bailout.

But if increasing vacation time makes your employees happier and you also get more productive work out of them, why don't the companies that switch then get all of the best employees and eat the lunch of everyone else? I can't think of any regulations that make it more significantly more expensive to offer lots of vacation, so I don't think government is the answer in this case.

I think the biggest clue is given in the original post: people (Americans) won't take vacation even when you offer it to them! In that case, offering more vacation is doubly bad for the company: you still pay your employees for the vacation time, but they don't actually take it, and lose the productivity benefits. Either this is because Americans actually rationally prefer higher salaries to more vacation, and the system is working, or they systematically underestimate how much good a vacation would do them, in which case we need things like mandatory minimum vacation policies or laws.

> But if increasing vacation time makes your employees happier and you also get more productive work out of them, why don't the companies that switch then get all of the best employees and eat the lunch of everyone else?

Because marketplaces aren't as competitive as you think they are. An advantage in one factor isn't sufficient to decisively kill off a competitor.

To give an example: Do you think one could find ten people who could each do a better job than your local muffler shop? Do you think one could find ten people who could each create a company that would eventually do a better job than IBM? Than Yahoo? Than Facebook? Then why does IBM still exist?

How come, in a competitive marketplace, corporations still make decisions based on where the CEO lives and who the executives play golf with?

That's not really a rebuttal. Sure, maybe we can ask that question about those things too. Why not? Are you expecting everyone's political opinions to mesh with yours so closely that we'll all agree if a theory seems to contradict them, it must obviously invalidate the theory?

> That's not really a rebuttal. Sure, maybe we can ask that question about those things too. Why not?

I gave my questions as examples of large groups behaving unoptimally. That happens all the time everywhere, so using the "well why hasn't the market sorted it out then" argument against any one question (vacation policy in this case) is a little naive.

> Are you expecting everyone's political opinions to mesh with yours so closely that we'll all agree if a theory seems to contradict them, it must obviously invalidate the theory?

I don't see where politics come into this unless you think Prop 13 is good for Californians or that U.S.'s nation-building in Iraq went swimmingly.

Those are good questions. I suspect the answer to two has to do with signalling.

True. If you can't tell how "hard-working" someone is from an interview, you might end up using "willing to work with less vacation" as a crude filter.

This is probably part of the answer to the whole question. In a world where you could measure every employee's productivity accurately, there's no need to keep track of how much vacation someone takes. In the real world, people end up using "time spent in the office" as a proxy, however weakly that might be correlated with actual productivity.

1. Simply, yes. Read up on Deming. US companies are not a bastion of efficiency and never have been. They innovate when there is massive competition, that's it.

Just be a freelancer, every day will be a holiday and christmas is just just another hackaton. ;p

Glad to see a new approach on the open vacation policy. I think this policy would work better if vacation days are only tracked until the minimum is met, otherwise I have a feeling it will be perceived as exactly 25 days, not more.

"Minimum" vacation gives employee the authority to take vacation without feeling guilt. Else some companies use open vacation policy to reduce the number of vacations that employee take.

The only thing surprising to me about this is to hear that this founder apparently had noble intentions at the start. I just assumed that every company that does this is cynically inducing more (short-term) work out of their employees while clearing some liabilities from the books, all at the cost of long-term success and morale. I would never work for a company with one of these "unlimited" vacation policies.

Twitter also had this policy when I worked there (two years ago) and I thought it was really poorly thought out. Apart from all of the (relatively obvious) issues mentioned in the post, any vacation at Twitter was at the discretion of your immediate manager. So if you happened to have a hard-arse manager, or one who hated you, tough luck. Really a bad idea.

Nice post... I especially liked the touch of posting a link to their hiring page right after describing their mandatory 25 paid vacation day policy.

I bet the people with families abused the hell out of this and went to Disney World every month. While all the bachelors never took a day off.

I can see the merit for enforcing more vacation; but is more vacation the solution to burnout, or is working less overall?

I like the idea 'minimum' vacation that allow people able to take more than 'minimum' vacation.

In all fairness "open vacation" policy is a yet another iteration on the age-old idea of Panopticon ;)

i said it first :) https://twitter.com/jimmyislive/status/495440322197876736

Society needs more free time in general. http://t.co/68fyM3950D

This is phenomenal.

I'd like to see the inclusion of data related to the structure and dynamics of the family unit. In the US the family desintegrates as kids are encouraged to leave home as soon as they finish high scool, say, 18 years of age.

This, in a huge number of cultures and countries around the world is an unthinkable attrocity. It isn't uncommon to have children live with their parents until they are ready to form their own families, say, 25 to 30 years of age. Under the stereotypical US culture this is looked down upon to the point of making fun of those still living with their parents.

Having millions of socially unprepared kids go off to try to make it on their own created, in my opinion, a society filled with various levels of dysfunctionalities. People tend to grow up, to some degree, in a "wild" setting where selfishness can become a necessity. In this context it is easy to see how work time can take the place of the social context lost due to having left the nest.

Having grown up and lived in three cultures it is easy for me to remove myself from my US culture and watch it from afar as a visitor from another planet might. Americans are said to seem socially inept and dry from the perspective of other cultures, and this is true. All you have to do is spend six months in Italy or Argentina to undrerstand this. Americans men develop a weird homophobic form of "macho" that is down-right funny from the perspective of other cultures. Hugging, or worst, kissing, another man is frowned upon. Human contact, in general, is just not considered to be "normal". I have lived in cultures where it was quite normal to greet your kids parents with hugs and kisses on the cheeks. In fact, it would be rude to come to a party or gathering and not go around the room kissing everyone, man, woman, kids. Yes, you kiss your friend's wives. School friends do this in high school when they greet each other. Again, unthinkable in the US. In fact, a teacher can get in trouble with the law for greeting a student with a hug and a kiss. Showing affection is alien. Weird.

In general terms, as much as TV shows and commercial try to stereotype this warm southern cowboy culture at the ranch with grandma this is, for the mist part, not the norm. The US family scatters and the kids are left to navigate a very important phase of their lives on their own.

Sorry to harp on this but i do think this is a very important part of the equation and one that explains so much about US society, their behaviors, beliefs, relationships, work and family life. Once you realize that some of these people become politicians that shape US policies and laws it is easy to see where some of our problems might come from.

There are subtle examples of this. For example, let's say you are working with a US friend on a project in their garage. He will use phrases like "give me my hammer" or "it's in my toolbox". In other cultures this becomes "give me the hammer" and "it's in the toolbox". I am convinced this egocentric view of the world is connected to leaving the nest early.

Another example that is particularly bothersome to me are cases where parents pay their children for things that in what I am going to call more socially adjusted societies is simply unthinkable. One of my friends pays his 18 year old kid to go pick him up at the airport. Another pays his kids to help paint the house. My neighbor across the street pays his kid to mow the lawn. Viewed from far more family-centric cultures these woukd be examples of seriously dysfunctional family units. As a teenager I helped my parents in their business. Money was never a part of it. This is simply how a family behaves in other cultures.

Of course I am painting with a wide brush. There are lots of cases of families that behave very differently from this. And, of course, the US has lots of multicultural families, such as mine. Yet I still think that a huge portion of the attitude towards work has to do with a bunch of single people existing "in the wild" and a setting where work can easily become a substitute for the family unit they effectively lost.

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