Comment by mackey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mackey | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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