Really? 25 days is 5 weeks; I feel like the standard for PTO is 10-15 days, and often it's 10 days, but you get bumped up to 15 after you work at a place for a year or two.

3) "Unlimited vacation," which is usually a hip facade for 1 or 2.

Is that really true? I have very limited first-hand experience; only two of my employers have offered unlimited vacation. For one of them, it was as you describe. For my current company... well, by the end of this calendar year, I think it'll add up to a little over 5 weeks, which is fairly unusual by US standards.

As a response, many companies are switching to "unlimited" plans. These look good to the uninitiated. But the real impetus for an "unlimited" plan is that it frees the company from having to guarantee -- or pay out for -- a minimum number of days for each employee. It's not really about lifting the ceiling; it's about lowering the floor.

I'm sure there are companies out there who really do have, and make every effort to honor, "unlimited" vacation plans. But I believe these companies are the exception to the rule.

In reality, it was nowhere near "unlimited vacation" as everything still needed to be approved, and it was very common for vacation requests to not be approved for a variety of business reasons. She probably ended up with ~20-25 days off per year, including stat holidays, which is the same as you'd get at Google or Microsoft.

Since it's a young company, most employees are indespensible, and without any written guarantee saying "you have X days of vacation a year", everyone is too afraid to even ask for any time off.

I worked for one of those. I'm glad I got out. Unfortunately, I landed at a company that's ridiculously stingy with PTO (10 vacation days, 8 holidays, 7 sick days -- this is slightly mitigated by the fact that you can make up hours you miss without using PTO, so I've done things where I leave early one day but stay late the next), however because company policy requires that employees take all our vacation days every year, at least I know what their expectations are. I took a vacation this year because I knew I had the days for it and so I just filled out our standard form and gave it to my boss, knowing it would be accepted. On the contrary, I didn't take a single vacation during my time at my previous employer, and in fact I never even asked for one, because we were bouncing from crisis to crisis, and I could just imagine my boss saying "are you crazy?".

"Can I take three weeks off in July?"

"Absolutely! But we might penalize you on your performance review."

Usual disclaimers about not every company etc.

Just my experience, but yeah, what I've seen is a 15 day minimum, and I don't explicitly filter out places that offer less.

Perhaps it's the type of companies I go for? If I recall correctly, Google, FB, Amazon, MS etc. all offer 15+ days for new hires, and most other large companies try to at least match them.