When I worked a Geckoboard they had a great system where you had unlimited paid time off, but you had to take at least 25 days off each year.

This, combined with colleagues visibly taking advantage of the time off available, helped ensure a healthy approach to unlimited time off.

>When I worked a Geckoboard they had a great system where you had unlimited paid time off, but you had to take at least 25 days off each year.

Thats doing it right. Or pay people for the vacation time they don't use.

I would expect that paying people for unused vacation would incentivize employees overworking themselves leading to reduced quality of output. In a sense, I expect that it would magnify the existing issues with unlimited PTO. It seems like this would be neither good for employee or employer.

Most companies only let you bank so many pto (Paid Time Off) hours and carry them over year to year. I think this came about because of accounting change where employee hours are considered a liability (Hours/Money owed for nothing in return), but I might be wrong on that.

As a result employees can't just bank their vacation hours and get a big payday when they leave. It tends to only take a couple years to get up to the max, and you end up with "use it or loose it" pto.

It's been accounting rules for a very long time. It's pretty much Accounting 101. If you accrue liabilities that you're obligated to provide (either in the form of employee time off or pay-out upon departure), that's a textbook liability.

Which is why employers almost always cap in some form or another; the exact mechanism is partially determined by state law.

I worked for a company once that, during a bad spell, eliminated an accrual cap to encourage people to bank vacation. The result was that a not small number of people who weren't really into taking vacation just let their balances balloon. The company eventually forced people to work down their balances.

>Hours/Money owed for nothing in return

From the business perspectice services rendered previously is "nothing", because you can't get any more value from that

People are technically already paid for their unused PTO when they leave a company with an allocated PTO/year (although this may vary between states). That was one of the reasons why I chose my current company, because I figured I'd make a little 'extra' money leaving after a year without taking any PTO. Personally, I did end up feeling a little burned out so I opted to actually start using my PTO, but it's nice to have the freedom either way.

What does it mean that you had to take 25 days off? What would they do to you if you didn’t?

> they don't want to inconvenience their team

This is is why it's important for team members to explicitly encourage each other to take breaks and vacations. I've often told a coworker, "stop working! Take a long weekend!".

I've seen companies set minimum time off, which can certainly simply the problem. (At risk of the Dilbert situation: "you need to get this done by end of year, and also take two weeks of holiday".) But ultimately, I think that's a road to this sort of cultural approach. Once people around you are taking time off, it becomes easy to justify taking time off. (And so, like most cultural things, you'd better have management doing it first.)

The best UPTO environment I've ever seen had managers who asked about time off in one-on-ones and pushed people who said "none" to take more. It also had a lot of acceptance for 'aimless' PTO; justifying your trip to the Andes is easy, but people take PTO more consistently if no one's expecting a better story than "sleep late and run some errands" or "play a new-release game".

> Once people around you are taking time off, it becomes easy to justify taking time off. (And so, like most cultural things, you'd better have management doing it first.)

Also once teams and management get used to people taking time off, the business processes also become more resilient to people missing for a week or two and taking PTO becomes less of a problem for everyone. Suddenly someone missing for a week is just not a big deal.

I'd never considered this explicitly, but it's an excellent point.

It occurs to me that Google somewhat famously adds artificial downtime to their services to make sure no one is relying on 24/7 uptime. I don't want to reduce people to server-equivalents, but I'll bet high vacation rates are a pretty good way of making sure no one relies too much on individual knowledge. Even from my personal experiences, lots of things get documented when the person who knows them well is heading out of town and there's a sudden scramble to formalize that knowledge.

You're generalizing based on your own behavior, but not everybody behaves that way.

I'm exactly opposite, and had no problem taking PTO when I worked at a company with an unlimited plan. Now that I have limited PTO again I hoard it and take less time off.

I don't feel inconvenienced when others take PTO, and I don't expect my taking PTO to inconvenience them.

The problem is, if it's not codified in law, there is no consistency. One person's gloriously well managed Unlimited PTO policy (congrats!) is another person's peer pressured non-usage.

"Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that through an approval process, offer it! But don't say it's unlimited, because it isn't. And if you don't want one of your business perks to be pointed out as fraudulent, don't advertise it as such.

> The problem is, if it's not codified in law, there is no consistency.

A poorly codified policy is an implementation problem, and will be a problem for both limited and unlimited PTO policies.

> "Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that through an approval process, offer it! But don't say it's unlimited, because it isn't. And if you don't want one of your business perks to be pointed out as fraudulent, don't advertise it as such.

The entire point is that the employer doesn't care how many days off people take each year. Employees can be responsible for deciding that for themselves. Some people don't want that extra responsibility, and I'd agree that they probably won't like unlimited PTO policies.

It would be ludicrous to outlaw unlimited PTO policies just because some people don't like them.

  The entire point is that the
  employer doesn't care how many
  days off people take each year.

Of course they do. Just they call it "abusing the policy" or "not getting your work done" and don't tell you what the lines you shouldn't cross are.

> Of course they do. Just they call it "abusing the policy" or "not getting your work done" and don't tell you what the lines you shouldn't cross are.

I don't know how many times I need to repeat this, but if your company doesn't communicate expectation it's a problem with the company, not with unlimited PTO policies in general.

If there's a trend that's affecting the industry as whole, and if most places are abusing that trend, then it's worth looking at the trend to see what's going not. It's not very helpful to say what you're saying when statistics speak otherwise. It's very lazy to say "it's an implementation problem" and is not giving the question enough thought.

So where are these statistics? All I've seen in this thread, and others on the topic, are anecdotes. If people are going to complain about how it didn't work for them then it's only fair to mention how well it worked for the company I was at.

I also disagree that my comments haven't been helpful. There's a difference between the concept of "unlimited PTO" and any particular implementation of it, and it's important to know where a problem is coming from. Perhaps there should be regulations around it, but getting rid of it entirely, as suggested elsewhere in this thread, isn't the answer.

We wouldn't ban all cars because one brand is unsafe, so let's not get rid of all unlimited PTO policies just because some companies do it wrong.

>All I've seen in this thread, and others on the topic, are anecdotes.

Great observation! Statistically, there are more anecdotes in this thread with employees with negative experiences with good ones. I think that's a great starting point.

And, as usual with self-reporting, accept that folks with experiences on the extreme are more likely to be motivated to speak up.

I don’t know about you, but any time off (even when unlimited) is still subject to approval by my manager.

If I take one day off 30 times a year nobody raises an eyebrow, but if I take 30 days off in one go it might.

> It would be ludicrous to outlaw unlimited PTO policies just because some people don't like them.

I can appreciate this opinion if you've had a good experience with an Unlimited PTO policy, but regulation isn't for the best experiences. Unlimited PTO is an HR/Marketing dark pattern.

EDIT: > It's disappointing so many people want to ruin things for everybody because they've worked at crappy companies in the past.

@jlarocco: I am disappointed you prioritize protecting your arrangement than the well being of others at crappy companies. As I mention in my other comments in-thread, you can still arrive at something similar to "Unlimited PTO" while still instituting regulations to prevent worker abuse (minimum PTO days issued + a process to request additional days). I do not understand the disdain for regulation that simply enforces what is being offered.

There has to be a limit somewhere though.

Say I booked the entirety of June off this year. Are they still cool with that? How about if I also decide I'd like July off too. That's an extreme I know but there's a limit somewhere.

I thought this was common sense, but can't you just ask? "Unlimited PTO" does not mean "do whatever you want". Your manager can deny requests when you have limited PTO, too, so I don't see what you're getting at.

FWIW we did have somebody take an entire month off to visit family in China. He was responsible for tons of code and functionality, and it worked fine because management knew about it and planned around it.

If you can't handle the responsibility, don't ruin it for everybody, just go work somewhere else.

I agree with you. I've seen people take 8 weeks for a similar reason. Over that time period they checked in, fixed a few bugs related to work they had done but were generally gone.

In a strict PTO environment that would have been almost impossible for them to do.

Some people are going to respond and be upset that they want to work exactly 8 hours, get exactly 41.5 hours of PTA and get paid that way. That's fine, although I hope they are giving the company back money for browsing HN.

I on the other hand like the freedom and flexibility that unlimited PTO provides along with a flexible work schedule. Do I end up working more? Probably, but I have way less stress. I much prefer working that hour on a rainy Saturday instead of the beautifully sunny Friday.

I've never worked at a place with unlimited PTO. I don't know. This is me asking :P

Only ever worked at UK companies where we get 5.6 weeks PTO as standard. Never had a request denied as long as I've given 2 weeks notice of a long'un

You're probably requesting with a degree of sense.

If you requested your 5.6 weeks off all at once and over an go-live date that you were 100% responsible for, you might receive a request to see if you could move those holidays a bit later

Booking those whole two months wouldn't even blow through standard 25 day allotment of PTO :) Which makes it even more obvious just how shortchanged you get with unlimited.

Unlimited PTO is not so much a marketing farce, though the ways it's promoted are. However, since it doesn't involve accrual and payout it's more of a tax scam on the back of employees (natch).

As a manager at various companies in the US, it's often been a struggle to get people to take their allotted PTO. And to get people to take 2 weeks off? Very infrequently. I had to make people take their PTOs.

Our European team colleagues? Not so much.

As others have mentioned, having a company minimum is a good idea. But you can also just give it to yourself: pick a number and make sure you take that many days off.

Current place I work has unlimited PTO, and I really like it. You do need to be careful not to fall into the trap of not using it, though.

I don’t understand this. Why would you not use it? There would be so many days where I just wake up and go: ‘No... not today.’ and stay in bed.

Then there’s still normal vacation trips to consider.

I can easily see myself using 40 days of PTO in a year.

With unlimited PTO and flexible schedule, I take way more time-off. Never will I give up my health, time-off for co-workers, they aren't family or friends, they are co-workers, who will replace you if you die tomorrow.

If I am on a limited PTO plan, California law guarantees me the right to cash out my unused vacation days when I leave the company.

It seems to me like it would be fair for companies to offer unlimited PTO as long as employees can cash out unlimited money when they leave. But for some reason, this is not often offered.

I currently have the most joyous of "unlimited PTO" policies. There's something in the handbook, which isn't that great, but I've been told that it's just there for documentation and we have no 'real' policy. YAY!

At trivago you can decide how many days to take off in a year, but German law stipulates that you have to take at least 24 (2 per month). One of my co-workers tried to never take vacation and HR made him stay home for all of December!

I've just started my first job with unlimited PTO, and I've never understood complaints like these. I can see how it isn't as amazing as a naive what's-on-the-tin reading would imply, but it seems to me that you can just set your bar at what a normal amount of vacation would be, plus a little bit if you feel like, since they're marketing it as "unlimited PTO". Eg, decide that three weeks is an appropriate, comparable amount, and then take three weeks off.

As I mentioned upthread, I've never had a job where I didn't work when and how much I wanted, go into the office when I felt like it, etc etc. I'm subject to the same pressures you describe, but it turns out they're really easy to handle: keep a rough eye on how many hours you're working.

The other day they had a rare beer release I wanted to go to in the middle of the day, on a Friday. I didn't have any meetings, so I "WFH" and worked 3-4 hours that day and spent the rest of the day drinking and getting dinner with a couple funemployed friends, including checking my email and responding to important ones for a few minutes every couple hours during the workday. I could've (and have in the past) written off those four lost hours of work as coming out of my effective productivity, but since this is a new job and I'm trying to hit the ground running, I just made it up in dribbles of an hour or two over the next week.

The dirty secret when people talk about being pressured at work is that 90% of the time, your employers are relying on you to do the work of pressuring yourself. If my employer wants me to work extra and go above and beyond, I make sure that it's explicit and metaphorically "on the record". Pulling all-nighters during crunch time or forgoing vacation for a long time should be banked as something you can draw on, giving you cover for taking a longer vacation or working shorter days after crunch time.

It's really up to you to set your work life balance, and the fears most people have about the consequences of doing so are largely (but not entirely) illusory.

The one major caveat here that I haven't ever had to face is if you're both at an abusive company and highly replaceable (eg feel like you couldn't get a similar quality job). In this case of effectively having a better job than you'd otherwise get, the power dynamic is markedly shifted and employers can get away with a lot. The only saving grace in this situation is if your more in-demand coworkers have healthy attitudes about work/life balance, since it's hard for management to crack down on individuals in a way that's perceived as unfair.

Come back in a year and tell us how this went.

Unlimited PTO can turn into unlimited working if your boss is really "good".