This is what I think of when companies offer the passive-aggressive "unlimited vacation time" policy.

It's not unlimited, and you shouldn't start off your employer-employee relationship with an obvious lie. Set a policy and make it clear that you are exchanging x dollars for y amount of work.

At some companies they call it “discretionary time off” to make it clear it is between you and your manager but the concept is the same. What many companies fail to do is properly train their managers (1) how to manage this with their reports and (2) to consistently take time off as an example to the people that report to them and to set expectations. Without a program in place to encourage people to use it, people don’t use as much as the company typically intends. Due to legal nuances, it is a bit tricky to officially track performance in this regard.

Most companies that I’ve worked at which had this type of vacation policy had a directive for managers to ensure that every employee took at least 3-5 weeks of vacation every year (the minimum varied with company). It wasn’t always successful but that was the objective. More than that was fine too.

One of the original motivations behind these policies was the burst-y nature of some types of engineering work. Companies wanted to allow engineers to take 2-3 months of paid vacation after a relatively intense 12-18 months with few breaks working to ship some product. Giving people multiple months of vacation is surprisingly difficult without also running afoul of other legal and accounting complexities around vacation time in various jurisdictions. The “unlimited / discretionary” policy is essentially a loophole in US law that originally allowed managers to reward people with large amounts of time off. It has been generalized, and has other accounting benefits, but this was the original use case.

Be interesting if there is a roll of a dice each day that increases if you have too many accumulated working days. If you get hit, you are forced to take that day off.

Or alternatively just accumulate holiday days the way it works in the rest of the western world!

In the U.K. the rule is you accumulate holiday but all employees MUST take all their holiday before the end of the financial year. Employers must give at least 5.6 weeks of holiday to each employee, however can give more (either as a fixed amount or unlimited amount). There are some rules that let you roll holiday over to the following year in some circumstances to allow a little flexibility, but in general the rule is you have to take them.

Legally employers must ensure that all employees take all of their 5.6 weeks of holiday, so it’s not a “use it or lose it” situation. Employers also cannot pay their staff more to have them work during their holiday, it’s got to be time off (up to 5.6 weeks, any holiday over that point is discretionary).

Because of this, all employers will pressure employees to take their holiday ASAP because if everyone postpones it you will have everyone off in the last few weeks of the financial year.

As a small caveat, the 5.6 weeks (28 days) is allowed to include the eight statutory bank holidays, and almost always does (i.e. the worker can't insist that they not be paid for the bank holiday, and take the holiday day some other time). So the minimum amount of non-discretionary holiday that a worker can accrue is usually four weeks.

In practice the actual baseline offered in many jobs seems to be five weeks, plus bank holidays.

As a further caveat, bank holidays are actually not different to the remaining holiday allowance in law.

Employers can dictate exactly when you take all of your holiday allowance by law, it’s just that this doesn’t happen in reality. Similarly they can force you to work bank holidays.

I’m back at a more traditional company after being at a startup for two years and the unlimited PTO was amazing.

It wasn’t passive aggressive at all and now I sit here one my hands waiting to accumulate enough pto to take an extended break.

It wasn't unlimited though. If startups will let you take 4 weeks, or 8 weeks, or 12 weeks, or whatever - they should simply publish that up front.

I am fairly certain that they would have had an issue with you taking 52 weeks of paid vacation time off per year. The actual policy number is somewhere between 2 and 52.

I agree that 2 weeks of PTO for an employee per year is too little, but I think we are talking about different things.

When employer says “unlimited” they actually mean “take as many as you like as long as your manager is happy with your work” so I doubt you can formalize that in the offer. It’s good deal tho for people who can deliver the goods

If you do really good can you take a year off? If not, then it’s still not unlimited. I’d like my salary and benefits be quantified in my contract rather than “manager discretion” which can go south in a hurry if you have a terrible manager.

In reality I saw employee #1 switch to a different project and take 3 months off. Seems reasonable.

I was happy taking a Friday off here and there when I needed and taking weeks off when I moved. This was in addition to my regular vacations prior to the pandemic.

Everyone anti-unlimited PTO seems to be completely missing the forest for the trees. It’s nice to be respected and trusted to do your work. It’s also nice to fuck off whenever you want.

The argument here is that of course you can’t take a year off and reasonably do your job. Well; we all knew that already.

Genuine Unlimited time off creates an environment of respect between the employee and the employer. If I do my job; I can take some time off. You can’t really do your job if you’re never there, so I don’t get your point.

> If I do my job; I can take some time off.

What does it mean to "do your job"?

At every place I've worked there was an infinite amount of job to be done. If I were to take 4 months off I would do less of it than if I've taken 1 month.

So that just shifts the conversation from "how much vacation you have" to "what amount of work is considered enough". Which doesn't seem all that different to me, or at least it would not have been at any place I've worked at.

to be fair, "what amount of work is considered enough" is still an issue with the traditional PTO setup. following the HR manual to a T is not sufficient to keep a job if you never finish anything. I do prefer the traditional accrual system as I feel it makes expectations more clear, and it slightly reduces the impact of the "did I get a reasonable manager" die roll.

also some people (like me) just don't take a ton of PTO. I look forward to cashing out the max accrual at my final salary whenever I end up switching jobs. unlimited PTO essentially penalizes people like this.

I think a fair few of us have been burned by companies where this level of respect absolutely did not and could not exist and engineers were treated equivalent to you, an amateur, calling a plumber to your house and then hovering over them telling them everything they're doing wrong. Informal PTO would have just made the situation even worse.

If you can’t do your job because it’s unreasonable and or the organization is dysfunctional it’s still nice to have time off to depend on.

If you want to be real pedantic I can counter with the fact that at least in the US and with the “at-will” contract just because they promised you 25 days of vacation doesn’t mean you can take it whenever you please or at all.

If you get fired befoee the PTO do you get the money they stocked for you?

Fired might be different, but if you leave some places won't pay out vacation or only 50%. Some places have learned not paying out banked leave leads to poor outcomes but others still get away with it. Not paying out vacation is a good way to get someone to take all their vacation right before they leave so you get no time to offload work.

Also depends on the state (for example, in New York State employers are mandated to pay out accrued vacation time unless it's a stated, formalized policy not to).

If you give people defined vacation time, you have to pay it out when they leave in CA. If it's undefined it's worthless, which is good for the employer.

Yeah I think it creates an insane inversion where the people there the longest can effectively have unlimited PTO and the people that are new are fucked. I was just talking about this with my wife.

This is exactly the issue. I left my last job with almost two months of vacation time. No startup wants to pay that out if they can help it.

I’m back to a traditional place after unlimited. It’s annoying waiting to accumulate time, but I prefer the lines being clearer. The way my old company did unlimited felt like a cheat to not have to pay a vacation accumulation out if you didn’t use it, but you also felt like you were put on the naughty list for taking too much vacation. If you took beyond a certain amount of leave, someone from higher and higher up the chain had to approve it. Well, you can’t the time of day from the upper echelons of management, so getting your only exposure with them to get approved felt like getting a spotlight put on you for the wrong reasons.

I wasn’t on a naughty list at my place place. I was encouraged to take time off and would regularly do so, even on short notice.

Maybe somewhat of a hate the player situation. It can be done right and I’ve seen it- and I miss it.

I take about 3-5 weeks of vacation a year + our 14 company holidays.

I typically do one big road trip for ~2 weeks and then a week randomly through the year plus random days fishing, doings tuff with kids or just taking a break from work.

I could never do that having to accrue

You could if you lived in Europe, where you must get at least four weeks minimum vacation per year (plus public holidays).

I wouldn't mind living in Europe... But i feel like i missed that boat. I'm in my mid 40s.. not sure what options there are.

Similar story from a friend. The privately held company paid record dividends in both 2020 and 2019, but used COVID as a cover to do without both bonuses and raises. The only way to see this money would be to become a stock holder in the company, which is only offered begrudgingly.

> both the recruiter and my new manager explained to me that I should think of the 10% bonus as a baseline expected part of my salary

If a company does this in Europe [I think generally in the EU], I believe it would then be considered a contractual entitlement and part of your salary - so the company would legally have to pay it anyway.

I work London finance. Bonuses are a big part of the pay package (in many cases over 100% of your base, sometimes even 10x base for guys who work on successful algo-trading projects).

Every place I've received a bonus from gave me a gigantic, in-very-clear-terms, no-nonsense page to sign that said I acknowledge the this bonus is discretionary, it is not to be expected, there is no expectation to ever receive another one, etc.

This is most likely done because everyone expects to get some kind of a bonus (if you don't receive a bonus, unless the company is basically going bankrupt, that's a really, REALLY strong sign that you should probably your bags up and GTFO). It is considered part of the basic pay package, but then again, one of these years, there might not be a bonus, and they want to make it absolutely clear that you can't expect one in that case.

The reason for this is that most hedge funds pay bonuses out of their performance fees, and if you have a shit year in the market, there isn't any money to pay bonuses.

Which company is this?