It's so pedantic to then point to these random rules, which are specifically designed to screw the employee over, and then say 'welp, those are the rules, too bad'. It also goes against the company mantra, of putting your health before the company (as he states in the article).
The guy in the article even stated:
> - No, it's not even a question, because you won't be using it as a vacation, right? Technically you won't be on PTO, so take a medical leave.
> It sounds very touching, but I didn't recognize the trick here. They wanted me to use my medical leave, because they didn't want to pay for the PTO I earned.
The point here is that the company didn't want to pay the guy for his hard-earned PTO. They pulled out all the stops to avoid paying him. They instead wanted to give him unpaid medical time off. Then they said they couldn't approve PTO because they didn't have enough office coverage, yet his boss took a month off.
So why can't he use his PTO? That's his money, his wife is dying, and his mental and physical health is at an all time low. Let him use his damn PTO.
Any manager under me who refuses PTO to someone caring for a loved one in such a mentally wrenching situation like this deserves to get fired themselves. And if I have anything to say in the matter, they will be, in short order.
It's basically understood that unlimited PTO means untracked and within some reasonable amount - if you were at an At Will company in the US they don't owe you much. Obviously you can't just take 3 years off of 'unlimited PTO' so it's hard to claim you truly believe it's limitless imo.
Expecting a promo when you're not working and expecting to be able to just take infinite vacation (even when dealing with tragedy) is just not realistic. There are other options (medical leave, extended leave, etc.) - some companies will go out of their way to be kind, but I wouldn't have that as my expectation.
This kind of rant doesn't look great either - my take away is this person was probably just difficult in general, there may have been other reasons they were not promoted.
My general impression is that it's the difficult people who use terms like "toxic" to describe those they clash with. His "Interesting fact 1" is also a red flag. Dirty words in some internal memo? I'm scandalized!
I don't like Atlassian for their slow software, but I'm sure it's a fine company to work for.
Of course, as with any heuristic it's far from perfect, and the author may very well be in the right here. It's impossible to tell from this piece and there are a few eyebrow-raisers – so all I can give this story is a shrug.