No. It can say otherwise in your employee handbook.

It should be in your contract, which means it was up for negotiation. Unless that's what you mean. While there's such high demand for tech workers, I would expect to see people being smarter with their contracts and picking up on things like that, start setting precedents.

At the moment the precedents are still heavily employee biased, but you ask for whatever you want in your contract during negotiations. Negotiate your sick pay, negotiate your PTO, negotiate your vesting schedules and exit terms, negotiate your hours and time in lieu policies. Negotiate your Intellectual Property terms. That one is super common to see lopsided toward the employer. We don't have unions or award rates, so we also miss out on some of those protections, hence why we need to make sure it's in the contract.

Even the nicest, fairest business owners I've worked for will start with industry standard contracts that do their best to shaft you, because it's industry standard and they don't see it as lopsided. But I've never had trouble negotiating for this stuff to be made clearer and fairer.

> It should be in your contract, which means it was up for negotiation.

Generally, employees in America do not have contracts. While plenty of things are open for negotiation during the offer/hiring process, I doubt you'll get an exception to a corporate policy on paying out on PTO if it's not something they already do.

That said, IME, accrued PTO has always been paid on departure (voluntary or not). For this reason, most of the places I've worked heavily encourage (or even require) taking PTO, because it's a liability on their books.

> Generally, employees in America do not have contracts.

Is that true? The company surely has terms for you, like expected working hours, terms about your sick leave, performance and health terms, out of office expectations, intellectual property disclosures and NDAs? Non-compete clauses? When does all that become binding if not through a contract?

A typical American tech worker's "contract" covers IP assignment and NDA. None of the other stuff is legally binding, and either side is free to change it or walk at any time.

I wonder if this is partly why upper-end salaries get so sky-high when compared to other country's tech sectors. It might be accounting for a level of risk that you could be cut off at any moment, especially in at-will states.

It seems common in the tech world, though? Amusingly, my current contract is from when the company was small, and explicitly guarantees provided lunch.

> It should be in your contract, which means it was up for negotiation

I've never seen this in the US. The only things typically up for negotiation is the sign on bonus/equity and base pay. If you start trying to negotiate vacations and holidays, you're going to look pretty silly.

I'm doing my best to understand this and be empathetic. Best of my brief research you haven't got any law bound entitlements so whatever the "status quo" is has been set by employers. So what I'm understanding here is that it's not even an agreement, it's just an understanding? Trying my best not to be inflammatory, as I understand this is a cultural thing for the US. But in a country with so little workers rights and entitlements, that high end workers are not even able to protect themselves with contracts seems silly.

> The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not require payment for time not worked, such as vacations, sick leave or federal or other holidays. These benefits are matters of agreement between an employer and an employee (or the employee's representative).

https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/workhours/vacation_leave

I think the concept is, you protect yourself with the cash you earn. Similarly to SW contractors in EU.

What? Negotiating PTO is pretty standard in my (US) view. I know plenty of people who've done it.

I vaguely recall striking out some sentences I didn't like, and initialing it. My current employer didn't mind.

> The only things typically up for negotiation is the sign on bonus/equity and base pay. If you start trying to negotiate vacations and holidays, you're going to look pretty silly.

Everything is up for negotiation. Just depends whether or not you have options. I have seen PTO negotiated in the US.

Not silly, happens all the time.

Everything is negotiable. That said, the bigger the company, the harder it can be.

F500 company and you want a line out of your mid-level developer contract? Their legal likely doesn't have time and they will just hire someone else.

Startup? Literally write your own contract.

That's true in less than half of US states.

Ah yeah I forget how little rights y’all have

On average US software engineers make much more money so even after any deficiencies like not paying holiday pay we still come out ahead. And even then, most companies will pay out holiday pay anyway regardless of state law, just as a matter of company policy.

We’ve got free speech though. So at least we can complain about it.

And on top of that we have to suffer in the tech industry with twice or more the average salary of non Americans. The horror!

In any major city in the US, a software engineer is probably making in the top 10% of area and there is little excuse to not have 3-6 months savings.

Having no rights is awesome as long as you're at the top percentiles of income (i.e. SWE), for the rest of the workers in the economy, not so much. And that's clearly reflected in the misery one can witness daily in American society, even in the richest cities.

Should I be expected to care about the plight of those in percentiles below me?

Yes

I witness plenty of misery every time I visit Europe. It reminds me that most places are about the same averaged out.

Reminder that the US has the highest median disposable income in the world, not just the highest top percentiles.

We are specifically talking about Stripe workers. But yes, I’ve chosen a contract job with even less rights than a full time employee at certain times in my life for more pay.

For what it's worth, Stripe is the only place I've ever worked that did not pay out accrued PTO. It does so only in jurisdictions where it is legally required.

My company switched from PTO to “unlimited time away” to avoid paying out accrued PTO upon departure. Their original home state didn’t require it, so they didn’t. But then they acquired some companies in states that did require it and also let us all work remotely. It was cheaper for them to drop formal PTO and replace it with hand-wavy “time away”.

Wow. Can’t do that here (Australia) - I think to have an unlimited leave policy, you’d still have all employees accrue annual leave (PTO) at the legal rate, and then just let employees take free leave once their annual leave balance reached zero. Any balance you have when you leave (or are made redundant) then has to be paid out.

It is not in most of the US.

It varies based on state. https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/articles/pto-payout-l...

In California, accrued vacation is part of wages and must be paid out as part of wages. However, unlimited PTO policies typically don't accrue vacation.

In Washington, it's "read your contract." If your contract doesn't say that they pay out accrued PTO upon separation, they don't.

It depends and some places go to "unlimited" for this reason, or combine sick and PTO and other stuff.

The smart businesses would just actually bank the dollar amounts and not worry about it, but those are rare.

This is exactly why companies go to unlimited PTO. They don't want the accrual on their balance sheets.