Exactly. I would respond to this policy by never taking any vacation time ever, or, at the very least, feeling guilty every time I did.
If a company had a "no vacation policy", and when pressed about it, they said "just get your work done - we don't track vacation time", how much vacation time would you plan to take in your first year there?
When you're there, you realize that nobody ever takes vacations. Can you still justify that three week long trip to Asia that you had planned? I mean, you can always find a new job, but you've already sunk a ton of time into the company. If instead they said that you get three weeks, at the very least you get paid out for it when you leave. It's also easier to get a direct answer for "do people take their vacation time?"
As an aside, but I think your point "they [think they] are irreplaceable or are in continual danger" is a pretty good point for encouraging extended vacation - if you can't survive for two weeks without someone on your team, something needs to change, and that can be a good way to identify those people.
For the email policy, I see that point. I hope that under 20 employees that won't be an issue considering Gmail auto complete, and mailing lists, but I'm going to have to be careful about it.
I agree with the vacation issue. I wonder if there is a way to encourage people to take any time off they need, but not worry so much about allocating individual days to it? Also, I don't love "earned" vacation as it seems to say we don't trust you enough yet to take vacation (if they are an early employee), and it's annoying having to delay vacation until you've put in an arbitrary amount of hours.
As for vacation, why not - you get 2 weeks vacation as a signing bonus, plus 3 weeks/year. This accrues up to X months. Seems to solve all of the problems. If you want to stick with the no vacation policy, assuming you're the founder, it means that you have to take long, extended vacations. If you want your employees to be comfortable taking two weeks off, you have to take two weeks off and make people know that you're taking two weeks off (and not work those two weeks, at least as far as people can tell). There are always deadlines, always important meetings, and I find it impossible to justify taking an arbitrary amount of time off with no guideline. The point of vacation time isn't trust, it's to set that guideline - I am here to work, but I need to know what the expectations are. You can deal with the outliers as they come up - if one of your good employees wants to take two months off in the summer, you guys'll work something out.
Then I think having no sick day policy ("come to work sick and you're fired") and a flexible work from home policy makes this less about beancounting and more about taking time off to energize. Everyone loses a few days a year to appointments, a cold, a sleepless night, etc., and hates having to take those out of their vacation days (or are forced to lie about being sick).
Most good companies/managers, at least in the software industry, also recognize that developers often work overtime and/or odd hours, so when you're sick or can't work for some other reason you can usually "make it up" by working off-hours. That way you can save your vacation time for when you're actually on vacation.
Memorial Day 1
4th of July 1
Labor Day 1
Thanksgiving 1
Christmas - New Years 3 (one day moves between the
two, depending upon the
calendar / weekdays for a
particular year)
Paid vacation often started at two weeks -- 10 days. However, depending upon your manager, you could end up consuming a significant portion of that for doctors appointments, home maintenance, managing whatever problem the kids have, etc. (Some managers insist you take every hour out of the office as time off; others are more flexible.)
A fairly standard policy seemed to be to add one week (5 days) of paid vacation after 5 years tenure. Another week at 10 years tenure. Most such increases maxed out at 3 or 4 weeks vacation, no matter the length of tenure.
Sick days were increasingly disappearing; this seemed to be a target of management consultants' recommendations for "streamlining" operations.
Some workplaces were/are somewhat more generous; however, none of that is mandated. (And again, the consultants with their "best practices" seem to have been making inroads on this -- just as they've continued to wedge people into smaller and smaller cubes having lower and fewer walls.)
I mention all this in part because I think many higher level technical people are somewhat sheltered. (Not all, though.) While technical, I worked fairly closely with many people who were not, and the above was not unusual.
I said not counting public holidays, i.e. 31 days holiday + 8 (I think?) days public holidays. If you start at two weeks, isn't that 10 days rather than 20?
And I wouldn't even dream of including sick days in that. When you're sick you get the day off, paid, without affecting your holidays; I think that's a legal requirement, but if it isn't it's certainly industry standard (If you're sick when you've already taken a holiday you can claim another day off in lieu, though that's a little more complex).
The US just seems to overwork immensely from where I stand.
Most people do not "overwork immensely".
As to vacation: I'm not speaking from experience here, but I think creating a culture of vacation could do it. If the founders are seen taking time off (off-the-grid off, not emailing-from-the-poolside off), that could set precedent.
Picking your own email address and hostname sounds fine in theory, but as the company grows, having a naming scheme like first initial last name lets you email people easily without having to remember the format that they chose. Plus it means that the first few employees get all of the cool email addresses ([email protected], etc), and it's hard to change emails down the line.
And no vacation policy sounds nice in practice, especially as an employer (we're all adults, be responsible), but it falls apart quickly especially if people are workaholics and don't take vacations. I have trouble taking vacation as it is, with no defined policy, I basically don't. It would be even harder if my boss didn't take vacations. Now, this isn't my employer's fault directly, but I would prefer a defined vacation policy with a no sick day policy (or better yet - "if you're sick at all, don't come to work or you're fired") and an understanding of short term tradeoffs for when you do things like pull all nighters.
Company credit card is great. I'd even go so far as to say tell every person - here's $500 to spend each year making yourself more productive. Then let people (subject to approval) buy whatever they want.
As for a clear salary system - in theory, sounds reasonable, but you have to be flexible with salary since you don't want to lose good developers because your "culture" says you can't pay someone an extra $5k/year. And if you start making exceptions, I think that's worse, since it gets perceived as favoritism. At the same time, that salary talk should happen twice a year, no exceptions. There should also be performance reviews every six months, and the performance reviews and salary conversations should not be the same thing (since otherwise I think people will just wait to answer the question of "am I getting a raise" and ignore the rest).
Quality furniture and office space and pick your own computers - very yes. Again, I'd say - here are some recommended/common setups, but here's $5k (or more) to spend on your office. Also, quiet space is so important, I hate open offices. If you're a small company, you take what you can get, but once you are big, at the very least have pair offices. Distraction due to random noise costs me days of productivity, and I'm generally pretty focused. I have a Herman Miller Embody at work, oh god that chair is awesome.
Snacks - I really like free lunches, not for the financial benefit because I figure it comes out of my salary anyway, but because it means I can get healthy food and I don't have to think about it. Also, get healthy office snacks as well as a bit of junk food.
Hours - I tend to work in long periods of high productivity followed by long periods of low productivity, so my work hours fluctuate a lot. I have friend however that works at a company that is quite strict about 9:30-6:00pm every day (as in, get in slightly before 9:30 ever day, and everyone is out before 6:00pm), which seems reasonable. I think that in a lot of companies where people are at work for 12 hours a day, they're not doing 12 hours of work but filling time to save face. So having never experienced a more strictly regimented day, I think that it might be interesting.