In most of the companies I've worked in with this policy, it ended up being a net negative. One place I think did it right, but I'm not sure how much of that wa

In most of the companies I've worked in with this policy, it ended up being a net negative. One place I think did it right, but I'm not sure how much of that was by design. People err on the side of not taking PTO, and everyone is always looking around at what everyone else is doing to see what's "normal", which adds a layer of stress to it. I mean of course it's a policy smell where "unlimited vacation" is just a way to get more work out of employees, or if there's actually some secret, behind-the-scenes value judgments being made against those rotten slackers for taking time off. But it seems to be one of those small ways that startups turn the screws on employee benefits. But actually at one of the places I worked, the CEO and the CTO took regular PTO. I mean of course the ship wasn't rudderless, but I'd say they took liberal, European amounts of PTO under the no-vacation-policy policy. This was actually a really useful kind of "lead by example" that showed they were trying to actually have a cool "unlimited vacation" policy. Their big thing was that as long as the work was getting done, they didn't care about butts-in-seats at all. Incidentally, that's now the standard by which I measure all other companies. Anyway, I think it is largely not a good idea, and the only time I would ever say it was a positive thing was as part of a broader pattern of excellent management. Like the "unlimited PTO" policy working out positively to the benefit of everyone was just a side effect of having great management in the first place. If I ever start another company, I'm just going to hand out 20 days of PTO and be done with it: It's sufficiently large that it's as impressive as "unlimited vacation" is supposed to be, but without all the hidden baggage that usually comes with it.