Absolutely horrible ripoff, and an excuse for companies to not pay back the unused vacation when the employee leaves. I worked at a startup and by conventional

Absolutely horrible ripoff, and an excuse for companies to not pay back the unused vacation when the employee leaves. I worked at a startup and by conventional numbers I would have had easily accrued ~2 months of salary with unused vacations, but I left and didn’t see any of it. And clearly taking vacation was never “the right time” over the years because there was always some fire to extinguish. After that I only worked in companies with fixed vacation days, some of which also paid the unused days at the end of the year rather than rollover or losing them, which was nice.