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I have "unlimited" vacation here in the states. If you go over three weeks, they still require special paperwork, but they allow it if you are tenured enough.
by sethammons 2y ago
I have "unlimited" vacation here in the states. If you go over three weeks, they still require special paperwork, but they allow it if you are tenured enough.
What unlimited means is "as long as your manager is decent, you will maybe get your days off" vs accrued vacation where you may be forced to take vacation to not lose it.
- withinboredom 2y ago> accrued vacation where you may be forced to take vacation to not lose it. I don't look at it that way. If you have accrued vacation, you "earned" your vacation and they can't take it away from you without compensation. Thus, you are guaranteed your days off. If they fire you, they should even have to pay you your salary for those vacation days. "Unlimited" vacation just gives all the control to your employer: the right to deny you vacation, the right to dictate how long your vacation is, etc.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> If they fire you, they should even have to pay you your salary for those vacation days. This is required in the US. That's the point of unlimited vacation - since it doesn't accrue, the company doesn't have to pay it out when you leave.
- hiatus 2y agoIt is not required in the US as it varies by state.
- solatic 2y ago> If you have accrued vacation, you "earned" your vacation and they can't take it away from you without compensation... If they fire you, they should even have to pay you your salary for those vacation days. This is indeed the law in Israel. What happens is that people are allowed to accrue a number of vacation days up to a limit, typically however many days of vacation you earn in a year, times two. Then the company forces you to take, at the end of the year, a number of vacation days down to the limit. Companies where this limit wasn't put in place introduced a moral hazard, whereby people would wink-and-handshake with their superiors when they would take a reasonable amount of vacation without actually reporting the vacation days to HR, wherein HR didn't really have the means to detect and enforce against the fraud. Thus people would work for decades, retire, and take compensation for decades of "untaken" vacation days, on top of the normal retirement packages. These policies represented usually $1+ million in obligation per worker and thus were clearly unsustainable without some kind of enforceable limit.
- gpvos 2y agoWhy would a company allow that, can't they put a limit on that themselves? All my employment contracts in the Netherlands had a clause about that.
- lmkg 2y ago> If you have accrued vacation, you "earned" your vacation and they can't take it away from you without compensation... If they fire you, they should even have to pay you your salary for those vacation days. This is the law in California but not most other states. In most states, vacation time is a benefit that can expire, evaporate, or be rescinded. The company is just deciding not to assign you job duties during your time off. How generous of them! But it's totally their right to decide not to do that, or to put a bunch of boxes around how they will do that. So it's legal, and common, that unused vacation time will actually be lost. In CA, accrued vacation time is classified as "deferred compensation." It is legally money that is owed to you. It will be paid at a later date, but it must be paid. It strikes me as no coincidence that the "unlimited vacation" fad started in tech companies with a large chunk of their workforce in California.
- leetrout 2y agoBingo: unlimited vacation is a scam
- ghaff 2y agoIt's highly dependent on company (and team) culture. If you can actually take a generous amount of vacation, personal, and sick (if you need it) time, I have no real problem with it. (Then, I haven't moved around a lot--I know some people who move jobs every year or two count on a payout from accrued vacation when they do.) Someone I know who retired from a fairly senior position at Netflix rather liked it and took some fairly long vacations but said there really was a good tradition of umplugging at least as he observed that came from the top.
- nmcfarl 2y agoSince everyone’s discussing the inverse, I shall mention that long ago I worked for a 100 person, 5 year old, startup who's policy was: your vacation is your year-end bonus. No one could take vacation ever, it just got paid out in December. They did give you Christmas and New Year’s off. Getting sick was jokingly referred to as a firing offense, though people did take sick leave. Burnout was a real thing – and I barely lasted a year, though that may well have been unrelated.
- swader999 2y agoI used to work at a place like that. I should make some inquires to see why they stopped paying me.
- gpvos 2y agoAssuming it is paid vacation, why is the special paperwork required? Governments over here require minimum amounts of vacation out of health concerns, but I can't imagine how giving away more or even infinite vacation days would concern them as long as the employer is happy with it.
- chgs 2y agoI could see each stint being off for more than 3 weeks would require something from the manager to confirm enough handover has happened. Waiting too 3 weeks is normal each time, but if you’re a project manager and vanish for 5 weeks at a critical part of the project then someone needs to know.
- gpvos 2y agoYeah but why would there be paperwork mandated by law?
- chgs 2y agoI don’t think anyone said they did
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gpvos 2y agoThe question would then become why a company would impose such paperwork on itself; but someone else replied that it has to do with unions, which I guess could explain it although it's still weird.
- chgs 2y agoWorking for a 100 year old 5b/year company the amount of forms to fill in to do various things are extreme. I could easily see a requirement from high up managment to “reduce risk” by having a department have a plan for an unusually long holiday stint (I.e someone taking 6 weeks off in a row), fundamentally because senior management don’t trust middle management.
- jonhohle 2y agoMy last office job had unlimited vacation and I never used it (not did most of my coworkers) and at the end of the year you neither had the days taken off nor had you accrued any credit for I taken time. At the job before that I had accrued 6 weeks of PTO, which was the max. I took every other Friday off after that and was paid out a month and a half when I left the company. Everyone understood the situation, so it wasn’t looked down upon when I was gone every other week. My perspective was that unlimited PTO was a scam to reduce vacation time. Most people are not going to take advantage of it, so the company benefits.
- dunham 2y agoIn addition to not having to pay out at the end of employment, they also do the "unlimited vacation" thing to reduce the liability of unpaid PTO on the books. When our revenue was hit hard in the early days of covid, the company I work for asked everyone to take a week of their PTO to help the financials look better.
- bushbaba 2y agoAnd when you quit you don't get unused vacation days paid out! Unlimited PTO is worse for employees than a prefixed number of days per year.