Re: Vacations, the place I work uses a combination of both, which seems to work out pretty well - everyone gets their yearly (competitive) fixed amount with som

Re: Vacations, the place I work uses a combination of both, which seems to work out pretty well - everyone gets their yearly (competitive) fixed amount with some rollover (which is mostly for accounting purposes, so the accountants can quantify the liability of outstanding vacation days), and if you want to take more, then...OK. The yearly fixed amount is good for anchoring/expectations-setting. It's a way of publicly saying the amount that people "should" take, and it means that for people who are worried that taking vacations will come back to haunt them in a review (which is a separate problem), they've got a company-sanctioned minimum. For people who want to do more ROWE-style and take more vacation, that's OK too. Management is on-board with it, and the culture is there. For some people, this means working their ass off for a few months, and then going to South America for two months and working two days a week remotely. Some people "work from home" every other Friday, when they're really working for two hours on a plane or a train while they go see their significant others in different cities for a full weekend. We have one guy who just doesn't like Wednesdays, never comes on in on them, and gets his shit done in the other four days. Edit: Mistyped the significant-other example; meant to say that they do that on Fridays so that they can get to wherever they're going for dinner on Friday nights.