17 ms·

Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

675 points by michaelochurch 12y ago

sportanova 12y ago
Of course the other reason for 'unlimited vacation' is so when an employee leaves, the company doesn't have to pay them for unused vacation days. Huge red flag when a company has 'unlimited vacation'
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  ... unless you just take vacations normally. Then perhaps you have already taken your vacation when you leave, and the company is out that work. It cuts both ways.
  - CalRobert 12y ago
    Until I left the US every I worked operated on the basis of accrued vacation. The day you started you had 0 vacation days, after 6 months you could use half your annual allotment, etc.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      I admit I don't know how my vacation schedule works, officially. I just take time off and inform HR. They do whatever they do.
    - vonmoltke 12y ago
      My previous company ran a PTO system and advanced the entire balance on 01JAN every year. There aren't many, but they are out there.
      - madcaptenor 12y ago
        My current company does this. In addition balances have to be used by the end of the year. People are encouraged to take their vacation, so this leads to a lot of people taking random days in December off. As a result you can't get a damn thing done in December. I can't help but think that a system where accrued days expire after a certain amount of time or you can't carry more than a certain balance would mean that people's vacation time would be spread out more. As a result I could actually get some stuff done now that requires coordinating with people. I'm not sure if there would be a cost, however, in not being able to get stuff done at other times of the year.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    err no in that case you normally reduce your final check pro rata ie if you leave half way through the year but have takeb 75% of your leave you owe the company and vice versa
- tylermac1 12y ago
  With these kinds of policies being more common in young companies, I highly doubt that paying back unused vacation can have any significant effect on normal operations. In the other case there's also generally limits on how much vacation time you can build up, generally taking a couple years of not taking vacation to max out.
  - cloverich 12y ago
    IANA Financial person, but... it does go on the books as a debt. I'd be highly interested in someone in the know putting some numbers up, but at my office I know of many people who have several months of vacation saved up (because seemingly people tend to under-use their vacation time). If that company is looking to get bought out, it must be relevant to at least some extent.
    - wallflower 12y ago
      At my previous company, they specifically created a policy of no more than five days of rollover vacation from year to year specifically because of an on-the-books obligation of a couple million dollars (500+ employees) due to accrued vacation. Later, they changed that policy to NO rollover without VP level approval (e.g. honeymoons). In states like California that have strong employee laws they had to force all California based employees to burn down their accrued vacation every three months. Quasi-ethical and possibly borderline legal but that is what you have to do when employees hoard vacation under the mattress.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > With these kinds of policies being more common in young companies, I highly doubt that paying back unused vacation can have any significant effect on normal operations. It has an effect on the balance sheet, since vacation time accrued but not used is a liability; in companies whose operations are labor-heavy, and that have high-pay workers, that's may be a concern, especially when seeking investors, since concrete current liabilities can weigh heavily against hoped-for future returns.
    - 12y ago
- stephen_g 12y ago
  It's sad that works in the US. Here in Australia you have to give a full time employee a minimum of four weeks (paid), which accrues if unused. So somebody at a company with unlimited vacation would be no worse off of they never took holidays than someone who worked at a company with the regular 4 weeks.
  - robzyb 12y ago
    I'm an Australian living in Japan. I moved here 2 months ago. Most Japanese get around 3 weeks of annual leave per year - but each day expires after 24 months. It is quite common for leave to expire.
    - GFischer 12y ago
      Here in Uruguay, if you don't take your leave, the company has to compensate you (pay it as an extra worked day). Same if they fire you.
      - sportanova 12y ago
        Time to move to Australia or Uruguay!
        whatthemick 12y ago
        Or Denmark
    - xfalcox 12y ago
      Here in Brazil, if the company let it expire, they have pay you the double.
    - mhurron 12y ago
      > Most Japanese get around 3 weeks of annual leave per year - but each day expires after 24 months. > It is quite common for leave to expire. Japan has the same problem as the US in this case, your worth is tied to your work, the more it appears you're working hard, the more worth (and self-worth) you feel you have.
- debacle 12y ago
  IIRC, the company doesn't have to pay you for unused vacation days even if you don't use them. It's pretty much at the discretion of the company.
  - gtCameron 12y ago
    It depends on the State the employee lives in
  - e40 12y ago
    In CA, this is definitely not the case. A company must cut you a check on your final day that includes everything owed to you, including unused vacation days.
    - justizin 12y ago
      Or they can cut you a check that doesn't include everything owed to you, but ask you to sign a long agreement, buried within which is an assertion that the company has paid everything it owes you. Since you need this check, you wouldn't get your vacation days. Anyway, while I agree with the red flag concern, I don't necessarily agree that companies have unlimited vacation in order to cause you to take less. Esp in the startup world, esp at early stage, I don't expect to see this sort of intentional subterfuge - esp because of how it could backfire. I do think a minimum vacation policy makes more sense and allows, esp in places like CA where vacation is earned wage, and unused vacation is paid out at the end of the year, to manage the way vacation is counted. I also think a company with mandatory vacation should consider allowing people to take at least some vacation in the form of a bonus. Maybe they have a spouse who doesn't have as flexible of a schedule or just really enjoy their work. I don't think this should be an option for founders, however, and I think it should accompany a discussion, because it doesn't work for most people.
      - jacques_chester 12y ago
        > Or they can cut you a check that doesn't include everything owed to you, but ask you to sign a long agreement, buried within which is an assertion that the company has paid everything it owes you. You can write any old thing you like and get someone to sign it. That doesn't necessarily mean it's enforceable. Writing unenforceable clauses into fine print -- that you know are unenforceable -- is a legal bluff older than keeping records on clay tablets.
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  And how you accrue vacation at a company. I gain something like 6 or so hours every 2 weeks. Before I started I let them know of something I needed to be at in my first few weeks and their response was "That's OK, you can just do unpaid time". Other than not paying me if I leave mid year, what other reason could there be for crap like this?
  - johnward 12y ago
    Yeah I don't understand this one. If you're going to give someone 4 weeks off (which is extremely generous in the US) just give it to them at the beginning of the year. Some places let you take the vacation before you accrue it but if you were to quit before earning enough to cover the days you've taken you owe the company money.
    - Tenhundfeld 12y ago
      This doesn't detract from your main point, but... 4 weeks off is not necessarily "extremely generous." It depends on whether that includes holidays. You might say that of course vacation days don't include holidays, but I know of several small tech/biotech companies that just give X total days of paid time off, usually 25-30. You can choose to take those PTO hours on holidays or not, which is more flexible I suppose. However, depending on the state and industry, there are 10-15 normal holidays every year. So, that 4 weeks off might really only equal 1-2 weeks of vacation, not so generous.
      - eru 12y ago
        Pray they don't start including weekends in the total.
      - johnward 12y ago
        I get 20 actual vacation days. I think maybe 8 recognized holidays and 2 personal choice holidays and I think another 2 holidays that are chosen by work site. So I get 30-32 days off per year which is pretty generous. For most people I know you would need to work 15 years before you earn even 4 weeks and that is usually the max amount. I'd say it's common for most white collar jobs to give you 2 weeks off until you hit 5 years then you might earn another week.
- tlrobinson 12y ago
  Or just take your vacation right before you leave... Seems like a good opportunity to test the limits of these "unlimited" vacation policies.
- jonstewart 12y ago
  It's gob-smacking that more folks here don't realize this. I would be very leery of working for a company with an open vacation, both for the reasons laid out in TFA, but also because it's a signal of pretty cynical management.
javery 12y ago
We have an unlimited vacation policy at Adzerk and I try to lead by example by taking at least 2-3 weeks off a year (especially in the summer). We also try to encourage everyone to take at least one solid week off a year and it seems to work pretty well. I think that's the real issue with unlimited policy - if the leaders don't take vacation no one else thinks they can.
- CaveTech 12y ago
  "At least 2 weeks off". Isn't 2 weeks the bare minimum?
  - jonathanwallace 12y ago
    Not in the U.S. At a contract packaging / manufacturing company I worked at, you received only one week (5 business days) of vacation after your first full year of employment.
  - jcadam 12y ago
    I'm also in the US, and I receive 15 days of combined vacation and sick leave. So one bad flu can wipe out your ability to take an extended vacation. Or, alternatively, you take only a day or two when the flu is at its worst, then come into the office to stare blankly at your screen and drool on your keyboard, whilst getting your colleagues sick. Yes, stupid policies tend to incentivize people to do stupid things.
    - maaku 12y ago
      You should have personal illness / sicktime in addition to vacation. If you don't ... that's sleazy.
  - billmalarky 12y ago
    I literally just walked out of an HR meeting where they brought in a lawyer to discuss questions like this and no vacation time is not required by US law (our company has roughly 4 weeks of vacation a year). In NY there is a minimum of 5 sicks days per year for employers with 5 or more employees, but again that isn't technically vacation time.
whoisthemachine 12y ago
Interesting take on paid time off that I've never seen before. Will be looking forward to the update on how this works out.
foolinaround 12y ago
What I found to be even more relaxing is if all the employees of a company are forced to take the same time off ( 2 days to a week) and other flexible time off where the employee can choose his own time. Then, there are no email or updates to come back to...
- antr 12y ago
  From my point of view, that's the way it should be. At my company we make you take vacations. If by the end of the year you have plenty of days left you tend to take a long christmas/new year's break... and in some exceptions move a couple of vacations days to the next calendar year. The unlimited vacations days, in my eyes, creates considerable pressure/anxiety on workers. If you are in the US and want to treat employees, just go for a fair number of paid vacations days like in most European countries... Germany, France, Austria, Spain, Italy, etc, all have approx. 28 days...
  - pestaa 12y ago
    Sounds like a mature way to run a business. Where do I sign up?
spir 12y ago
It's like all these high-powered technology executives never opened an economics textbook.
larsberg 12y ago
I definitely saw the "being totally unplugged" problem both previously when I worked at Microsoft and now when working at Mozilla. It's arguably even worse at Mozilla with the shift of many people (myself included) to IRCCloud, which is a wonderful service but turns what was supposed to be an asynchronous, loose availability chat system into a realtime, all-hours interruption mechanism.
turnip1979 12y ago
Genuine question: how do companies/teams that run services deal with peak vacation periods? E.g. Christmas holidays. Even if everyone wants to take the last two weeks of the year off, you have to have someone keeping the lights on. Also, what happens if a high priority problem comes in? Are the team leads/managers careful not to schedule work around the holidays?
- liveoneggs 12y ago
  I am on vacation next week but am still the primary on-call. I will take pages if I'm available or pass/escalate to the next guy if I'm not. Since I'm on vacation it's understood to be a best effort. Normally I would switch with someone but it's a busy vacation week so we just figure it out. I took a two hour call the morning of thanksgiving, for reference.
  - jellicle 12y ago
    > I am on vacation next week but am still the primary on-call. Whatever that is, it isn't vacation.
    - coldcode 12y ago
      It's like the difference between vacation and prison. In both case you are away from home.
  - smackfu 12y ago
    Do you at least get compensated for on-call?
  - philwelch 12y ago
    That sounds like a shitty vacation combined with doing a bad job at being oncall.
- shawabawa3 12y ago
  I imagine by offering more money I would gladly work on christmas for 2x pay (especially if I had unlimited vacation I could take at other points) and if something does go majorly wrong over christmas, your clients will probably understand
butwhy 12y ago
Why do companies even try out these weird policies? They've gone from having unlimited days (then admitted it was a mistake for 2 whole years) and are now blindly trying out another unusual strategy. I don't see why they don't just offer a standard solution which seems to work for most companies, instead of trying to be extremely controlling of people.
- jadc 12y ago
  I don't think these are weird policies anymore. I work at a major software company and one year ago, we went from having a set of number of vacations days to an "unlimited vacation" policy. Many companies are already doing this or following suit. In California at least, I suspect this has something more to do with accounting than experimentation, i.e. the companies don't have to have on their books the money owed if people were to leave without using all their vacation.
  - josephschmoe 12y ago
    While that liability is nice, I think the world is better off without it. If people know they can't take their vacation with them, they'll actually take it when it's appropriate. The liability situation is a lose-lose one. You take less vacation because you're comfortable you'll get it and the company gets a liability on the books because you work too hard. Without the liability, you'll see a lot of people take vacation during layoffs though.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Without the liability, you'll see a lot of people take vacation during layoffs though. Not necessarily -- quantitatively unlimited vacation doesn't mean that the vacation can be taken without management approval of the specific timing, it just means that its not held to a fixed limit.
- josephschmoe 12y ago
  A minimum vacation policy is the same as a normal one. You just don't have to get special approval or get your pay docked if you go over.
padobson 12y ago
If I worked somewhere that had an unlimited vacation policy, I think I'd probably stop working on Fridays all together. An unlimited vacation policy could be an open invitation for a 4-day work-week (or 3 day or 2 day...)
- laxatives 12y ago
  We have an unlimited vacation policy and no one has taken more than 20 days off in a calendar year (not including holidays). That being said, I'm at 18 and only started in September.
- wahnfrieden 12y ago
  It's expected that you don't abuse the policy. While what constitutes abuse may be a line that needs elaboration, making your standard work week 2-3 days under this policy is not a gray area.
  - johnward 12y ago
    Which is exactly why these policies suck. It's "unlimited" but it's implied that you don't take too many days. It's like the comcast of vacation policies.
    - wahnfrieden 12y ago
      That's what the minimum days you must take is for. If the company culture is right, it's a liberating policy. At my new job now it feels like I'm spending a precious commodity instead of booking vacation feeling like reprieve due in the wake of hard work or payoff.
      - johnward 12y ago
        Oh I agree. I like the idea that the article was talking about. I'll be interested in seeing how it works out. It reverses the stigma to almost be where you'd look bad for not taking enough time vs taking too much time.
- 12y ago
Someone1234 12y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again, unlimited days off (or "open") and zero days off are identical. If you have unlimited vacation people are inclined to take less and people respect the vacation you take less ("as you can always take more!"). Here's a study[0] (PDF) called "Overwhelmed America: Why Don’t We Use Our Earned Leave?" It is biased (travel association) but interesting nonetheless. According to this study[1] you need at least ten consecutive days of leave to "de-stress" from work. Short vacations aren't as effective as long ones. In "europe" a two week vacation (10 work days) is common/standard. As opposed to American's "long weekends." A lot of these "unlimited" places have a "as long as your work gets done" policy, meaning you can take tons of short days off or afternoons off, but almost no extended holidays (e.g. travel abroad, out of state, etc). [0] http://traveleffect.com/sites/traveleffect.com/files/OverwhelmedAmerica_FullReport_FINAL_0.pdf http://traveleffect.com/sites/traveleffect.com/files/Overwhe...
- byoung2 12y ago
  A lot of these "unlimited" places have a "as long as your work gets done" policy, meaning you can take tons of short days off or afternoons off, but almost no extended holidays (e.g. travel abroad, out of state, etc). My friend works at a company with unlimited vacation and they pay you $1000 for every full week you take off.
  - jedc 12y ago
    Full Contact does the same thing: employees get $7500 to go on vacation, but only get it if they actually go on vacation. https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/paid-paid-vacation/ https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/paid-paid-vacation/
  - hedwall 12y ago
    Your normal pay + $1000 or just $1000 ? In Sweden you actually get a ~12% higher pay during your vacation.
    - delluminatus 12y ago
      Do you know why? Is it just to encourage people to take more vacation time?
jbb555 12y ago
very good. Except "now has a required minimum of 25 (paid) vacation days per year, no matter what country they live in." Well no. If they live in the UK for example they have a mandatory limit of 28 days not 25 because it's the law.
- TillE 12y ago
  But is that an enforced minimum? Is an employee required to take that many days off work? Because that's the distinction being drawn here.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    In the UK you cant normally be forced to take leave its up to the employer how they handle overages some have use it or lose it some allow a carry over. Apart from the finance industry where for some staff I think its mandatory for anti fraud reasons to take at least a two week block.
  - hessenwolf 12y ago
    Yes, it is. And, just, seriously, what sort of a society doesn't mandate holidays?
    - philwelch 12y ago
      A society that's not into proclaiming mandates.
  - gambiting 12y ago
    No, you are not required to take them,but if you don't the company has to pay you the full amount for those days(so in effect, if you don't take ANY holidays during the year, you will get an additional 1-month's salary at the end).
- awjr 12y ago
  I think you are talking about 25 days they can choose. In the UK you have 8 days that are Bank Holidays and National holidays. So this is a 33 day holiday policy.
jcadam 12y ago
I like this idea of minimum vacation. Most companies I've worked in use vacation days as some sort of reward for sticking with the company for X number of years (i.e., "When you hit your 5 year anniversary, you get an extra 1.5 days of paid vacation. Won't that be nice!"). And when I say paid vacation, I really mean PTO with no separate 'sick leave' days. Which means people show up to work sick. Funny enough, the company I work for was recently bought, and in the interests of making things 'uniform', we were forced to adopt the purchasing company's vacation policy, which meant an across the board cut in everyone's PTO hours (to include folks that negotiated additional vacation days when they were hired -- those agreements were declared null and void). Apparently the execs thought the hit to morale/retention was worth the 'cost savings'. On the other hand, I once interviewed at a company with an 'open' vacation policy and was immediately suspicious of it. My first thought was "I'm guessing people don't take much vacation?" That didn't go over so well with the interviewer. It's nice to see an employer that treats vacation as a means to increase employee productivity and retention (burnout prevention, etc.), rather than as a pure cost to be minimized as much as possible.
- walshemj 12y ago
  Hmm is that not a breach of contract could in a tech company lead to an exodus of staff.
  - kabdib 12y ago
    You shouldn't be surprised at the number of execs who don't really care. at. all. about attrition, and who are clueless about what motivates engineers.
    - walshemj 12y ago
      I wouldn't :-) but that just means you competitors just got a free shot at your best and brightest. The really clever ones volunteer for redundancy and the pay off and then go and work for a competitor.
ngmaloney 12y ago
I jokingly refer to Unlimited Vacation Policy as Guilt Driven Vacation Policy. IMHO, it is a sham so companies don't have to take liability for accrued vacation time on their books. While I commend Travis for coming up with a workable solution wouldn't it be easier to just say: "Everyone has 4 weeks vacation, use them!".
- hedwall 12y ago
  Isn't that exactly what they did? Everyone has to take 5 weeks minimum, and on top of that you may take more if you want/need.
chton 12y ago
"We tried something that didn't fit our culture, and it didn't work." Taking less vacation time is not necessarily a bad thing. For myself, not having to meet a minimum quota means I enjoy the vacations I do take more, since I take them when I need and want instead of mandatory ones. It means, as long as I'm feeling good, I can keep the momentum up. The bigger problems is that employees didn't respect others' vacation time. Or their own, for that matter. That is a cultural problem, and a change in vacation policy won't help (much). If you want the people in your company to be happier with their time off, work on respecting it. "The guilt of taking time off takes over, and you "just check in" or promise to be available if anything comes up." That is, to me, a sign of an unhealthy culture. Fix that before trying yet another vacation experiment.
- unreal37 12y ago
  It sounds like having an open vacation policy is what leads to not respecting those days off in others. Also, what the leaders do, the staff generally do. It sounds like a healthy place to work to me. I'd love to work there.
- organsnyder 12y ago
  What you're proposing is unlikely to work in many environments. Even in the best of environments, where trust and respect course through every coworker interaction, people will still be looking to their coworkers (especially their superiors) to get a feel for how much vacation time is acceptable. In fact, companies with exceptionally strong cultures may be worse, as people really won't want to be a burden on their coworkers by taking more vacation days than average. This is especially true for anyone with any sort of leadership role—whether it's an official senior position, a mentor, or just someone who is known for being a model employee. Your own behavior serves as a model for others, and no company policy is going to tell people any different. I work for a small nonprofit organization with an extremely dedicated president. She's been very gracious with the freedom she allows her employees (though the official policies could be better), but I'm always wondering if she thinks that I'm actually working hard enough—not because of anything she's said, but because she puts in a ton of hours. I know many of my coworkers feel the same pressure. If you're forced to take vacation time even when you don't need it, then try to find other pursuits—personal projects, reading, volunteering—that are still "work", but of the unpaid variety. Take the time to catch up with friends and family (especially if you have kids). Vacation doesn't just have to be about traveling and/or resting; it can also be an opportunity to catch up on other priorities.
cellover 12y ago
I really like the tone of this post. It makes me think that this person is trustworthy and I'd be glad to work for him. I wish my company had such an open communication!
genghisjahn 12y ago
The company I work for has open vacation and it works out fine. People take a few days, a week here and there and it winds up being 4-5 weeks a year. This is in the US. I'm sure there's no big payout for unused vacation when people leave, but no big deal. When you're sick, you stay home, when you need time off, you take it. The CTO and upper managers are all coders and have worked hard at maintaining a good work culture.
gadders 12y ago
As a counterpoint, most investment banks enfore a mandatory 10 working day break where all remote access capabilities are disabled (including blackberries). This is less out of altruism, and more so that any untoward activities can be uncovered whilst the person is out of the office.
- e40 12y ago
  This is less out of altruism, and more so that any untoward activities can be uncovered whilst the person is out of the office. I'd love to hear more about that.
  - gadders 12y ago
    That's pretty much it. It's a compliance-type regulation. The idea is that if you were, say, hiding a $3bn loss in an obscure book or something then it is more likely to be discovered if you were out of the office and someone else is trading/covering your books. You can read an article about it in the WSJ here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444914904577615483583558306 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100008723963904449149045776154... or google for "Take Those Two Weeks Off —Or Else" and click the top link.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Here's an example: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/easy-street/credit-suisse-makes-life-little-harder-aspiring-rogue-traders http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/easy-street/credi... Everyone has at least a two-week period every year when they are completely cut off from the job. If you have been doing something off-the-books, that's enough time for it to explode. Or, if the auditing department suspects you of something -- or even if they don't -- this is the natural time to bring in forensics to dig through your books and figure out exactly you've been doing. It's not as important in non-finance, but it can still have some use. I know of at least two cases where a sysadmin was on vacation and then outsiders were brought in to find all the backdoors he had installed.
  - calgaryeng 12y ago
    There have been many cases of people in finance being able to cover up significant losses of company funds (through bad trades or what not) or a long period of time simply by understanding the front/back office systems. If you force people to leave (and cut off remote access) they are unable to maintain the pretenses required to cover up these losses, and can help drive exposure of foul play. At a minimum you'd need two people 100% in on the cover-up which reduces the chance of it happening.
qeorge 12y ago
Another upside is forcing the company to learn to run without its founders or other key employees for a meaningful period of time. This forces good processes to be put in place, and is an excellent fire drill in general.
- nekopa 12y ago
  Talking fun, I think it would be fun for a company to run a bus factor fire drill from time to time -:just point to one employee and say "Bam! You're hit by a bus, leave the office now here's $2K, come back next Thursday. No email, no remote working and no phone contact with anyone from here." I wonder how many companies (let alone startups) could deal effectively with this situation.
  - exhilaration 12y ago
    A chaos monkey that takes out personnel instead of servers. I like it.
  - alxndr 12y ago
    I really like this idea! Wonder how I could convince my day job to try it out.
mariusc23 12y ago
Glad to see a new approach on the open vacation policy. I think this policy would work better if vacation days are only tracked until the minimum is met, otherwise I have a feeling it will be perceived as exactly 25 days, not more.
acd 12y ago
You can also view it likes this. In the end of your life when looking back at it. You can think of asking two questions of yourself. Did you wish you worked more hard days for your company? or Did you wish you spent more time with family and gaining new experiences? Obviously you will need to find a work / life balance but if you only work/play hard you might regret it later and you cannot get lost time back.
dalke 12y ago
If anyone wants to read more about unlimited vacation policies, here are some of the previous HN threads on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125973 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4874743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4874743 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613526 . The last contains comments about the Jacob Kaplan-Moss essay that was mentioned in this thread's link.
stevenkovar 12y ago
I can see the merit for enforcing more vacation; but is more vacation the solution to burnout, or is working less overall?
my_username_is_ 12y ago
I'm glad to see someone trying this out. It's something I've been wondering about [1], and it seems pretty uncommon. I'll be looking forward to seeing how this works out for them, and any other companies that are so inspired to try to improve the status-quo. Frankly the American culture of working continuously seems like a negative to employee and employer both--and even if it were only a negative to one, it would be something worthy of change. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053580
asgard1024 12y ago
I would go even further and postulate that lack of rules about who is in power kills societies. Many equate "lack of rules" with "freedom", but it's a problem. People without conscience will freely abuse the lack of rules or start to fight with each other, while the good people will get screwed. Eventually, the good people, who usually just want to do the work, will get unhappy and leave. This applies not only to vacation, but to governance as well. So called "consensual democracy", where there is no hard and fast rule about who has how much power, has the same kind of problem. The most important thing about democracy is that it is very specific - everybody has the same amount of power. That discourages political fights, because you cannot (without explicitly changing the rule) accrue more power. In my opinion, many institutions (for example Wikipedia) suffer from this problem.
- innguest 12y ago
  This is a bunch of leftist FUD to be honest. Read up on libertarianism. You've even managed to get the definition of "freedom" wrong. Lack of rules? Are we using arguments from decades ago? It's lack of rulers. There's never a lack of rules because we all understand natural law.
  - krapp 12y ago
    >There's never a lack of rules because we all understand natural law. No we don't. More to the point, I can guarantee that not everyone agrees with your understanding of whatever 'natural law' is, or with your inalienable right to exercise that view in their presence. Not even Libertarians agree on that.
    - innguest 12y ago
      It's not something for which there is "my understanding" and "your understanding". It's obvious stuff. If you punch someone in the face you can expect retaliation. If you trade with others you can expect peace for the duration of that contract. And so on. I'm not saying there's a list of the natural laws that I imagine people know of. There's no list. There's only the obvious stuff. Obviously I'd have to retaliate if I thought my life were in danger, and obviously I'd do my best to keep alliances that benefit me. Others will do the same. It all ends up working itself out. No need for a Hammurabi.
mrottenkolber 12y ago
Just be a freelancer, every day will be a holiday and christmas is just just another hackaton. ;p
danielweber 12y ago
> A company has to learn how to function when people are on vacation and unavailable, however important their role is. Yes, this is essential for having a viable company. If the company grinds to a halt without person X, the solution is not to get rid of person X's vacation. Also, in finance, required vacations are often a compliance aid. If someone is running a scam, it tends to need near-daily tending, and it will explode when they are out for two weeks (unless they find a co-conspirator).
- nekopa 12y ago
  Wow, remind me never to work in finance, too much paranoia for me (though I do know it's justified a lot of the time- I taught some IT folks at a bank once and they told me about a branch manager who went on holiday and forgot to turn off his automated money siphoning software. That was the only reason he got caught)
sqs 12y ago
This is a great post. At Sourcegraph, we had a similar realization, based on our own experiences. We wrote a blog post about it and it got picked up by the BBC: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/mandatory-vacation https://sourcegraph.com/blog/mandatory-vacation http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20140903-relax-or-else http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20140903-relax-or-else
fishnchips 12y ago
In all fairness "open vacation" policy is a yet another iteration on the age-old idea of Panopticon ;)
zakvyn 12y ago
I like the idea 'minimum' vacation that allow people able to take more than 'minimum' vacation.
zakvyn 12y ago
"Minimum" vacation gives employee the authority to take vacation without feeling guilt. Else some companies use open vacation policy to reduce the number of vacations that employee take.
gutsy 12y ago
This is phenomenal.
tdumitrescu 12y ago
I last moved from a shop with unlimited PTO (where in practice people settled around 4-5 weeks per year) to one with 15 days per year. Quality of life is noticeably worse with the limited PTO, and people tend to hoard their days because they're scarce. Travis's tracked minimum vacation sounds better than either of those policies.
- nilkn 12y ago
  I'm at a company where you start with 14 days of PTO per year, including sick time. It was a huge shock coming from college, and it's the main complaint I have about my job. It jumps up to 19 after two years. I honestly think 20 days PTO is the bare minimum for a decent work-life balance, and even that isn't all that great. If I were changing jobs, I'd actually be willing to exchange salary for extra PTO, if the default PTO were less than 20 days.
asafira 12y ago
As a graduate student, I feel that (at least within my research group) there is this "unlimited time off" policy, but in the end it's not really taken advantage of very much and it certainly doesn't take any stress away from work. Even this holiday season, I'll be taking a week off from work, and I always phrase it as "I promised my mother I'd be home for at least a week". The minimum vacation policy sounds like an interesting alternative, but I'm not sure it could fit within the academic community. Any professor has the power to instate such a policy, but at any given moment there's an "important" project that rests on one or two people working hard to get results. Often, in academia, you have those people that are precisely the kind that will work hard and get shit done, and honestly I can't imagine there being an understanding of "minimum time off". It's more convenient to the professor and the ambitious PhD student/post-doc to have the "take time off when you want" policy, and let the unwritten rules and undertones dictate when you should take time off (e.g., when you just finish a project). I know the article wasn't trying to apply things to academia, I just thought I would consider it in that light.
- nekopa 12y ago
  I would think that in academia a minimum time off policy would be great: depending on where you are in the project, sometimes stepping away from a problem can lead you to the solution.
hgh 12y ago
".... and you "just check in" or promise to be available if anything comes up. You respond to just one email or just one GitHub issue." When people need to be "available" while on vacation it usually means that there is way too much dependency on that person or insufficient knowledge-sharing. It shows the glaring holes on what's being hacked together and where systems can strengthen.
legohead 12y ago
So here's a slightly different view from someone I know -- they are slotted X number of vacation days, but actually need more. He is divorced, and his kid is across the US, so he ends up using all his vacation to see his kid. Now he is left with nothing to take a real vacation with his current spouse, and they both really want to.
- eru 12y ago
  He should perhaps look for a better job?
eyeareque 12y ago
My job went from 20 days paid off per year where we accrued hours per pay period, to an open vacation policy. The company did this because of the cost of having to keep money saved up to pay out to employees who have saved up their vacation hours. Like the article describes, most people including myself took off less time. I know for myself I felt guilty and didn't want to be seen as taking advantage of the new open policy. I'm going to talk to my new job's management and ask them to setup a minimum vacation day policy.
rebootthesystem 12y ago
I'd like to see the inclusion of data related to the structure and dynamics of the family unit. In the US the family desintegrates as kids are encouraged to leave home as soon as they finish high scool, say, 18 years of age. This, in a huge number of cultures and countries around the world is an unthinkable attrocity. It isn't uncommon to have children live with their parents until they are ready to form their own families, say, 25 to 30 years of age. Under the stereotypical US culture this is looked down upon to the point of making fun of those still living with their parents. Having millions of socially unprepared kids go off to try to make it on their own created, in my opinion, a society filled with various levels of dysfunctionalities. People tend to grow up, to some degree, in a "wild" setting where selfishness can become a necessity. In this context it is easy to see how work time can take the place of the social context lost due to having left the nest. Having grown up and lived in three cultures it is easy for me to remove myself from my US culture and watch it from afar as a visitor from another planet might. Americans are said to seem socially inept and dry from the perspective of other cultures, and this is true. All you have to do is spend six months in Italy or Argentina to undrerstand this. Americans men develop a weird homophobic form of "macho" that is down-right funny from the perspective of other cultures. Hugging, or worst, kissing, another man is frowned upon. Human contact, in general, is just not considered to be "normal". I have lived in cultures where it was quite normal to greet your kids parents with hugs and kisses on the cheeks. In fact, it would be rude to come to a party or gathering and not go around the room kissing everyone, man, woman, kids. Yes, you kiss your friend's wives. School friends do this in high school when they greet each other. Again, unthinkable in the US. In fact, a teacher can get in trouble with the law for greeting a student with a hug and a kiss. Showing affection is alien. Weird. In general terms, as much as TV shows and commercial try to stereotype this warm southern cowboy culture at the ranch with grandma this is, for the mist part, not the norm. The US family scatters and the kids are left to navigate a very important phase of their lives on their own. Sorry to harp on this but i do think this is a very important part of the equation and one that explains so much about US society, their behaviors, beliefs, relationships, work and family life. Once you realize that some of these people become politicians that shape US policies and laws it is easy to see where some of our problems might come from. There are subtle examples of this. For example, let's say you are working with a US friend on a project in their garage. He will use phrases like "give me my hammer" or "it's in my toolbox". In other cultures this becomes "give me the hammer" and "it's in the toolbox". I am convinced this egocentric view of the world is connected to leaving the nest early. Another example that is particularly bothersome to me are cases where parents pay their children for things that in what I am going to call more socially adjusted societies is simply unthinkable. One of my friends pays his 18 year old kid to go pick him up at the airport. Another pays his kids to help paint the house. My neighbor across the street pays his kid to mow the lawn. Viewed from far more family-centric cultures these woukd be examples of seriously dysfunctional family units. As a teenager I helped my parents in their business. Money was never a part of it. This is simply how a family behaves in other cultures. Of course I am painting with a wide brush. There are lots of cases of families that behave very differently from this. And, of course, the US has lots of multicultural families, such as mine. Yet I still think that a huge portion of the attitude towards work has to do with a bunch of single people existing "in the wild" and a setting where work can easily become a substitute for the family unit they effectively lost.
hero454545 12y ago
Nice post... I especially liked the touch of posting a link to their hiring page right after describing their mandatory 25 paid vacation day policy.
evanpw 12y ago
I don't think I see a single negative comment here about long vacations, so allow me to play devil's advocate. (These questions don't necessarily reflect my own opinions.) 1. If this is such a free lunch (employees are both happier and more productive overall), then why isn't lots of vacation offered everywhere (in the US)? Can it really be the case that the vast majority of US companies are too short-sighted to make a policy change that would be in their own best interest? 2. If, alternatively, more vacation is really good for employees, but slightly bad for employers, why doesn't the labor market adjust? In this case, you would expect employees to offer to work for a lower salary in exchange for more vacation time.
- jarek 12y ago
  > Can it really be the case that the vast majority of US companies are too short-sighted to make a policy change that would be in their own best interest? You can ask that about anything. Are the U.S. banks really so short-sighted to offer absolutely crap person-to-person transfers and get undercut by any number of hacky startups? Were the U.S. car manufacturers really so stupid? Are California taxpayers really too short-sighted to realize how Prop 13 hurts the state? The entire federal administration in lead-up to the Iraq invasion? Etc, etc
  - evanpw 12y ago
    I don't disagree that bad decisions are made all of the time, but the questions is how the same bad decision can be made everywhere in a competitive marketplace. You've given a couple of good examples where the answer is government: banking is highly regulated, so breaking into the industry is tough, and the big U.S. auto companies actually would have gone out of business and been replaced without a bailout. But if increasing vacation time makes your employees happier and you also get more productive work out of them, why don't the companies that switch then get all of the best employees and eat the lunch of everyone else? I can't think of any regulations that make it more significantly more expensive to offer lots of vacation, so I don't think government is the answer in this case. I think the biggest clue is given in the original post: people (Americans) won't take vacation even when you offer it to them! In that case, offering more vacation is doubly bad for the company: you still pay your employees for the vacation time, but they don't actually take it, and lose the productivity benefits. Either this is because Americans actually rationally prefer higher salaries to more vacation, and the system is working, or they systematically underestimate how much good a vacation would do them, in which case we need things like mandatory minimum vacation policies or laws.
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jimmyislive 12y ago
i said it first :) https://twitter.com/jimmyislive/status/495440322197876736 https://twitter.com/jimmyislive/status/495440322197876736
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pierotofy 12y ago
Society needs more free time in general. http://t.co/68fyM3950D http://t.co/68fyM3950D
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robotmakinglove 12y ago
This is so awesome.
thoman23 12y ago
The only thing surprising to me about this is to hear that this founder apparently had noble intentions at the start. I just assumed that every company that does this is cynically inducing more (short-term) work out of their employees while clearing some liabilities from the books, all at the cost of long-term success and morale. I would never work for a company with one of these "unlimited" vacation policies.
KennyCason 12y ago
I see a lot of people saying that they would "never work for a company with unlimited vacation." I also understand their reasoning and have seen similar examples. At DataRank we balance this with a small amendment. It's unlimited vacation but you MUST take a minimum of two weeks off. We are also very flexible about remote work. If you feel the itch to travel to Japan for a 2 week vacation + 2 weeks working remote, go for it. If you just feel burned out and want to watch Netflix at home all day. Go for it, just let someone know.
dyadic 12y ago
There are a few people here commenting about how their employer's unlimited vacation policy allows them to take two weeks vacation and then work remotely for a week or two extra. That's great, and it's good to see companies allowing it but remote work is still work, and it certainly isn't a vacation. Many people are working remote by default* and already have to fight certain perceptions that they are just sitting in their pants, watching tv, and eating chips all day, and it certainly doesn't help when others liken working remotely to being a holiday. It's definitely a good thing that more companies are opening up to remote work and trusting their people to get things done without being watched over, let's not perpetuate this idea of it just being a bunch of slackers that do it. * including me, obviously, and hence this response.
superuser2 12y ago
Mandatory vacation is not only a good idea, it is a security feature. When one employee takes over another's "world" within the company, it is very likely that they will notice if the employee on vacation has been embezzling, defrauding customers, etc. In the financial industry, this is not only good practice, it is a regulatory requirement. People who do not want to take vacation are seen by auditors as highly suspicious because that behavior often indicates a desire to cover up fraud.
- jacques_chester 12y ago
  I think pairing with frequent rotations is going to be more effective, but most shops don't practice pairing.
alecthomas 12y ago
Twitter also had this policy when I worked there (two years ago) and I thought it was really poorly thought out. Apart from all of the (relatively obvious) issues mentioned in the post, any vacation at Twitter was at the discretion of your immediate manager. So if you happened to have a hard-arse manager, or one who hated you, tough luck. Really a bad idea.
kpmah 12y ago
"unlimited" days off are nonsense. Can I take off 365 days a year? If the answer is no it's not unlimited. There's a limit, you're just not specifying it.
- alkonaut 12y ago
  I have a feeling this only works in places where you can be fired for performance reasons.
  - kpmah 12y ago
    Sure, but my point is if you can be fired for taking too many days off, it's not unlimited. It's limited by the amount of work you're expected to reasonably do, and that's decided by your boss and colleagues. Except now instead of having a hard number where you know you are safe, it's completely subjective how many days off you can take.
vertAlign 12y ago
I bet the people with families abused the hell out of this and went to Disney World every month. While all the bachelors never took a day off.

675 points by michaelochurch 12y ago

Of course the other reason for 'unlimited vacation' is so when an employee leaves, the company doesn't have to pay them for unused vacation days. Huge red flag when a company has 'unlimited vacation'

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
... unless you just take vacations normally. Then perhaps you have already taken your vacation when you leave, and the company is out that work. It cuts both ways.
- CalRobert 12y ago
  Until I left the US every I worked operated on the basis of accrued vacation. The day you started you had 0 vacation days, after 6 months you could use half your annual allotment, etc.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    I admit I don't know how my vacation schedule works, officially. I just take time off and inform HR. They do whatever they do.
  - vonmoltke 12y ago
    My previous company ran a PTO system and advanced the entire balance on 01JAN every year. There aren't many, but they are out there.
    - madcaptenor 12y ago
      My current company does this. In addition balances have to be used by the end of the year. People are encouraged to take their vacation, so this leads to a lot of people taking random days in December off. As a result you can't get a damn thing done in December. I can't help but think that a system where accrued days expire after a certain amount of time or you can't carry more than a certain balance would mean that people's vacation time would be spread out more. As a result I could actually get some stuff done now that requires coordinating with people. I'm not sure if there would be a cost, however, in not being able to get stuff done at other times of the year.
- walshemj 12y ago
  err no in that case you normally reduce your final check pro rata ie if you leave half way through the year but have takeb 75% of your leave you owe the company and vice versa
tylermac1 12y ago
With these kinds of policies being more common in young companies, I highly doubt that paying back unused vacation can have any significant effect on normal operations. In the other case there's also generally limits on how much vacation time you can build up, generally taking a couple years of not taking vacation to max out.
- cloverich 12y ago
  IANA Financial person, but... it does go on the books as a debt. I'd be highly interested in someone in the know putting some numbers up, but at my office I know of many people who have several months of vacation saved up (because seemingly people tend to under-use their vacation time). If that company is looking to get bought out, it must be relevant to at least some extent.
  - wallflower 12y ago
    At my previous company, they specifically created a policy of no more than five days of rollover vacation from year to year specifically because of an on-the-books obligation of a couple million dollars (500+ employees) due to accrued vacation. Later, they changed that policy to NO rollover without VP level approval (e.g. honeymoons). In states like California that have strong employee laws they had to force all California based employees to burn down their accrued vacation every three months. Quasi-ethical and possibly borderline legal but that is what you have to do when employees hoard vacation under the mattress.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > With these kinds of policies being more common in young companies, I highly doubt that paying back unused vacation can have any significant effect on normal operations. It has an effect on the balance sheet, since vacation time accrued but not used is a liability; in companies whose operations are labor-heavy, and that have high-pay workers, that's may be a concern, especially when seeking investors, since concrete current liabilities can weigh heavily against hoped-for future returns.
  - 12y ago
stephen_g 12y ago
It's sad that works in the US. Here in Australia you have to give a full time employee a minimum of four weeks (paid), which accrues if unused. So somebody at a company with unlimited vacation would be no worse off of they never took holidays than someone who worked at a company with the regular 4 weeks.
- robzyb 12y ago
  I'm an Australian living in Japan. I moved here 2 months ago. Most Japanese get around 3 weeks of annual leave per year - but each day expires after 24 months. It is quite common for leave to expire.
  - GFischer 12y ago
    Here in Uruguay, if you don't take your leave, the company has to compensate you (pay it as an extra worked day). Same if they fire you.
    - sportanova 12y ago
      Time to move to Australia or Uruguay!
      - whatthemick 12y ago
        Or Denmark
  - xfalcox 12y ago
    Here in Brazil, if the company let it expire, they have pay you the double.
  - mhurron 12y ago
    > Most Japanese get around 3 weeks of annual leave per year - but each day expires after 24 months. > It is quite common for leave to expire. Japan has the same problem as the US in this case, your worth is tied to your work, the more it appears you're working hard, the more worth (and self-worth) you feel you have.
debacle 12y ago
IIRC, the company doesn't have to pay you for unused vacation days even if you don't use them. It's pretty much at the discretion of the company.
- gtCameron 12y ago
  It depends on the State the employee lives in
- e40 12y ago
  In CA, this is definitely not the case. A company must cut you a check on your final day that includes everything owed to you, including unused vacation days.
  - justizin 12y ago
    Or they can cut you a check that doesn't include everything owed to you, but ask you to sign a long agreement, buried within which is an assertion that the company has paid everything it owes you. Since you need this check, you wouldn't get your vacation days. Anyway, while I agree with the red flag concern, I don't necessarily agree that companies have unlimited vacation in order to cause you to take less. Esp in the startup world, esp at early stage, I don't expect to see this sort of intentional subterfuge - esp because of how it could backfire. I do think a minimum vacation policy makes more sense and allows, esp in places like CA where vacation is earned wage, and unused vacation is paid out at the end of the year, to manage the way vacation is counted. I also think a company with mandatory vacation should consider allowing people to take at least some vacation in the form of a bonus. Maybe they have a spouse who doesn't have as flexible of a schedule or just really enjoy their work. I don't think this should be an option for founders, however, and I think it should accompany a discussion, because it doesn't work for most people.
    - jacques_chester 12y ago
      > Or they can cut you a check that doesn't include everything owed to you, but ask you to sign a long agreement, buried within which is an assertion that the company has paid everything it owes you. You can write any old thing you like and get someone to sign it. That doesn't necessarily mean it's enforceable. Writing unenforceable clauses into fine print -- that you know are unenforceable -- is a legal bluff older than keeping records on clay tablets.
jimktrains2 12y ago
And how you accrue vacation at a company. I gain something like 6 or so hours every 2 weeks. Before I started I let them know of something I needed to be at in my first few weeks and their response was "That's OK, you can just do unpaid time". Other than not paying me if I leave mid year, what other reason could there be for crap like this?
- johnward 12y ago
  Yeah I don't understand this one. If you're going to give someone 4 weeks off (which is extremely generous in the US) just give it to them at the beginning of the year. Some places let you take the vacation before you accrue it but if you were to quit before earning enough to cover the days you've taken you owe the company money.
  - Tenhundfeld 12y ago
    This doesn't detract from your main point, but... 4 weeks off is not necessarily "extremely generous." It depends on whether that includes holidays. You might say that of course vacation days don't include holidays, but I know of several small tech/biotech companies that just give X total days of paid time off, usually 25-30. You can choose to take those PTO hours on holidays or not, which is more flexible I suppose. However, depending on the state and industry, there are 10-15 normal holidays every year. So, that 4 weeks off might really only equal 1-2 weeks of vacation, not so generous.
    - eru 12y ago
      Pray they don't start including weekends in the total.
    - johnward 12y ago
      I get 20 actual vacation days. I think maybe 8 recognized holidays and 2 personal choice holidays and I think another 2 holidays that are chosen by work site. So I get 30-32 days off per year which is pretty generous. For most people I know you would need to work 15 years before you earn even 4 weeks and that is usually the max amount. I'd say it's common for most white collar jobs to give you 2 weeks off until you hit 5 years then you might earn another week.
tlrobinson 12y ago
Or just take your vacation right before you leave... Seems like a good opportunity to test the limits of these "unlimited" vacation policies.
jonstewart 12y ago
It's gob-smacking that more folks here don't realize this. I would be very leery of working for a company with an open vacation, both for the reasons laid out in TFA, but also because it's a signal of pretty cynical management.

javery 12y ago

We have an unlimited vacation policy at Adzerk and I try to lead by example by taking at least 2-3 weeks off a year (especially in the summer). We also try to encourage everyone to take at least one solid week off a year and it seems to work pretty well. I think that's the real issue with unlimited policy - if the leaders don't take vacation no one else thinks they can.

CaveTech 12y ago
"At least 2 weeks off". Isn't 2 weeks the bare minimum?
- jonathanwallace 12y ago
  Not in the U.S. At a contract packaging / manufacturing company I worked at, you received only one week (5 business days) of vacation after your first full year of employment.
- jcadam 12y ago
  I'm also in the US, and I receive 15 days of combined vacation and sick leave. So one bad flu can wipe out your ability to take an extended vacation. Or, alternatively, you take only a day or two when the flu is at its worst, then come into the office to stare blankly at your screen and drool on your keyboard, whilst getting your colleagues sick. Yes, stupid policies tend to incentivize people to do stupid things.
  - maaku 12y ago
    You should have personal illness / sicktime in addition to vacation. If you don't ... that's sleazy.
- billmalarky 12y ago
  I literally just walked out of an HR meeting where they brought in a lawyer to discuss questions like this and no vacation time is not required by US law (our company has roughly 4 weeks of vacation a year). In NY there is a minimum of 5 sicks days per year for employers with 5 or more employees, but again that isn't technically vacation time.

whoisthemachine 12y ago

Interesting take on paid time off that I've never seen before. Will be looking forward to the update on how this works out.

foolinaround 12y ago

What I found to be even more relaxing is if all the employees of a company are forced to take the same time off ( 2 days to a week) and other flexible time off where the employee can choose his own time. Then, there are no email or updates to come back to...

antr 12y ago
From my point of view, that's the way it should be. At my company we make you take vacations. If by the end of the year you have plenty of days left you tend to take a long christmas/new year's break... and in some exceptions move a couple of vacations days to the next calendar year. The unlimited vacations days, in my eyes, creates considerable pressure/anxiety on workers. If you are in the US and want to treat employees, just go for a fair number of paid vacations days like in most European countries... Germany, France, Austria, Spain, Italy, etc, all have approx. 28 days...
- pestaa 12y ago
  Sounds like a mature way to run a business. Where do I sign up?

spir 12y ago

It's like all these high-powered technology executives never opened an economics textbook.

larsberg 12y ago

I definitely saw the "being totally unplugged" problem both previously when I worked at Microsoft and now when working at Mozilla. It's arguably even worse at Mozilla with the shift of many people (myself included) to IRCCloud, which is a wonderful service but turns what was supposed to be an asynchronous, loose availability chat system into a realtime, all-hours interruption mechanism.

turnip1979 12y ago

Genuine question: how do companies/teams that run services deal with peak vacation periods? E.g. Christmas holidays. Even if everyone wants to take the last two weeks of the year off, you have to have someone keeping the lights on. Also, what happens if a high priority problem comes in? Are the team leads/managers careful not to schedule work around the holidays?

liveoneggs 12y ago
I am on vacation next week but am still the primary on-call. I will take pages if I'm available or pass/escalate to the next guy if I'm not. Since I'm on vacation it's understood to be a best effort. Normally I would switch with someone but it's a busy vacation week so we just figure it out. I took a two hour call the morning of thanksgiving, for reference.
- jellicle 12y ago
  > I am on vacation next week but am still the primary on-call. Whatever that is, it isn't vacation.
  - coldcode 12y ago
    It's like the difference between vacation and prison. In both case you are away from home.
- smackfu 12y ago
  Do you at least get compensated for on-call?
- philwelch 12y ago
  That sounds like a shitty vacation combined with doing a bad job at being oncall.
shawabawa3 12y ago
I imagine by offering more money I would gladly work on christmas for 2x pay (especially if I had unlimited vacation I could take at other points) and if something does go majorly wrong over christmas, your clients will probably understand

butwhy 12y ago

Why do companies even try out these weird policies? They've gone from having unlimited days (then admitted it was a mistake for 2 whole years) and are now blindly trying out another unusual strategy. I don't see why they don't just offer a standard solution which seems to work for most companies, instead of trying to be extremely controlling of people.

jadc 12y ago
I don't think these are weird policies anymore. I work at a major software company and one year ago, we went from having a set of number of vacations days to an "unlimited vacation" policy. Many companies are already doing this or following suit. In California at least, I suspect this has something more to do with accounting than experimentation, i.e. the companies don't have to have on their books the money owed if people were to leave without using all their vacation.
- josephschmoe 12y ago
  While that liability is nice, I think the world is better off without it. If people know they can't take their vacation with them, they'll actually take it when it's appropriate. The liability situation is a lose-lose one. You take less vacation because you're comfortable you'll get it and the company gets a liability on the books because you work too hard. Without the liability, you'll see a lot of people take vacation during layoffs though.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Without the liability, you'll see a lot of people take vacation during layoffs though. Not necessarily -- quantitatively unlimited vacation doesn't mean that the vacation can be taken without management approval of the specific timing, it just means that its not held to a fixed limit.
josephschmoe 12y ago
A minimum vacation policy is the same as a normal one. You just don't have to get special approval or get your pay docked if you go over.

padobson 12y ago

If I worked somewhere that had an unlimited vacation policy, I think I'd probably stop working on Fridays all together. An unlimited vacation policy could be an open invitation for a 4-day work-week (or 3 day or 2 day...)

laxatives 12y ago
We have an unlimited vacation policy and no one has taken more than 20 days off in a calendar year (not including holidays). That being said, I'm at 18 and only started in September.
wahnfrieden 12y ago
It's expected that you don't abuse the policy. While what constitutes abuse may be a line that needs elaboration, making your standard work week 2-3 days under this policy is not a gray area.
- johnward 12y ago
  Which is exactly why these policies suck. It's "unlimited" but it's implied that you don't take too many days. It's like the comcast of vacation policies.
  - wahnfrieden 12y ago
    That's what the minimum days you must take is for. If the company culture is right, it's a liberating policy. At my new job now it feels like I'm spending a precious commodity instead of booking vacation feeling like reprieve due in the wake of hard work or payoff.
    - johnward 12y ago
      Oh I agree. I like the idea that the article was talking about. I'll be interested in seeing how it works out. It reverses the stigma to almost be where you'd look bad for not taking enough time vs taking too much time.
12y ago

Someone1234 12y ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again, unlimited days off (or "open") and zero days off are identical. If you have unlimited vacation people are inclined to take less and people respect the vacation you take less ("as you can always take more!"). Here's a study[0] (PDF) called "Overwhelmed America: Why Don’t We Use Our Earned Leave?" It is biased (travel association) but interesting nonetheless. According to this study[1] you need at least ten consecutive days of leave to "de-stress" from work. Short vacations aren't as effective as long ones. In "europe" a two week vacation (10 work days) is common/standard. As opposed to American's "long weekends." A lot of these "unlimited" places have a "as long as your work gets done" policy, meaning you can take tons of short days off or afternoons off, but almost no extended holidays (e.g. travel abroad, out of state, etc). [0] http://traveleffect.com/sites/traveleffect.com/files/OverwhelmedAmerica_FullReport_FINAL_0.pdf http://traveleffect.com/sites/traveleffect.com/files/Overwhe...

byoung2 12y ago
A lot of these "unlimited" places have a "as long as your work gets done" policy, meaning you can take tons of short days off or afternoons off, but almost no extended holidays (e.g. travel abroad, out of state, etc). My friend works at a company with unlimited vacation and they pay you $1000 for every full week you take off.
- jedc 12y ago
  Full Contact does the same thing: employees get $7500 to go on vacation, but only get it if they actually go on vacation. https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/paid-paid-vacation/ https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/paid-paid-vacation/
- hedwall 12y ago
  Your normal pay + $1000 or just $1000 ? In Sweden you actually get a ~12% higher pay during your vacation.
  - delluminatus 12y ago
    Do you know why? Is it just to encourage people to take more vacation time?

jbb555 12y ago

very good. Except "now has a required minimum of 25 (paid) vacation days per year, no matter what country they live in." Well no. If they live in the UK for example they have a mandatory limit of 28 days not 25 because it's the law.

TillE 12y ago
But is that an enforced minimum? Is an employee required to take that many days off work? Because that's the distinction being drawn here.
- walshemj 12y ago
  In the UK you cant normally be forced to take leave its up to the employer how they handle overages some have use it or lose it some allow a carry over. Apart from the finance industry where for some staff I think its mandatory for anti fraud reasons to take at least a two week block.
- hessenwolf 12y ago
  Yes, it is. And, just, seriously, what sort of a society doesn't mandate holidays?
  - philwelch 12y ago
    A society that's not into proclaiming mandates.
- gambiting 12y ago
  No, you are not required to take them,but if you don't the company has to pay you the full amount for those days(so in effect, if you don't take ANY holidays during the year, you will get an additional 1-month's salary at the end).
awjr 12y ago
I think you are talking about 25 days they can choose. In the UK you have 8 days that are Bank Holidays and National holidays. So this is a 33 day holiday policy.

jcadam 12y ago

I like this idea of minimum vacation. Most companies I've worked in use vacation days as some sort of reward for sticking with the company for X number of years (i.e., "When you hit your 5 year anniversary, you get an extra 1.5 days of paid vacation. Won't that be nice!"). And when I say paid vacation, I really mean PTO with no separate 'sick leave' days. Which means people show up to work sick. Funny enough, the company I work for was recently bought, and in the interests of making things 'uniform', we were forced to adopt the purchasing company's vacation policy, which meant an across the board cut in everyone's PTO hours (to include folks that negotiated additional vacation days when they were hired -- those agreements were declared null and void). Apparently the execs thought the hit to morale/retention was worth the 'cost savings'. On the other hand, I once interviewed at a company with an 'open' vacation policy and was immediately suspicious of it. My first thought was "I'm guessing people don't take much vacation?" That didn't go over so well with the interviewer. It's nice to see an employer that treats vacation as a means to increase employee productivity and retention (burnout prevention, etc.), rather than as a pure cost to be minimized as much as possible.

walshemj 12y ago
Hmm is that not a breach of contract could in a tech company lead to an exodus of staff.
- kabdib 12y ago
  You shouldn't be surprised at the number of execs who don't really care. at. all. about attrition, and who are clueless about what motivates engineers.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    I wouldn't :-) but that just means you competitors just got a free shot at your best and brightest. The really clever ones volunteer for redundancy and the pay off and then go and work for a competitor.

ngmaloney 12y ago

I jokingly refer to Unlimited Vacation Policy as Guilt Driven Vacation Policy. IMHO, it is a sham so companies don't have to take liability for accrued vacation time on their books. While I commend Travis for coming up with a workable solution wouldn't it be easier to just say: "Everyone has 4 weeks vacation, use them!".

hedwall 12y ago
Isn't that exactly what they did? Everyone has to take 5 weeks minimum, and on top of that you may take more if you want/need.

chton 12y ago

"We tried something that didn't fit our culture, and it didn't work." Taking less vacation time is not necessarily a bad thing. For myself, not having to meet a minimum quota means I enjoy the vacations I do take more, since I take them when I need and want instead of mandatory ones. It means, as long as I'm feeling good, I can keep the momentum up. The bigger problems is that employees didn't respect others' vacation time. Or their own, for that matter. That is a cultural problem, and a change in vacation policy won't help (much). If you want the people in your company to be happier with their time off, work on respecting it. "The guilt of taking time off takes over, and you "just check in" or promise to be available if anything comes up." That is, to me, a sign of an unhealthy culture. Fix that before trying yet another vacation experiment.

unreal37 12y ago
It sounds like having an open vacation policy is what leads to not respecting those days off in others. Also, what the leaders do, the staff generally do. It sounds like a healthy place to work to me. I'd love to work there.
organsnyder 12y ago
What you're proposing is unlikely to work in many environments. Even in the best of environments, where trust and respect course through every coworker interaction, people will still be looking to their coworkers (especially their superiors) to get a feel for how much vacation time is acceptable. In fact, companies with exceptionally strong cultures may be worse, as people really won't want to be a burden on their coworkers by taking more vacation days than average. This is especially true for anyone with any sort of leadership role—whether it's an official senior position, a mentor, or just someone who is known for being a model employee. Your own behavior serves as a model for others, and no company policy is going to tell people any different. I work for a small nonprofit organization with an extremely dedicated president. She's been very gracious with the freedom she allows her employees (though the official policies could be better), but I'm always wondering if she thinks that I'm actually working hard enough—not because of anything she's said, but because she puts in a ton of hours. I know many of my coworkers feel the same pressure. If you're forced to take vacation time even when you don't need it, then try to find other pursuits—personal projects, reading, volunteering—that are still "work", but of the unpaid variety. Take the time to catch up with friends and family (especially if you have kids). Vacation doesn't just have to be about traveling and/or resting; it can also be an opportunity to catch up on other priorities.

cellover 12y ago

I really like the tone of this post. It makes me think that this person is trustworthy and I'd be glad to work for him. I wish my company had such an open communication!

genghisjahn 12y ago

The company I work for has open vacation and it works out fine. People take a few days, a week here and there and it winds up being 4-5 weeks a year. This is in the US. I'm sure there's no big payout for unused vacation when people leave, but no big deal. When you're sick, you stay home, when you need time off, you take it. The CTO and upper managers are all coders and have worked hard at maintaining a good work culture.

gadders 12y ago

As a counterpoint, most investment banks enfore a mandatory 10 working day break where all remote access capabilities are disabled (including blackberries). This is less out of altruism, and more so that any untoward activities can be uncovered whilst the person is out of the office.

e40 12y ago
This is less out of altruism, and more so that any untoward activities can be uncovered whilst the person is out of the office. I'd love to hear more about that.
- gadders 12y ago
  That's pretty much it. It's a compliance-type regulation. The idea is that if you were, say, hiding a $3bn loss in an obscure book or something then it is more likely to be discovered if you were out of the office and someone else is trading/covering your books. You can read an article about it in the WSJ here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444914904577615483583558306 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100008723963904449149045776154... or google for "Take Those Two Weeks Off —Or Else" and click the top link.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Here's an example: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/easy-street/credit-suisse-makes-life-little-harder-aspiring-rogue-traders http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/easy-street/credi... Everyone has at least a two-week period every year when they are completely cut off from the job. If you have been doing something off-the-books, that's enough time for it to explode. Or, if the auditing department suspects you of something -- or even if they don't -- this is the natural time to bring in forensics to dig through your books and figure out exactly you've been doing. It's not as important in non-finance, but it can still have some use. I know of at least two cases where a sysadmin was on vacation and then outsiders were brought in to find all the backdoors he had installed.
- calgaryeng 12y ago
  There have been many cases of people in finance being able to cover up significant losses of company funds (through bad trades or what not) or a long period of time simply by understanding the front/back office systems. If you force people to leave (and cut off remote access) they are unable to maintain the pretenses required to cover up these losses, and can help drive exposure of foul play. At a minimum you'd need two people 100% in on the cover-up which reduces the chance of it happening.

qeorge 12y ago

Another upside is forcing the company to learn to run without its founders or other key employees for a meaningful period of time. This forces good processes to be put in place, and is an excellent fire drill in general.

nekopa 12y ago
Talking fun, I think it would be fun for a company to run a bus factor fire drill from time to time -:just point to one employee and say "Bam! You're hit by a bus, leave the office now here's $2K, come back next Thursday. No email, no remote working and no phone contact with anyone from here." I wonder how many companies (let alone startups) could deal effectively with this situation.
- exhilaration 12y ago
  A chaos monkey that takes out personnel instead of servers. I like it.
- alxndr 12y ago
  I really like this idea! Wonder how I could convince my day job to try it out.

mariusc23 12y ago

Glad to see a new approach on the open vacation policy. I think this policy would work better if vacation days are only tracked until the minimum is met, otherwise I have a feeling it will be perceived as exactly 25 days, not more.

acd 12y ago

You can also view it likes this. In the end of your life when looking back at it. You can think of asking two questions of yourself. Did you wish you worked more hard days for your company? or Did you wish you spent more time with family and gaining new experiences? Obviously you will need to find a work / life balance but if you only work/play hard you might regret it later and you cannot get lost time back.

dalke 12y ago

If anyone wants to read more about unlimited vacation policies, here are some of the previous HN threads on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125973 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4874743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4874743 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613526 . The last contains comments about the Jacob Kaplan-Moss essay that was mentioned in this thread's link.

stevenkovar 12y ago

I can see the merit for enforcing more vacation; but is more vacation the solution to burnout, or is working less overall?

my_username_is_ 12y ago

I'm glad to see someone trying this out. It's something I've been wondering about [1], and it seems pretty uncommon. I'll be looking forward to seeing how this works out for them, and any other companies that are so inspired to try to improve the status-quo. Frankly the American culture of working continuously seems like a negative to employee and employer both--and even if it were only a negative to one, it would be something worthy of change. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053580

asgard1024 12y ago

I would go even further and postulate that lack of rules about who is in power kills societies. Many equate "lack of rules" with "freedom", but it's a problem. People without conscience will freely abuse the lack of rules or start to fight with each other, while the good people will get screwed. Eventually, the good people, who usually just want to do the work, will get unhappy and leave. This applies not only to vacation, but to governance as well. So called "consensual democracy", where there is no hard and fast rule about who has how much power, has the same kind of problem. The most important thing about democracy is that it is very specific - everybody has the same amount of power. That discourages political fights, because you cannot (without explicitly changing the rule) accrue more power. In my opinion, many institutions (for example Wikipedia) suffer from this problem.

innguest 12y ago
This is a bunch of leftist FUD to be honest. Read up on libertarianism. You've even managed to get the definition of "freedom" wrong. Lack of rules? Are we using arguments from decades ago? It's lack of rulers. There's never a lack of rules because we all understand natural law.
- krapp 12y ago
  >There's never a lack of rules because we all understand natural law. No we don't. More to the point, I can guarantee that not everyone agrees with your understanding of whatever 'natural law' is, or with your inalienable right to exercise that view in their presence. Not even Libertarians agree on that.
  - innguest 12y ago
    It's not something for which there is "my understanding" and "your understanding". It's obvious stuff. If you punch someone in the face you can expect retaliation. If you trade with others you can expect peace for the duration of that contract. And so on. I'm not saying there's a list of the natural laws that I imagine people know of. There's no list. There's only the obvious stuff. Obviously I'd have to retaliate if I thought my life were in danger, and obviously I'd do my best to keep alliances that benefit me. Others will do the same. It all ends up working itself out. No need for a Hammurabi.

mrottenkolber 12y ago

Just be a freelancer, every day will be a holiday and christmas is just just another hackaton. ;p

danielweber 12y ago

> A company has to learn how to function when people are on vacation and unavailable, however important their role is. Yes, this is essential for having a viable company. If the company grinds to a halt without person X, the solution is not to get rid of person X's vacation. Also, in finance, required vacations are often a compliance aid. If someone is running a scam, it tends to need near-daily tending, and it will explode when they are out for two weeks (unless they find a co-conspirator).

nekopa 12y ago
Wow, remind me never to work in finance, too much paranoia for me (though I do know it's justified a lot of the time- I taught some IT folks at a bank once and they told me about a branch manager who went on holiday and forgot to turn off his automated money siphoning software. That was the only reason he got caught)

sqs 12y ago

This is a great post. At Sourcegraph, we had a similar realization, based on our own experiences. We wrote a blog post about it and it got picked up by the BBC: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/mandatory-vacation https://sourcegraph.com/blog/mandatory-vacation http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20140903-relax-or-else http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20140903-relax-or-else

fishnchips 12y ago

In all fairness "open vacation" policy is a yet another iteration on the age-old idea of Panopticon ;)

zakvyn 12y ago

I like the idea 'minimum' vacation that allow people able to take more than 'minimum' vacation.

zakvyn 12y ago

"Minimum" vacation gives employee the authority to take vacation without feeling guilt. Else some companies use open vacation policy to reduce the number of vacations that employee take.

gutsy 12y ago

This is phenomenal.

tdumitrescu 12y ago

I last moved from a shop with unlimited PTO (where in practice people settled around 4-5 weeks per year) to one with 15 days per year. Quality of life is noticeably worse with the limited PTO, and people tend to hoard their days because they're scarce. Travis's tracked minimum vacation sounds better than either of those policies.

nilkn 12y ago
I'm at a company where you start with 14 days of PTO per year, including sick time. It was a huge shock coming from college, and it's the main complaint I have about my job. It jumps up to 19 after two years. I honestly think 20 days PTO is the bare minimum for a decent work-life balance, and even that isn't all that great. If I were changing jobs, I'd actually be willing to exchange salary for extra PTO, if the default PTO were less than 20 days.

asafira 12y ago

As a graduate student, I feel that (at least within my research group) there is this "unlimited time off" policy, but in the end it's not really taken advantage of very much and it certainly doesn't take any stress away from work. Even this holiday season, I'll be taking a week off from work, and I always phrase it as "I promised my mother I'd be home for at least a week". The minimum vacation policy sounds like an interesting alternative, but I'm not sure it could fit within the academic community. Any professor has the power to instate such a policy, but at any given moment there's an "important" project that rests on one or two people working hard to get results. Often, in academia, you have those people that are precisely the kind that will work hard and get shit done, and honestly I can't imagine there being an understanding of "minimum time off". It's more convenient to the professor and the ambitious PhD student/post-doc to have the "take time off when you want" policy, and let the unwritten rules and undertones dictate when you should take time off (e.g., when you just finish a project). I know the article wasn't trying to apply things to academia, I just thought I would consider it in that light.

nekopa 12y ago
I would think that in academia a minimum time off policy would be great: depending on where you are in the project, sometimes stepping away from a problem can lead you to the solution.

hgh 12y ago

".... and you "just check in" or promise to be available if anything comes up. You respond to just one email or just one GitHub issue." When people need to be "available" while on vacation it usually means that there is way too much dependency on that person or insufficient knowledge-sharing. It shows the glaring holes on what's being hacked together and where systems can strengthen.

legohead 12y ago

So here's a slightly different view from someone I know -- they are slotted X number of vacation days, but actually need more. He is divorced, and his kid is across the US, so he ends up using all his vacation to see his kid. Now he is left with nothing to take a real vacation with his current spouse, and they both really want to.

eru 12y ago
He should perhaps look for a better job?

eyeareque 12y ago

My job went from 20 days paid off per year where we accrued hours per pay period, to an open vacation policy. The company did this because of the cost of having to keep money saved up to pay out to employees who have saved up their vacation hours. Like the article describes, most people including myself took off less time. I know for myself I felt guilty and didn't want to be seen as taking advantage of the new open policy. I'm going to talk to my new job's management and ask them to setup a minimum vacation day policy.

rebootthesystem 12y ago

I'd like to see the inclusion of data related to the structure and dynamics of the family unit. In the US the family desintegrates as kids are encouraged to leave home as soon as they finish high scool, say, 18 years of age. This, in a huge number of cultures and countries around the world is an unthinkable attrocity. It isn't uncommon to have children live with their parents until they are ready to form their own families, say, 25 to 30 years of age. Under the stereotypical US culture this is looked down upon to the point of making fun of those still living with their parents. Having millions of socially unprepared kids go off to try to make it on their own created, in my opinion, a society filled with various levels of dysfunctionalities. People tend to grow up, to some degree, in a "wild" setting where selfishness can become a necessity. In this context it is easy to see how work time can take the place of the social context lost due to having left the nest. Having grown up and lived in three cultures it is easy for me to remove myself from my US culture and watch it from afar as a visitor from another planet might. Americans are said to seem socially inept and dry from the perspective of other cultures, and this is true. All you have to do is spend six months in Italy or Argentina to undrerstand this. Americans men develop a weird homophobic form of "macho" that is down-right funny from the perspective of other cultures. Hugging, or worst, kissing, another man is frowned upon. Human contact, in general, is just not considered to be "normal". I have lived in cultures where it was quite normal to greet your kids parents with hugs and kisses on the cheeks. In fact, it would be rude to come to a party or gathering and not go around the room kissing everyone, man, woman, kids. Yes, you kiss your friend's wives. School friends do this in high school when they greet each other. Again, unthinkable in the US. In fact, a teacher can get in trouble with the law for greeting a student with a hug and a kiss. Showing affection is alien. Weird. In general terms, as much as TV shows and commercial try to stereotype this warm southern cowboy culture at the ranch with grandma this is, for the mist part, not the norm. The US family scatters and the kids are left to navigate a very important phase of their lives on their own. Sorry to harp on this but i do think this is a very important part of the equation and one that explains so much about US society, their behaviors, beliefs, relationships, work and family life. Once you realize that some of these people become politicians that shape US policies and laws it is easy to see where some of our problems might come from. There are subtle examples of this. For example, let's say you are working with a US friend on a project in their garage. He will use phrases like "give me my hammer" or "it's in my toolbox". In other cultures this becomes "give me the hammer" and "it's in the toolbox". I am convinced this egocentric view of the world is connected to leaving the nest early. Another example that is particularly bothersome to me are cases where parents pay their children for things that in what I am going to call more socially adjusted societies is simply unthinkable. One of my friends pays his 18 year old kid to go pick him up at the airport. Another pays his kids to help paint the house. My neighbor across the street pays his kid to mow the lawn. Viewed from far more family-centric cultures these woukd be examples of seriously dysfunctional family units. As a teenager I helped my parents in their business. Money was never a part of it. This is simply how a family behaves in other cultures. Of course I am painting with a wide brush. There are lots of cases of families that behave very differently from this. And, of course, the US has lots of multicultural families, such as mine. Yet I still think that a huge portion of the attitude towards work has to do with a bunch of single people existing "in the wild" and a setting where work can easily become a substitute for the family unit they effectively lost.

hero454545 12y ago

Nice post... I especially liked the touch of posting a link to their hiring page right after describing their mandatory 25 paid vacation day policy.

evanpw 12y ago

I don't think I see a single negative comment here about long vacations, so allow me to play devil's advocate. (These questions don't necessarily reflect my own opinions.) 1. If this is such a free lunch (employees are both happier and more productive overall), then why isn't lots of vacation offered everywhere (in the US)? Can it really be the case that the vast majority of US companies are too short-sighted to make a policy change that would be in their own best interest? 2. If, alternatively, more vacation is really good for employees, but slightly bad for employers, why doesn't the labor market adjust? In this case, you would expect employees to offer to work for a lower salary in exchange for more vacation time.

jarek 12y ago
> Can it really be the case that the vast majority of US companies are too short-sighted to make a policy change that would be in their own best interest? You can ask that about anything. Are the U.S. banks really so short-sighted to offer absolutely crap person-to-person transfers and get undercut by any number of hacky startups? Were the U.S. car manufacturers really so stupid? Are California taxpayers really too short-sighted to realize how Prop 13 hurts the state? The entire federal administration in lead-up to the Iraq invasion? Etc, etc
- evanpw 12y ago
  I don't disagree that bad decisions are made all of the time, but the questions is how the same bad decision can be made everywhere in a competitive marketplace. You've given a couple of good examples where the answer is government: banking is highly regulated, so breaking into the industry is tough, and the big U.S. auto companies actually would have gone out of business and been replaced without a bailout. But if increasing vacation time makes your employees happier and you also get more productive work out of them, why don't the companies that switch then get all of the best employees and eat the lunch of everyone else? I can't think of any regulations that make it more significantly more expensive to offer lots of vacation, so I don't think government is the answer in this case. I think the biggest clue is given in the original post: people (Americans) won't take vacation even when you offer it to them! In that case, offering more vacation is doubly bad for the company: you still pay your employees for the vacation time, but they don't actually take it, and lose the productivity benefits. Either this is because Americans actually rationally prefer higher salaries to more vacation, and the system is working, or they systematically underestimate how much good a vacation would do them, in which case we need things like mandatory minimum vacation policies or laws.

deleted 12y ago

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jimmyislive 12y ago

i said it first :) https://twitter.com/jimmyislive/status/495440322197876736 https://twitter.com/jimmyislive/status/495440322197876736

deleted 12y ago

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pierotofy 12y ago

Society needs more free time in general. http://t.co/68fyM3950D http://t.co/68fyM3950D

deleted 12y ago

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robotmakinglove 12y ago

This is so awesome.

thoman23 12y ago

The only thing surprising to me about this is to hear that this founder apparently had noble intentions at the start. I just assumed that every company that does this is cynically inducing more (short-term) work out of their employees while clearing some liabilities from the books, all at the cost of long-term success and morale. I would never work for a company with one of these "unlimited" vacation policies.

KennyCason 12y ago

I see a lot of people saying that they would "never work for a company with unlimited vacation." I also understand their reasoning and have seen similar examples. At DataRank we balance this with a small amendment. It's unlimited vacation but you MUST take a minimum of two weeks off. We are also very flexible about remote work. If you feel the itch to travel to Japan for a 2 week vacation + 2 weeks working remote, go for it. If you just feel burned out and want to watch Netflix at home all day. Go for it, just let someone know.

dyadic 12y ago

There are a few people here commenting about how their employer's unlimited vacation policy allows them to take two weeks vacation and then work remotely for a week or two extra. That's great, and it's good to see companies allowing it but remote work is still work, and it certainly isn't a vacation. Many people are working remote by default* and already have to fight certain perceptions that they are just sitting in their pants, watching tv, and eating chips all day, and it certainly doesn't help when others liken working remotely to being a holiday. It's definitely a good thing that more companies are opening up to remote work and trusting their people to get things done without being watched over, let's not perpetuate this idea of it just being a bunch of slackers that do it. * including me, obviously, and hence this response.

superuser2 12y ago

Mandatory vacation is not only a good idea, it is a security feature. When one employee takes over another's "world" within the company, it is very likely that they will notice if the employee on vacation has been embezzling, defrauding customers, etc. In the financial industry, this is not only good practice, it is a regulatory requirement. People who do not want to take vacation are seen by auditors as highly suspicious because that behavior often indicates a desire to cover up fraud.

jacques_chester 12y ago
I think pairing with frequent rotations is going to be more effective, but most shops don't practice pairing.

alecthomas 12y ago

Twitter also had this policy when I worked there (two years ago) and I thought it was really poorly thought out. Apart from all of the (relatively obvious) issues mentioned in the post, any vacation at Twitter was at the discretion of your immediate manager. So if you happened to have a hard-arse manager, or one who hated you, tough luck. Really a bad idea.

kpmah 12y ago

"unlimited" days off are nonsense. Can I take off 365 days a year? If the answer is no it's not unlimited. There's a limit, you're just not specifying it.

alkonaut 12y ago
I have a feeling this only works in places where you can be fired for performance reasons.
- kpmah 12y ago
  Sure, but my point is if you can be fired for taking too many days off, it's not unlimited. It's limited by the amount of work you're expected to reasonably do, and that's decided by your boss and colleagues. Except now instead of having a hard number where you know you are safe, it's completely subjective how many days off you can take.

vertAlign 12y ago

I bet the people with families abused the hell out of this and went to Disney World every month. While all the bachelors never took a day off.