[caoilte]

Unlimited leave policies encourage employees to self-police and conform to peer pressure. At a place like Netflix I can imagine the result being that people end up taking less than the industry average.

A better gimmick would be if Netflix picked one of the Nordics and announced that they were going to adopt all of the social policies provided by that country's government.

[danudey]

> I can imagine the result being that people end up taking less than the industry average

The industry average in the US is abysmal though. Yahoo 'doubled' theirs to 16 weeks, which is 1/3 of Canada's (and many other countries') legally mandated minimum. Taking double the industry average would still be abysmal by global standards.

[baudehlo]

It's a shame that canada has a better mat/pat leave standard but such a terrible (same as the U.S.) vacation standard.

[rhino369]

Global standards include a government paid paycheck. No country has companies pay for a anywhere near a year.

[Osmium]

> Unlimited leave policies encourage employees to self-police and conform to peer pressure.

I'm sympathetic to your concerns, but this is still a good thing and–importantly–a very good step in the right direction.

Playing devil's advocate a little, but this "peer pressure" idea seems to come with paid vacation too. I think, to an extent, it's peoples own responsibility to resist this peer pressure, rather than the company's. I would always take paid vacation on principle, for example. If you don't want me to take it, don't offer it to me–and if you don't offer it to me, I'll take a job somewhere else, thank you. I'm quite happy for the quality of my work to be judged on its own merits. Which is not to say it's easy to do if you're working at a company with an entrenched culture of abusive expectations. But we only become complicit in it if we give into peer pressure rather than asserting our rights, no?

That said, I say this from the privileged position of living in a country where taking paid vacation is expected, so perhaps it's easy for me to say...

[kelukelugames]

I agree. This is Netflix we are talking about.