[cldellow]

Doesn't Netflix already offer unlimited vacation? Parental leave isn't vacation, of course, but the cynic in me thinks this is another example of a case where a corporation can benevolently offer the moon while replying on peer pressure to ensure that no employee accepts what is on offer to anywhere near its fullest extent.

Does Netflix publish any stats about vacation usage?

[svachalek]

Although the word "unlimited" gets thrown around in casual usage, of course no company is going to pay you forever if you never show up for a day of work. You've still got to get your job done at a high level perspective (say quarterly) but the idea is that management is not tracking every hour you show up to work or decide to take off; they're looking at results not attendance.

In that light I'm reading this as essentially setting the expectations bar very low, potentially to nothing, for a year.

Basically this policy and pretty much all of Netflix's policies come down to behaving like a professional and treating other people with the same expectations. If you lose that culture and either side starts to misbehave of course things could go very badly. But that culture is very important to Netflix and they are always working consciously to preserve it.

I haven't seen any official stats about vacation (as someone else pointed out, in order to do that they'd have to track it) but I've never known anyone to have a problem with it. I've seen quite a few people take 3 weeks or so at a time because they're going overseas, and in Silicon Valley that's pretty unheard of.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, I don't speak for the company, yada, yada. I'm just a rank and file employee interpreting what I know.

[CrankyFool]

(I manage at Netflix)

We can't publish stats about vacation usage.

That's because I don't know of a single manager here who tracks vacation usage. There's a general allergy to doing that, because that can lead to trying to manage that number and then the 'unmetered vacation' is no longer so unmetered.

I suppose I could, for my people, try to find all the out of office notifications, but that'd be a silly level of effort.

(There's no consistent process across the board for dealing with vacations, but to the best of my knowledge the typical way this works -- and the way it works in my own group -- is that an engineer will at some point probably mention to me that they're taking days off casually. I try to make sure it's clear to them that they're not asking for permission, and then move on).

[e40]

Does Netflix publish any stats about vacation usage?

I would love to see stats. I doubt they'll publish them. If people use less vacation than they used to (before the policy went into effect), then they would take a negative PR hit for it. If they used more than before, then it might encourage other employees to do the same.

[giaour]

Isn't part of their unlimited vacation perk a promise not to track how much vacation you use?

[CrankyFool]

It's not explicit, but as I noted above that generally ends up being the case. Most other managers here with whom I've talked consider tracking vacation usage ... suspect and worrisome. It feels icky, so we don't do it.