[phamilton]

At a previous company with a "no vacation policy" policy, I found I was more liberal with my odd Friday off to go skiing, and more likely to work remotely one or more days on my actual vacation.

Today, with a normal PTO accrual system, I find myself very aware that a day of vacation costs me $500 in lost paid out PTO. That makes a semi spontaneous Friday on the mountain more expensive than I'm comfortable with. It means that when I'm bored over the year end holidays at my in-laws home I don't do any work even if I feel like it because I don't want to waste my limited PTO.

Honestly, I'd rather ski more and have semi-working vacations. Not all the time, but often.

[jerf]

"Today, with a normal PTO accrual system, I find myself very aware that a day of vacation costs me $500 in lost paid out PTO."

If you have a cap on how much you can accrue, which is pretty typical [1], that's not true. Once you hit the cap, you'd still lose the days; thus, they are a sunk cost.

The only days that cost you are any days that would be paid out at the end of your employment, and even that really only matters if you're going to roll from one job into another in less than the number of days you were paid out at the end, otherwise it's still just a rearrangement of a constant number of paid days and unpaid days.

Good news: You probably don't need to conceive of paid vacation days as being "changed" against you.

Not wasting your limited PTO remains a concern, of course, but as with so many other things "unlimited" isn't truly on the table either, so....

[1]: I hear tell of rumors that accrued vacation time is somehow taxed at year's end in the US, but I've never quite heard someone lay out the accounting and tax details. If you know them I'd be interested to hear it.

[phamilton]

> If you have a cap on how much you can accrue, which is pretty typical [1], that's not true. Once you hit the cap, you'd still lose the days; thus, they are a sunk cost.

It's not a sunk cost at all. It's only a sunk cost once you hit the cap.

In the current SF engineering culture the average tenure at a company is around 18 months. Most caps are about the same timeframe.

Leaving and cashing out PTO is a very common occurrence. Getting acquired also results in PTO being cashed out.

>The only days that cost you are any days that would be paid out at the end of your employment, and even that really only matters if you're going to roll from one job into another in less than the number of days you were paid out at the end, otherwise it's still just a rearrangement of a constant number of paid days and unpaid days.

The paid out PTO is a "sunk windfall". Every day you choose not to work between jobs costs you regardless of whether you had any PTO paid out.

[Someone1234]

Taking that into account now I'm glad my current place of employment DOESN'T pay out PTO. You can accrue about two years worth but after you hit the cap you start to lose the days (just dropped, not paid out). They also don't pay out if you quit.

So I have no valid reason to convert my PTO into dollar amounts, so no specific guilt about using them. It also doesn't make sense for me to save too many as I could be fired tomorrow and lose them all...

PS - My employer does warn you if you're about to lose days at least a month ahead. A colleague took three weeks off last summer because they hadn't used enough in previous years.

[phamilton]

What state are you in? California requires PTO to be paid out when you leave.