[oriel]

The only company I had offer this used it as a lever to pressure us to work more and longer. Then encouraged peer shaming if we took a day much less a week off. At that job I had two weeks off in two years.

To be a tiny bit fair, this was a tiny company with 3 engineers doing the whole lean startup thing.

I'd say the situation was valuable to learn from because it was apparent (in hindsight) from the first interview how bad the company culture was. So the lesson was if the company seems to be informal and unstructured, one person wearing five hats, Project Manager is also your designer or lead coder etc... (and I realize I just describe a huge number of startups. Use your best judgement).

tl;dr its more likely to be abused by the company than the employee