[zensavona]

Something which made me want to stay where I am even more is a recent counterexample to this seemingly common response...

I went to my CTO with a similar conversation and his response was "totally understand, leave it with me" - 6 hours later he had spoken with whoever it was he needed to speak with, and my ~20% raise was formalised. I was not expecting that response and the way it was handled made me even more happy to stay.

The company I work for even improved their benefits in some ways which do not directly affect the salary spend (added unlimited paid leave) to further sweeten the deal for everyone.

At the time I assumed they wouldn't want/be able to match it so I was very regretfully ready to go.

These conversations sometimes go differently to the way you expect!

[nly]

Unlimited leave is actually a dirty trick. On average people go on less holiday under such a deal, because there's no "use it or lose it" incentive to take time off. Everyone works under the anxiety of wondering how much holiday is acceptable and whether they're taking too much or not enough.

I prefer what my employer offers: 30 days paid holiday plus the ability to sell days back to the company.

[borski]

It’s only a dirty trick if they don’t mean it. We actively encouraged vacations, and as founders took them ourselves, and it generally worked very well.

[willcipriano]

It's also only a dirty trick if you fall for it. I've spent my life being accused of having autism, sometimes it's good to strategically not be aware of social norms like that.

[ghaff]

I have never had an issue taking every day I was owed, including taking month-long vacations. I have tried to be sensitive to not taking time off at "bad" times but if I was ever generally told I couldn't take my vacation time I would be interviewing.

[pnutjam]

It's still just a way to keep it off the books. In the states, you have to pay out leave people earned and did not take when they resign.

That can be very helpful when your pay dates don't line up right due to how different companies handle pay.

[borski]

It’s not “still just a way” to keep it off the books - that’s just a convenient side effect for the company. The overall effect was that more people took more vacation at our company, which was overall a good thing.

[pnutjam]

If that were the case you should give people a generous amount of leave and make it expire if unused, 30 days on the first of the year?

[borski]

And what if someone needs a 31st day?

That’s the challenge this aims to solve. There’s nothing wrong with either approach, and “shaming people into not taking vacation” works either way.

[mywittyname]

It's a trick to reduce the average number of PTO days taken by the employees. When companies offer use-it-or-lose-it 20 days of PTO, the average PTO usage per employee is going to be like 19 days. But when they keep the 20 day policy behind the scenes (because HR systems don't often support "unlimited"), but call it unlimited, PTO usage drops dramatically.

Plus, there are other benefits to the employer, like not having to pay out banked PTO to employees who leave.

Unless it comes with a mandatory minimum, unlimited PTO is a negative for me.

[borski]

There are a lot of assumptions here.

1) Having a set number of PTO days can also often come with pressure to not take them. When I worked at Morgan Stanley, you got vacation, but taking it made you look bad.

2) Plenty of HR systems support unlimited vacation; ADP and Gusto both do, at a minimum. My company used Gusto, and the acquirer used ADP; both had unlimited.

3) Mandatory minimums are a fantastic idea, and it's something we implemented as well. Agreed there.

Whether PTO usage drops dramatically when unlimited is entirely dependent on how the company treats unlimited vacation; if they encourage it, that isn't true. Also, the flexibility of being able to 'not run out of sick days' and take a longer vacation during the holidays, etc., is something that all of our employees greatly appreciated.

Point is: just like anything else, it can be done poorly, but that's not as a result of it being unlimited.

[bencollier49]

I don't even understand how that's legal. If you took 100% of your time off as leave, what recourse would they have to fire you? Presumably this only happens in regions with laws that have few legal protections for employees?

[detaro]

There's a reason you predominantly see this from companies in the US, with at-will employment.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Because if you took 100% of your time off, you wouldn't meet objectives. You'd have zero productivity.

[vmception]

> added unlimited paid leave

Make sure to use at least 20 days a year

Take a whole week off per quarter and set that expectation

and the Christmas to New Years time doesnt count so double it in Q4

[DaiPlusPlus]

> added unlimited paid leave

The only time this works is when the company's in early-days stages, when you'll be severely underpaid in cash and paid in equity instead, that the VCs have added a tolerance for crash-out-time to their spreadsheets.

I've never worked for a company that put "unlimited paid leave" in their job-ads, let alone the actual contract, so I'm curious how those things are spelled out.

Under at-will employment, the company can fire you for any (legal) reason, but if you bunk-off work all the time, but your contract says "unlimited paid leave", what case do they actually have? Has it been tested in court?

[vmception]

You can be fired for any reason, aside from a few exceptions, but since the "reason" simply never needs to be one of the exceptions, it undermines the point of the exceptions.

In New York, a compliance officer was fired for reporting compliance violations and this former employee challeneged that and lost, and lost on appeal, helping people realize that its a check-the-box job filling a seat.

https://www.jacksonlewis.com/resources-publication/new-york-...

So, as these will always be at state levels and will remain unresolved for all states within your lifetime, you have to make assumptions for how to achieve and maintain standing in society. Best to just assume its the same everywhere. As this extends to nearly anything regarding employment, there is no reason to elevate "using paid time off" as any higher reason you'll get fired than anything else. If you are intimidated and feel there will be a disruption in your ability to exchange time for food and shelter, then there is no assurance that US employment can offer you.

You have to try to make in-office leverage yourself, and then rely on the assumption that you have it.

I like unlimited PTO because it doesn't "accrue". I don't stay at places long enough to accrue PTO.

[Merad]

In the US contracts aren't very common for average employees. I assume that executives and maybe upper management have contracts, but not the peons. Most of the US also has at-will employment so they don't _need_ a reason to fire you.

[nly]

My guess is they the word "discretionary" tends to come up, and all leave still has to be approved a respectable amount of time in advance.

[DaiPlusPlus]

If its conditional upon approval then it isn’t “unlimited”.

[ghaff]

Something like unmetered or untracked is probably a better term. Of course, it's not literally unlimited.

It really does need to come with a top-down culture of taking vacation which a senior former Netflix person told me was the case there. (Though I've also heard it varies by team.) It also isn't great if you want to switch around jobs a lot because you won't get any payout when you leave.

Though you do have issues with people taking vacation even in a more traditional system. In a prior job I took some month long vacations and there were some coworkers who were incredulous that "I could do that."

[nly]

It's all horse shit. I worked somewhere in the UK where we had "unlimited leave" and someone was fired for taking the piss.

All holiday is subject to approval here, whether it's under your allowance or not.

[hhmc]

I agree that 'unlimited leave' is incompatible with at-will employment.

However, this presupposes that most (all) employment is at-will, which obviously isn't true, especially globally.

[Fiahil]

Sounds low. Make it seven weeks. That's what most of us get in France.

[saberience]

It's why so few companies want to invest in France and things like Activision Blizzard closing all their French offices. And of course, the radically lower salaries there.

[Fiahil]

This has absolutely nothing to do with companies wanting to invest in France - or not. Blizzard closing its Versailles HQ is also a very bad example, one, because they are in a middle of a massive crisis, and two, because the move was motivated by unnecessary greed and it will most likely cost them an arm and a leg in severance packages.

[vmception]

Yeah I put it just below what people in developed nations get, because the holidays and sick leave put it much closer on par (5-6 weeks)

I don’t consider france a productive environment that has struck a balance for doing business reliably, with a hostile sentiment that permeates down to seemingly everyone and so I don’t really put much stock in their particular labor advances

[shoo]

Why do you think that is? Is the balance of power in France tipped in favour of labour rather than capital? Or is the arrangement in France fairly typical for European countries, and it is countries like the US that are weird exceptions?

[sirwhinesalot]

I think 4 weeks is bare minimum in Europe, 5 common, 6 or close to 6 pretty often (my case). I guess in some places it goes to 7.

[borski]

The US tends to be one of the only countries literally obsessed with worker productivity. Many other countries value worker happiness over worker productivity, generally speaking, partially because of a social safety net.

[shoo]

in australia it is standard for all full time permanent roles to have 20 days paid leave a year, in addition to national/state holidays (there are about 10 of these). moreover, if you have accrued a balance of leave when you quit your job, you get paid out for it.

having "unlimited leave" where you can't cash it out if you don't use it seems pretty bogus.

[coffeeblack]

I have 30 days per year (plus another 12 days of public holidays). How does “unlimited paid leave” work? Can I just sign the contract and then never show up but still get paid? Or is it just a euphemism for “we expect you to never take a day off”?

[bombela]

In my experience, it's closer to the latter.

[blitzar]

Perhaps helped going to the top of the food chain? Otherwise the 3 managers betwen you and the decising makers start to wonder if they too deserve a 20% pay raise and bat harder for themselves than for you.

[zensavona]

Perhaps one of the reasons I received the response which I did is that there is no middle management :)

[blitzar]

Imagine getting the chain of emails through 4 levels of middle management we need +25% for this little guy down here - oh and while we are handing out candy, me too.

[everfrustrated]

As a manager myself I've had a couple of experiences where my reports have read others negative experiences on HN and presumed it would be true for them also.

It's very disheartening to not be even given the chance to fight for more money for my team.

Be kind to your manager. If you're seriously interviewing around at least drop hints in your 1:1s so your manager can start the ball rolling about your raise internally.

[polymatter]

Why do you need reports to drop hints? Once they are even considering leaving for a greater salary enough that they are interviewing, they are half a step out of there already. You should be proactively fighting for your team on their behalf regardless.

[everfrustrated]

You need to give your manager the ammunition.

A manager going to HR with "cost of living increase please" vs "I have a valued member of my team who is dropping hints theyre unhappy about pay" are very different things.

You're presuming all employees are like yourself. Not everybody is motivated by money. I have team members who are well paid, know it, and turn down large increases elsewhere due to the projects they have excite them, etc.

[rowanajmarshall]

Because not everyone has the same priorities.

Like, your manager in their mid-30s might value steady employment, a good salary and good benefits, whereas their low-mid 20s report might value fast promotion, salary growth and relocation potential. So if their request to move from London to Seattle got denied, the manager might think it's not a big deal, while for the report it's a complete deal-breaker

[wccrawford]

This is it exactly. The only "hint" that a manager needs than an IT employee is thinking of leaving is that their salary isn't increasing faster than cost of living. I guarantee they know that they can leave and get a bigger raise.

If that happens multiple years in a row, it's not just possible, it's likely.

[darkerside]

All the time 100% of the time? There has to be an upper limit somewhere. Your manager is not a mind reader. You need to tell them when you are not happy with your comp.

Of course, it's your manager's job to make sure you are more comfortable talking to this about them than you are interviewing with strangers, which honestly is not a high bar to clear.

[SamuelAdams]

That’s great to hear. However I’ve always had trouble trusting my manager. There’s a lot of information managers cannot legally disclose to employees. So it feels very one sided when I get well-rehearsed-seemingly-ok responses.

What is stopping my manager from doing a 20% raise today, then replacing me in 3-6 months with a lower cost person? How do you build trust or guarantee a 2-5 year timeline attached to that raise?

[pnutjam]

Bingo, I have little incentive to accept a counter offer. It requires alot of trust and if that trust existed, I wouldn't be leaving.

I thought I had trust with my manager, but when I converted from contract to FTE (required), they rejected my request for a small raise and tried to lowball me. They eventually settled on the same pay rate, so 2 years with no raise. Only to "adjust" my salary up in year 3 because 2 people quit. I'm still looking at an easy 15% increase and less stress by jumping.