[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.