[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.

[pnutjam]

Give them the 31st, but you need to set a floor and commit budget.

[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.