[compiler-guy]

"Unlimited PTO" is a fiction created by accountants that sounds good on paper. When you need or want time off, you work it out with your manager. No debate about how many days you have left this year, or how many you have accumulated. It's undefined and technically you are supposed to work together and away you go.

Accountants like it because guaranteed time-off is a liability that appears on the company's books as a debt, especially in California where the company is required to pay it out when you leave (whether fired or voluntary).

But what happens in practice is no one feels like they are entitled to the time they should be entitled to, and negotiations from the employee side always come from a place of weakness. It's a terrible system.

Undoubtedly someone will respond to this post with just how amazing their manager is and that they have never had a problem. But you know when I have never had a problem taking time off, even a long time off? When I could point to the corporate policy that says I have X days, and I was taking those days.

And now I'm not playing manager roulette on whether or not I have the time, or how kind they are feeling. Or how buddy-buddy we are.

It's one of those things that are great in theory, and terrible in real life.

[georgeecollins]

Exactly- sounds great but in practice often not great. Depends on the culture. I once worked for a small but ultimately very successful start up, as a married guy with kids. Unlimited PTO sounded great. Until I planned my second week long vacation in a year and got a lot of side eyes. Two weeks per year of vacation was less then what I got when PTO was "limited". In practice under unlimited PTO you could take a week off but more than that resulted in a PIP for something else.

[superfrank]

> But what happens in practice is no one feels like they are entitled to the time they should be entitled to, and negotiations from the employee side always come from a place of weakness. It's a terrible system

> Undoubtedly someone will respond to this post with just how amazing their manager is and that they have never had a problem.

That me! Except I don't think it has anything to do with my manager or company.

I've worked 5 different jobs over the last 12 years with 8 or 9 different managers and literally never had an issue with taking the time I want while taking 6-8 weeks of PTO a year. I've hit the point where when I'm looking for a new job unlimited PTO is kind of table stakes.

I manage a few teams now with some people in the US where my company does unlimited PTO and others in Canada where our company cannot give unlimited PTO. Looking at my teams, the amount of PTO people take has almost no correlation to whether they have unlimited PTO or a set number of days. I have US employees who take a ton of PTO and Canadian employees who have burned through their entire balance and then some and I have employees in both places who take essentially none.

I get that if you're in that second group it's preferable to be in a place where you'll get paid out for the days you didn't take, but I'm pretty convinced that unlimited vs set days has almost no bearing on how many PTO days someone will actually take.

[cortesoft]

> Looking at my teams, the amount of PTO people take has almost no correlation to whether they have unlimited PTO or a set number of days.

If the number of PTO days taken is the same between the groups, isn't it CLEARLY superior from an employee perspective to have a set amount? That way, you get paid out if you leave or are fired.

I know quite a few people who use their PTO as a sort of emergency fund if they are laid off... they will at least get paid that amount to hold them over until the next job.

[superfrank]

> If the number of PTO days taken is the same between the groups, isn't it CLEARLY superior from an employee perspective to have a set amount

For me, no. I take more PTO than most companies with limited PTO offer. Most big tech companies offer 20-25 days and I'm taking 30 minimum. I take 6-8 weeks a year and the year I got married, I took 10. A normal year of PTO for me is 2 weeks during the summer for a vacation, a week at Thanksgiving, a week in April or May since my family has multiple birthdays in that window, 2-3 weeks in the Christmas/NYE period, and then random days here and there for the rest of the year.

For my team, for the people on the low end banked PTO is probably better. For the people on the high end they often take more than the allotment for CA employees, so no.

Everyone's experience will be different, but in my career I've always found that unlimited PTO often means no one cares how much PTO you take as long as you're getting your work done. I value that freedom. I know it's not for everyone and I'm not saying that every company should be unlimited PTO, but I just hate this narrative that it's a scam.

[BoiledCabbage]

So "unlimited" for you is literally one week more than 5 weeks tech companies cap at?

Why not take 10 weeks or 12 weeks? If it's unlimited?

And how many other employees are only taking half of what they would be taking because they feel silently pressured to - and do all of those missing weeks make up for the single extra week you're taking?

[compiler-guy]

Some people do like it, and I'm glad it's working out for them--I really am.

But adding all that manager and corporate discretion sets one up for abuse when things go wrong at either the manager or corporate level. For some, I suppose the benefit is worth it--but if "unlimited vs set days has almost no bearing on how many PTO days someone will actually take", then people are giving up a lot of guarantees for very little benefit on their side. Especially the payout when you leave.

[superfrank]

> But adding all that manager and corporate discretion sets one up for abuse when things go wrong at either the manager or corporate level

I have never worked at a place where I didn't need manager approval for my PTO. That includes places where I had a set PTO balance.

In my experience, having banked PTO days doesn't actually give you any real protection from abuse. A manager can still deny every single PTO request or load you up with so much work that taking any PTO will result in you falling behind. The only difference is that the company then needs to pay you out for those days, which isn't nothing, but it's also not a ton of protection from abuse.

[gambiting]

>>A manager can still deny every single PTO request or load you up with so much work that taking any PTO will result in you falling behind.

I was once on a team where the manager thought he was being tough by really discouraging PTO taking in their team, and it was all great until we got to the end of the year with pretty much everyone on the team still having 20+ days of PTO left. HR just made everyone take the entire december off to use those days up, after that once incident no one had any issues booking PTO the following year.

[nly]

I worked at a small firm once where an 18 year old joined and took full advantage of the "unlimited PTO".

He was taking roughly a third of his time off.

Fired inside 6 months, and amazed it took this long.

[aksss]

It reminds me of the Dilbert joke about asking to be put on 4-10’s and the boss replies why would I do that when I already have you for 7-12’s? With unlimited PTO, if you can only take it when there’s no work to do.. well in my business the work is never done. Demand outstrips supply so completely and consistently, it would be an impossible hurdle. I’ve worked in jobs where even limited PTO was near impossible to take beyond the occasional one or two days. Banked PTO was basically considered your severance package. Seems hard to set expectations correctly with unlimited PTO plans.

[marssaxman]

I have worked for quite a few companies with unlimited-PTO policies, with quite a few different managers, and it's always been fine. I've never had any manager at any company give me any trouble about any time I wanted to take off, ever.

Different people have different temperaments. Unlimited PTO works great for me because I am more likely to actually take time off when I don't have to meter it. When vacation days are limited, they feel scarce and precious, so I avoid using them if at all possible - what if something more important were to come up later in the year, after I'd run out? It's stressful. There are never enough PTO days.

When I don't have to count days or worry about whether I have enough left, I'll just take time off, whenever the occasion arises. Taking all the time I want doesn't actually end up being much more than I'd be allowed if I had to ration it out.

[jagged-chisel]

Never quite understood the “negotiation” bit. I, the employee, am offering you, the employer, the courtesy of letting you know I am unavailable for work on $DATERANGE.

Of course, it’s well in advance, and nearly always avoids big company plans.

[jandrewrogers]

You have to manage discretionary PTO. The problem has almost never been people taking too much but taking too little.

At some companies, the directive from the top to management was to make sure people took at least 3-5 weeks of PTO every year. For legal reasons you can't keep official track of this (it will be imputed as accrual) but managers would actively nudge people to take more PTO.

If you proactively manage it, it works pretty well.

[danaris]

> The problem has almost never been people taking too much but taking too little.

The management culture in the US (other places too, but I'm most familiar with the US) is such that any time the employee (particularly ICs/line employees) wants to spend outside of work is automatically considered suspect.

This is because non-management employees are considered to be inherently lazy and constantly seeking to get as much out of the organization as possible for as little work as possible. And when they do work, they're considered to be incompetent and malicious (requiring constant supervision).

[musicale]

Does anyone else remember the people bragging about how they "work" two "full-time" jobs remotely?

I wondered how real those stories were, but that is probably what companies are thinking everyone is like.

[peab]

we have "unlimited" time off, with the recommendation of taking off at least 1 week per quarter. This seems to work pretty well, and I'd rather have this than 20 days PTO. I usually try to take 1 week off, as well as 1 day here and there for an extra long weekend.

[b0rtb0rt]

at my “unlimited PTO” company i just put time off on the calendar when im planning to be out and management deals with it, i don’t ask for permission. i try to be fairly reasonable about the time im taking and no one has ever questioned it or pushed back

[overfeed]

> i try to be fairly reasonable about the time im taking and no one has ever questioned it or pushed back

In other words, it is roughly the same way as regular PTO except "unused" PTO doesn't accumulate, and you won't get paid for any unused PTO at the end of your employment - which is the the whole point of "unlimited PTO"

[DanielHB]

Is it really a financial liability part really pushing companies for these policies? I never heard this argument before and compared to salaries PTO is minuscule liability...

Seems much more likely companies just trying to squeeze employees into taking less PTO.

[compiler-guy]

Pretty much every article on a naive Google search lists "reduced financial liability" as one of the corporate benefits. Even the ones that talk about more complicated financial scenarios deal with "unexpectedly short-staffed" rather than, "We have a big financial liability on our books."

A somewhat random example:

https://www.higginbotham.com/blog/unlimited-pto-pros-cons/

"Cost efficiency. Traditional PTO policies can result in financial liabilities due to unused vacation payouts when employees leave the company. With unlimited PTO, these liabilities are eliminated. This can be particularly advantageous for companies looking to manage their finances more effectively."

[DanielHB]

I mean I can understand why an accountant would be happy his one metric is down when the company implements unlimited PTO, or maybe the stock market responds to the (slightly) reduced liability levels.

But surely it can't be a significant amount of make sense to implement this kind of police only for this unless the company has insane turnover (so "unpaid" PTO is not paid out as cash). The reduced amount of PTO staff takes must be the main reason.

Unpaid PTO is (assuming that the employee _doesn't_ leave the company) essentially debt in the company books with 0% interest rate.

[rectang]

From the perspective that a company is an amoral profit-seeking automaton, it's not a "terrible system", it's a successful initiative to reduce compensation.

[cyanydeez]

I pointed out to my boss' boss when they switched to unlimited PTO that they were effectively downgrading my salary and benefits by ~2k$