

Our holiday / vacation policy – unlimited with bonuses  - unignorant
http://blog.boxedice.com/2011/08/19/our-holiday-vacation-policy-unlimited-with-bonuses/

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patio11
I like this sort of policy a _lot_ more than I like "Just take off whenever",
because it establishes specific expectations that _taking a day off TODAY is
actually OK._

The all-you-can-eat-no-tracking-but-watch-out-for-the-evil-eye vacation
policies scare the bejesus out of me, because of the potential for (planned or
unplanned) social pressure to never leave. It is like "Take as much salary as
you want!" coupled with getting guilted for every $5 bill you took out of the
drawer. "Whoa whoa whoa, $3,000 this month? Somebody's a big spender! Dude,
you don't even have a family, what do you need $3,000 for!?"

~~~
lutorm
_The all-you-can-eat-no-tracking-but-watch-out-for-the-evil-eye vacation
policies scare the bejesus out of me_

This is how I feel about leave in academia. I _can_ basically take as much
leave as I want. But because there's no clear expectation of how much leave to
_actually_ take, there's this (totally implied) social pressure to never
leave.

I kind of would much rather be at a place like this where they say " _use_
your time off" and clearly signal this by either have "use it or lose it"
policies or this kind of vacation bonus.

Incidentally, in Sweden vacation bonus (semestertillägg) is mandated by labor
law. For each vacation day taken, you get something like an extra 1% of your
monthly salary.

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benwerd
I really like this. They're an English company, of course, and must adhere to
the European legal minimum of 28 days a year. I've never understood the
American attitude towards vacation - unnecessarily macho, and geared towards
burning people out (and, at the two-weeks-a-year end of the spectrum,
effectively forcing people to never leave the country).

~~~
gst
Depends on the company. In my home country in Austria I've got 25 paid days
off + public holidays per year. Here in the US I get 15 paid days off (+
public holidays). While it's lot less it is not that bad.

~~~
ugh
Three weeks seems pretty unacceptable to me. I would be alright with four
weeks and happy about five.

~~~
gst
Just take the holidays between the jobs. :) I took 4 months off between my
last job and my current job, even though I would have had the chance to start
immediately.

In addition, some companies here also allow you to take unpaid holidays if
justified. Even with an additional of two weeks of unpaid holidays I would
earn more money here in the US than in Austria (and the available jobs are
much more interesting).

~~~
ugh
I guess that’s an alternative but what if I don’t want to switch jobs all that
often?

I personally need regular breaks. Irregular and really long breaks do less for
me than regular breaks.

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balloot
I'm not a huge fan of the "unlimited" time. I've never worked somewhere with
that policy, but it seems an unintended result would be that nobody knows
exactly how much time is considered "reasonable". The policy likely sounds way
better than it ends up being.

I say pick a number that you think no productive employee should exceed. Make
that the yearly number, and make sure everyone knows that they will be
encouraged to take ALL their days. Make the days expire after a year, so
people don't feel the need to "bank" days. Then, everyone knows where they
stand in terms of how much vacation they "should' be taking.

For the record, If I were starting a company now, I would make the number of
days in the aforementioned system start at 20, and then increase with
seniority.

~~~
hartror
As someone else noted many of these ideas won't work in countries where large
chunks of payed holidays are enshrined in law.

In Australia most of us have 40 days per year that roll into the next year if
you don't take them. There are options for employees to turn in some of their
days for cash if they accrue a lot which is nice.

~~~
nl
_In Australia most of us have 40 days per year_

Err.. most of us have 4 working weeks of paid vacation per year. That's 20
days, not 40 (although it excludes paid sick leave - usually 10 days - and
public holidays). Vacation leave usually rolls over, but sick leave varies.
Public holidays don't.

(I'm Australian, and I've never seen variance on this except on the roll-over
rules. The one exception is my current employer that offers an extra day off
on your birthday)

~~~
hartror
Gah you are quite right maths on a hangover obviously isn't my strong suite.

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Joakal
Unlimited*

*Means 'you can’t have a year off!' I'd report you in Australia if you abused that word here.

Don't apply buzz words to your own employees as they do not want to feel like
a sale; especially if they live in a country where people have got burnt for
'Unlimited' (ISPs, Shared Hosting, etc). Be more clear: "You can have up to
most of the year without much restrictions (We might need your help!)" etc.

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epoxyhockey
Caution to US workers: if layoff time ever comes around, you get paid $0 for
your unused vacation time under this kind of policy. I know, it happened to
me.

~~~
jackowayed
True, but that's not entirely bad. It even further encourages you to actually
take your vacation. Since there's a checkpoint at the end of the year, you
should never have more than a year's worth of vacation "saved up", and really,
a policy like this wants you to take vacation slowly and steadily and never
burn out.

Also, if you're a US worker and your employer is yelling at you for taking
fewer than 5 weeks off, not including public holidays, you're in a pretty
awesome situation.

~~~
epoxyhockey
Most years, I schedule a solid 2 or 3 week vacation to completely unplug from
the office. For US people, that would consume most of your "socially
acceptable" vacation time allotment during a calendar year. That particular
year, my 3 week vacation was scheduled for September and I get laid off in
July, so yes, it _was_ entirely bad.

At my next job there was an annual allotment of 3 weeks of vacation that
accrued little by little every pay period. I was able to "borrow" time from
the next year so that I could take my already-booked vacation. And, for the
duration of that job, I maintained a negative vacation-time balance vowing to
not get screwed again.

Unfortunately, whenever I hear of the "fantastic unlimited vacation time
benefit," I can only view it as a way for the CEO to milk an extra month of
work out of employees before laying them off at no cost.

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zeteo
Worst use of the term "unlimited" since bandwidth-throttling ISPs. Basically
they seem to be flexible about holiday timing and to have a Japanese-style
minimum vacation policy.

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idiot900
If you have a small team and everyone is passionate and good at their jobs,
does it really matter what the policies are?

The real challenge is in a larger company, where that assumption may not hold.
Are there any existing examples of anywhere near as liberal a policy in such a
company?

~~~
yalogin
Correct. And a big company saying you can take any number of days off as you
want is a big earning sign for me. One of the reasons I don't even think about
joining Netflix.

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missy
I think you can have this kind of policy in a smaller company because you are
assumingly in a closer relationship and also lack of funds , so that you must
adapt to each others needs and work out in the interest of the company.You
must trust each other more i think and that you must be closer and respect the
other persons situation

On the contary....

Most bigger companies are impersonal and see you as mere statistic and will
not be so felixble as they would say" many other guys would take your job". So
thats why such actualy fair holiday conditions seems weird.

~~~
enjo
Best Buy corporate was at least testing a similar setup a few years back. I'm
not sure what happened, but I'm not sure this is exclusively small company.

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bugsy
This is considerably better than others since he comes out and s ays it's 30
days off.

But it leaves many questions unanswered. Is it paid holiday or not? I see
there is a bonus for unused days, that seems to imply it is paid holiday.

The bonus scheme clearly is designed to wrap up so things don't carry over
from year to year.

That does prevent someone from banking time to be able to take a 3 month
sabbatical to write a book. Whether that would be permitted is not disclosed.

~~~
lutorm
_I see there is a bonus for unused days_

You read it wrong, there is a bonus for _used_ days.

~~~
bugsy
Hm, well thanks for the clarification. I just reread it several times and it's
not clear. I'll agree that it's ambiguous. It would be interesting to know
more. Is this a fixed 25 day cut off then, or is it prorated? Kind of alarming
is the part where the monthly salary as an example is £100, surely he meant to
type £3000?

It sounds like you might work there? If so I have a couple questions for
clarification, in addition to (1) clearing up that the £100 thing was just a
random number and not representative (since some Chinese developers do make in
that range, so it's not an impossible salary to claim). (2) Did "What’s normal
for time off varies from country to country" mean that US employees of the
company (for example) are expected to use less days than european ones? That
the cut off for what is considered "unreasonable use" differs depending on
company. (3) If the answer to that is yes, then are salaries matched to
standard market rate in the economy each employee lives in? Are SF based
employees paid 20 times as much as the guy in Bangladesh for the same work?
(4) With a worldwide workforce, how does the company handle paying social
insurance tax and providing for benefits in each country? Are competitive
insurance plans offered, a different one for each employee? Or is there some
insurance company that is able to provide insurance for all employees
regardless of what country they are citizens of and resident in? Thanks for
any clarification you can provide, these are all interesting subjects.

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ericHosick
We have a similar policy but even more open. The one rule is that any time-off
needs to be approved by the person's team: can the team still meet their
commitments?

We figure that if we need to trust teams of people to make complex technical
decisions and want to have people around who are basically programming
artists... Well, then we should be able to trust those teams with managing
their own time.

So far, no one has ever taken advantage of this.

~~~
balloot
That policy is crap.

Any time someone takes vacation their team is going to move a bit slower on
the current project. Commitments should be built around vacation, not the
other way around.

~~~
ericHosick
Sad to see responses like this on Hacker News (referring to your usage of the
word crap). Ah well.

Why we know this isn't "crap".

Commitments are built around Vacation AND Vacations are built around
commitments. It doesn't have to be an either/or proposition and here is why:

We apply Agile and the management aspect of our company uses Scrum. The teams
are self-organizing. This even includes who is hired into the team and who is
fired from the team. The team commits to an amount of work (it isn't forced on
them by management).

This commitment process is very well defined in Scrum through the iteration
planning meeting. If someone wants to take time off to go on vacation, then
during the planning meeting (and hopefully they talked about it with their
team members before), they let the team and product owner know at the start of
the planning meeting (every team member, as Scrum requires, let's everyone
know the number of hours they have available to commit directly to the current
log).

In this case - Commitments are built around vacation.

On the other hand, the team has been given the authority and responsible of
getting out potentially shippable product increments (a part of Scrum). The
team, as a whole, has taken on this responsibility so, as a whole, must take
that into consideration when taking time off.

In this case - Vacations are built around commitments.

Our approach to time-off and vacation aligns quite nicely with the Agile
process and, in my opinion, is an other example of why Agile (and Scrum in
this case) is such an amazing way to manage the production of software.

~~~
lutorm
Aren't people chronically optimistic about how much time something will take?
Unless your teams are awesome time estimators, this sounds like it would mean
that if the schedule slips, out goes your vacation? And that sounds like a
recipe for a burn-out spiral.

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RK
I'm very confused about the bonus calculus.

More days of = more bonus, fewer days off = more bonus, or you always get the
same bonus?

~~~
sp332
If you take at least 25 days off, you get the bonus. Fewer than 25, no bonus.

