So pay top rate, completely de-prioritize work-life balance, fire everyone who complains about lack of said work-life balance, and voila, right? I know a few developers that would thrive in this environment, but most wouldn't last. But perhaps that's the brilliance: hiring people who can spend their lives working and doing nothing else.
It's clearly something that comes up on Glassdoor a lot[0]
A serious caveat about relying on Glassdoor.
Glassdoor doesn't do absolutely any verification - no corporate email address verification, etc.
Anyone can place any review for any company!
Here is an experiment at it - Techloaf (The Register for newsletters) asks it's viewers to write Glassdoor reviews about Techloaf.
https://us17.campaign-archive.com/?u=14538d8f8591165977d9a9d... (Search for Glassdoor)
A CARL TO ACTION: REVIEW US ON GLASSDOOR
You don’t know much about Netflix. Netflix was the first company to give unlimited vacation and 1 year family leave. Netflix openly says that if you work long hours then it’s not the right place for you. They would prefer people who get the job done in an hour than someone who tools for 10 hours a day.
Feel free to attack my knowledge of Netflix, but the opinions left by employees in that link I posted are pretty damning. That said, you base your argument solely on the perks advertised without acknowledging the nuance and politics of large companies, and what they advertise is never quite as rosy as it sounds.
Frankly, it sounds to me like you don't know much about Netflix either.
A small sample of reviews:
"Work life balance is a joke at times but it depends on team and manager"
"High turnover rate, culture of fear"
"most managers are stressed out all the time and encouraged to weed out employees no longer useful or not performing to "high standards"
"Culture is a lie"
"Take the good salary with the risk it gives. You will be let go, it's just a matter of when."
Do you even live in Silicon Valley? Netflix is known to pay top of the market and the ones who work there love it. And Glassdoor is known to produce “ratings” biased by disgruntled employees.
Go on blind and talk directly to Netflix engineers. The ones that fit the culture are universally happy. The ones that are unhappy are the ones who likely aren’t good fits and will get let go soon. My friend said he saw 20 people let go in 2 years. But he’s genuinely happy being there and makes over $600,000/yr.
Some of your comments were probably downvoted because you began them with personal swipes. Could you please edit those out when posting here? They break the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It's a pity, because it does sound like you know something about this topic.
Not sure how where I live factors into this argument at all.
> The ones who work there love it.
Again, this clearly isn't true based on what's posted on Glassdoor. Many people have written about being blindsided and fired without any warning or indication. That kind of environment gets toxic, clearly not everyone who works there is happy. There's a reason the word "cult" gets dropped constantly. Are you saying those people who claimed to be fired despite good performance are just trolls who've never actually worked there?
If anything, Glassdoor review bias tends to skew towards companies because HR departments send out internal emails asking employees to fill out positive reviews to counter the negative reviews. I've been asked to fill out positive employment reviews by my employer on multiple occasions throughout my career, but perhaps my experience is unusual.
> My friend said he saw 20 people let go in 2 years. But he’s genuinely happy being there and makes over $600,000/yr.
How he doesn't wonder when they're going to axe him is beyond me, but I'm not privy to his situation. In most companies, turnover like that dramatically destabilizes the culture and retention of truly outstanding employees.
It's a way for companies to eliminate their vacation payout when you're fired. If you have a defined vacation policy, then by law the company is obligated to pay you out for the unused vacation days in case of termination/resignation. But in the case of an "unlimited" policy, there's no such obligation. Great for the company. Not so great for the employee.
This is the truth in my case. Having quit my last job yielded in a huge payout (5 figures). I do understand that this was basically the salary for the time off that I didn’t take. I still took decent amount of vacations but over time with PTO rollovers the balance built up to a significant amount.
> If you have a defined vacation policy, then by law the company is obligated to pay you out for the unused vacation days in case of termination/resignation
I think this is only the case if vacation is accrued. If it's a single yearly lump, it doesn't appear they have that obligation (at least, not in NYC)
It has become pretty common. You don't track the days you take off. You are expected to honorthe commitments you make. At most companies this becomes an informal 5-8 weeks.
At first, I was extremely skeptical, but it actually works well when you work with people who act like reasonable, understanding adults. If you don't, then the vacation policy won't matter, because it's going to suck working for them no matter what.
Most people don't end up taking 5 weeks, and I think 8 is more along the extenuating circumstances - i.e. at one job I needed to leave early on a regular basis to deal with trips to the vet for a very sick dog. My boss was very understanding and since I was one of the more senior and productive team members, no one minded.
Honestly, I don't think I would take a job offer that only included 2 weeks vacation, even if the pay was exceptional. Early on in my career I didn't mind not having much vacation, since I rarely, if at all, used it. Now that I'm older, the added flexibility is more important.
Maybe it's my level of experience? I've been in the industry over 12 years now, with some variation of senior / staff / principle title for I think 8 of those years. No idea what the market is like in NY, but I would imagine you could also pretty easily negotiate starting with 2.5 or maybe 3 weeks.
Just like the list of requirements are a guideline, so too are perks offered on job postings, and you don't actually have to settle for what they first offer you. So long as the labor market for programming is hot, you should take advantage of it.
FWIW, I’ve been in the industry even longer than that. And yes, senior developers have the leverage to sometimes negotiate for more. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the most common policy or that most people (especially those in less in-demand occupations) aren’t stuck with it. Nor that it doesn’t influence how people interpret unlimited-PTO policies.
As for me, most of the 10-day-PTO gigs were earlier in my career (startups seem to almost universally opt for “unlimited”). Going into the most recent one, I had other priorities to negotiate for.
But mostly, the way we think about time off and work/life balance in the US bites.
I had a one hour commute each way at the time, so if i had an appointment, I took the day off / worked from home, depending on the appointment. She was a very, very sick dog, went from healthy and happy to put down because she could no longer eat on her own over the course of 6 months. It was a painful (not to mention expensive) experience.
Though, I was also doing some real estate transactions (selling and buying a house) so some of the days were also for that.
No such thing as unlimited vacation. What happens in every “unlimited vacation” environment is people start to feel guilty about taking vacations, and therefore stop taking them. Studies have shown this - you can look them up.
When people offer this, it's illuminating to try to suggest numbers and ask if that's still "reasonable".
It quickly becomes clear that for all the talk about it being "unlimited", most employers will be very uncomfortable when you start offering up numbers even slightly above the caps most other places.
Most of the time these "unlimited" policies seem to either be extremely cynical (with full knowledge of studies into the subject) or reflective of workaholics with extremely naive views of how much vacation time someone might like to take if it felt truly unlimited.
> I'd be surprised if I took 60 days of vacation in 30 years as an FTE.
Are you saying that you'd be surprised to have taken 60 days (12 weeks) in a single year, or that across 30 years you don't think you've taken 60 days in total?
The latter would be very surprising to me, but seems to be the most natural reading of your sentence.
The latter. I'd have to sit and tally it up. It's possible that I'm slightly low in my estimate but not by a tremendous amount. I realize that that's only a couple of days a year. I'm not including getting sick in that swag.
Typically I'd work for somewhere for 5 years and then pocket the vacation when I left. There might be a single week (or two) off and a handful of Fridays off in that time.
I'll tell you when the non-vacation time comes up is when you become a FT contractor. If the money flows, you row.
It's a shame that you're being downvoted, because you are correct.
> But Brantner said research indicates that employees with unlimited vacation tend to take less vacation each year than workers who have caps on their vacation days. This, she said, is partly because many companies have policies requiring those with limited vacation days to use those days or lose them at the end of a calendar year, which encourages those workers to take off all the time they're allowed.
> The 2017 HR Mythbusters report by Namely, which offers HR software and services to midsize companies, found that employees who were offered unlimited vacation took, on average, 13 days off a year, while workers with capped vacation days took, on average, 15 days off.
> A rundown of research compiled by Sage Business Researcher showed that companies offering unlimited vacation found that in many cases it actually encouraged employees to take less time off. Other research shows that it may even create competition to take fewer days off.
"Unlimited vacation" is not actually unlimited. Hear it from Joshua Reeves, CEO of ZenPayroll, which offers this benefit to their employees:
> Even if your time off is technically “unlimited,” your manager obviously doesn’t expect you’ll take off 75% of the time. Actually, he or she probably has at least a general range of number of days or weeks in mind that is acceptable for an employee to take off—even if that range hasn't been openly communicated. Similarly, your company may expect you to take a minimum number of vacation days. At the company HubSpot, for example, employees are expected to take at least two weeks off each year under its “two weeks to infinity” policy.
> To get a sense of the norms, ask your boss (or other colleagues) how many days or weeks other employees typically take off. If the theme seems to be “2-3 weeks, plus a day here and there,” stick to that. If you have any doubt about whether you’re using the vacation policy appropriately, pay attention to how your manager and those around you use it. (Of course, be careful: Some workplaces do have different rules and expectations for managers and their reports.)
So if the company has an idea how much vacation you should or should not take, why call it "unlimited"? Because it's great marketing (for those who don't think about the above factors anyway), and because vacation that is not accrued does not need to be paid out. Back to that SHRM article:
> Some organizations, Brantner said, began offering this benefit as a way to get around having to pay workers for unused vacation days when they left a company.
> "I'm absolutely sure that it originated in some camps as a way to get a vast amount of vacation time off the books. It was something preferred by accountants and others looking at the bottom line. At the same time, there are companies that adopted it with good intentions and that believe in the value of taking vacations."
> In November 2017, the Financial Times reported that "a big firm that ditches fixed paid leave for open vacations can wipe millions of dollars' worth of unused leave liabilities from its books that would otherwise be paid to departing employees. At the same time, it can safely offer bottomless holidays knowing most employees will never take them, especially in the U.S., the only major advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee workers paid vacation time."
I dream of a world in which, when someone says "studies have shown", the appropriate response is to politely change the subject so as not to embarrass the speaker.
Netflix was hardly the first company to give unlimited vacations! I always have done that at my companies since 1989 and I learned it from someone else.
It's clearly something that comes up on Glassdoor a lot[0]
[0]: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Netflix-Reviews-E11891_P2....