I worked at a company that had unlimted PTO when suddenly one day they revoked the policy because they said some people were abusing it. The new policy was still very generous (6 weeks PTO per year) so no one complained. Fast forward a year later and we were hearing things from executives and managers like, "you know you don't have to use all you're PTO, right?". I'd ask, oh, it will rollover to next year? The reply: "No, it won't. But that's really the wrong way to think about it."
So it turns out people were taking much more time off now than when PTO was unlimited. They started denying request and making up trivial rules, like 2/3 of your team must be available at any time (regardless of the team size), oh, and those rules weren't in the official policy. Good luck trying to get specifics in writing.
Eventually they changed back to an unlimited policy but secretly told managers they should start denying requests after x number of days have been used. I think it was five weeks, which again is still generous but it bothers me because the intent is to hide that number in hopes that people will use less. I also get no tracking for how many days I've already taken unless I go through my requests and count the approved ones myself.
The unlimited policy is definitely a scam at many companies. Most of my team has been denied requests for reasons that don't exist in the written policy, like, "you recently had PTO already." Honestly I'd rather have a policy that only allowed 3 or 4 weeks with a minimum mandatory that each employee is required to take at least two weeks off per year.
I worked at a startup where the CEO reverted the unlimited PTO because one asshole engineer took 2 months off paid leave and then came back and quit immediately. We were angry at the engineer, not the CEO, because it was clear what he was doing was taking advantage of the company's generosity.
When I worked at Uber engineering which had unlimited PTO, I took between 6-8 weeks of PTO every year. Most years was at least 6, but one year I took 8. No one batted an eye. I think it all depends on company culture or maybe team culture.
I would never work for a company that denied me a PTO day, even if it was a single day. I would never irresponsibly take PTO but I would also make sure that I took at least 4 weeks off per year no matter what. The secret is taking 1 week off per quarter, and then another 2 weeks off during Christmas. That automatically brings you up to 6 weeks.
But make no mistake, unlimited vacation is a way to keep PTO off the books as a liability. In California you cannot lose PTO that you have accrued. They can stop accrual however once you reach a certain level. Once you max out on accrual, you are giving the company money, which is stupid so it's important to consistently take PTO.
That's exactly why so many companies are enacting "unlimited" policies.
What they do is say "It's unlimited, but if you take more than 4 weeks it has to be approved" or something and then that way they can cap you like they did before but also not pay you out if you leave because wink wink it's "unlimited".
Those plans are much better than plans that are strict cap and then no data, which are better than no limits but if you use more than your quota it costs a ton and by the way the usage information is delayed at least 7 days.
I do remember seeing the plans that said unlimited (tiny print slow after 30Gb) and that's misleading... better to put the 30gb in big letters, but I just want like 1 or 2 gb fast... Just switched to a hard capped plan cause it was half the price though and a higher cap and I haven't hit the cap in a long time.
I'm ok with that. I'm still on an old data plan that throttles me after I got the limit for high speed data. But they don't hide that limit or my usage, and it's really cheap.
I don't want to pay for unlimited data, and I don't want to lose data after hitting a cap.
Everyone is ok with being sold something that they understand, most people are not ok with being sold something that screams "UNLIMITED" and then uses fine print to limit your seemingly unlimited plan.
Maybe the plans you're describing could spin the feature as "throttled for your pleasure" or some such. I'm sure there are marketing people that can come up with a positive way to spin it that isn't a borderline falsehood.
Only if you're maxing out all the time. I had a plan with a similar sort of thing, even after using up all my "fast" data I had enough bandwidth for regular browsing and streaming music.
Skype iirc used to have an "unlimited" talk time capped at some ten thousand minutes as fair use.
I am pretty sure even today if you have a phone call on Google voice that goes over two hours or so, your call will drop. I like it better this way because I can call back immediately after being disconnected.
The difference is that they are very reasonably up-front about "first X GB at 4G speeds" where the PTO thing is going to have a shrowd of mysteries and unwritten limits.
Unless a union is involved, firms do not enact policies that make them less money. Unlimited PTO removes a liability.
If there are specific policies that demarcate how an employee uses PTO to the degree specified in this blog post, I would argue that the firm does not have "unlimited PTO" and in fact accrues a vacation balance.
As just one example, a few years ago our company changed parental leave to 4 months from 6 weeks. Is that making them the same or more money?
I think companies do things like Unlimited PTO because although it may mean some people take more leave than before, other people take the same or less and there's no liability, so it may net out roughly the same but sounds better to new hires.
I don't think every company is extremely cynical as you're suggesting. As others here have mentioned, it depends where you work - we don't bat an eyelid if people are using 4-6 weeks plus holidays, in fact we check to make sure people are actually using their PTO.
Yep in California PTO and vacation get paid out. They can not do use it or lose it. They can cap how much of PTO and vacation you can have at one time. Sick time does not need to be paid out. The whole scam of unlimited PTO is so they do not have to pay out when you leave. Then can not roll over your PTO or vacation at the end of year but if they do that, they have you pay you out.
Yes you never want to hit your cap. At some of my older jobs people would be like oh crap I gotta take two weeks off starting next week. I much rather have defined PTO. My last role and current role are "unlimited PTO" I take about 4-5 weeks off with out issue. But you are taking a risk for sure going to company with "unlimited PTO".
At a company I worked at in St. Louis I was pairing with the owner on the PTO system when we noticed I was at the cap that day... we were using my data as the test. He made me go home right then and there. We implemented the system emailing HR when people were nearing the cap so we could make sure people didn't work too much and lose vacation.
Really depends on the company and in big companies it depends on your team. My very first job out college had vacation and sick time. You could take your vacation at any time no questions asked. It was really nice but they paid less than everybody else. But the work life balance was much better. You saw a lot of people with families come and work there and take paycut. It was interesting seemed work well for them.
I can give a comparison to Germany.
Here at least 25 days PTO a year are mandatory for each full time job. Anything below that is illegal, most companies offer around 30. Sick days don't count into that. Even if you're on a planned 2week vacation and get sick for three of those days, those three days can't be subtracted from your annual PTO days. You have to get a confirmation document from your doctor though, which is of course free.
If you don't take your PTO, it will be transferred to the next year, but most companies try to avoid that. You can usually decide if you take those days within the first three months of the next year, or they have to pay you out.
You are usually not free to choose when you take your PTO and it's normal to only take one or two weeks around holidays like Easter or Christmas and the rest for individual occasions.
Yep, you figured it out. Preset PTO must be paid out (at least by CA laws), "unlimited PTO" pays bupkis if you don't use it. If the workforce routinely under-utilizes the PTO (which is easily achieved both culturally and managerially) the whole scam is pretty clear.
> one asshole engineer took 2 months off paid leave and then came back and quit immediately. We were angry at the engineer, not the CEO, because it was clear what he was doing was taking advantage of the company's generosity.
I don't understand why you're mad at someone for using a benefit he's entitled to?
Unlimited PTO means you should never have to work if you don't want to. Otherwise it's not unlimited.
Well, this is kinda like complimentary condiments or whatever. Technically you are allowed to abuse it to the wazoo, but in practice it just means "Take a reasonable amount, we're not stingy". There obviously is an unspoken "we're all grown ups here" type of social contract in these sorts of things. Abusing it is going to come at the cost of the commons, and in the GP's case it did cost them the perk, so being angry at the abuser seems justified.
One of my co-workers a few years ago decided to go to Japan for 3 months, but that didn't fly with my company and it ended up being mostly an unpaid sabbatical (despite the unlimited PTO policy). 3 months later, the guy extended his stay and let us know he wasn't coming back. There were no hard rules anywhere in sight, but the way this played out seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Some people are just missing that part of their development that helps them to intuitively grasp what counts as abuse when there are no clear written rules. You can't just ask them to be reasonable. I worked for a company that ordered free dinner for folks who stayed late. No limit to what you can eat, but if you're feeling a little hungry, grab a slice of pizza! Well, sure enough a few people ruined it for everyone by taking armfuls of pizza home with them, enough to feed 10 people. I'm talking multiple whole pizza pies, boxes and all, straight to their cars. "It was for employees, and there were no written restrictions" was the justification. So, that perk ended.
It's interesting how inconsistent and asymmetric these intuitive limits seem to be. Pushing employees to work extra hours, easily $X000 in time? Perfectly acceptable. Abusive JIRA-powered micromanagement? That's just how it is. But $60 worth of pizza!? How could a reasonable person possible justify that?
I would find not having defined benefits extremely uncomfortable.
Saying that you have unlimited paid leave when that is obviously untrue and leaves the policy open for abuse by both employee and employer. I'm sure the example stating that less leave was taken when it was "unlimited" was because people understood that there were limits but didn't know what the limit was and didn't want to trigger management. Once things are defined, of course people will think that it's ok to take the maximum leave allowed.
Consider that your employment contract doesn’t even specify how much work you will get done. Isn’t that a much more extreme degree of freedom than number of days of PTO? It’s between you and your manager to figure out what your expected amount of output is. Given that, isn’t PTO just one of many factors in that ongoing negotiation?
> Some people are just missing that part of their development that helps them to intuitively grasp what counts as abuse when there are no clear written rules.
I think the guy who quit after two months' leave knew perfectly well it was abuse; he just didn't care. Or maybe he felt slighted by the company in some way (unfair resolution of a conflict, promotion denied, underpaid, whatever) and this was his way of getting even with them.
How can it be abuse? If 2 months leave is part of package then surely it's up to them how they use it. You wouldn't criticize them for using all the money they get paid would you?
The problem isn’t taking two months off. It’s taking a large chunk of time off, then immediately quitting.
That means the team was down an engineer for basically an entire quarter, without notice. That wrecks schedules and causes headaches for your coworkers who now have to figure out how to make up for the lost time or figure out what work to cut from the schedule.
No, HR doesn’t schedule work or features. It’s practically impossible to pad timelines for the case where an engineer decides to effectively pad their two weeks notice by an additional six weeks except for large companies like Google.
> Some people are just missing that part of their development that helps them to intuitively grasp what counts as abuse when there are no clear written rules.
2 months is clearly abuse, but I'm worried my CEO or HR will have a far less generous definition of abuse. I'm already reading a thread about 4-6 week vacations where I get at most 2 weeks.
> There obviously is an unspoken "we're all grown ups here" type of social contract in these sorts of things.
It's absolutely not grown-up behavior to remove terms from an explicit business contract (employment agreement) and move them to an implicit, unwritten "I know it when I see it" social contract.
Obviously there's some actual limit that your platonic grownup has in mind, between 2 weeks and 40 weeks of PTO per year. Just write it down.
It's not, because people won't easily benefit from taking unlimited condiments, while they would easily benefit from real unlimited holidays.
Holidays should come with some limits, eg. no more than X weeks per year, like it was in the past.
I get it, the government made a stupid rule (forcing PTO accrual in the contract between employer and employee) and companies were creative enough to find a solution to bypass that rule and made it sound attractive on a job ad.
In an ideal world we would just have an explicit upfront amount and no government interference.
In a world without "government interference" you wouldn't have leave, you'd work every day of the week, and you'd work 12+ hours a day.
Being paid out leave, and having leave accrued isn't a stupid rule. It's a law that's made in reaction to companies writing an upfront amount of leave into contracts, and never allowing their employees to take that leave.
When you side with no regulation, you side with abusive employers, not for "common sense winning out". People will abuse you as much as they're legally allowed to.
Roughly 1 in 5 workers do earn just that or very close to it. Easy to forget working in tech. But labor laws aren't just for in-demand techies. They are for everyone, including your cashier.
You are moving the goal posts. The original post said:
>...In a world without "government interference" you wouldn't have leave, you'd work every day of the week, and you'd work 12+ hours a day.
The claim is that without a government rule specifying otherwise, we would be working every day of week for almost all of our working hours. The government does mandate a minimum wage - if the original point was true, we would all be paid at the minimum wage. Your "1 in 5" percentage seems high, but as you point out, most people are paid more than the minimum wage.
> Holidays should come with some limits, eg. no more than X weeks per year, like it was in the past
That's anchoring bias. Unlimited does have some nice properties (e.g. very generous allowances in many cases, and the possibility of spending unaccrued time, for example)
If we're in talking about ideals, I'd just ask for people to be more transparent about what the actual dynamics are: if taking 2 months vacation where everyone else takes 1 week affects metrics tied to promos, then say that upfront so people can make a conscious decision about whether signing up for asshat culture is worth the brand prestige or career trajectory potential or whatever it is that people value.
"In many organizations, there is an unhealthy emphasis on process and not much freedom. These organizations didn’t start that way, but the python of process squeezed harder every time something went wrong. Specifically, many organizations have freedom and responsibility when they are small. Everyone knows each other, and everyone picks up the trash. As they grow, however, the business gets more complex, and sometimes the average talent and passion level goes down. As the informal, smooth-running organization starts to break down, pockets of chaos emerge, and the general outcry is to “grow up” and add traditional management and process to reduce the chaos. As rules and procedures proliferate, the value system evolves into rule following (i.e. that is how you get rewarded). If this standard management approach is done well, then the company becomes very efficient at its business model — the system is dummy-proofed, and creative thinkers are told to stop questioning the status quo. This kind of organization is very specialized and well adapted to its business model. Eventually, however, over 10 to 100 years, the business model inevitably has to change, and most of these companies are unable to adapt." [1]
Wasn't that the point? They're talking about being mad about someone taking 2 months of PTO off and then talk about how they always take 6-8 weeks cough of PTO with no one batting an eye.
So the reason for being mad is the company and team culture. The first company had a clear unspoken culture that actually using the benefit was off limits.
On that same point, I see a lot of turnover throughout my career and would say about 50% chance someone goes on medical leave and actually comes back to work. We basically start recruiting expecting they’ll not return. It’s obviously correlated with that persons income and ability step out of their employee compensation. But, especially with first time mother’s in their >30. They’ve been saving for it and often hold a key position within the organization by this point in their career. Or perhaps that’s just what I’ve observed at several companies.
Probably because it changed the workload or leave approvals for the remaining staff
Depends on your mental model, some would say the company should be staffed to account for x% on leave, thou account for a person taking 2 months is likely out of reach for smaller companies
> Once you max out on accrual, you are giving the company money, which is stupid so it's important to consistently take PTO.
Early in my career I never took a vacation, so I maxed out. I realized that I'd be losing money by being maxed out, so I worked out a deal with my boss to take every Friday off from May to September that year. Four day work weeks all summer was pretty nice!
I'm a FIRE type personality, which means I would like to take the hit now to be better off in the future.
What that meant at my first real job was that even though I would have liked to take time off during the year, I liked the idea of having time off saved up better.
Since we couldn't carry days over, that meant that around the middle of November I told the team, happy holidays, see you all next year.
On January second, my boss told me he would never let me do that again. Which was sort of my first clue that employment conditions could be negotiated on a one by one basis.
I'm not at all a FIRE type person, and don't tend to trust these sort of casual time off in exchange for time worked up front agreements, but I like what you did there. In my area, compabies aren't required to pay tech workers overtime. Thanks EA!
financial indepenedence, retire early. frontload all your money making and then reach a point where you can statistically expect to die on the day you reach 0 money left.
Just be careful. When I went to part time I made the mistake of choosing Monday as one of my days off - most public holidays here are Mondays so I missed out.
Let me tell you the song of front-lin nurses where summer vacation must be requested in March, time off for March break be put in before the end of January and Christmas/New Years requests must be put in September. Oh, and you have to alternate once every year.
I can see a stiffer policy in critical care, (or assembly line) types of jobs that have to be organised to fill the position well in advance to train-in/hire/book via temp agency the workers so they know when you are going/returning so things work well on a continuous basis. Some companies have a full shut down and people get some sort of bonus for scheduling their 2, 3, 4 weeks then. Often line changes/upgrades/model shift etc are done efficiently so the line runs flawlessly at startup.
High tech jobs, esp startups often have novel policies that are rarer in the average industry.
Lots of interesting points of view in this thread.
If a company is advertising unlimited PTO as a positive part of their compensation, but intends to give you 10 days in 1.5 years I guess it isn't a bluff...they just think you are stupid. He =outlines how he was told that the expectation was to take 20 days off a year- don't give employees some benchmark unless it is followed. I've definitely worked at companies that publish the average or median taken as a way to guide employees about what the true quantity of "unlimited" is. I agree that most of us understand unlimited PTO a bit better, which is why most of us would never be as honest as he was with his employer. I would definitely counsel anyone in his situation to get whatever PTO approved FIRST, come back for a few days, and then request FMLA straight with HR. Your manager should understand that what you use your "personal" (not "vacation") time off isn't their business. Be cheerfully vague about PTO prior to approval. Before and after any kind of leave, take notes on all conversations with date/time, outlines of subjects and direct quotes. This is actually something all employees (and really managers, but managers already have the company and HR in their corner) should do with any and all one on ones.
A manager telling someone they can't approve PTO because they aren't going on a fun vacation but rather staying home with family, and then mis-directing them to take their FMLA before exhausting whatever PTO could have been granted, and then denying them any additional PTO after the FMLA is insane. FMLA is not a Federal Government program to subsidize a private company's PTO expenditures. I would also love to know how this ruins anything anyone. Are fun, vacuousvacations being ruined by people with real problems having a reasonable expectation that unlimited PTO policies would include the sorts of extended/bereavement leaves that used to be offered in separate policies?
Unlimited can also mean erratically occurring. Plenty of 2 job + 2 kid families have sudden 'parent must be at home' times, when families/friends are suddenly not able to fill the instant need.
Look at how many people complain how Amazon fired them where a parent had to be absent for such an emergency - they then go from bad to worse in a heartbeat - AND they now have no job at all. I feel enormous compassion for these people, and I can do nothing at all for them.
Taking care of children, much like being sick yourself, is not vacation. Staying home to do so shouldn't reasonably be deducted from your vacation days, regardless of vacation scheme.
True enough, it is a sick day.
Sadly US labor relations has been cast into a them versus us scenario - recall the worker riots in US and UK history.
This has it's roots in the relics of 'royal rule, kings - god linked etc = workers are to be out down, and of course slavery follows. Japan and Europe treat the workers as partners in an enterprise, US/UK and Canada in the past cast the worker as the enemy who wants to steal the bosses $$ by underworking and overcharging for that work - thus we have Amazon's labor relations - to a degree. Amazon is a middling abuser, however, Amazon is rapidly improving, as we see, when they sit down and think about traditional roles. Of course, labor wants an enemy to rally against. Recall how the UAW steadfastly refused boards seats on the car makers board? I think union management wants an adversary. They do not want to see 100% of all financial and management matters. They would be able, as board members are entitled to, see the details of all costs, wages, benefits etc., so they would know how much an auto-maker can afford in reality. Makes you wonder. This board seat process works very well in Japan and Europe - on occasion the unions see that a manufacturer has a valid need to lower labor costs and the unions agree, and the car makers agree to restore wages after a depression - after all, no-one benefits when the company goes broke.
People probably should just have 2 months off a year, I don't see what your problem is. It would be way better for everyone's mental health, this guy was just smart enough to take it, probably in an effort to see if it would help them feel fine about staying at the company afterward.
> Unlimited PTO has never meant taking months off at a time.
Isn't that exactly what it's supposed to be? To give people an ability to work whenever they feel like working. It's not like the company just wanted to give people few more days of vacation like everyone else. They wanted to "stand out" with unlimited amount.
Not to mention that 2 months vacation is something that can easily happen even under normal circumstances (at least in Europe). If someone gave me "unlimited" amount of vacation I would certainly use more than that.
~320 hours isn't an uncommon amount to bank, I had more than that when I left my first tech job after 2 years. Albeit I didn't just take time off at the end I went the payout route but that's not really an option for unlimited PTO. I also took over a month off at the end of every year at then next job as they had decent total time off but didn't allow it to be rolled over year to year so I wouldn't say taking a month or two off is ridiculous in it's own right either.
Hard to say if it was actually unfair or not given the lack of background details (e.g. were they only there for a couple of months working the minimum needed or where they there for 2 years working heavily) but nothing about what was said so far actually seems unfair. "unlimited pto" should be about flexibility not about trying to silently lower the amount of PTO people take.
My current place now is much smaller and has unlimited PTO. I just act like it is no rollover front loaded and arranged my major blocks throughout the year up front. Throughout the year I'll make additional minor requests for unplanned things. Unfortunately many others don't do this and even though nobody is ever denied very few come close to using how much I get approved on Jan 1 and they'll just leave without it.
This is pedantic, and goes to your point of “never met an adult…”, but what exactly does unlimited PTO mean here if not “whatever you want”? What is the cutoff for what a “responsible adult” does? Is two weeks at a time okay? Is it okay if I do that in June and then August?
I’m not trying to justify a 2 month paid vacation, but this kind of clarification is all up to who’s doing the interpreting. The 60 hour week boss who never takes vacations may think anything beyond National holidays is excessive.
If I want to travel to Brazil I’m not going to spend 38 hours round trip to go for just a week.
How many people have you asked what it meant? Because I'd be willing to bet the answers would be all over the place with respect to how many weeks are ok.
I for one won't take an offer that includes "unlimited" PTO because it's a lie, and it means I can't compare the offer to my current job, and an employer offering it has a good chance of being underhanded. If they're not, they should be willing to put a specific number in my contract.
While I was at HubSpot during the initial rollout of their infamous $30k developer referral program, I remember one person getting a referral, paying out the $30k, and then taking PTO until they quit 90 days later. The developer who was recruited was already set from a previous equity cashout and had effectively retired.
Both programs got dramatically reformed after that, though naturally retrospective profiles of the program give it a much shinier glow.
> took 2 months off paid leave and then came back and quit immediately
That's absolutely common practice in places where you can accrue PTO without limits. People rest with compensation they earned and then leave re-energized. And that's a good thing.
Yup, have seen similar thing where we hired and SWE and took 2 months off stating he need to take care of sick parents in India. He came back, 2 days later he resigned & joined FAANG.
How is the engineer a asshole for utilizing one of the company perks? It sounds more like they were being underutilized and had management material written all over them.
It’s often potentially a slight financial trick as well. At least it can be. Depending on structuring it can a tinnnnnny one time pickup on profitability due to not having a vacation accrual balance sheet liability any more. Aka 1)when you leave no payout, and 2) the one time reversal of that acrual can(*) impact profit. Do the math with payroll at 40% of revenue that can be a ~2.5% one time pickup in profit margins. Slightly less tax adjusted and fully rolled back.
Just saying it could be even more nefarious than you intended to convey :)
> We were angry at the engineer, not the CEO, because it was clear what he was doing was taking advantage of the company's generosity.
In other words, we tried to scam him on "unlimited" vacation which isn't, but he scammed us back by taking us at our word and treating it as if we weren't actually lying. Indeed, what a jerk.
I personally would hate to lose unlimited vacations, or more specifically what Atlassian provides. I like the freedom of not worrying about how much vacation I have available. It allows me to take random days off or take a long planned vacation.
I wonder what would happen if California just passed a law that called for unlimited PTO to be paid out (using some pretty high implied accrual rate, like 8 weeks a year or something).
I don't know how it would work in cali, but in the UK I'd pitch at statutory minimum holidays (25 days+bank holidays) OR average time off taken at the company, whichever was higher. I'm sure an employment tribunal would take either.
Every company I've worked at forces you to take your vacation if you hit the accrual cap. Simply preventing you from continuing to accrue seems like a terrible policy.
>I worked at a startup where the CEO reverted the unlimited PTO because one asshole engineer took 2 months off paid leave and then came back and quit immediately.
The CEO made a dumb bet and lost. You can't be mad when you offer unlimited PTO and people use it.
But 2 months off could be a totally reasonable amount? If you worked for 2 years without taking PTO, taking 2 months off to avoid burnout seems like a normal thing to do. Some people prefer to take bigger, longer vacations rather than smaller more frequent ones.
>Sure. Leave of two months should obviously be coordinated with your leadership, which this person didn't do.
How do you know that individual wasn't approved for the 2 months? I missed that part of the story. Do you not believe an employee has the right to resign from a job, or are they a slave for a certain period of time after taking a vacation?
By the fact that the two months of PTO didn't result in an immediate "you are fired for not coming to work", I take the position that it was approved PTO, and (thus) coordinated with (some) management. I do not see any context that supports another interpretation.
Well what does it mean? the words are pretty plain and clear. I've never worked in a place with a unlimited PTO policy, so I have no idea what it means and would need clarification. Most of us work in technology and understand that in most cases the devil is in the detail.
I've done something similar, walking off a bad job at the most critical time they needed me. Would you like to know what happened? I used one of my many other references, and within two weeks I had a job for 20% more money making six figures. Your value isn't attached to what some idiot CEO thinks of you.
You made 20% more and broke into six figures. Congrats, you're an average tech employee with baggage. Everyone that remembers you will be a hard no on future interviews.
Thank you! This was many years ago, and I've held several jobs since then, 1000+ miles away from there now. It has not impacted my career the slightest, but thank you for your concern! I don't have some superiority complex against those making a median wage, so your sarcasm really isn't an insult at all. It's quite a good living, and I don't begrudge those making more.
It it doesn't mean that, why not say "up to 2 months PTO"? If you say "unlimited" and mean "limited", then yes, it needs a footnote, just as if you said "we're going to pay you $200K per year" but then paid only half and said "what, are you crazy? I'd never pay so much as $200K, surely you know I didn't mean this, do I need a footnote over every tiny thing?" No, not every, only in cases where you say one thing, but mean completely different one.
I also worked at Uber as an engineer and could barely take off a few days to visit my family during Christmas. I'm not even Christian but I at least thought that would be a good time. I guess it was very dependent on department.
Honestly as a long-tenured employee, I'd be more happy with a modest, capped N weeks / year, with an explicit XX week sabbatical every M years.
It's difficult to get that "hard reset" you need every once in a while with a 1-2 week vacation [which to be fair, is already fairly privileged], and even if you have 4-5 weeks / year ["generous by US standards"] it can be hard to take more than a couple of weeks at once because you need to save a week or so for Christmas, a few days for your anniversary, a couple of days for you or your spouse's birthday, three days to close out Thanksgiving, etc etc.
I think the funniest part of discussions like this on HN is all the Americans who are somehow... proud? for not taking any paid time off, and then the ones that are weirdly grateful for getting a pittance of time off from their employer?
Listen, PTO is money is salary.
Not taking PTO is leaving money on the table, it's the same as being proud that you're not receiving your full salary for your work, or being grateful that your company actually paid the agreed-upon salary this month.
But some people don't make that connection, because they're conditioned by shitty labour rules in the US.
I enjoy taking my month (20 days) off each year. I even have the opportunity to double it and take it at half pay if it suits. Work to live, not live to work.
The UK also gives people 6ish weeks (5 weeks to take when you want, plus 8 fixed bank holidays). I grew up in the US and am American more than I am anything else. I've lived in the UK for a relatively short time (6 years, under 20% of my life) -- but that's been my entire professional career. It's cultural differences like this that lead me to believe that America will never feel like "home" again -- I now can't imagine living somewhere where 6 weeks of vacation time seems like it's far outside the norm.
The UK minimum is "25 days, including Bank Holidays". Most decent places will make that "25 days, plus Bank Holidays". One place I worked did "25 days, plus Bank Holidays, but since we need in-office cover, you can work a Bank Holiday and take that day off somewhen else."
Australia is 20 days as well, some companies voluntarily offer 1-2 weeks more. It accrues if you don't take the leave and must be paid out if you leave, there are no caps. But most companies will force you to take leave if you have accrued 40 days as it affects the balance sheet.
Sick/Personal leave is min 10 days/year and also accrues with no cap but is not paid out if you leave. In addition there are myriad of unpaid leaves for causes like bereavement, natural disasters, domestic violence etc.
Don't forget long service leave. A uniquely Australian/New Zealand leave offering. After 10 years you deserve a nice long break from the office. Came about due to the excessively long travel times back in the day to Europe.
My employer just let me take it piecemeal, like any other leave. Looking back that was probably worse for both of us. LSL is a good excuse to improve your bus factor.
I could take it piecemeal once it's accrued, but I just don't think that's a good idea. It's quite an opportunity to take a long period off work paid and I intend on honouring it.
I don’t know if it’s still the case (it’s a long time since I lived in Australia) but at one point Australian workers were actually paid _more_ while on vacation. About 17% more. The rationale is that there was no opportunity for overtime while on vacation, and the extra pay on vacation was to make up for that.
Also note in some states where it's after 10 years you actually start accruing the leave after 7 years and if you leave the company prior to 10 years you get paid out for the amount of long service leave you have accrued. Again from the article at 5 to 10 years tenure is around 18%
Even with low participation it would be political suicide to make long service leave harder to gain or even try to take it away. Probably why Victoria actually made long service leave kick in after only 7 years.
I was an executive manager at 2 different startups that originally had "unlimited" PTO. In both of cases it felt wrong to me: The reality is that PTO is never unlimited. Like, if it was unlimited, someone could come to me and ask for 40 days of PTO and I'd have to tell them yeah. Or what about taking every Friday off?
The result was that, lazy/low-performing people would take the most PTO while high performing more dedicated people would sometimes NOT take 1 day in a year (I had to remind/push them to take PTO at the end of the year for their own sainity!!).
Personally, I prefer companies that tell me "25 days of PTO" or 20 or 30 or whatever. That way you everyone including the managers know that every employee WILL be out of the office that time, and it becomes a RIGHT of the employee instead of a charity of the manager.
Ultimately, in these two startups changed from "unlimited" to something between 2 and 4 weeks of PTO per person.
I bill by the day or by the hour. Client's choice. I even round down to the nearest even hour each day so I don't ever have to have that icky feeling of "did I really bill them right this week?" which would just distract me.
When I work 14 hours in a row, that's what I bill. If I'm in the zone I push it till I fall over. It's worth it for the client. If I'm having an off day, I go home early and bill 4 or 6 hours.
If I'm billing by the day, I just bill by the day. Whether it's 14 hours of working or 4, it evens out and if I'm unsure, I'll bill half a day. The important part is that the work gets done. And if I work a Saturday, you bet it's billed.
Now, why do I say all of this? Because when it comes to time off I vastly prefer my situation. Sick for months? I'm not worrying about whether my PTO qualifies or whatever. I just don't get paid. This has happened recently and when I was healthy again my clients were happy I was able to help again.
This weird sorta dance around time off (sick days, PTO, government holidays, dealing with a manager under pressure for the quarter, etc) makes a bit of sense for the working poor, but I don't understand why so many software developers bother. Just bill what you work and if you want a day, week, or month off take it. I'm sure if more developers asked to work this way large corps would be happy to accommodate them.
> I'm sure if more developers asked to work this way large corps would be happy to accommodate them.
Oh, yes the penny pincers in accounting will just love the fact that their budget calculations for the next year will entirely consist of statements like "whatever our 1000 code monkeys feel like working even if it exceeds the amount you are willing to pay if they get into 'the zone', best case you wont have to pay them at all because none showed up".
I'm not saying your comment was in bad faith, but if you have a thousand developers working for you I'm pretty sure the law of large numbers brackets your outlay.
It sounds like you're someone who is comfortable in dealing with uncertainty. I think most people desire certainty and stability, so they want employers and the government to 'guarantee it' (even when the guarantee is illusory).
I am a contractor/consultant, and I do occasionally consider going back to permanent employment. What stops me every time is the dread of returning to just 25 days off.
I don't do much dynamic hours like above as I work with/manage others but I do take 40ish days off a year. 2 weeks at Christmas and Easter, 3 in the summer, and 3-5 days off for some of the kids half term holidays.
I prefer just informing the clients when I am unavailable and that is it. Never had an issue since going solo 9 years ago.
There are many downsides to being a contractor, but time off is an upside, if you can afford it.
Exactly. I hadn't even considered kids because I'm childless. I imagine it would be so much fun to actually spend some real quality time with them in the summer or during the holidays.
I hear this, but when I was a consultant, I found it difficult to take any time off. When I took time off, I wasn't billing, and when I wasn't billing I was leaving money on the table.
The whole point of being an employee rather than a contractor is to have a stable income and not run the risk of e.g. suddenly having no money because you're sick for months. (Speaking as a European who would expect legally protected sick pay as a matter of course)
> Sick for months? I'm not worrying about whether my PTO qualifies or whatever. I just don't get paid.
How is that different from quitting or taking an unpaid sabbatical and hoping the job still exists? I mean, your clients may have found a new contractor in those months.
My employer noticed that people weren't taking enough PTO, even with an unlimited PTO policy, so made new minimum PTO requirements. Each employee is required to take at least 2 days off per quarter and at least 2 weeks per year. People have actually started using it.
A company I worked for required everybody to attend anti-corruption sessions (and later made it part of the induction process). A fun fact is that a reliable indicator of corrupt behaviour is never taking time off. If you're cooking books you don't want to let anybody else looking at them.
Huh, that's interesting and wouldn't have occurred to me. Even without that, there's value in testing the "bus factor" of critical roles. So, Jane wants to go on vacation and everyone's panicking because work can't get done without her around? It's much better to find that out now than when Jane switches jobs.
I've made it a personal goal to lead by example on this.
Coworker: I'll be out of office for my friend's wedding next week, but I'll check in sometimes to make sure everything's OK.
Me: Oh no you won't! Go have fun and stay away. We'll be fine for a few days.
Chalk it up to enlightened self interest if you want. When it's my turn to be on vacation, I don't want to feel obligated to check in. Therefore, I don't let the people who report to me do it, either.
I used to work at a company that, like everyone else, tracked PTO days. But I'm kind of a pain in the ass so I never bothered, plus, I worked ridiculously hard and came in at least one day every weekend and sometimes both Sat and Sun (plus most nights in general). Anyway, the head of HR asked me to start putting my PTO days in the system and I said sure, just let me know where I can submit the overtime slips. They got the point...it helped that I was good at my job.
I've always liked the "treat people like adults" policy with unlimited PTO and no formal tracking. If someone can't manage PTO and is abusive of it, my guess is they either might not be a great hire anyway, and if they are, what are you accomplishing by bothering them?
Seems you misunderstood their comment. They took time off but never logged it in the system. HR asked them to log the days they took off, they said sure but I also get to log my overtime and get paid for those then.
How do you figure? Technology roles are well understood to be exempt, no? Don't get me wrong, I think it's stupid and should be changed, but it is what it is (for now).
I did well and was promoted and given raises and bonuses - that was kinda the point of working hard, not to get more days off. I just didn't like people making PTO a thing, it struck me as juvenile. I used plenty of PTO days, one summer I took every Friday off, but I didn't like the idea of being tracked like I was a child. My simple thought was if people do a good job, who cares about PTO tracking.
Although the point of documenting PTO is both useful for you (to quantify days off as you may be taking much less than you thought!) and the company (was behead meant to be in work today?! What if there's a fire alarm and headcount is needed?)
Congrats on the promotion and raises! I agree that ideally working hard should lead to those outcomes.
Unfortunately "adult" does not have a universal definition in this context.
However I'm with you... I'd never work somewhere again (circumstances permitting) that did not offer me the flexibility I need to perform well. Sometimes that means I take a Monday and do nothing because I'm not recharged and my brain isn't being productive. Sure I could try to force something out, but honestly that doesn't benefit me or the company. My output would be poorly thought through, and I'll grow resentful. The tradeoff is, when I'm in the zone on something, it tends to consume me a bit and I'll gladly work until I'm done with it, nights or weekends be damned, because it's interesting.
Knowledge work is not a "show up and punch the clock" gig. Brains have off days and inconsistent output. When the quality of the thinking matters, and impactful output scales way beyond the cost of the individual employee, it pays for employers to be flexible.
Companies like "unlimited" PTO because it doesn't put a liability on their books (e.g. 6 weeks of PTO x N number of employees amounts to a large liability).
What companies doesn't like though is when you put restrictions on it.
What I've seen as a middle ground is to have unlimited PTO but if you take more than 3 consecutive weeks off, it must convert to a leave of absence.
I like the word "liability" you used here, because in Germany (where I've worked for the last ~5.5 years) there is another perspective of 'liability': an employer has to ensure that their employees take their vacation and adequately rest, else they expose themselves to legal liability. This isn't just about vacation - but also rests during each working day (I think it's 30 mins for < 9 hour workdays), and between working days (at least 11 hours between the end of day X and the start of day X+1).
I was travelling by bus and we got delayed. The bus stopped 15 minutes before reaching the destination because the bus driver had to take his 30 min rest. The rules are pretty strict especially for drivers.
In California PTO is considered part of salary. You either take the vacation or else company will pay you the vacation days or all your days will be rolled over to next year.
Thats why most of the companies in Bay Area have unlimited PTO to bypass this law.
> Q. My employer's vacation policy provides that once an employee earns 200 hours of vacation, no more vacation may be earned (accrued) until the vacation balance falls below that level. Is this legal?
> A. Yes, [and a bunch of examples]
They're only required to cash out your vacation at the end of your employment, and rolling over vacation isn't really a thing because you accrue it incrementally with each paycheck. See "Q. How is vacation earned?" in that link for more info.
The counterpoint is also valid: don't have policies which, if used, would be untenable to the company.
The best places I've worked have had PTO policies, no rollover (but flexibility for longer trips), and (critically) managers who would gripe at you at the end of the year if you didn't use your PTO.
Expectations were clear, everyone was on an equal playing field, and PTO was sized to something the company could afford everyone making use of.
I think that's where policy + manager discretion for overages is the better approach. Your manager should know if you and your team are killing it.
"Unlimited PTO" just sounds like make believe land.
And if it's not an actual, usable, guaranteed policy that doesn't negatively impact your career... then why are we deluding ourselves and creating a policy vs culture mismatch?
Years ago, when I was first married (like several months after getting married), my husband needed surgery. The surgeon thought it might be pancreatic cancer.
The board gave me all the time I needed, no questions. And, the day of the surgery, a colleague from work spent the day at the hospital with me. A free day from the board and director.
Now it's true that I worked every day husband was in the hospital - I mean, he was sleeping most of the time so why not work? But they knew I would work since that's what I did. I delivered for years.
I was incredibly grateful they allowed me to take the time. Am still grateful. But I was also in a position where I could take an unpaid leave or quit. Neither optimal, but family comes first.
Would the organization have done the same for other staff? I don't think so. I had been there the longest and busted my ass for them, loving the work every single day.
Coincidentally, I quit a consulting job that wouldn't give me (unpaid) time off to be with my mother through surgery for pancreatic cancer (positive outcome, so far).
Had saved enough that finances permitted, and I still feel great about the decision.
Having gone from limited PTO to unlimited really helped me realize that I'm a hoarder. When PTO is limited, I rarely take it, but when I had unlimited I was much more liberal about actually using it. I went from average 1-2 weeks per year to 5-6, mostly by taking random days here and there, ducking out early to have a fun afternoon with the kiddo, etc.
I don't understand unlimited PTO. I mean, why not just take every Friday off, then? There is almost never a point at where where there's no work to be done; it's never going to be a case of "as long as you get your work done, you can take time off"... because there's no such thing as "done", just "prioritized".
If you can be competitive with peers and get enough done to continue progressing in your career with every Friday off, why not? The limit for me has always been my own productivity (and availability for meetings), and I think at a certain role level it's a reasonable expectation that you be measured in outcomes and not time spent at desk.
There are still expectations on the amount or level of work to be done. If you're meeting those and not blocking others, there's no reason one couldn't take more time off.
It's certainly a tricky thing to sort out, though. As you noted, "abuse" is possible, but defining what constitutes abuse is nearly impossible.
You call it "hoarder", I'd call it "low risk tolerance".
I'm sort of the same. I never had unlimited PTO, but I tend to save my time off for cases where I actually need it. Saved my bacon a bunch of times, before I started working remotely, with teams/companies that don't mind me taking off half a day to run some important errands, as long as my total work hours add up to the correct number each month.
Reminds me of the story in Freaknomics of a Daycare that instituted a late fee. After the fee was instituted, the number of parents being late went up!
Exactly. I haven't seen it as much now I'm in the U.S., but when I worked in Australia, it was very common for your 2 weeks of paid sick leave to be seen as "vacation". Most people who had sick leave left come December, were suddenly sick for a few days before the end of the year.
When I was younger and working more junior roles and moving from role to role every year or 2 (generally headhunted) there was a use it or loose it mentality. You wouldn’t take the day off the moment you had a sniffle / didn’t feel 100%.
However once your older, have kids and are at the role for more then a few years, that sick leave is often “banked” for when the kids come down with whatever is going around the schoolyard this week
I worked at a bigco that implemented 12 weeks of maternity/paternity leave. A good friend was the first person to take paternity leave, he helped his wife with the new baby and their 3 other children.
His director was furious that he took the paternity leave. He started getting bad reviews and was sandbagged when he tried to switch departments. After he left the bigco, another director told him why he got the treatment he did.
> Honestly I'd rather have a policy that only allowed 3 or 4 weeks with a minimum mandatory that each employee is required to take at least two weeks off per year.
In Germany, your idea is the law. You get at least 5 weeks of vacation per year and you have to take at least 2 continous weeks off.
nope in germany the law is 24 work days and if you have more than 12 days off per year it's preferably! advised to allow 12 or work days contiguously (but it's not a hard requirement it only comes into play if an employee wants to take it like that) (people below 18 have different rules)
also the employer is required to tell if days off will decay and force them to take them.
and work rules are always in favor of the employee so it can be extended but never reduced in a contract.
Yeah, 24 work days, which is roughly 5 weeks (with weekends) . But the other part is not fully correct. Yes, the law is pro-employee, and you have the _right_ to take 2 weeks of continous vacation (12 free days). But you are also _required_ to do so when possible:
> Kann der Urlaub aus diesen Gründen nicht zusammenhängend gewährt werden, und hat der Arbeitnehmer Anspruch auf Urlaub von mehr als zwölf Werktagen, so muß einer der Urlaubsteile mindestens zwölf aufeinanderfolgende Werktage umfassen.
I was really surprised when I first learned from my manager that it's a two-way law (right and obligation). But then again it is really a pro-employee law, basically forcing you to rest from your work.
It's a candidates' market right now, especially for developers. If my holiday got denied for a trivial reason (or no reason) I would just walk out the door.
I think unlimited PTO policies only make sense with a minimum. The minimum in Australian law is 4 weeks. When I worked in Singapore I also got 4 weeks even though the labor law in Singapore technically only mandates 4 weeks.
When I work with unlimited PTO firms I will just make my intention clear from the start which is to take 4 weeks. Plus the two weeks of sick leave I am entitled to if I get sick. So max I use 6 weeks. But my sick leave accrues. LIke when I left a company I had 6 weeks of sick leave left unused and not paid, which is fine.
My last workplace had "unlimited vacation" policy which in reality was a no-vacation policy. Everyone was constantly stressed and on the edge of burning out - would not recommend.
I assumed unlimited PTO was BS and then I got a job that offered it and confirmed.
In my industry/level 4-5 weeks PTO is pretty standard, with maybe 1 week allowed to carryover to say Q1 or maybe Q2 of following year. I almost certainly take slightly less average PTO now with "unlimited" than when I simply had that 4-5 week allotment.
With a fixed allotment it is an entitlement you feel free to use. With unlimited managers get into psychological games of trying to shame you out of taking it. Even if you are strong and don't give in, many of your team isn't. A lot of studies have shown "unlimited PTO" is actually used less than the standard allotment for the industry/level studied. I certainly have to wrangle almost every request. Very few people take 2 solid weeks consecutive either.
> So it turns out people were taking much more time off now than when PTO was unlimited.
Is that surprising? I've had 'unlimited' (there must be a better way of saying that: obviously it has 'fair usage') for a couple of years, not counting but I'm pretty sure I've taken less than statutory.
Previous place was seven days over statutory and up to five would roll; fewer than statutory requirement taken would be paid in lieu (by law), obviously I took enough to use it all or roll some over - why let a couple of days go to waste? But when there's just no numbers on anything... if I don't have something to do I don't take it. (That's probably unrelatable for anyone with children, or a spouse who is taking holiday, that makes sense and I'm not knocking it!)
Well that's a slightly pessimistic angle on it. Thinking about it my offer letter might've said something more like 'you decide', which is a bit more correct than 'unlimited' without the ominous threat of an undisclosed limit.
Perhaps I should have actually 'decided' and written something down if only for myself!
I find "unlimited PTO" enough of a warning signal that I think "not explicitly stated" is an excellent description of what it gives you. And, yes, at least one former workplace switched us from "25 days, plus Bank Holidays" to "unlimited PTO".
With pretty much everyone in my team complaining that we preferred an explicit limit than a nebulous non-explicit managerial capriciousness.
I think unlimited PTO is an absurd policy to begin with. Why would you allow that? If people take a reasonable amount of days, then why not just have a generous policy like 6 weeks. If some people abuse how are you going to deal with them? Fire them? No, because you had the unlimited policy...
As an employee at a dot com I despised unlimited PTO. I would rarely take PTO, working through all major holidays etc while others took months off.
The hardest working most dedicated people will get punished by an unlimited PTO policy.
As an employer I offer 20 days/year base +1 day for each year of service. Our official policy is to only allow 10 days to roll over to encourage people to take vacation. We monitor people's vacation and work with them to schedule time off.
The hardest working most dedicated people dont realize they need time off so we make them take the time off.
Right, it seems relatively simple to calculate someone's salary to also include additional 5 weeks of pay per year so that if you have to pay it out it was already budgeted. Alternatively, you could do it in such a way that every two weeks you get paid for 11 days worth of work and all time off is unpaid. Essentially you are getting 26 paid vacation days and you can use them or keep the extra money. It seems like a win-win. Known costs that are over time and extra money for employees or extra time off for employees.
Part of the problem is that California doesn't let companies have use it or lose it policies. Companies need to pay out unused at the end of the year.
And employees don't like accrual cap policies (i.e. stop earning after you hit some figure) that don't let them bank some amount over their annual accrual.
The problem is that unlimited PTO is a loophole that companies use to avoid paying earned benefits. California’s regulations on this are poor because they don’t account for this, not because they’re a bad idea.
My last job switch, 6 month ago, I explicitly asked to apply that calculation on my shinny new yearly salary.
To go from 2 weeks off to say.. 5. ( I really means 6 … )
I got 2.5 and a lesson on budgeted HR cost and resource availability.
At least there was a response.
The funnier is : I had to care for a family member too.
I took 3 weeks already and they just routinely approved the unpay part of it.
I don’t like Japan’s default number of days off, but I do like their policy, which is that it is up to the employee when they take time off. The only situation in which a manager could reject it is if it would materially affect the company.
In larger companies that’s obviously never the case for any individual person.
Of course, that’s not quite how people use it, but the law as written is very nice.
American overcorrection is bizare. Years ago I recall hearing regularly that many Americans had no annual leave at all, or the ones who did would get fired if they took it. Now it's the other extreme of unlimited, paid time off?
Just have 4 weeks a year of rolling annual leave and be done with it! These absurd extremes serve nobody.
Accrued PTO can become a major liability for companies as it is wages that must be paid out at some point in the future. That is probably the main/only reason that companies offer 'unlimited' PTO since it doesn't carry over at year end and zeroes out when an employee leaves the company.
I worked at a place that, until a few years ago, allowed unlimited PTO rollover. You were allowed x days a year on a sliding scale that increased with tenure, but you could roll over all of it if you chose. This was also the kind of shop where some folks had been working there for 20 years, and had worked their way up from the shop floor to upper management. There were people that retired there with 2000-3000 hours of PTO banked, which of course paid out at their current rate. The were doing everything they could to switch peeps to a capped rollover plan.
Another technique that is employed to reduce the $ value of accrued PTO hours of lifers is the 'donate PTO feel-good' plan where people can donate PTO hours to colleagues that are on medical leave and running out of PTO hours. Since the people with massive PTO accruals are usually upper management (who are 'always working' as they never have to clock in and out) and the recipients are not, the company gets to pay out the PTO hour at a much lower wage.
Yes, they introduced that too, after one of the larger natural disasters took a few regional stores and offices offline for a while. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was the real reason but you’re exactly right. Tooth-and-nail capitalist focus on reducing expenses while couched in the language of we’re-all-in-this-together virtue.
It wears on the soul to carry the necessary cynicism of modern life with us.
Sounds like that company has (had?) a serious management culture problem. Without giving anything away, was it a large well-known company, a large obscure company, a small well-known company, etc.? Curious about what kind of company creates such an environment.
At FAANG the PTOs roll over (but there's a maximum cap, usually 1 full year of saving PTOs) + when you leave the company they convert to cash based off your hourly salary.
There was a great money stuff by Matt Levine where he talked about bankers doing vacation arb, where they would not take any vacation early, work through a few promotions, and then get paid out the vacation when they left at the higher hourly rate.
Every time I see a job listing with Unlimited PTO, theres always some accompanying verbiage that makes it sound a lot like that unlimited PTO will be unavailable.
My company has unlimited PTO for being sick. If sick for more than 3 days (consecutively or probably within some time) you are required to provide documentation to HR of the sickness.
A (young, vaccinated) colleague caught COVID and was out for weeks, with multiple urgent care and one ER visit (quickly discharged; urgent care thought he might have had a stroke).
As far as I can tell he’s had no problems with the company after providing the medical evidence that he was, in fact, sick during that time.
OP’s story sounds terrible and the company completely toxic. I don’t defend it at all. However, in the US, nationally taking time off to care to others is not what paid sick leave is typically intended for. (In Washington State, where I live, the Family Care Act allows employees to use any form of paid leave provided by their employer to care for sick family [1]; I don’t know how many states have passed a similar laws.)
Taking leave to care for a sick family member is typically a different kind of leave. In the US, the Family and Medical Leave Act (known as FMLA) entitles eligible employees to 3 months per year to, among other things, care for a seriously ill spouse, or treat a serious illness of their own. FMLA leave is completely unpaid but your job is protected during and after that time, and there’s insurance you can buy to maintain your income when on FMLA.
It is illegal for an employer to deny a request for FMLA if you are eligible for it, or to retaliate for taking it [2]. If you are eligible for FMLA and request it or are retaliated against by termination, that sounds like a lawsuit that would be easy to win, as well as getting the company in trouble with the Department of Labor.
But who would want to work at a company with such toxic behavior from management and HR? I’m glad this was exposed, assuming that it’s true. (You never know who is lying and has a hidden agenda or axe to grind that they are not disclosing.)
Good companies offer paid leave for the same activities that FMLA requires unpaid leave, such as Amazon’s 6 months of paid leave for birth mothers and 3 for other new parents. My current employer is offering 30 days of paid leave for taking care of family members who have serious illnesses like COVID and I’m confident based on what I’ve seen so far that they’ll honor it.
There’s no “unlimited vacation” at Facebook or Amazon and I’m glad for that. My management chains at both companies have always encouraged taking vacation, and set an example by doing it themselves. Facebook even allows you to have a negative vacation balance, and I haven’t seen people need permission for taking their vacation at either company, though it would probably be wise to do so if you were playing an important role in a vital company activity that would be happening during your vacation (such as the launch of a major product you worked on, or periodic performance reviews if you’re a manager or have an important role in them). I typically entered my vacation into the system after taking it at Amazon, and would let my manager/peers know only if I was planning to be gone and unreachable for an extended period. (At Facebook there’s a good system for notifying people who want to/need to know when you will be out of the office, which also sets up the equivalent of out of office emails for their predominant form of internal communication, which is via Workplace.com (basically Facebook for Work, and an overall excellent product that I would recommend [3]); so at FB I’d enter it in advance because of those integrations, but unless I was performing a crucial job function at a crucial time, I wouldn’t expect to need to ask for permission, so much as notify my manager of my plans.
During performance or promotion review committees for employees I’ve participated in, we always tried to adjust fairly for accomplishments per day of work vs. expectations and others, to avoid penalizing people who take full vacation or leave. It’s human nature to want to give a better performance rating to someone who worked hard for a year with minimal vacation, vs. someone who was on leave for half the year and also took vacation, thus having fewer accomplishments total; but the performance committees I’ve seen and participated in always tried to be fair and measure performance adjusted for time worked, and if anything erred toward being generous toward those who had been on long leaves.
> I'd rather have a policy that only allowed 3 or 4 weeks with a minimum mandatory that each employee is required to take at least two weeks off per year.
As a person who was once young, very ambitious, and had no responsibilities or dependents, I would be opposed to requiring that people take so much vacation. When I entered the industry, I wanted to work hard, build things, build a reputation, progress in my career, learn new things, and earn achievements (including one that got me an award and handshake from Jeff Bezos, back when he was CEO at Amazon); I didn’t want to or need to take vacation, and would have preferred higher pay instead. College was largely a 4 year vacation already, except for a few very challenging 400 level CS courses, and during which I had taken several real international vacations with my family. After graduation I was ready to work hard and build my career. The company provided holidays plus an extra day or two were sufficient for me.
What I do wish is that companies were required to pay employees for any paid time off that is offered but not used, as they are required to do when you leave the company, but ironically not if you stay. (By not used I mean such as due to maximum vacation balances or yearly vacation balance resets, as Amazon used to do). Any vacation that would otherwise accrue as vacation balance but doesn’t, due to maximums, should be obliged to be paid as a proportional amount of compensation to the employee; the same if a vacation balance is reset.
I am older now and have responsibilities for people besides myself, and I am aware of the risk of working too hard and burning yourself out, which is why I am glad to have always worked in environments where taking vacation has been encouraged. But for people with few responsibilities that love their job and want to progress in their career as fast as they are able, I do not think those people would be happy with vacation being forced on them. I wouldn’t have been. I do wish that employers were required to compensate employees for any PTO that is offered but not used though. I can understand why some people would not want the law to require this, since it might encourage people to overwork themselves - but we are all adults and some people may be in a situation where they need more money more than they need vacation time; it should be their choice in my opinion.
[3] I don’t know if it has the same degree of integration via bots that Slack has, however, so if that’s important to your workflow then you may want to scrutinize this aspect when evaluating the product; but the capability for them exists and is used extensively internally.
Depending on the company, that's not great advice. At my company you cannot take PTO until you accrue it, so if you end the year with 0, then you can't take anything for a while until you accumulate enough time.
Here is the problem with these policies. What happens when just 1 person or 2 people have key knowledge?
My company has/had (the people I know with it left) this problem. Things hinged on one person and a team of effectively 1 or even 2 can never go on vacation.
Now, obviously this should be considered a problem too but other problems can make the 2/3 part unworkable.
I think the issue is that it was used as an excuse to deny vacation. It could also lead to everyone being put on teams of 2. Great, now no one can take a vacation by definition.
I'll accept that what the author posted is the truth. Atlassian did not give him what he wanted or needed. And now this battle is public, he will never get anything else from them. The proverbial glove has been thrown down and they will fight you on all fronts.
To everyone else, If this happens to you, I implore you to get legal counsel ASAP, and keep it quiet. Find out all your options and strike a quiet deal with your employer. That is the best you'll ever get.
Almost any large company has much deeper pockets than you do and their reputation is more valuable that their ethics. You'll rarely win in the court of public opinion and you'll probably never get hired anywhere again. I say this even if you were 100% in the right.
This person is giving advice from the PoV of an individual comfortable with playing zero sum or even negative sum games as long as they are able to continue winning.
Don't be like this, don't corrode the commons for personal gain. By not speaking out you are endorsing a harmful asymmetry, make no mistake about your personal responsibility for perpetuating hostile norms.
I would normally agree _IF_ the person didn't already have to deal with his wife's cancer. Under the US health system no less.
Some other reason? Meh, it's just a job. But getting thrown into distress, financial or otherwise, warrants looking out for oneself (and family) first.
I think that as long as in general folk do the right thing, if a few folk “unfairly” do the wrong thing because of extenuating circumstances like having cancer (or a family member having that or something else serious)… well, that’s ok.
Calling for universal absolute behaviour from everyone is unkind, and, statistically not necessary for the outcomes you want.
Basically; it’s easy to say “call them out!” when it’s not you and youre not taking any risks.
Pretty nice and comfortable to sit in your armchair and say that…
I think there are a lot of people here to want someone else to do it, but aren’t willing to do it themselves.
Are you just expressing cynicism or are you actually interested? If the latter, you can just talk to insiders.
I had a somewhat curious personal experience at Uber. I went to interview there circa 2016/2017 and got an offer but had to wait for a visa to come out. In the meantime, the Susan Fowler scandal exploded. The hiring manager reached out to me out of his own accord to express his own outrage and how he'd absolutely not tolerate toxic behavior within his area of reach, and that many others within the company shared that feeling.
Turns out he was right: the team I eventually joined was fantastic and indeed there was a very large part of the company that was deeply troubled (and often quite vocal!) about the growing accounts of harassment and injustices. Driven by pressure to get the house in order, this eventually culminated in hundreds of separate investigations, and various degrees of corrective actions (including firing several perpetrators)
Since then, I've heard my share of complaints about higher ups as well (being in a role that involves quite a bit of cross-department communication), so it's not like it's all rainbows and roses, but my main point is that if you ask the average joe in a company, they're often happy to be straightforward with you.
Funny that you mention Susan Fowler, because she acted the same way for the commons.
I'd be probably not be speaking about toxic behaviour with a hiring manager, during a high-stake hiring process. Maybe you wouldn't have either if it wasn't for her whistleblowing.
Yes, to be clear, I hugely respect people like Fowler and others who come forth from vulnerable positions to shed light into problems. IMHO, the cleaning house at Uber was largely thanks to her.
FWIW, I'm involved with hiring and have on occasion been asked by candidates about company culture (and in one case, specifically about the Fowler case). I try to be as candid and transparent as possible with these sorts of topics, because that just seems like the natural thing to do.
I agree with both you and the above commenter. Perhaps it is optimal to keep quiet for yourself, but optimal for the group if none of us keep quiet. A tough problem.
Trying to make the world better is a laudable goal but let's not pretend that there is some intrinsic "point" to existence. A point to existence almost implies that you chose to exist in the first place.
For truly egregious conduct, one can avail themselves of the state attorney-general. They have resources and tools that every company must respect. At least in Washington State, there are also mandated exceptions to all company's non-disclosure agreements for this purpose (I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice).
GP's statement has a lot of merit. Going on the attack against a well-resourced opponent should only be considered after long and deliberate consultation with legal counsel. Even if you don't involve an attorney, your opponent may/will. Attorneys are expensive and proceedings may take far longer than someone who believes themselves to be in the right may expect.
The system is imperfect, but it abstracts conflict to a higher and more-deliberate plane than bludgeoning one another with sticks or urging a mob to pick up torches.
You can inform the company (through your lawyer) that their options are a settlement with you in exchange for keeping quiet, or public airing of dirty laundry. The company can then decide if the settlement amount is worth the PR hit.
You don't do this out of the goodness of your heart to inform other people how bad the company is, you do this purely to maximize the probability of receiving any sort of compensation from the company. Most people (?) would only consider this route if they genuinely feel that the company has egregiously wronged them, because it's a big, low-probability-of-success pain, and airing dirty laundry is easier and often more cathartic.
If you have already decided that informing other people is more important to you than a settlement (or have concluded that the effort is not worth your while), then fine, you've made a different decision, and perhaps the commons are better as a result. But if you decide to air the dirty laundry, you'll usually lose the ability to change your mind later.
>You inform the company (through your lawyer) that their options are a settlement with you in exchange for keeping quiet, or public airing of dirty laundry
That sounds like blackmail/extortion. I'm not a lawyer, but the first amendment should protect you pretty well from merely making truthful accusations, but once you threaten money in exchange for not making them it could be construed as a very serious crime.
IANAL - but the legal term would be "non-disparagement" as one of the carrots the lawyer dangles. It's all very legal, very cool, and both side perfectly understand what it means.
Avoiding bad PR is one of the reasons most settlements have non-disparagement clauses, usually paired with a confidentiality clause that says you can't even talk about the settlement (and therefore you can't mention or imply the existence of the non-disparagement clause therein).
No, it's a negotiation at that point. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm fairly certain that the difference lies in whether or not you make a demand. If you simply say "I'm going public with this info on X date" and leave it at that, it's not extortion. If the other party decides they want to pay you to not do that, it's on them and you can negotiate from there because they made the offer. If you say "I'm going public with this info on X date unless you pay me" it's extortion.
I'm not sure it works like that. You may get away with it, assuming the lawyer never reveals your intent, but this sounds a lot like the "security" extortion rackets of the mob:
"Hey thought you should know, my 'security' company is currently for hire for businesses around town. We heard through the underground grapevine that a lot of folks may lose some product in their bodegas next month. Anyway, nice to introduce you to my 'security' business -- have a great month!"
If you revealed that your true intent was blackmail, and that's what this is, to your lawyer or anyone else then I imagine the intent in combination with the act is enough to nail you.
That explanation does make sense. But Shitlassian guy did talk about things that were done wrong to other people, so I'm not sure he'd be able to pass this test.
In my previous classification it would be extorsion to say "pay me or I will add those things to my accusations" but not to say "pay me or I will drag you in the mud as much as possible", that is it would matter whether you keep them bundled together or not.
It sounds like you have an overly idealistic view of how this process works.
Why do you imagine non-disclosure agreements are standard after an out-of-court settlement? It's because "pay me or I'll badmouth you" is essentially always one of the implied threats.
You can call it blackmail if you want (and I'm being deliberately glib here, because I also think it's at least blackmail-esque), but your lawyer and the company's lawyer will absolutely understand that this is how things are done.
His first duty is to his family, so he should have done anything within the bounds of morality to get as much time/money/aid for his wife. That's why I say take the path of privacy to get a settlement.
Also, this isn't an issue of a company doing something illegal or immoral. We are not talking slave labor or dumping toxic chemicals. This is an argument over compensation levels and therefore I don't think he owes the world his story for the cost of making himself a pariah.
> INAL but is see no way this would damage his legal leverage... actually the opposite.
IANAL either, but I imagine posting this gives an opening for Atlassian to sue for slander and ruin the author by taking forever to debate minutiae of every sentence in the article - whereas if the author went after Atlassian directly, the case would be only about what the company did or did not do to them personally.
“I’m not f---ing around with this, and I’m not continuing to play games,” Avenatti told Nike reps, according to court papers. “You guys know enough now to know you’ve got a serious problem. And it’s worth more in exposure to me to just blow the lid on this thing. A few million dollars doesn’t move the needle for me.”
> Avenatti was arrested in March, about 15 minutes after tweeting that he had scheduled a press conference to “disclose a major high school/college basketball scandal perpetrated by @Nike.”
That's one quick police response. Regardless of the merits of the case, I'm scared of the headline itself.
Somehow since it wasn't mentioned in the article and me being European, I didn't even think about money as a relevant factor in the whole debacle, only about the time involved and needed to be with the family. I cannot imagine being in the same situation, and besides the horrible bad situation, having to worry about going bankrupt.
I am a EU based software dev, who is currently going through a cancer diagnosis & treatment of a partner (her second one in as many years).
Knowing that I have legally mandated sick leave with pay that covers me for some time has helped immensely while going through this ordeal. Not to mention all healthcare costs taken care of by the state (rather than via some weird golden handcuff scheme with my employer).
I simply can not imagine how vadly workers in the US are exposed when the unexpected happens (and it does, unexpectedly).
I thought the sick leave with pay would only apply to yourself, but not when your partner is sick? Though maybe there is some way to get leaves for yourself to take care of your partner I guess.
Also, even though most Europeans like to say what you said, the fact is still that, as a young healthy individual, the possibility of you even getting sick and needing to go to the doctor is actually incredibly slim. I haven’t visited the doctor except for the dentist in a few years but I’ve paid massive amounts into the German health care system, and I would still much prefer the American pay to the European social system. Maybe when you have a family the European way of life would have more appeal, but even then the system is somewhat collapsing as we speak, e.g. the horrible wait to get an appointment at NHS and also to some extent for the publicly insured Germans. I would still trust having resources at my own disposal instead of leaving my fate on a big, public system working the same for decades, which never happens in history.
It's better to not extrapolate it on entire company (a dozen of offices, thousands of employees worldwide, different policies per continent or country).
I have done this for a company who was knowingly making materially false information to investors. The company merely asked glassdoor to remove it, and they did. It's probably not worth the liability to glassdoor to have reviews that actually show material deficiencies in a company, like lying about benefits.
I've also done this on yelp when I was working as a contractor when I should have been an employee. The company informed yelp I was an employee, so my review was removed (yelp only has a policy employees cannot leave reviews, they had no such policy for independent contractors at the time I left the review). This was doubly insulting because I tried to inform yelp the entire reason I left a review was because I _should_ have been an employee and not a contractor, and yelp informed me I was actually an employee so I could not use their platform!
I also disagree about it being a career ender to publicly reveal serious dishonesty in your employer. The company I work for now usually laughs when I talk about all the shit I've been through and spoken of ( I worked for two very dishonest companies, out of the dozen or so I've been with). If you work for honest people, then they have a vested interest in the dishonest being exposed (its good for their business).
My exact impression too. The article set off some alarm bells in me - it feels tad too lightweight on actual evidence of misconduct, and too rich repetitively making the same emotional points. Could be explained entirely by the author writing it in justifiable anger. Or it could be because they're trying to blow a few situations out of proportion.
I've seen plenty of posts like this landing on HN over the years, and it's not always a given the accused party is in the wrong. While my first instinct is obviously to believe the author, I'm withholding judgement until more details are clear.
EDIT:
I keep in mind an old HN drama about AirBnB, I'll try to look up details and edit them in - but what I remember to this day is, there was an angry post vilifying AirBnB, the commenters believed it fully and became very angry. As I recall, pg himself jumped in to defend AirBnB, only to be booed out. I also recall being convinced the company is strongly in the wrong. Then it turned out the situation was entirely opposite, AirBnB was in the right. I felt really stupid for jumping the gun, not waiting for full story to come out.
(And then, of course, AirBnB turned out to be a socially destructive company, so I don't like them anyway - but for different, and better thought out reasons.)
EDIT2: The AirBnB story I refer to happened in 2011, when a blogger described an extremely bad experience with AirBnB, causing one hell of a shitstorm in general startup sphere (with plenty of big names and news outlets getting involved). There was way too much written about this on HN for me to find what was the resolution now - skimming quickly I'm no longer sure which side was proven to be guilty of what. But I do recall the feeling of first being so sure in outrage, and then ashamed after discovering the story is way more complicated than what it seemed at first.
>Not approving more than 10 days in 1.5 years given the circumstances is inexcusable
Atlassian should have been more flexible given the circumstances (and maybe they were! The author didn't mention the leave of absence they took, but it's mentioned in their manager's email denying them taking "Vacay Your Way" right after getting back from a leave), but asking for 2 months of PTO all at once is a lot different than taking 9 weeks over 1.5 years. The author did not say they were denied taking any more than 10 days of PTO over that 1.5 years, they were pissed because they felt they were "accruing it" when they were, in fact, not.
If you watch for it, you'll notice that pattern is common with discrimination claims. It's self destructive too because it prevents self analysis and improvement if you believe you didn't get a promotion or whatever because of discrimination. Then the cycle repeats.
This article should be read with a huge grain of salt.
They forget to mention (or I missed) the 30 odd days of “no questions asked” special leave we got over the past 2 years.
They also don’t mention how, by policy, small leave applications are approved, no questions asked.
I’m a current P5 SWE at Atlassian and whilst I agree that going from P5 to P6 tends to be difficult, I can’t say I’ve observed any of the other aspects mentioned in this post.
I personally have a larger frustration with there being too much time off as I actually enjoy the work I do
I think it's perfectly possible for one person to be on their org's good side and another to walk into every single branch of a hostile bureaucracy. Especially in large companies, which Atlassian certainly is now. I've seen that in action, side by side, even within the same team.
Neither invalidates the other, because a large company is perfectly capable of both at the same time.
> Until your last paragraph, I believed what you were saying.
I have no connection to Atlassian, but I've been "forced" to take time off, which I neither needed nor wanted. If I'm working a lot it means I'm enjoying it.
I have also taken quite a bit of PTO when needed by the way; I'm not afraid of doing so. But I don't really like the "one size fits all model" when it comes to this kind of stuff.
I have also been forded to take some vacation. It was late in the summer, and I think my boss started to feel that HR might be coming down on him if he let me work all summer :)
> I personally have a larger frustration with there being too much time off as I actually enjoy the work I do
Can't you just not take the time off? If it's mandatory I'm sure you could still work while "off". Honestly I have an extremely hard time relating to this sentence.
Where I am we do require people to take vacations, usually if they are going to hit their PTO accrual cap (ie, they really have not been taking vacations).
accrued leave is a liability that a company doesn't want too much of.
For people leaving, accrued leave is something that the person could ask to be paid out in cash, or they can take the leave prior to quitting.
As an org grow larger and larger, they'd need to prepare for these to crunch together - and thus, by forcing leave, they can cap the amount of reserves (cash, and people to take over) they need. It's understandable, but of course, frustrates the employee.
> I’m a current P5 SWE at Atlassian and whilst I agree that going from P5 to P6 tends to be difficult
Which... is fine? It should get harder and harder to climb the ladder the farther you climb, because -- especially as an individual contributor -- it's hard to increase your impact on the company more and more as you climb. And on the flip side, I see plenty of people getting promoted before they are really ready, and become ineffective -- and worse, counter-effective -- in their new role. Then they either languish, get fired, or get fed up and quit. Or worse, they stick around and make things more difficult for everyone else.
So Atlassian actually has 30 days of PTO instead of unlimited, yeah?
Or those "no question asked" is unpaid time off? But then it wouldn't make send because if you already have unlimited PTO why would anyone take unpaid TO.
A different manager can make a completely different experience in a single company. A rule of thumb when things blow out of proportion is that the manager is quite likely to have been a catalyst.
The PTO is unclear in my opinion. There may be something depending on what's written in the contract and what jurisdiction he is in. There's way too little information to judge.
I was routinely physically bullied as a kid and I learnt the hard way that sometimes you just had to fight back even when you were outnumbered and unlikely to come out on top. Why? Because if you can land just one or two punches next time they’ll think twice about whether it’s worth their time.
Even if it’s ill advised, and even if it’s likely to harm OP more financially, only a response as strong as this will make a them think twice about their policies.
What Rosa Parks did wasn’t advisable, but it was the right thing to do. The same can be said of many human rights activists. Not that this is comparable to those struggles, but we all have our part to play in creating a better world.
Employers have deep pockets. They'll win over your legal counsel by dragging it out for years, making you bankrupt.
At least by exposing it publicly, the company is now forced to address the issue in front of... well everyone. And, other people can see if they've been screwed over as well. After decades and decades of employees trying to resolve matters internally and quietly, and just getting retribution, does anyone actually think being quiet is still the way to go?
I mean, that's how #metoo got started, by going public and getting people together to push back on corporate BS. Same applies here, and for all corporate issues.
> the company is now forced to address the issue in front of... well everyone.
No they don't. They'll just release a statement saying "to protect employee privacy, we don't comment on any employee's situation, but we will say that we are committed to treating our employees well and blah blah blah". It'll blow over after a few months, and everyone will forget it.
I’ve never sued an employer, but I have commenced legal action against my deep-pocketed landlord (they were a developer and didn’t feel like following the eviction & compensation laws for doing a rental apartment to condo conversion). I won, without even needing a lawyer.
They get to continue suppressing current and future employees.
Here's a perfect illustration: You know that recent article that came out about Google not paying their temp employees fairly? Well were you aware of that problem before that article came out? If not, apparently full time Google employees weren't either and are now organizing to fix that.
Every time I read these google employees are going on strike / organizing I which they would describe HOW MANY actual google employees are ACTUALLY going on strike and organizing or whatever.
You can talk to a lawyer or a HR professional and not make it a battle with your employer (or even known by them). You'll just get perspective and learn if your position is valid or not. Better to know the law and your options before you negotiate. Had the writer know what was legally owed to him, he may have taken a more productive path.
Good point. I think #meetoo showed that internal corporate oversight failed miserably for women. A lot of women were done wrong by many companies and I'm glad their struggle became known and I'm glad things have changed (but still more change is needed).
This situation is a dispute over compensation (PTO), not an accusation of abuse. I stand by my premise that the best way to help his wife would be to further negotiate with Atlassian for unpaid time off w/med benefits or something similar.
- (Quiet, Lawyer) Watch your target carefully and, when the opportunity presents itself, go for the throat
vs
- (Publicly Yell) Bark loudly at your target with your teeth shown, so that everyone sees you, and the have no choice but to treat you like a rabid dog and put you down.
> (Quiet, Lawyer) Watch your target carefully and, when the opportunity presents itself, go for the throat
The problem is that people tell themselves this is what they're going to do and never follow through. It's the perfect way to do absolutely nothing and convince yourself it's the right thing to do.
I think that's a pretty uncharitable interpretation. "Strength" does not have to mean "post a mostly-unsubstantiated rant on a website". To me, strength is quietly gathering evidence and consulting with a lawyer to make your case, and then hitting them hard -- in court -- when you are ready.
Given the choice the offer made, the more likely outcome here is that Atlassian will give him nothing, and he'll suffer some hard-to-detect discrimination from other companies for the rest of his career. To use your analogy, he walked into a room full of sword-wielding wolves, stuck out his belly, and said "cut me, I dare you"... after which they said "sure", and disemboweled him.
> hitting them hard -- in court -- when you are ready
Hitting them "hard" in a way that would be painful for them would be extremely unlikely in court. He hit them hard in a way that could actually impact their company's ability to retain and attract talented people. He also demonstrated some self respect in the process. I have to think that to many people that - combined with a giant megaphone for telling their story - is worth a lot more than a payout.
This is a little harsh. I think it's very situational and depends mostly on whether you feel better about blowing the whistle and helping others or getting some beneficial concession from the company whether monetary or not. In this case, the aforementioned author's wife has cancer and seems to feel some kind of moral obligation to disclose this to others.
I've known people who transition to get a great new job, then pursue a pretty clean case (quietly) against their old company - often with pretty good results.
This demonstrates you have power of choice in your destiny (the opposite of cowering and whimpering) and it's practically much easier to job search while employed. And I've seen old managers let go, not because of the case per se but because they were losing staff.
This type of thing? There is going to be some sympathy for their manager having to manage someone like this (who does not sound very professional).
The case is also easy after you leave. You don't need the money as you have a new job, you don't need to keep your (old) job - you've already left. So it's simple, so and so kept trying to get one room for both of us while travelling, here are their nasty text messages, work environment was not healthy, would prefer not to litigate the issue. Done. Now you are really set.
Imploring others to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else is a strange pattern I see a lot on these forums.
It's clearly not in your (or any of our) interests to do this, as the obfuscation perpetuates these problems. So what is the motivation behind this kind of post?
It’s lashing out. Sour grapes. Procrastination. The perception of doing something to address a problem but the problem is: the action isn’t the correct one, these words are not directed at the right people.
This should have been a letter from his lawyer to his ex-employer, probably HR.
I interpret it as a pre-defensiveness. Whereas some people admit they wouldn't have the guts but respect people that do, others are trying to convince themselves that the choice they'd make would be the right one.
Sometimes standing up for what is right is more important.
Considering this company directly interfered with his ability to care for his wife, it makes sense for him to write this.
It’s worth remembering humans are not entirely rational. The most rational thing would be for him to of simply quit when they weren’t treating him right.
I’ve done that a few times. And it’s worked very well for me.
So basically, it sounds like you want people to shut up, take what the bosses give, and you want the entire industry to blacklist people for speaking out against abuse.
No. I do not want people to "shut up and take what bosses give". I want people to negotiate in the best possible manner to get the best personal outcome. We do this all the time with salary negotiation.
IMHO, the actions taken by the author, while possibly noble, did nothing to further the benefit of his wife while potentially risking his future employment opportunities. I genuinely want he and his wife to have the best outcome and I just don't see how his actions achieve this goal - in both the short term and the long.
I would have asked for unpaid time off and for Atlassian to continue to pay my medical insurance. That would be a deal which I think could have been reached.
>>> I would have asked for unpaid time off and for Atlassian to continue to pay my medical insurance. That would be a deal which I think could have been reached.
The author was fired if you believe the title of the post, so it's way past asking for time off or insurance coverage.
I’m going to have to be careful, because decorum, but you have no right to decide what’s best for him and his wife. Maybe he has a job lined up. Maybe the whole thing was his wife’s idea. You don’t know.
People are fed up being told “heres your options take it or leave it” first by slimy managers, then by people like you pretending to be the voice of reason.
I've been in a similar situation as that described by the author, and went shopping for lawyers.
The four lawyers who would even talk to me basically said this:
Even if you have documentation, there's nothing stopping a company from producing an "HR file" that shows they tried to correct an employee's course, and the employee failed to meet expectations.
There are laws in some states where, if you ask, a company is required to send you all documentation they have about your employment. So I did, and was shocked at how out of sync their records were with reality.
What their records showed was a belligerent, reluctant, and untalented employee, one who was given many many warnings.
Which is not what my actual experience. I was routinely praised by my manager for exceeding expectations, had great relationships with everyone I worked with, could prove that my contributions made the company 3x more than they paid me, etc, etc.
But when struck with pancreatitis, they let me go. While I was in the hospital. Their reason: I didn't request the time off. As if that's a thing you do when you nearly die and are saved by emergency surgery.
TL;DR - it's easy to say "lawyer up", but in reality, much harder to fight than you think, even when you lawyer up.
The good news is I work for a company that doesn't just encourage people to use unlimited PTO, they will frequently pay for vacations for people who go above and beyond. Like, 5 star resort, airfare included for 10 days for up to 4 people.
When my dad was diagnosed with cancer, they said "do what you need to do", as I was his only caregiver. Feeling a bit cautious given past experiences I went on FMLA so that, should things go bad, at least I'd taken the correct legal steps. After being away for two months, when I got back they said "we have unlimited PTO, so we let you use 5 days of FMLA just so it's official, but paid the rest. Welcome back." So, in a way, the first company described did me a favor, since I wouldn't be at my current company had they not fired me.
I forgot to mention: the company that fired me did offer a severance package, though if I'd accepted it, I would have needed to agree to never talk about the circumstances of my leaving the company.
It was worth every penny I didn't get by telling them I wouldn't sign the severance agreement.
How does this work? Can an NDA prohibit you from talking about itself, or does it have to be structured in a cycle, with one NDA protecting "future NDA", and the next NDA protecting "the last NDA"?
There is always an NDA you can talk about - but that NDA could consist solely of the contents "All agreements signed while employed with so-and-so are confidential" - which restricts even your ability to discuss the parties of other NDAs.
Interesting experiences, but without the names of the companies (or at least what they rhyme with), what can we actually learn from your story? There’s a shit company and a great company out there, and good for you for ending up at the good one. But this just reads like a form of humble brag.
Knowing the name of the first company doesn't help make my point that lawyers may advise you that you can't win a fight with a crappy company.
I considered naming my current company but didn't want to be called out for promoting it. If that comes across as a humble brag to you, I can live with that.
I don't even know what that means when you say called out for promoting it, good companies deserve name recognition - your unwillingness to name at least the current company is disappointing.
I guess the question is, is it the worst your employer will ever get? Sometimes, if you want to win, the opponent just has to lose more. It might not be a good strategy for improving your own life, but it might be a good strategy for doing as much damage as possible to the organization that has wronged you.
Personally, I generally feel that life is too short. But I think the more belligerent approach is probably better for society in general. If everybody went full Michael Kohlhaas when wronged, the world would be a much better place, and people that do so should be commended.
Based on what the author has written, I'm just not feeling particularly strongly here. He has a bunch of unsubstantiated claims, plus some screenshots from Blind (which I don't consider representative or reliable).
If I take what is written at face value, and assume it's true, I think it's pretty bad, but unfortunately not that remarkable or unusual. Unless he's holding back some damning evidence of actual law-breaking, I don't really see how Atlassian will be all that hurt by this.
I already wouldn't want to work for Atlassian because I think Jira and Confluence are the some of the worst products I have to use, and working on those would probably drive me to drink. Reading an unsubstantiated, biased account of their employment practices (practices which may not be "practices" but more an unfortunate one-off edge case) doesn't really move the needle much for me.
Upvoting because I think it's important to talk about this, not because I agree.
Appreciate everyone else's responses around this being a dark pattern where "bad publicity" gets paid off.
How do we incentivize companies to hire people like this? How do as I founder say "I want people like this so that our company is strong, not weak like Shitlassian?"
Is there a role for more anonymity on the internet?
I think smaller companies might value this sort of thing, but once a company gets large enough to have a big HR department where recruiting reports to HR, people like this get automatically filtered out before anyone with more principles might see them.
That’s not necessarily true. I just got hired by <Megacorp>. I don’t have any reason to think I was pre-screened at all.
The whole thing seemed very responsible. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a secret thing, but IDK, some things just work like they say.
I can’t see it coming up in a background check, since I get the results and a chance to defend myself, but who knows? If / when I got “filtered”, it would probably be later in the process. At some point, we did talk about past employers and why you left… really seem to remember nothing until an offer was extended.
I was actually quite surprised by how responsible they were (at a surface level at least).
In Australia where Atlassian is headquartered there is a govt body names Fair Work Australia where you can complain if you believe your workplace rights are violated. They will try to work with the company and can take them to a quasi judicial body called Fair Work Commission. Next step up is Federal Courts.
Employers want to keep things as quiet as possible and will settle and stay out of court even if your chances are very slim because a one time payout is cheaper than gathering evidence, assembling lawyers, sapping admin time, etc. Unless you go big and then they will take you to court and most likely you’ll lose because you don’t have lawyers on retainer nor the bank.
Then, even if you win, now you’re persona non grata for most HR departments because typically only particular personalities will take on a company and the chances of you being unpredictable are calculated to have gone up. So make sure it’s a retirement payout as your chances for employment went down.
So, unless it’s something egregious and utterly wrong, take your losses and walk away with a quiet settlement.
> "you'll probably never get hired anywhere again."
No, you'll never get hired anywhere again with companies that employ the same tactics. Ideally you've just developed an uber-filter to get rid of all the terrible companies in one go.
Agreed. There will be plenty of time to rant after legal options have been explored and allowed to take their course, assuming you're not forced to sign a non-disparagement agreement in order to get what you want.
>>You'll rarely win in the court of public opinion
I think this is wrong... Likely you could win in public opinion. It will not matter much though because
>>you'll probably never get hired anywhere again.
This is likely true. Winning in Public Opinion will not amount to much when you are homeless and hungry
>>I implore you to get legal counsel ASAP, and keep it quiet. Find out all your options
Which will likely amount of little to nothing... Even if you sue likely the legal fees will eat up much of the award. As with most legal battles the only people that win is the lawyers.
Regarding getting hired again, I went through something very similar to what he did (except my employer was highly supportive, so I had nothing complain about online) and I can't blame him for writing this.
He may have disqualified himself from employers looking for single 20-somethings with a complete devotion to work, but there are managers in the world who are going to understand what he and his wife have gone through. Especially after this last year, we're going to have to understand that some of our coworkers have publicly expressed their pain before.
Perhaps a future employer will include a non-disparagement clause but I'd be surprised if he didn't find a new role that was better suited to his new life circumstances.
> I implore you to get legal counsel ASAP, and keep it quiet
If you’re a white male the lawyer will politely tell you no thanks because you’ll never get punitive damages. Why does that matter you ask? Well ordinarily wrongful termination is only subject to actual damages. So if you get another job in a month you can get at most one month’s pay in damages. But wait it gets better! If you can’t find another job because you’re not able to perform those job duties, say because you’re caring for a sick loved one, then the court will deem that your actual damages are zero. Obviously no lawyer wants even a great shot at winning 30% of nothing on contingency.
The only exception would be if you’re in a jurisdiction with juries that are exceptionally sympathetic to the plights of white men and will vote for punitive damages large enough to make it worth a lawyer’s time.
In any event the consult is free so by all means talk to a lawyer, but realistically you’ll get better results by just asking nicely for a separation package.
Recent ex-Atlassian employee here. No part of this article matches with my experience. It's one of the better companies I've worked for. I usually took 3-4 weeks of PTO a year, it wasn't a big deal. We didn't even have to register our time off in a payroll system or anything like that. Yeah you couldn't take 6 months off and expect to keep your job, but I felt like 3-5 weeks of PTO was the norm there. I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave. It wasn't a big deal. This article complains about being at a job for 2 years without a promotion. That's the mark of an entitled person. P4 is still a great position with solid pay.
Another recent ex-Atlassian here (I left 4 months ago after working there for 5 years), and I'll +1 this. Was a really solid company. I took multiple 3+ week vacations over my 5 years, and one 3 month vacation. In addition it felt like the company actually cared about me. I had the best work life balance of any company I've worked for at Atlassian.
Some other things about this article stood out to me though. The author brings up: "Interesting fact 1: Atlassian is the only company that has words "shit" and "fuck" in their core values." without the context here. These values are "Don't fuck the customer" and "Open company, no bullshit". It seems strange the author is calling out the language of values I actually feel were pretty decent. If anything this is just a reflection of word choices of Australian vs American cultures. It feels like the author is just trying to pull every gotchya out there due to a bad experience with a manager.
Engineers are not the customer, the executives of companies willing to sign off on the license fees are, they're the only ones they need to keep happy.
In fairness to Atlassian I work for a charity and we get to use their products for next to nothing and I've found Jira to be a valuable project management tool.
My experience is that dev's have...mixed feelings about it because it can get in the way of "actual work" but only a few of those dev's are as good and organised as they think they are. The rest it's like herding cats and without Jira or an equivalent they'd be churning out dogshit.
It’s interesting that as a dev my feeling about PM’s is more or less the same. Transforming the garbage in Jira tickets into something resembling a product is a challenge.
I've worked with some large Jira installations and I don't remember ever running into 10s page loads without a broken VPN/internet connection. This sounds like a very very broken setup.
My company uses Confluence (NOT self hosted) and it regularly takes 10s or more to load a page on a 400Mbit connection. Text content only, no diagrams. Confluence is a joke
I think, about 20 years ago, one of the street vendors at Badaling section near Great Wall of China had written their rules for employee on their back wall. One of them was
While others have said it's an Australian thing, to give an example a popular Sydney based pub-brewery down the street from me has the rule "No Dicks!" on their wall and it really works. Always a friendly place to be, the people genuine and a sense of community.
Swearing, when used properly, punctuates an otherwise boring corporate message.
For non-Australian companies, yes. But for Australian companies, it's the standard. It'd be like saying, "My employees in Spain are falling asleep in the middle of the day! It's so juvenile and unprofessional!" despite a seista being a cultural aspect of the country.
Keep in mind managers often make or break your experience. The article could be about OP’s manager as much as it could be Atlassian.
Companies that don’t provide any training and structure with how managers handle engineers end up with employees having wildly different experiences. So, I would find Atlassian at fault here
Atlassian is ultimately responsible for the experience of all employees.
That said, this employee seems to have long running grievances with his or her managers that predate the cancer diagnosis. Somewhere in there was a team switch (see the complaint about new techs / can't go back to the previous team.) So this spanned multiple managers.
As near as I can infer: the central complaint is Atlassian didn't offer longterm paid leave to deal with the cancer treatment, this employee didn't want to use unpaid leave, and Atlassian expected him or her to either work or go on unpaid leave. It's hard to tell.
This post and many of the details about it leaves me suspecting the relevant managers at Atlassian would tell a very different story.
Agree, direct managers, make or break all the difference.
Ex Atlassian. Worked on a good team. We were told we were seen as "high performance". I had positive reviews, was told I was, without doubt, the star/person who made the team, received a performance bonus when issued etc.
I had a great two years, and then the business wanted to change some stuff, new CTO making his mark, ban some languages we had been using for two years that enabled us to be high performance and instead work more like the CTO's ex company, Gumtree which while large are non-descript. The team wasn't happy. The team was systematically watered down/broken up/moved elsewhere/members were replaced to align with the CTO's opinions.
My manager, who had been good for the past two years, an evangelist for what we were doing and encouraging it, did a complete 360. What he was previously evangelizing for, he was actively hunting out, trying to crush and punish. Chat messages were being watched and then used against people in one and ones for criticizing specific code, nothing that looks out the ordinary on a dev chat room. A colleague and I talked outside work and later found we were being played against each other in a he said / she said. The same colleague got put on performance management for writing to many Lambdas in Java as we cannot be seen to be using the word Function anymore. My colleague resigned. On his last day, I was pulled into an office with some historic tweets on Twitter. Someone had actively searched me out on the internet, found some stuff to use against me, and I had my resignation on the table ready to sign. It gave me a bit of gardening leave just enough for some stock to vest as a severance package i guess.
The manager who only a few months earlier who had nothing but praise and actively encouraging my/my teams work had now gone online, typed my name into Google to see what they could find. They found some messages, admittedly silly for me to post but nothing terrible, and used them against me to get rid of me for doing what he was an advocate for before the new CTO tried to make his mark.
Worst sprint-review I'd ever been in, a team of 5-6 people, calling out issues with a pr, heads on desks because the manager says we have to merge a rewrite by another team. All devs were silent as they had already said everything, and the manager just pressed merge and said: "done".
The specific manager was very career-driven, and the best thing for his career was to follow CTO direction. Rather than bat for his team, he systematically rebuilt it and turned on people to move them on.
Glassdoor reviews around the time I left by other people where not great either.
It's very culty, you are either in the cult or not.
If you turn 360 degrees, you end up facing the same direction you were in before the turn. A U-turn is a 180, not a 360. That is why in great grandparent, "did a complete 360," does not mean what the writer thinks it means.
Yes, US median is something like 2-5 weeks maternity leave and many require you to exhaust all of your accrued paid sick time and PTO first and many of them also require you to file it as FMLA (the federal red tape/insurance program for long term leave) even if you don't plan to extend past "given" amounts of maternity leave. So yeah, in corporate dystopian America, 3-4 months sure looks generous.
I think you must misunderstand FMLA. FMLA is job protection to take care of medical issues (you or family member). It isn't really any red tape, but it prevents an employer from firing you during those 12 weeks and it prevents them from denying your PTO. So if you have 4 weeks of PTO saved up they cant deny your time off request to take care of your baby for 4 weeks. FMLA leave is unpaid.
I wish it were just me misunderstanding FMLA. It's not intentionally red tape and I was being a bit hyperbolic, but the "optional" certification forms for FMLA in the hands of a lot of corporate HR drones become "required" because HR wants "CYA" despite that not being the intent of the certification forms. Maternity leave doesn't even have a direct "certification form" nor is it supposed to because it should be pretty obvious to an employer (much less the Department of Labor) to "certify" a maternity, but a lot of mothers in the US workforce get burdened by idiots in their HR departments to fill out CYA paperwork sometimes in the hospital with an implied threat that their job is on the line if they don't. Despite that not being how FMLA works or is intended to work. I don't know why so many companies seem to misunderstand some of these basic facts about FMLA, I just know that forums are filled with pregnant people complaining about their HR representatives giving them paper "homework" sometimes in the worst possible moments, just to "prove" their maternity leave "because FMLA requires it". (It doesn't.)
A lot of people lean on grandparents or spouses for kids. But to be honest, we all worked from home so it wasn't a big deal. It was common to see kids or babies in Zoom calls.
As a parent of an infant myself (well she's one now), I cannot imagine trying to work while also caring for a child. Like I've done it, and it's incredibly, incredibly difficult.
But yeah, if both parents are working you need childcare, and that's expensive if you don't have (much) family support.
I fail to see how this is the company's problem. What if I take on a baby sloth that needs two years of potty training before you can leave it alone. Is my employer somehow morally responsible to make sure that I can stay home for this amount of time? Isn't the responsibly with me who actually chose to get the sloth in the first place?
Baby humans do eventually grow into productive adult humans who pay taxes, and parents who are given generous parental leave do better at their careers in long term. Therefore both are beneficial to a society. Of course a private company won't care for either - that's why in sensible countries you get 12 months of maternity pay, majority of which is paid from the social fund not by the company. After all we all pay taxes for something, no?
Surely you're not comparing the critical initial development of a human child to... having a pet, right? I sincerely hope I'm misunderstanding your position.
> I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave.
Is that supposed to sound like a lot? Not all commenters are from the US! Here in the UK, AIUI, it fairly recently shifted from 12mo maternity (paternity I think was employers' discretion entirely?) leave to 12mo split between parents as they see fit, and not necessarily concurrently or at birth, etc.
Germany: 14 months paid parental leave (“Elterngeld”), with max of 12 used by one parent, at 2/3 of average net from previous year, capped at 1800 EUR/mo, paid via the employment office. Months can be distributed as desired through first three years of child’s life. Outside of paid parental leave, either or both parents can opt to take unpaid leave, or work 15-30 hours/week (pay prorated, of course) until the kid is 3 - all of this is collectively called “Elternzeit”. My husband used his first Elterngeld month right after our kid was born, and is using his second now as I start back to work. It’s excellent, and everyone deserves this.
“Mutterschutz” is why I was put on paid leave six weeks before the due date, and forbidden to return any less than eight weeks after birth - that’s paid at a rate close to previous net and if there is a cap, it’s higher than my nice (by German, not US tech hub, standards) IT salary. Paid out of federal taxes, administered by employers.
10 of these 12 months are on statutory parental leave, which is something like 140£ per week. If you have a decent job, it’s almost equivalent to unpaid leave.
Recently companies started offering enhanced parental leave, usually 5-6 months of full pay, but it’s not even close to being the norm.
Ah. Hadn't appreciated that, thanks. I suppose that's still better than nothing though, so the USA's 3-4 full pay ends up more than 2, but another 10 months' pay however meagre with a job to return to seems better to me. I think (again, with no experience) in that situation I'd be optimising for time off rather than money anyway, once required amounts of each are reached I mean.
You can’t compare US benefits to UK benefits. I’m fairly certain Atlassian’s EU offices will have very different parental leave to the US. IIRC, Aus is 6 months
Well I'm comparing to UK (perhaps nee EU?) statutory requirements, of course there's some win-some/lose-some, I just think (even as a right-leaning^ bachelor) that's something worth legislating around.
Especially if you're (I'm not) pro positive-discrimination: the 'time with newborn vs. work/pay/career progression' decision is awful for gender equality, surely? Traditionally it is indeed maternity leave, and if you don't even mandate a good amount of that then the 'better hires' are men (all of us, family size decisions aside), women who won't-have/have-had children, and women who value career more.
(^: I say 'leaning' more because of US/UK political spectrum differences than anything else; feel free to read 'pretty solidly Conservative' in a UK context.)
Why? That grinds my gears. If the company believes in the values and benefits of longer parental leave (and I'm sure they say they do), why not enforce above the minimum in every country they operate in?
And in california, it's paid, but at 60-70% of wages. And capped at like $1357 a week. Better than nothing, but for most people here, it's not paid at your salary.
Yeah, that’s fair. Being in the US is amazing if you’re in the “in group”. But if you leave that narrow path for any reason, your quality of life begins to degrade quite quickly.
I never heard of a company giving less than 6 months. My wife works for a very large financial firm and it was 6 months. All startups I worked at were 6 months.
I got 3 months and that’s more than literally everybody I know in real life. Even that was longer than the company gave just a year prior, so long time employees were jealous.
I'm not trying to encourage anybody to quit their jobs for a different local job that I suppose will have better benefits - I'm commenting under the assumption that the discussion's a bit more abstract than that.
> We didn't even have to register our time off in a payroll system or anything like that.
This tells me that it was entirely up to your manager to be ok with it or not, as it wasn't tracked anywhere else.
That's a double edged sword. If you have an awesome manager, it's great. But if you have a workaholic manager, you'll have a difficult time getting any time off ever.
It's much better overall to have a policy of N days per year (none of the "unlimited" lies) that accumulate clearly on your pacheck, that way there is never doubt or argument as to how many days you have earned and can take.
You might have a skewed or incomplete perception I'm thinking... Neither of the holiday amounts you've quoted here are big in any sense, they're actually quite low.
It actually says in the beginning that he was a P5, which I assume to be over 200k total comp, which is more or less the top few percent of software engineers nationwide. That is a great comp package even for management. So if you are indeed that valuable, any company would want to retain you, and you could ask for a lateral move to a new manager, or just bolt when things get hairy. Everybody wants to retain or hire the top talent.
Edit: that is not to justify the alleged treatment, only placing the situation in relative terms. He wasn't being paid 80k at the only shop in town, with no other possibilities available.
> I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave.
So when you say 'manager' you mean someone like a team lead (line manager) and they kept their teams? At least that is what I would expect when you write 'wasn't a big deal' and judging from the other stories I am not sure that is the case.
How about male managers? Did they take parental leave too?
What does your contract say with regards to unlimited vacation?
If you take it literally how could they fire you if on your first day you leave for PTO and never return. I wonder if this has ever been tested in court
The OP quote about the female manager doesn't really imply whether it was paid or not, one way or the other.
That said, whether FMLA is unpaid or not depends on the state.
I took my 12 weeks of FMLA parent leave (as a father) and I was paid weekly by the state (California). There is a cap to what the state will pay so it was less than my regular salary but it was a paid leave with the state providing the income.
(On top of that my company made up the difference, but that was a benefit they chose to give. But even if the company was stingy and didn't want to pay anything during the leave, the state does provide some income.)
Companies implement this policy so that they don't need to pay out unused vacation days when an employee quits (which is required by law in many locales).
Further, people take less time off with unlimited PTO than with a fixed number of days. [1] Psychologically, this makes sense - with a fixed number of PTO days you feel entitled to take time off. With "unlimited PTO" you don't know where the boundaries are. At a former job, I had a good manager who asked HR for some guidance on "unlimited PTO" and shared it with our team. Unsurprisingly, HR had an unwritten policy for the number of days you could take off before you had to get PTO approval at the VP level.
This. Unlimited PTO is kind of a scam. Then again, I think most experienced devs know this. Come on, would a company really offer you unlimited PTO? No.
That said, I feel like I do have quite a lot of PTO and I feel free to take it. Having that confidence requires having an employer that gives you feedback on your performance and knowing that you've 'earned' the time off.
Even at companies with fixed PTO, there are still times when you just know taking the time off would be career suicide. Taking time off near a planned release date is just insulting to other team members.
There's a story I keep going back to that I think is useful here. Way back, 20 years ago, working for a newly acquired division of WindRiver, we had an informal policy where you just got your work done and could come and go as you pleased. A couple of young, new engineers weren't comfortable with the informal policy and asked for clarification during a company meeting with upper management. Of course the official answer was that you got X days off and it required managerial approval and blah blah blah. Fortunately middle-management continued to look the other way and allowed the informal system to continue. Sometimes there are unwritten rules in business. These are, unfortunately, often unfair for new engineers and under-represented groups who don't feel secure enough in their positions to take advantage of them. I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I like the quid-pro-quo system but I do understand that some people, especially engineers, have trouble with vagueness.
The problem is that informal policies can be bastardized by individual managers. Relying on rapport and good will doesn't work with narcissists (an extreme case) or people with different values (more mundane), for instance. And different values are common in most workplaces-- almost everyone has a slightly different answer for how much leave is too much.
I don’t think it’s that simple. If you’re willing to exploit unlimited PTO then it can be a better deal for the employee, you just have to get over your feelings about taking time off.
And if you exploit it, you'll get fired. And if you're so valuable to them that they don't care, they'd be flexible on limited PTO as well, and just give you extremely generous limits.
That'd make you a super star. "Exploiting" it means taking considerable time off -- if you're gone for a third of the year and you're still hitting your goals, you're in the top 5% and companies without unlimited PTO will also get you sweet deals.
But that's not what 95% of people are experiencing.
My only experience of unlimited PTO was at a startup that was very successful and full of people who worked very long hours and took almost no vacations. If you took a vacation everyone was very supportive, in the sense that: We are really glad you are doing this, we know how hard it must be for you to take a vacation.
In my second year when I let people know that I was going to a second five day vacation (ie two one week vacations in a year) I could see opinions of me drop considerably. I was not a team player.
If I ever were to work at a place with unlimited PTO, I would simply ask, what is the average PTO people take in a year. If they can't say, don't believe it. It's just a ploy to not have to account for vacation days or pay vacation days when there is turnover.
I really like this about my current employer. I take at least 4 weeks off a year in addition to medical/sick leave for things like dr's appointments and just not feeling well. They don't even track it as far as I can tell. Couldn't tell you my exact number I've taken this year or last year, but I take a full week every quarter and my managers have never quibbled about it or anything.
I don't think I'd work somewhere that was so nit picky about PTO and looked down on fellow workers for taking it. That way quickly leads to burnout and long term lower productivity.
We enforced a fairly strict “you should really take this minimum amount off per year” while we had our unlimited vacation policy. We never went so far as to punish anyone for not taking it, but we set the minimum expectations upfront, and that seemed to work well.
I’ll give you a funny opposing story. I worked at oracle data cloud, a very small section of oracle. We got unlimited pto but the rest of oracle didn’t. They wouldn’t rebuild/change the hr system so we were told to just not put pto in the system and take it as needed. When I left I had taken close to two weeks, but was also paid out more than one paycheck’s worth for my “unused” pto.
Unlimited PTO has the downside of having no minimum that lets you go and push back against managers who do not want you to take it/haven't set things up so you can actually use it.
I work for a company with unlimited PTO. However, if you are in a relatively niche role, it is hard to use as you block people when away. A couple colleagues have quit over it.
It is first and foremost a cost saving measure for the company as it is a simple policy to create and enforce, in my experience, and it avoids payouts for accrued PTO when terminating employees in some cases.
There are no federal or state laws mandating paid vacations or holidays. That's entirely at the discretion of the company.
There is no federal paid sick leave mandate. Some states have them.
We have a federal right to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for qualified medical and family situations under a law called FMLA, the Family and Medical Leave Act. Even that has limitations - small businesses, highly compensated employees, and new employees are carved out.
When you are hired, all of these are defined by the companies policies or what you can negotiate. If you have paid vacation time that accrues it'll be paid out if you quit; most companies don't like that, so they give you "unlimited time" on the approval of management. But because we have no statutory protection, your unlimited time could legally be "zero hours".
> There is no federal paid sick leave mandate. Some states have them.
Or, you get states like here in Texas, where the state senate just passed a bill making it impossible for cities like Austin to require companies provide sick leave.
This is also illegal in Mexico: Your contract must say the number of vacation days you have, particularly because at the end of every year you get a "vacation bonus" (prima vacacional) that is proportional to your total yearly vacation days (25% or 50% pay of each day). If you don't use it, they still have to pay you. Of course if someone put that they give ∞ vacation days, the amount to pay yearly to each employee will be quit a bit haha.
I imagine it would depend on the state. In California, I believe they can get away with putting "0" as the number of vacation days you are entitled to, so any of the "unlimited" days you take off are really at the whim of your employer.
Where I am in Canada (and I imagine many states) there are legal minimum requirements so I officially get "3 weeks" vacation, but take a couple weeks on top of that using the "unlimited" policy. So "unused" vacation would be paid out according to the official 3 weeks policy in my case. I could see something similar being possible in Europe, but I think in practice europeans already take more paid time off than most North American's with unlimited vacation.
There's no accrued PTO. You just work it out with your mgr and then just...go. And you get paid for it (at least in the companies I've had it) and come back and just go back to work.
I believe different states have different laws, but at least in my state an employer is required to pay you for your accrued PTO when you leave the company. Therefore, they have to have (and accurately track) PTO on their accounting books.
Years ago, the company I work for switched from accrued to unlimited PTO at the end of the fiscal year in order to make the books look better. When it was announced, they basically told everyone to take the remainder of the month off. The fiscal year happened to be the same as the calendar year, so most people were taking huge chunks of time off due to the holidays anyway and didn't really care. For those who had more PTO than what was left, they were told to work with their managers to arrange for as much time off as they felt was necessary in compensation.
This only worked because it was a one-time deal and the managers were (and mostly still are) very reasonable and supportive people. A while later we were merged with another company and they switched us back to regular PTO to be in line with their own HT policies.
It isn't meant to simplify admin, it's meant to prevent the company from having to pay out someone who worked for six years without taking a single vacation day, when they get fired/quit/die.
It's also why many companies hate carrying vacation days over - they don't want someone to save up three months of vacation that they earned at a low wage from getting promoted, and then receiving it in cash when they quit at a higher wage.
Given the choice, an employer will always prefer to keep payroll costs predictable.
> It's also why many companies hate carrying vacation days over - they don't want someone to save up three months of vacation that they earned at a low wage from getting promoted, and then receiving it in cash when they quit at a higher wage.
This can be a nasty carrying cost for companies.
I worked at a place that went from the standard accrual of vacation to "a minimum of 20 days/year, no carry-over."
To keep employees from engaging in open rebellion, they had to offer two tiers: either 1) you agreed to the new plan and gave your accrued time back, or 2) you keep your accrued time to date, received no more, and could join the new plan only when your vacation time balance hit zero.
The new employees, including me, quickly picked option one. The long-timers all picked option two, sat on their time, and cashed out when they went to other jobs.
I'd advise anyone in this situation to go with option 3) - find new employment and get the company to immediately pay out all that vacation time in cash possibly by booking your last three months with the company as solid vacation time. Once that's cleared up feel free to rejoin the company on option 2).
Earned vacation time is earned - companies trying to reclaim it are acting dishonestly and need to be avoided at all costs.
When my company switched to a use it or lose it system (with some extra days thrown in), they let everyone who had accrued vacation keep it in a separate category. I don't know if I'll ever use it but it's nice to know I have an extra bank of 3 weeks vacation if I ever want it.
Heh. $DAYJOB lets us accrue vacation and then get cashed out annually for anything over 160 hours (so it is "use it or we will cash it out for you"). It pays out at your new rate as well (since annual raises are on the same schedule). It used to be tied to your work anniversary date, but it is now "just after New Year's" for everyone to make budgeting easier. I understand why companies hate it, but I also like the way I get treated as a human rather than a nameless cog in a multi-billion-a-quarter monstrosity. I, personally, prefer the "let's be human" than "$$$ at all costs" end of the spectrum. Others seem to disagree.
As for how it gets used, apparently it's very bimodal and "everyone" is either a "keeper" or "flirts with having none".
Employers can always chose to force annual vacation payout - or have reduced hour rollover (i.e. halved if rolled over). I absolutely despise any sort of vacation reduction (or full disappearing on expiration) but having the hours paid out is a pretty equitable situation. If I want to take a vacation in January and am forced to take it using unpaid hours (I'll always talk to managers about carrying over hours for some fixed vacation if they're willing and usually get positive feedback) then I'll at least end up neutral at the end of the year (or employment) when those accrued hours get paid out.
Employers don't want to force payouts for the same reason that they don't want all the other sources of variability I listed. They budget for a payroll of X, not X + 7%.
I believe in California (and maybe one or two other states), you can't do use it or lose it. Though AFAIK, you can still cap accrual at some maximum. (i.e. once you've given someone a day of vacation you have to pay it out if they leave and haven't taken it.)
Personally I don't have a problem with "unlimited PTO" but (big but) there really does need to be a culture of people taking a reasonable amount which I would define as a month or so.
Right. Not that I personally care much for use it or lose it myself. It definitely requires more deliberate planning and potentially taking time at suboptimal times than an accrual/cap system assuming the cap is set at some reasonable level.
True, but this is an side effect once again of government meddling and it having unintended consequences
See the government saw employers with "use it or lose it" policy as "screwing over" the employee, so they ban it believing all companies would just accept they would have to allow accrual of PTO / Vacation time
Reality is that is not tenable for most companies and many people (like me) would just rack up years of time because we never take any off (when Possible I just cash out any PTO / Vacation I get, but many company stopped doing that as well)
So in response to the government banning employee lost their access to guaranteed number of days, instead how have this "unlimited" which is also an impossibility.
IMO "unlimited" is many many times worse than use it or lose it with a guaranteed number of days every year
FWIW, I've had unlimited PTO since the start of my career and I've definitely averaged somewhere between 5-6 weeks every year.
I think it's still a huge perk comparative to other options in America; companies that don't give unlimited typically just give 2 weeks, and you have to work your way up from there via the career ladder.
Europe has some of the highest amount of vacation time in the world. It is not "very limited". Of course we would all like to take more though. Here's a map of each country's minimum mandatory vacation time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...
You get more than 10% of your time off for work and that's "limited" to you? You expect your employer to pay you for not working 40% of the year?! Insanity.
> You expect your employer to pay you for not working 40% of the year?! Insanity.
Insanity is saying "You have unlimited PTO", when actually it's a very normal 20 days / year or whatever. Unlimited !=20 days. Just say you have 20 days leave and then it's clear to everyone involved.
I don't know about insanity, in Europe it is very clear what the contract and law says, and it is very simple. People usually have the holidays around the same time of the year. Then again the salaries are much, much lower than (some parts) of the US. You could see it as a tradeoff.
However it varies from country to country but in my understanding the difference to US is drastic.
To be honest, I think this is quickly becoming an outdated way of thinking that favors the business. There is room in our current model to respect that businesses, and the people who found and run them, have a bottom line and also need to grow. But there is also a lot of room for workers to be treated much more humanely than they are today. Why not try to give people 10%, 20%, or more of their time off? A major goal should be humans living their best lives, not just businesses achieving the highest valuation or dollar profit possible. And that is not the current paradigm. Even in Tech, where workers probably have some of the best bargaining power of any sector, most of the humane treatment is lip service. A more worker centric model is an inevitability - more time off, less hours per day, and less days per week worked. It's already happening.
1. I wouldn't call that necessarily insane, depending on the specifics of the work contract.
2. I think the objection to using the word "unlimited" is correct. The only way I can imagine a truly unlimited PTO policy working is if there were concrete performance metrics that I was expected to meet to retain my job. And if I manage to get a year's worth done on January 2nd, I can take off the rest of the year.
In accounting/finance terms the "unlimited" PTO equals 0 PTO, and this is why business loves it. Thus you don't earn it, and instead it is just like a bonus given [or mostly not] at the whims of the manager. The Atlassian HR response is a wonderful mix of the "more flexibility" BS and the true harsh reality of the "unlimited PTO" scam https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/...
Next thing is "unlimited" health insurance where your medical bills are paid [or not] at your manager approval :)
You're correct about unlimited PTO, it's absolutely a mixed bag.
I worked at Atlassian, and my experience was that people were actively encouraged to take between 20-30 days off per year, and that getting vacation was usually a mere formality - telling your manager "hey I'm planning to take the week of so and so off, any issue with that?" I never had vacation or sick time checked, never had any denied, and I very much took advantage of the benefit.
Still, the manager does have to approve it, so I have heard stories about teams that are understaffed declining vacation when they don't have enough people to be on call etc. I don't know how that would work out differently if you did have accrual vacation though... somebody does have to be on-call. It's tough.
I suspect that the same companies/teams that make it hard to take time under an "unlimited" plan would probably make it equally hard to take the 4 weeks of vacation you'd accrued under a traditional plan.
Grandparent post was in management, higher management wanted one of his reports disciplined for using the unlimited time off (in an amount that's not uncommon for anyone in management or with 5+ years at the company to have as vacation)
Parent is a lead/manager of some sort, and they were directed to verbally discipline a person who "reports" to them (IOW, works under parent commenter's org).
Having worked at companies that do both, I prefer the explicitly accrued/yearly allotment. There's less of "I'm back in elementary school and need to raise my hand and ask permission to use the bathroom" and more "This is my time, as long as I'm responsible I can use it essentially whenever". And that's with the previous unlimited time company actually being fair with it, I can't imagine how difficult it would be to use with a company that discouraged it.
It's a cost savings measure for CA companies to avoid having to hold employee's earned vacation hours as a liability to be paid out if they are unused when the employee separates. This is also why they cannot set a minimum, as that would indicate an amount of earned vacation per year.
To be clear, this is still very disingenuous and I believe companies should stop the practice.
It is a loophole in labor laws that CA's legislature especially should close because it is against the spirit/intent of the laws that vacation time should be an asset owed to the employee as part of total compensation, not a whim to be managed (removed without recompense) by the employer.
There are some companies where it seems legitimate, especially larger ones. I hear that at Indeed for example it is very legitimate. The problem in smaller ones is not so much that it is a deliberate lie, but rather a promise the business cannot keep as the bus factor for lots of roles is 1.
I don't fundamentally disagree with you that yes, of course there is always some ultimate limit, nor that it's generally done in bad faith as an accounting scam to get around legal paid time balance sheet requirements. That said, I don't think you're right here:
>otherwise you'd take 100% paid time off, get a second job, and collect two paychecks in perpetuity
Even if 100% genuine, "unlimited PTO" in no way implies PTO for any reason. It's not incompatible to offer it while at the same time having eligibility requirements and other continued employment requirements. At the most simple it merely means there isn't any set limit. A 25 year veteran who gets cancer can be treated differently then someone who just skives off to go party. The latter can just as easily be fired not for exceeding some arbitrary PTO limit, but absence from work without a listed reason in the contract, defrauding the business (if they lie about it), etc.
In practice I don't think "depending on the fuzzy discretion and good will of management/HR/whomever" is a good practical deal for employees in general vs actual hard PTO which translates to money, since at scale the incentives for the business just are not normally aligned that well and even on the employee side those who abuse it will inevitably arise as well further throwing the thing into a negative spiral. It wouldn't stun me though if someone could find a few real examples of companies that had it because they wanted to offer really good sick people more time, there are lots of ideas that depend on human factors which work very badly on average but well in instances.
Sure, if you approach everything in bad faith then yes it's not really "unlimited". That said, calling it unlimited is much easier than saying "we offer no set number of days, use what you need. you still work here though so you can't just not actually ever come to work. act in good faith, use good judgement" every time you open your mouth about a vacation policy.
>It's not legitimate, otherwise you'd take 100% paid time off, get a second job, and collect two paychecks in perpetuity.
This is not a great argument. Unlimited just means there isn't a pre-defined limit, not that every amount has to be approved.
Do you think there's unlimited amounts of money in the world? If yes, then by definition it's worthless (also, can I have a trillion dollars an hour?). If no, then what's the maximum amount of money?
So you mean 'no defined limit but definitely not unlimited' or do you mean 'unlimited except with the following limitations'?
You don't have a great argument.
I have unlimited PTO and have for quite a while and love it.
We are encouraged to take off at least 5 days a quarter / 20 days a year in addition to our holidays (which are flexible given culture, personal preference, etc). We don't count sick days or appointment time towards that. We can take off more, and frequently do, we just have to tell someone we're doing it.
We frequently are put on "nicely forced" vacations if our manager notices we have not taken off in a while. You'll usually get a message from your manager like "hey, schedule some time off in the next month, it's been a bit since you've been off".
This doesn't include parental leave as well, which is pretty solid compared to other places I've been.
I am a small business owner with unlimited PTO. It's not a passive aggressive lie. I want people to take time off. I just can't have large outstanding liabilities associated with accrued PTO.
Do your employees take more time off than they would otherwise get with accrued PTO? If yes, then I doubt it's the outstanding liability issue you are worried about, because you could just set aside revenue for that specific purpose, switch to accrued PTO and come out ahead. If your employees take less time off than they otherwise would with accrued vacation, then it sounds like a shit deal for your employees.
Why not require your employees to take the time off? You could even schedule it for them at the start of the year "Bob, you're off the first two weeks of May and last two in October" and make it easy for them to reschedule to times that suit them, but not to carry over unlimited amounts of it.
Can't you just force vacation time payout annually to avoid large liabilities? I've worked in places like that and it's usually received pretty well - there isn't any expectation of accruing half a year of vacation over several years of employment anymore - at least not in younger (under forty) folks.
Any company I've worked at with an accrual vacation system has typically had an accrual max, i.e. your vacation doesn't go away but you stop accumulating more when it hits the cap which is usually something like 1.5x annual accrual.
That's a good way to avoid the situation where employees need to take vacations as unpaid time in january but they still end up hitting the same issue in June (or whenever the cap kicks in). So if you accrued up to the max at one of these places would the additional time you would accrue just get immediately paid out? Or was no vacation time earned?
So let's say I earn 4 weeks per year. Don't take any vacation year 1 starting Jan 1. Still not taking vacation year 2. On July 1, I have 6 weeks in total. At this point, assuming a 1.5x accrual cap, I stop accumulating until I take some time off, at which point I start accruing again up to the same 6 week limit. (So no new vacation time is earned until you get below the 6 week cap. There's really no relation to the calendar year.)
I believe some places pay out unused while still employed but I've never seen this.
I worked somewhere where this was the case. A guy went on a two week vacation and called in every two weeks to extend it: for four months. Genius. After that, it was still unlimited, but after three weeks, it was unpaid.
This is the unfortunate truth of a lot of US labour laws and why I prefer it up here in Canada. I know with certainty that my coworkers (even university coops!) have access to good healthcare and have provincially mandated vacation time. I work hard in my position and carry a fair amount of responsibility that I've accrued over the years - but I don't want any of my coworkers, no matter how junior and no matter how short their stay at this company may be, to struggle to live a healthy life.
Depending on local labour laws this can happen to you even without unlimited PTO. I have a coworker in BC who was denied the ability to exercise their vacation during a three month crunch period - and then the company refused to pay out the hours and disappeared them into the aether - this tends to be legal in a lot of places when labour laws confirm that vacation is at the convenience of the employer (which is totally reasonable) but fail to mandate either vacation carryover or vacation payout - a lot of jurisdictions can allow this sort of grey area and if your company leverages it... Quit Immediately.
At my current and former company, both of which offer unlimited PTO, vacation requests are approved by HR, not your manager. Managers are only allowed to challenge PTO requests if they can demonstrate that the employee is not getting their work done. (For on call employees, managers cannot challenge PTO requested for periods when the employee is not on call.)
If blocking people is the problem, could you not take unlimited PTO in sub-week increments? Plus maybe a couple actual vacations a year near the holidays when people are all blocking each other anyway.
Seems like the perfect intersection of policy and need, if you would like to work fewer hours a day or fewer days a week. (Which, ok, maybe isn’t for you.)
While I'm sure there are some legitimate grievances here, nothing about this makes the author look credible in any way. Personally, none of the claims made here seem to stand up to scrutiny.
He claims that Atlassian has illegal hiring practices because of one instance where they passed on the first candidate that just cleared the technical bar? Or that unlimited PTO is a scam because his manager had to approve time off requests (completely standard practice - unlimited PTO or not)? Sorry, my pitchfork is staying put.
Disclaimer; I work at Atlassian as a Software Engineer.
First of all, he has this weird take at the very beginning
> Interesting fact 1: Atlassian is the only company that has words "sh*" and "f*" in their core values.
Those values are "Don't f* the customer" and "Open company no bulls**" (oh the irony). This 'take' immediately threw me off. Why would you even mention something this trivial? I'll give it a pass as his emotions were probably elevated.
> After being in the company for more than a year I had found that folks with children are less likely to get a promotion. I had no evidence, it was a feeling.
Most of the folks I've seen got promoted had children. Having no evidence to support your claim in an article like this (with a banger title) is a red flag to me.
PTO is unfortunately something that I'm unfamiliar with. The country that I live in prohibits unlimited PTO by law, so I've never had that experience. Although, using the PTO that I acquire is still subject to approval of my manager. That part of the story is what the author should have really focused on. Going after the whole company in such a vicious manner is not a good look in my opinion.
I agree with most of the top comments here. Stay low, get a lawyer, deal with this silently. Hope his wife has a fast and easy recovery. Tough times, tough challenges for the author personally. No matter how hard I try, I certainly wouldn't be able to fully empathize with him.
> Or that unlimited PTO is a scam because his manager had to approve time off requests (completely standard practice - unlimited PTO or not
If a company advertises unlimited PTO but then the company(or it's representatives) block my ability to take PTO, then yes it is a scam.
Why doesn't Atlassian keep track of requests/denial rates and then intervene since they're so benevolent and worried about the potential future employees well-being?
But it would equally be a scam is I explicitly earned a given number of vacation days and couldn't take those.
My main objection to "unlimited PTO" is that it really puts the onus on the company to set some expectations and stick with them, e.g. "While it will differ by workload/deadlines/etc., a normal expectation is that employees take 3 to 5 weeks in a typical year." (or whatever.)
While the veracity of this is hard to determine, these sort of actions don't surprise me. If you have some of this evidence in writing, a lawyer might be a good place to start.
However, what really stood out to me was the design, or lack of it. The childish paint.exe job on the hero image doesn't help either. It really reads like a scrawled out screed of grievances, being aired without much forethought.
IANAL, but my understanding in the jurisdiction in which I live is that having this sort of stuff up can actually make your case harder! Refine the message and make it much more clear and logical.
In my opinion, you should take this down and contact a lawyer.
It really depends on what they want to accomplish. Perhaps given the choice of (1) publicly exposing the company and causing them reputational harm, and (2) in X years time getting a Y$ settlement and having to sign an NDA saying they cannot speak ill of the company in return, they prefer 1. They don't seem to be trying to go the lawsuit way and they don't mention it in their post.
If people don't speak out about bad conditions in the workplace, it will get swept quietly under the rug. With this, the information is out there for people to make their own judgements about it.
I'm glad they drew the dicknoses, it makes it memorable.
Legal recourse is only one avenue; a settlement usually involves hushing up. That's incompatible with warning others.
I agree. There's value in people getting angry enough that they prefer to attack as hard as they can, instead of getting the best outcome for themselves.
> However, what really stood out to me was the design, or lack of it. The childish paint.exe job on the hero image doesn't help either. It really reads like a scrawled out screed of grievances, being aired without much forethought.
Can you blame the guy?
Im not some emotionless robot - I would be absolutely furious if I was peddled lies from my employer and be treated this way too.
This notion that we need to rise above things at all times is just silly. The man has a lot on his plate and has every right to scribble on two Atlassian peoples image.
I mean, his wife has cancer, and he's being fucked with. It's easy to say from a distance that one should deal with everything in a calm, rational manner.
Well, my fix would be to remove the "dick face" art.
And, if I was feeling fancy, spend an hour or two applying consistent styles, and trying to apply a linear and progressive story structure to the posts to help people understand the charges better.
One of the pennies that's been dropping for me recently is that extreme duress can provoke a mindset/belief that the capacity is not available to fulfill a particular global set of role(s), position(s), task(s), etc (in this case spanning worker/workplace-politician/father/husband/carer/human being). This "over-duress" seems to manifest as a sort of fundamental loss of core equilibrium that leaves an existential vacuum in its wake (maybe a bit like the mental spoon counter going negative), and if pushed far enough (circumstances hit the sour spot just right), I've noticed this can involuntarily be expressed to others in a somewhat irrational/illogical, clingy, needy, and unfortunately sometimes cringy way.
While I don't think this particular case is as extreme as the end-state suggested by the trajectory described above, I find it interesting that the OP of the domain has the execution to put a domain and webpage together, and has published info that describes a situation that, in theory, is still redeemable... although now that this been published I do definitely think that it's a given that there's not very much this person can do to recover their professional relationship and retain their job with everyone keeping a straight face when they theoretically next come in to work. (Cue guaranteed awkward conversation the moment they get in...)
I definitely get "just leave already, or hire a lawyer" vibes from this, but it's clear this person is at 101% emotional saturation and don't have the attention span for that, sadly. It is an excellent philosophical question as to whether this means this person's overall mental competence should be taken into question - if I'm ruthlessly honest, that's the instinctive response I have to this sort of thing, yet it's also entirely inappropriate in just about every realistic and non-realistic context I can think of. Yet it's what my brain reaches for every time. Uncanny valley is stupid sometimes.
So I guess the caveat emptor for businesses here is, sometimes people will find themselves between rocks and hard places and try to get out of them by taking you up on claims that would reasonably be immediately disregarded as fashionable puffery ("unlimited PTO" is very obviously impossible).
This person obviously doesn't care about the money. They are understandably bitter and angry and lashing out. Not sure what else to say about it. Feels a little voyeuristic just to have read it.
For the author this isn't the best way, a lawyer and some settlement + NDA would have been. But for the community it's good that he choose to publish it and allow others to see this perspective.
Not sure whether Atlassian would want to sue, that could become yet another example of the Streisand effect...
Another ex-Atlassian here - this post sounds a world away from my experiences. I have narcolepsy, and I told my team, and everyone was super accommodating. On nights when I didn't sleep well (I also have epilepsy, and sleep deprivation can cause seizures), I'd just take the day off, or take a half-day. I never had anyone complain or make an issue of it - the other way round actually, sometimes I'd wfh and everyone would tell me that I didn't have to.
I worked in the US office for a while and I took heaps of leave - at least 6 or 7 weeks, but broken up into bits. I guess it depends on your manager, but for my office the sense was generally that you could just organise time off and put in a request, and it would be granted - at least for short holidays. If you wanted to take multiple weeks off, you were meant to discuss it with your manager and it could be denied, but from what I experienced, they would try to see how to make it work.
I actually ended up quitting because I got put under a bad manager, and that definitely is an issue - some people were promoted into management too early, and without enough training, and they weren't great at it. I know Atlassian had identified that as an issue that they were trying to solve, but I guess it's not that easy. Reading this article, it sounds like the poster probably had one of those managers.
But yea, when I left, there was this whole option to keep health insurance for a month or so after leaving (I didn't need it as I was going back to Australia, so I didn't pay that much attention). OP's experience sounds awful re: dealing with his wife's cancer and a poor manager, but I don't think his claims are entirely fair.
It seems like a sad story all around. All of the parts about how the PTO works seems pretty normal to me though. You definitely do not accrue any days in an Unlimited PTO system, that is the whole point of it. The company wants to clear themselves of the obligations that comes with accrued vacation days.
As an Engineering Manager myself though, I just cannot imagine not giving this guy as much PTO as he needed. I would have at the very least tried to work with him to help as much as I could such as maybe having him only work 2-3 days a week for a while. So just based on his version of events I tend to blame the managers and how they handled it. Even if I was getting pressure from my manager I would stand up for anyone that reported to me and their need to have time off in this situation.
I hope his wife is recovering and that he has landed a new job somewhere.
I'm not impressed by this hit piece. Maybe it's because I'm already jaded that "unlimited PTO" never really means that at companies, especially if it's only manager approved PTO. Offering medical leave where you keep your benefits seems reasonable to me (if not preferred? I don't see how this would qualify for PTO. Taking medical leave is something I see regularly, even at companies with "unlimited" PTO). Not being promoted while you're not working seems reasonable to me. This person is clearly very angry, to the point where they're trying to find any way to hit at Atlassian, like "there's favoritism," which is true of 99% of companies. I think the try-to-hit-from-every-angle result of the anger works against them in their main point that they were mislead into thinking they could use PTO to care for a loved one.
What a weird perspective this is. There is a man whose wife is dying. He needs support from his employer because that's what's paying the bills for the food, shelter, and medical bills that pile up while he's taking care of her. He's put in all his time and effort into helping the company succeed, now he's asking for some leeway when shit hit the fan for him.
It's so pedantic to then point to these random rules, which are specifically designed to screw the employee over, and then say 'welp, those are the rules, too bad'. It also goes against the company mantra, of putting your health before the company (as he states in the article).
The guy in the article even stated:
> - No, it's not even a question, because you won't be using it as a vacation, right? Technically you won't be on PTO, so take a medical leave.
> It sounds very touching, but I didn't recognize the trick here. They wanted me to use my medical leave, because they didn't want to pay for the PTO I earned.
The point here is that the company didn't want to pay the guy for his hard-earned PTO. They pulled out all the stops to avoid paying him. They instead wanted to give him unpaid medical time off. Then they said they couldn't approve PTO because they didn't have enough office coverage, yet his boss took a month off.
So why can't he use his PTO? That's his money, his wife is dying, and his mental and physical health is at an all time low. Let him use his damn PTO.
Any manager under me who refuses PTO to someone caring for a loved one in such a mentally wrenching situation like this deserves to get fired themselves. And if I have anything to say in the matter, they will be, in short order.
He didn't say his wife was dying. Colon cancer is not automatically fatal. The problem is that these are always one sided stories and it's impossible to get the full picture...how can you even begin to adjudicate this by assuming his claims are true?
Doesn't sound like he had much PTO anyway. Why wouldn't he just take leave? If he wanted to take PTO and then dip into leave when it runs out, there may be legal reasons you can't do that.
Yeah agreed - the emails they show also have bad grammar and misspellings too along with the general writing.
It's basically understood that unlimited PTO means untracked and within some reasonable amount - if you were at an At Will company in the US they don't owe you much. Obviously you can't just take 3 years off of 'unlimited PTO' so it's hard to claim you truly believe it's limitless imo.
Expecting a promo when you're not working and expecting to be able to just take infinite vacation (even when dealing with tragedy) is just not realistic. There are other options (medical leave, extended leave, etc.) - some companies will go out of their way to be kind, but I wouldn't have that as my expectation.
This kind of rant doesn't look great either - my take away is this person was probably just difficult in general, there may have been other reasons they were not promoted.
> my take away is this person was probably just difficult in general, there may have been other reasons they were not promoted.
My general impression is that it's the difficult people who use terms like "toxic" to describe those they clash with. His "Interesting fact 1" is also a red flag. Dirty words in some internal memo? I'm scandalized!
I don't like Atlassian for their slow software, but I'm sure it's a fine company to work for.
"Gaslighting" is another one that seems quite a decent heuristic; I find that people using this to be less than reasonable in a well above-average number of cases.
Of course, as with any heuristic it's far from perfect, and the author may very well be in the right here. It's impossible to tell from this piece and there are a few eyebrow-raisers – so all I can give this story is a shrug.
> I've been working two years without promotion, bad Atlassain.
> I went on PTO and another worker took over and important project. This coworker did a fantastic job on a project with high visibility. They got promoted, not me.
The reason you took PTO doesn't really matter, work either got done by you or it didn't. The one the that did the work got promoted, pikachu face meme.
Yes, the wife's diagnoses sucks a lot, and you should probably get PTO in some way, but the promotion points are just weird.
I’ve never said no to a PTO request on my team since we adopted Unlimited PTO, but now I’m finding out that it’s been abused elsewhere and actually constitutes a red flag. I wonder if our company should revert to traditional PTO so that prospective candidates don’t avoid applying.
Unlimited PTO is widely adopted because companies now know that people statistically take less PTO and the less ethical of those companies would like to exploit that.
I would rather work for a company that gives a generous amount so that I can work within the parameters / not feel guilty. It also allows me to put a total value on a offer as well.
My wife had a heart attack not long after giving birth to my second child. My parental leave was planned for a few weeks later. When I got the call, I closed my laptop walked out of a meeting and went to the hospital. I didn't come back to Atlassian until my life was sorted out many months later.
They handled everything for me to make it easier.
I'll add that they pay 100% of my health plan and the birth of my kids cost less than the 3 whole foods bag I bought on the way home.
I'm sorry I can't speak to details as this is all very personal for the folks involved, but I know all the people involved in this story and can tell you this is not a very fair account of what happened. It was a long-running and very difficult situation for everyone involved.
In other posts you seem quite willing to disclose very specific details of the situation, like what leave the person in question did and didn't take. But you're not telling us the details that supposedly constitute Atlassian's side of the story. Isn't that interesting?
Maybe Atlassian's side of the story doesn't actually look so good for Atlassian.
The details I’ve commented on are the ones present in the authors writing. Atlassian is not perfect, but the story as told is far from complete. But beyond that, I don’t have anything to gain from elaborating, and the author is already angry and going through a lot, so why pile on?
My experience was that Atlassian was very generous with PTO, but it's true there was no accrual. I was encouraged to take 20-30 days off per year, and I did, and I never got pushback. My experience was that nearly everyone took 4-5 weeks off per year, and those that did not were often encouraged to take more PTO.
There was an entitlement for 6 weeks paternity leave and 6 months maternity leave, which is very good for the US.
But there is no accrual. I know that some people there had a really hard time with the idea of "unlimited" and felt that they could't use their time off if they didn't know how much they "really" had. The truth was you really had as much as your manager said, but this sucked for managers because occasionally someone would abuse it and try to just work 3 days a week, so they tried to give guidance. The standard guidance was "we want you to take at least 20 days off, and you should be fine up to 30, if it's more than that we might start saying no."
The person who wrote this post did not, and still does not, understand that this guidance is not the same as accrued vacation.
No it's not true at all. I recently left Atlassian after working there 4 years. 3-5 weeks felt like the average PTO my coworkers would take. It was an easy-going system.
I don't know if OP had a particularly bad manager as that happens in any large company, but no one I worked with ever brought up any issues.
Atlassian does not have an “unlimited vacation” policy per se, but it has a “flexible, non-accrual, discretionary vacation policy” called “vacay your way.” Like unlimited it does not set an annual limit, but there are policies around how it is used, key being (a) it should be coordinated with manager (and your team) (b) no more than 30 consecutive days. Otherwise people are encouraged and do take random days off, go on planned one, two, three or four week vacations.
Prior to working here, all the places I had worked allowed me to accrue vacation, which I rarely used and cashed out when I left the company. For me, at the time, I thought it was fine. But when I joined Atlassian, i was looking for better work life balance, and I found it versus prior employers. I was very well aware that I need to use may vacation, because there is no cash equivalent. In fact, I tell all my coworkers to take vacation frequently even if you just stay home and play games all day… often times they are reluctant (American work habits are quite unhealthy). So in the years since joining, I have taken far more vacations per year without any impediment or scrutiny. My managers (had quite a few over the years) never questioned it and it took a while for me (personally) to get used to just taking breaks and going on vacations or just staying home… again, bad American habit of overworking and thinking I need to carry more than my load at work.
At Atlassian, my understanding is any employee can take off two consecutive weeks, and will talk to the manager if they want to take off more. Many employees take sporadic days off throughout the year for whatever reason, for kids, health, needing to just get away. I personally never had a problem in asking for or receiving vacation. The problem I usually see is people choosing to not take time off, and that leads to burnout.
As noted, Americans often do not take much vacation, and this is why there is a lot of discussion about accrual and cashing out. I think the program allows people to just take time off anytime for big or small reasons and not worry about counting the time off. It is very much about the freedom from worrying about if you have time to take, and the flexibility in taking it when you need it.
In the past 12 months, I have taken over 30 days off (probably closer to 40) without anyone batting an eyelash. Those days off were both planned vacations and random days off due to being sick, tired or some other person reason. I never needed to ask for the time off.
It looks quite generous by American standards (maybe on par with european), and I would say I was never able to take this much time off at other employers, unless I did not use it one year and had it roll over to the next.
In addition to vacation time, Atlassian does provide other generous leave:
During COVID we also have a nice benefit for all employees globally to take up to a month off due to stress of the pandemic, no approvals needed.
I have seen friends and coworkers use the generous parental/maternity leave which is very generous for Americans. I don’t know all the details, not having a kid born while working here, but it is something like maternal (child bearer) is 26 weeks, parental (spouse) is 20 weeks, both at 100% base pay.
We also have have paid leave to care for a family member for 7 weeks at 100% base pay. Something I also have not needed (thankfully) but know others have needed.
So I honestly do not understand all the scrutiny over Atlassian vacation and leave policies. It is not quite “unlimited vacation”, it is “vacay your way” and it is pretty fair and flexible.
I get the OP had their own unique circumstances, but it does not reflect my own experience (obviously) and of those I work or socialize with at Atlassian. I sympathize for them and wish them and their spouse the best.
Believe what you want. I no longer work at Atlassian, and I had my own frustrations with the company. There are definitely some internal struggles, and specific teams under a lot of pressure, and if you get caught in one of those situations it sucks. The specific team this person was on is under a lot of pressure, and this person is not the only person who quit over it.
But the person who wrote this article did not give an accurate portrayal of the entire situation.
Yes, the five month old account with a whopping 67 karma is questioning another account's legitimacy. You'll be needing a knife for cutting through that irony.
It's obvious what the implication is, yes. It's also not the charitable interpretation that the HN guidelines suggest. Especially when using one's five-month-old account to talk smack to people one has never met, let alone know where they work.
Hi Mike. The fact that you discard my comment based on the measure of "karma" or how "old" my account is just as childish and "talking smack" as what you insinuate I am doing. You believe you are on the side of good moral but you are merely on the side of the self proclaimed strong.
I once quite a job because they did not want me to take off for a week during Thanksgiving because of a deadline ... in January. Never took a vacation before that. Never again will I settle for unlimited PTO.
Every time I have ask during interviews with unlimited PTO companies about how much PTO an average employee takes, they never have an answer.
The advantage with companies with set amounts of PTO is that they end up either needing to roll those hours forward into the next year, pay them out - or look like a total ass and expire them (often a combination of two or all three). When you have a fixed amount of PTO there's more clear accountability about where unused hours go and, potentially, you can reclaim missed vacations in the form of an end of year payout that compensates you for the lack of a vacation.
Oh gods - I've never worked at a place with unlimited PTO and that sounds miserable. I'm a highly visible employee who fields a lot of questions from junior and intermediate folks - taking a three week block off always means the other very senior dev needs to shoulder the load (but we're on good terms and happy to see each other balance work and life)... more senior folks would be less able to take vacation due to how much more visible their absence would be.
It should be ok for absences to be visible. And if they are more than just visible, you have a bus factor problem, and past a certain company size that's not something you should have.
But if it's a question of balancing your standing then it's all about visibility. If I'm off in a corner working maintaining some legacy system as a team of one that has somehow failed to be replaced in twenty years then I could just continuously be on vacation - additionally voluntarily taking odd working hours (like working 8PM-4AM) would also make it much less obvious that you're snogging vacation... except to the management team which usually can't comment on things like that except to consider firing you.
I haven't done it for a while but I've certainly taken off 3 weeks at a time previously. And if you count a combination of work travel and PTO, I did it last about a month before the pandemic hit.
And as others have noted, taking multiple weeks off is quite normal in Europe.
This makes me think of the spate of mental health initiatives I've been seeing in workplaces over the last few years. It's a cynical opinion, but I can't believe anyone actually cares. Things like team "check in" calls and higher ups saying you can approach them about anything. But outside of maybe direct colleagues I trust on a personal level, I wouldn't tell anyone anything. I imagine if you went to someone higher up the chain and said you were depressed and anxious, or, god forbid, approaching suicidal, they would hand you off and put as much distance between you and them as possible. Maybe not care at all isn't right, but rather the care is reserved for non-complex, easy to solve issues, and anything beyond that carries stigma and poses some level of risk for your employer.
I'm skeptical that this person's initiative will lead to positive outcomes, but all the best to them and I hope their wife recovers fully.
I'm sorry that your wife is fighting cancer. It's terrible and i wish you overcome it together.
But other than that i don't get the article. You are a software engineer in US. You are part of the elite, you have top salary, you will probably never have to worry about job security and money. You can make decent savings. You have powers to build your own business. Something a few billions other people don't have. Yet you are crying like a baby that you maybe got a bit screwed. Take it as a lesson for your next interviews and employments with other big and rich technology companies. It's not like you spent your whole life there.
This article doesn’t represent my experience at the company so far at all. My team has been super chill about taking 3-4+ weeks of PTO, we’ve got people having kids and getting promo, we have people taking parental leave and coming back in good standing on the team, and we’ve had people take carer’s leave without any problem.
Not sure if this person was in bad standing with the team to begin with or just happened to have a tough manager, but this kind of vitriol is not at all justified from what I’ve seen at the company.
I have seen several overly entitled people throw tantrums about inadequate pay/benefits/conditions since I’ve been here, and that’s pretty much how I would categorize this website.
> This article doesn’t represent my experience at the company so far at all.
Good for you, but your personal experience is not really relevant. Assuming the article is true, it sounds like Atlassian allowed a bad manager to make some very poor decisions.
> just happened to have a tough manager
You make it sound like it's an act of God. "Just happened". No, it's Atlassian's fault here, they advertise some values but don't really enforce them.
I don’t understand why the author didn’t take medical leave. That’s exactly what this is for. You get reduced pay while on leave, though you can work with the company to see if they can fulfill a portion of that. My current employer covers 30%, while short-term covers 60%. 90% pay to be able to completely disconnect from work for several months is absolutely worth it.
It does sound like communication with the manager was poor, though. The manager should have been more empathetic to their situation (depends heavily on how comfortable the employee was with giving out this information).
It's true that "unlimited" is just a scam so that the company doesn't have to pay accrued unused vacation. I think most people just read between the lines and understand it is "unlimited with manager approval." 8 weeks is quite a lot. I don't know anyone at my unlimited vacay company that has taken that much. 4 is normal. 6 is kind of pushing it. I usually take 2. This is the US, though, I've heard Europeans expect more.
Maybe instead of demanding 8 he should have just offered to take 4 and use family medical leave for the other 4. Seems like a fair offer that works out to 50% salary. FMLA is more legally protected than PTO as well, since the PTO could have fine print, essentially, saying it is with approval.
I've definitely been in the position before where my SO needed more care than I could give when going through a tough pregnancy and after without getting negative comments from management about my availability. In my case I hired a nanny. Could be tough for him if he's more cash strapped, though. Still have my job, however.
Also, he might be better off removing a lot of the informal language about "lies" and "shit". People will take him more seriously if he makes the tone a bit more objective while still pointing out the employers' legal obligations weren't met if they violated FMLA, or the weaker argument that they didn't provide what offered in the job listing if that's the strongest argument against them, etc..
Do people really come back from a 6 month paid parental leave and expect to get promoted? No shit the coworker who busted their ass the entire time will get picked over you. That isn't discrimination, just reality.
Unlimited PTO appears to be a bone of contention here. The simple fact is that "unlimited" PTO is never unlimited in practice, and there's the all-important caveat of "subject to management approval" even with unlimited PTO. Unlimited PTO is simply a way for the company to get away with no money paid out to you at separation from the company. In that sense, it really is a scam that can entrap the unwary and the naive.
The other fact of life is that HR is there to protect the company, not the individual employee, when there is a problem. The priority for HR is to eliminate, reduce or limit company exposure to liability from noncompliance with employment law. A secondary objective is to be the eyes and ears of the company (via exit interviews, complaints from disgruntled employees, etc.). As with any job function, HR can also fail at this task (the Susan Rigetti case at Uber), sometimes in spectacular ways. If you are in an adversarial situation with the company, be very careful about HR and document every single dealing with them. Seek independent legal counsel, and walk away from a bad employment situation before you even need to seek out such support.
So it turns out people were taking much more time off now than when PTO was unlimited. They started denying request and making up trivial rules, like 2/3 of your team must be available at any time (regardless of the team size), oh, and those rules weren't in the official policy. Good luck trying to get specifics in writing.
Eventually they changed back to an unlimited policy but secretly told managers they should start denying requests after x number of days have been used. I think it was five weeks, which again is still generous but it bothers me because the intent is to hide that number in hopes that people will use less. I also get no tracking for how many days I've already taken unless I go through my requests and count the approved ones myself.
The unlimited policy is definitely a scam at many companies. Most of my team has been denied requests for reasons that don't exist in the written policy, like, "you recently had PTO already." Honestly I'd rather have a policy that only allowed 3 or 4 weeks with a minimum mandatory that each employee is required to take at least two weeks off per year.