On paper I’ve never used up all my PTO, even though in reality I was probably taking more time off than I was allotted. None of my managers have ever cared, and one of my first managers even explicitly told me not to bother reporting PTO (“you can get a nice check when you leave for unused PTO”).
Obviously this varies from place to place, but I believe the practice was pretty widespread in silicon valley at least. And this was one of the justifications for companies moving to “unlimited” PTO policies - employees weren’t reporting PTO diligently, and they didn’t like having to pay people out when they left.
Hard disagree. Everyone's mentioned the toxic workplace thing, so I won't bother, but I will say that I loathe having some limited number of vacation days per year that I have to ration out like a starving orphan with a slice of bread.
Do I skip the 4th of July beach trip so I can have an extra three days around New Year's? Should we leave on a Friday to visit the grandparents, or should I save that day in case I need it in the fall?
And in December, suddenly half of my coworkers realize they have two weeks left to spend 9 vacation days they didn't think about, that won't roll over and get paid out - and now, it's me and one other person having to split the on-call shift to cover.
Give me unlimited PTO. I'll fight for it in a toxic workplace, and/or get another job.
You'd think, but we went from 'unlimited' to .. maybe that, but nobody will say what the definition of the term we use for the 'above minimum' is. Frankly I'd rather have it fixed at any positive number of days above the current contractual amount than have this ambiguous, stressful, manager-dependent, inherently unfair non-quota.
I'm in Canada, and that's how the unlimited PTO work here. Because there's a legal minimum by law (afaik), we track PTO and how much balance we have. And they have to pay if you have a positive balance - in case you weren't taking the PTO.
I hear you, brother. It's not my situation now, but I have had years when I would go in to work feeling awful so that I could have a day to use when my child turned up sick.
I turned down 2 consulting offers because of unlimited PTO. One person I knew who worked at one place said it as impossible to get more than 4 weeks and most people got 3 based on metrics.
Took a boring corporate job with 25 days plus a lot of extra time for sick family, 3 months of paternity leave, and lots more holidays.
Indeed it is a scam. Biggest problem with unlimited pto is that managers don’t care until you take what they feel is a disproportionate amount of time off. With a fixed number of PTO days, managers can tell you take time off , so they don’t have to pay out at end of fiscal year for unused days.
Real PTO is a liability that shows up on the company's balance sheet. I'm sure they care if their manager tells them, "hey we need to reduce the amount of outstanding PTO and your department is dragging us down, fix it".
At least at my job it “comes out of my paycheck” and “budget” because my employees bill their time and all my KPIs are based on yadda yadda so yes short sighted managers could see it see it taking from both. Personally I’m not a numbers person and would rather concentrate on having a good team and producing a good product and let the numbers do what they do. I don’t even look at PTO requests and just approve them.
I prefer unlimited PTO. I can see toxic workplaces making it worse than the alternative. But I’ve only worked in places where it was no issue for me to take 4-5 weeks off per year on their unlimited vacation policy.
Well, yeah. Everything is easy in a functional workplace. You can even have de facto unlimited PTO while not having it officially.
Official Unlimited PTO is a scam because of how easy it is to abuse in toxic workplaces. It’s a shortcut for saying there’s no minimum and you can take vacation when everything is caught up (nothing is ever caught up).
I was lucky enough to work at copy.ai as they were defining their PTO policy and got the CEO to agree to unlimited PTO along with a minimum of 3 weeks.
This is the best way to do it. The biggest blocker to folks taking advantage of the unlimited PTO is "my peers aren't doing it", which required PTO circumvents neatly.
And forcing people to take PTO (especially in 2+ week chunks) is also a good thing for the company: it helps the company identify and fix single points of failure in their employees skills and knowledge.
And for those of you who are lucky enough to to currently have non-toxic workplaces, are you sure management changes or business needs wont change this in the future?
Exactly. Sure, take your PTO, just get three approvals first, use this broken online HR web site to make sure payroll knows, and confirm that this is your cell phone number just in case we need to reach you. Oh wait, no, sorry, that date range is our really busy season, no big deal, don't worry the Grand Canyon will still be there next month.
So why not just call it "Our lovely 5 week vacation policy?"
Do you actually prefer the gratuitous cognitive dissonance of calling it "unlimited" when everyone knows it isn't (and everyone knows that everyone knows, etc)?
If it's a set number then usually you need to worry about how many days you have accrued. So you are not able to take 1 day PTO until you've worked for a few weeks. Or you might have trouble scheduling time off early in the year having used most of your allowance around the holidays. Unlimited means the system is flexible.
If it’s unlimited PTO, why not take 52 weeks off a year?
I got a job offer from a company that offered unlimited PTO a few months back and wish I had accepted and then given that a shot.
Edit: If you’re downvoting me because “of course unlimited doesn’t mean unlimited”, you’ve just stumbled across the reason why unlimited PTO policies are nonsense.
That doesn't make sense. If you are fired one time, you can't be fired the other nine times unless you were rehired[1]. What you are saying is a contradiction.
1: and it is not likely you'll be rehired if you haven't done any work
It's also true that he can't possibly take the entire year off as PTO, because he'd be fired before it's allowed to happen. So taking a full year PTO is already a contradiction.
Then in classicial logic, a contradiction can imply anything:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
Therefore he can be fired 0,1,2,10,100,1000 times, with all those possibilities being true simultaneously.
It isn't exactly a scam. But the of needs to be enforced. My wife's company has a lottery for people who take at least three weeks of (she gets unlimited pto)
Where it can be a scam is when you request it and get rejected.
People who think of their time off in terms of monetary value often see it that way, but if the problem you're trying to solve is less like "how to I maximize the value I accrue from this job" and more like "how can I make time for all the things I want to do with my life", doing away with the nickel-and-diming scarcity feeling which comes from rationing out and accounting for a limited number of PTO days can make it much easier to actually use and enjoy time away from work.
In contrast, my first SWE position out of college adhered to PTO allotments and I accrued 6/8 of a day off each month I worked. Then, my father died, I missed a couple of weeks, and spent several years in time-off debt! Three hours south of SF.
Conversely, I just came from an employment situation with unlimited PTO. After an especially long project, I took three solid weeks off to recover. This gave the CEO pause, but it was in alignment with our policy, I was grateful, and, I think, the company benefitted significantly from my efforts while I was available!
No real point to make here, I suppose. Just sharing a varied experience.
This kind of empathatic, humane management is quite rare.
I have seen that the manager lets it slide but behind the scenes "keeps record" and it shows up in your performance report. This usually happens when the manager is under pressure themselves and needs to find a scapegoat. Who better to scapegoat that the undocumented PTO taker.
This is my experience as well. I worked at 5 different companies in my career and at 3 of them nobody cared about reporting PTO.
Now we have an “Unlimited PTO” policy and everybody on my team takes roughly a month off every year and nobody cares.
This is in NYC. Not Silicon Valley but it seems culture is similar.
I'm left a bit confused here about your interpretation - or at least those of your managers.
When we're talking about this "nice check when you leave" - what does that money represent? If you are taking more time off than your official policy it isn't compensation for working more hours than expected.
Yeah, I get the mechanism of what is going on. I'm more interested in why all the parties involved think doing that is justified. Why do people think they should be given a lump sum when they quit. Do they see it as linked to leave somehow? Is it just custom to have a goodbye gift? Do they see it as a bit dishonest but an open secret? Or is it an implicit right?
I would say it was an open secret that was a bit dishonest. It’s a little thing that managers can do to keep their employees happy that doesn’t come out of their budget. And in addition to providing a little bonus compensation, it also eliminates a somewhat dehumanizing aspect of having to ask for permission and track time away from the office.
This was many years ago, but I still remember when my manager came by my desk and said “don’t ever submit another PTO request again. I trust you to take as much personal time as you need and still do a great job.” It made me feel valued and respected, which to me was a lot more important than the small cash bonus when I finally did leave (I eventually left when that company was acquired and found that the new company did not value their employees as much).
that's where unlimited vacation days come in. You don't earn them, so you don't get them when you leave. That's the point of unlimited PTO. Remove the liability for the company.
If companies cared about getting employees to take time off, they would force a minimum. "Take 4 weeks off each year, and if you don't we will turn off your access card and vpn access in December."
As you get older then you realize time is finite and work is just a means to an end. I take all my vacation in the year I get it and if the company were to ever say anything then it's like shrug. It's like WFH in that you could tell me to work from a cube but I'd ignore that. I take my vacation and don't ever check email or respond to texts.
I’m currently a manager at an org with unlimited PTO. I take at least five weeks a year, and I enforce a minimum four weeks a year with my directs. No Slack, no email, it all gets turned off in Azure AD until they return. There are few hills I’ll die on, but this is one of them. Life is short and most work is inconsequential on a long life arc.
I don’t believe in the concept of unlimited PTO (usually disadvantages the worker), but I’m fine playing along when it’s their dime and they’re calling the tune.
>No Slack, no email, it all gets turned off in Azure AD until they return.
I won't really categorically disagree. But, if I'm hanging in my hotel room and surfing or whatever, if I can point someone in a direction or answer a quick question, I'm not sure that's wrong. I assure you I'll go back to my book-reading or movie-watching right after.
I appreciate that idea, I did so myself during my last vacation (I stay on slack and email as I report to c suite). But it is my job to defend the quality of life of my direct reports, and we can spend some more cycles as an org if needed versus bothering people OOO/PTO/Vaca. If we are so reliant on that person that we need that ability, we’ve failed (processes, documentation, cross training, etc).
We’re not saving lives, we’re just moving bits.
Edit @ghaff: Love the CEO anecdote in your reply, I’d work for that person! Priorities set properly.
Yes, this is a hidden benefit of having people take real time off. No org should be dependent for daily/weekly functioning on one person. If the cracks start showing in a single week of vacation, you’ve got some knowledge/skill sharing to do.
I'm mostly pretty disciplined. I'm on vacation but if I can spend 5 minutes unblocking something, hey, they pay me well enough.
Though to your C-suite comment, an engineering director at a fairly high profile SV company was telling me that they hired a senior comms person who just couldn't deal with the fact that the CEO would take vacations where they literally unplugged--and ended up quitting.
> The FDIC endorses the concept of a vacation policy that allows active officers and employees to be absent from their duties for an uninterrupted period of no less than two weeks. During this time, their duties and responsibilities should be assumed by other employees. This basic control has proven to be an effective internal safeguard in preventing fraud. In addition, such a policy is viewed as a benefit to the well-being of the employees and can be a valuable aid to the institution's overall training program.
Look at it from a different perspective - you're sending a message "I'm on vacation, but I've found few minutes and I'm checking in to help". Other team members now may feel obliged to do the same, because, well, we are social animals and try to blend in to a group by behaving similarly. Give it a year or two and suddenly the line between vacation and work is not so clear to anyone anymore.
If you don't have anything to do, is it really that work is the only thing you can occupy yourself with while you're on vacation?
I just joined a company with unlimited PTO.
Last week I found out one of my direct reports took less than one vacation week last year.
I told the team they had to spend all vacation within the year (22 days).
We're all spread in Europe. Not taking vacation could be a liability for the company, not to mention that tired and stressed people makes a lot of mistakes and I cannot afford loosing any engineer due to burnouts.
Anecdotally, I and most of my coworkers don't typically use all our vacation days because my company has a 300 hour accrual cap, and it can be useful to store up a big reserve depending on your objectives. I know some people who just maintain the cap and use their accrual hours each month so they aren't losing anything.
At least with an accrual max system, you can track your time and just start slowly bleeding it off when you get near the cap. With use it or lose it, it's easy to get near the cutoff date and now you have a bunch of time to use which may not be the best use for you while the company may also have to deal with a lot of people taking time off at the same time.
My company has a 400 hour cap, and i bump along it for half the year.
Maybe one week of actual vacation a year, it takes time to plan and money to actually go anywhere. And then you need a staycation after to recover from the "vacation" anyway.
How are airline points a trick? I've literally saved thousands without changing my spending habbits. Well actually one of my habbits is now reading about airline, hotel, and credit card points as a hobby, but it's still not spending more.
With very minimal effort you can literally have an effective 25% rebate on all flights.
It's there to give you an incentive to choose a given airline. It doesn't mean that you are being taken advantage of, per se, but it probably affects the choice of airline.
Yes this is what I mean, they're there to keep you captive, and thinking you're saving.
Let me put it this way, you might get a 25% cashback on a 1000 flight, but there might be a 500 flight alternative from another lowcost competing airline which you didn't even consider or knew it existed due to their points moat or whatever
more commonly: which you knew existed but didn't take because the $1000 flight was on your employer's dime while the points were something you benefited from personally -- essentially a kickback scheme.
While there can be some price discrepencies between legacy full-service carriers, usually it's not too big. Low cost carriers will definitely offer flights at a huge discount but the experience is so awful that I refuse to fly them.
>No wonder only around a 3rd of Americans own passports.
The US also has a ton of attractions within its borders. And other than going to Canada or Mexico, you're talking about relatively expensive flights to travel internationally.
> And other than going to Canada or Mexico, you're talking about relatively expensive flights to travel internationally
You should checkout flights to Cancun or the Caribbean. Even South America is cheap, and flights from the East Coast (of North America) to Europe are a few hundred bucks.
If what you were saying had any merit, surely Australians and New Zealanders wouldn't explore outside their country much.... but they do in droves.
Cancun and the Caribbean are very specific types of vacations I mostly don't have much interest in. There are other South American trips though those can get more involved; looking at one at the moment.
To be clear I've traveled internationally a lot. But I also understand why fewer Americans are inclined to do so than someone who lives in a small European country who might drive across a border.
I’m actually traveling to Europe in about a week but it’s about $1K.
That was my point. Europeans can travel between countries without a passport at little cost. For probably most Americans an international vacation is an expensive trip.
> For probably most Americans an international vacation is an expensive trip.
No, we established that flights to Cancun and the Caribbean are extremely cheap, and flights to Europe can be had for the same price as flights to the far coast of North America.
I'm in the UK and a lot of my travel over the years has been to places relatively far away (Asia, Americas).
Travel in Europe is expensive when you're there so a lot of people from Europe travel to SE Asia and similar destinations (althought the cost differential is reducing)
I'm very confused by this comment. Travel within Europe is insanely cheap compared with North America because low cost carriers exist and the distances are way smaller, not to mention you can take buses if you're really on a budget.
You're not finding flights in the US between major cities for less than 3 digits, and buses take several hours. In Europe you take a 2 hour bus ride and end up in a completely different country whichever way you go.
There's a reason your stereotypical university student backpacker goes to Europe.
> Travel within Europe is insanely cheap compared with North America because low cost carriers exist [...] You're not finding flights in the US between major cities for less than 3 digits
That's 'nuts', why's that? If £12 short haul flights between cities works in Europe why not in the US? Obviously the US is a lot bigger than the UK, but so's Europe, I could book a flight right now for today to (checks) Ibiza for £9.99, Milan or Barcelona for £12.99, and so on. Why's it 10x that (actually 29x for today, but ae little as 5x (mid two digits) if we push the date out and go mid week, call it 10x, whatever) for NY to Chicago? Naively I would think within one country it should be possible to run it if anything even cheaper.
Subsidies on fuel among other things. For some of us, for a trip of any length, it’s also hundreds of dollars to
park or have airport transportation though that applies to domestic flights as well.
In any case I’m hundreds of dollars to fly in the US.
There is a lot more budget carrier competition, often flying in and out of secondary airports, in Europe. The US does have a few like Spirit but nothing like Europe. In Europe, there are probably more subsidies, generally it's denser, probably a higher percentage of leisure travelers, more competition from trains, fewer people likely drive, etc.
It just adds up to a lot of competition among no-frills airlines because there's a sizable group of price-sensitive travelers who are fine with talking a budget flight for an hour or two.
Huh, in my experience food costs around the same. Maybe fast food is cheaper in NA?
Looking at my bookings in northern Europe and US major cities, they're also roughly the same price, but there's a lot more cheap hostels in Europe if you're willing to go that route.
Southern Europe is cheaper by over 50% though.
Interesting how we could come to basically opposite conclusions given the same data.
Wow, as someone who loves to travel and has the good fortune to do it often, the idea of not being able to or not wanting to leave one's home country is unfathomable.
I have used each passport exactly 1 time in the last 20 years, once to the British Virgin Islands and once, recently to Vietnam.
But I keep one handy because the process to get one is months and frankly, there may be scenarios where you may want to leave the country without months of beurocratic delays first.
That survey makes a lot of sense to me, as a Brit. If I don't take my PTO my boss's boss gets nagged by HR, so they nag my boss, who nags me.
Our PTO year runs from 1 April, so the only (unwritten) rule about vacation is that we should try to spread it over the year. This is because we're only allowed to carry over 5 days to the next year, not taking PTO is frowned upon, and HR don't want everybody to be using up their PTO at the same time at the end of the year.
A few days ago we had a Zoom town-hall meeting where our CEO thanked everybody for taking time off.
I moved from the UK to Finland, and while the overall process is similar there are some niggles.
Generally you'd have a similar amount of time off here, 4-5 weeks, and it would run April-April as you said for your own.
The biggest difference is that you must take two consecutive weeks at least once a year.
That said there are pluses I think I'm allowed to stay home to care for a sick child 11 days a year, paid. That's a nice bonus, and it has been useful as a parent. When our child was a baby, or toddler, sickness mostly meant that he stayed asleep all day and was lethargic and quiet. Now he's older there's no chance that I'd be able to work from home and take care of him, so those days come in useful. (Helps that I get my 11 days, and my wife gets a similar amount too.)
Otherwise it feels like most Finnish people take a month off in the summer, to the extent that a lot of shops/places in the city close down due to no staff, so there's often a bit of negotiation within teams about who can be away, to make sure there is cover. But it feels pretty relaxed and friendly.
> The biggest difference is that you must take two consecutive weeks at least once a year.
I had this in the UK when I worked in finance. As I recall the two-week rule was commonly written into employment contracts in banking. There was some FCA guidance around this, possibly in the wake of the Jérôme Kerviel scandal (I am not sure, it's been a while).
The idea was to make it a harder for a single rogue trader to perpetrate fraud as they would have to collude with someone to look after their books while they were out for two weeks.
In my experience it's hard to get redundancy, teams are run lean enough (esp today w/ layoffs) that there isn't really much slack, deliverables and work doesn't really go away, it just piles up until you get back. It's usually almost a job in itself handing things off so things don't drop to the floor.
In reality I take a lot of time off, there’s days where I literally will just report at a standup meeting and then do nothing else, while I go off and do something fun. This is “lite” PTO. I don’t mind if I have to answer the occasional slack message to keep up the appearance of a busy person.
To me, reporting a day where I just don’t feel like doing anything as time off seems like a waste of a PTO day. I’d rather use official PTO for when I travel to some place far and will really be completely unavailable if anyone should try to reach me. This is “deep” PTO.
Yep, and I also have regularly scheduled real PTO. Every third Wednesday is a PTO day where I do personal projects or just watch TV or read a book. My company has unlimited PTO and I have no compunctions about using that to my advantage.
With “unlimited time off” becoming more common I wonder how that’s accounted for over time. Some places are really explicit with handbooks that say they expect people to take “4 weeks off” a year (this was one place I worked) and others don’t specifically say a number like that.
I think it’s kind of a shame and I’d like to go back to split PTO and sick time
> With “unlimited time off” becoming more common I wonder how that’s accounted for over time.
"unlimited time off" means it's not accounted for at all. You basically play unaccounted hooky at will and whether you get away with it depends on how cooperative your team/management is.
Finance is totally oblivious because it's not a "benefit" part of your compensation package anymore. HR only hears about it when you didn't get away with it and management is building a case for firing you.
I didn't mean books accounting, i meant in studies like these and others. Since the guidelines become murky, how do you really account for how much workers are taking off more broadly?
It leads to an obfuscation of the data over time, I think.
They're one in the same though. If the time off isn't on the books, it's definitely not making it into any study's datasets no doubt sourced indirectly from those books via some employment-related TLA...
Understanding the inherently undocumented ad-hoc nature of the "unlimited time off" scam makes it pretty obvious IMO.
It gets complicated with longer sicknesses. But with something sort term like hard hitting flu or food poisoning the person isn't probably doing much work anyway. Being stuck in bed or bathroom likely means that not much work is done. And it is more humane to just give that time off straigh and not count any days on those cases.
The intention is that if you're sick for such an extended period of time that you cannot perform your job duties any more, the company no longer has to pay you (i.e. they fire you).
IMO unmetered time takes a real commitment from senior management to work fairly which, yes, probably means some reasonable typical guidelines. I'm not a fan of limited but combined PTO and sick time though, fortunately, it's never been a real issue for me and, in fact, I've almost certainly come out ahead at the end of the day.
For someone with a disability, having combined PTO and sick time basically means taking time off to remain healthy means you don’t get time off to actually do anything with your life.
Sick days aren’t vacation for me. I’m generally too depressed or manic to function. I’ll usually drive to a park or the local zoo to walk so I’m not sitting in a chair, too anxious or tired to get up. Somehow that’s “vacation” time because I’m able to (or need to) leave my house.
This this this. Split PTO is an accommodation for disabled and chronically ill folks that allows them to have actual vacation and also take care of themselves. Unified PTO penalizes people who need time off work to care for themselves regularly.
If you're disabled/chronically ill you maybe be able to use intermittent FMLA (in the US) to take more sick time but this is unpaid and can be a big hassle, esp if your employer/doctors are not supportive/cooperative (which can be a result of incompetence/ignorance as easily as malice)
I have ADA accommodations for intermittent leave, which is about as good as it gets, but I’m required to use my PTO before going unpaid. Once I’m unpaid, I don’t have PTO to use.
I have routine procedures that require 2 days just for the procedures. Then a half day for travel. The hospital is 2.5 hours away. One of those days is a prep day so I don't venture to far from the hotel.
And this is a yearly occurrence. Now if I have an acute episode that is a 3 day stay (at a local hospital). Which, luckily this only happens every other year or so.
Basically if I take any time off that is true vacation days I have to make sure I have plenty of days on the books in case I get sick or know I will be having to make doctor appointments in the next few months.
In the US, you can use sick time for these things, BTW. Things that are required for care are legally allowed to be used as sick time instead of PTO.
I think the unlimited time off loophole damages the sick time more than actual vacation, as others have pointed out in this thread, which is the real shame.
We’re talking about companies that don’t offer “sick time” at all. PTO is one bucket of accrued time with no distinction as to why you are taking time off.
The first company I worked for out of college had this policy. Ironically, they were lauded in the press at the time as they had some of the most comprehensive health coverage for workers and all of their dependents. Cadillac plans at zero payroll deductions to the employees regardless of family size.
I’m out a lot more frequently than that. If I actually took the time I needed, it would be 2~3 days each month. I usually want to take a minimum 12 days of vacation per year to attend conventions and visit people.
The end result is me spending a week or more per month being barely functional. I’m at my desk, poking at code I don’t have enough brain power to understand. But, better to “work” than get in trouble for not being visibly at my desk.
As far as diseases go I guess I'm fairly fortunate. I don't have to manage it day-to-day but it is always in the back of my mind.
If I had known in my teens and 20s I'd end up with this type of disease I'd have done drugs and raw dogged some hookers, at least I'd be able to point to a reason for having a bad liver. /s
Because, historically, you had vacation which you planned for and sick time which you did not--but which was just there if you were sick up to often fairly generous limits (or just have a lot of doctor's appointments). Being laid up with the flu or an unexpected surgery for a week didn't mean you potentially had to cancel your vacation that year.
There's better solutions to that, like allowing carryover (if people don't need to schedule all their PTO to be used before year's end, they can have some "slop" for unexpected needs), and/or allowing a certain amount of PTO to be used in arrears.
If you separate out vacation and sick time, then employees need to lie to use all of their time off.
>If you separate out vacation and sick time, then employees need to lie to use all of their time off.
This was historically mostly not a problem. People took vacation and they used sick time if they needed to (including I'm sure for the occasional hangover). Sick time wasn't "your" time to use up in the normal course of events. But it was there if you needed it. Sick time was never viewed as a benefit to maximize any more than health insurance was.
Pooling them still leads to a "sucks to be you if you need to take a lot of sick leave." I guess that you can argue that's not the company's problem. But to me that's a generally un-empathetic attitude.
Lets say a worker has nominally 10 days off per year. What the company does practically is if you take more than 6 days off is start writing you up. Theoretically you could take 10 days but any infraction would result in termination. The practice ensures employees are always dismissible for cause unless they don’t use vacation days.
Not all companies use such tactics on their workforce, but enough do to make it a systematic problem.
Mandatory payout at 100% for unused PTO, and a ban on use-or-lose would be a good start.
I meant more, it’s not like people aren’t using as much as they can. It’s that there’s some tactics used against workers.
This happened to an in-law who works for a soft drink distributor, but this kind of thing happens often in decent wage but lower end jobs, the 20-40/hr range.
At the high end it’s more workaholics or people looking to get promoted. On the lower rungs it’s coercion and games by HR to manage people out and claw back vacation days.
Agree. It's unbelievable from a European perspective.
Here in the UK, I get 28 days PTO per year. I can carry forward up to 5 days into the next year. But once you've done that once, you're pretty much committed to taking at least 28 days off the next year, because it's not really acceptable (from a company perspective) to lose PTO. We're strongly encouraged to spread the time off over the year, and to use up our allowance. Anybody here that only took 10 days per year would be having a chat with HR about healthy work/life balance.
I genuinely struggle to understand how it's possible to have anything like an enjoyable existence with only 10 days off per year. I mean, that's all your PTO gone for only a single 2 week vacation. Not even a single spare day for a duvet day.
More like a one week vacation, if you're lucky. You're forgetting that most of us don't have separate sick leave so PTO has to get used for sick days, dr appointments, etc. My first company I worked for wouldn't let you take any time off unpaid until you were out of PTO, so if you got the flu and were out for a week, there goes half your yearly vacation.
I often feel the same - the thing that surprises me the most about American time off is people who say they're allowed XX days of sickness a year.
Sure if you're sick you shouldn't work, and on average most people are probably healthy enough that they lose 1-3 days a year, maybe a few people lose a week or two, but it just seems wrong that somebody could be fired for being too sick, or be forced to work because they've used their allowance.
In the UK I've been off sick for several months at one point in my career, and while I started to lose money pretty quickly at least I knew that I'd not get fired, and would/could return happily.
(Where I live now I'm allowed around 11 days, paid, to stay home to take care of a sick child. That's a pretty nice bonus, though I remember last year I was trying to count the days up to see how close we were .. covid must have used a week, twice, and then the standard child-sickness that go in waves at daycare/preschool/school.)
My PTO is in addition to bank holidays, which I think is the equivalent to your federal holidays. A quick count shows that there are 10 bank holidays in the UK this year.
Whichever way you slice it, American workers are getting screwed.
And GP calling it "4 weeks" is, I think, a bit disingenuous given how those federal holidays are spread through the year and can't really be combined into consecutive weeks off.
Lol no. Assuming at-will employment, which is the vast majority of the US workforce, "using all your vacation days yearly" is not a protected class so they are absolutely able to fire you for it.
The significance of a for cause termination is to keep unemployment benefit insurance premiums low for the employer, because the terminated employee is made ineligible for unemployment benefits.
Of course any employer not in Montana can simply terminate anyone at anytime for no reason, but then there is no reason to write up anyone.
I read it as getting written up for minor infractions that otherwise would be overlooked. Clock in a minute late? Write-up. Clock out 2 minutes late without manager approval? Write-up. Skip a minor safety precaution that everyone skips as a matter of doing business? Write-up.
When I was reading this story, knowing how US vacation/PTO is something like 2 weeks per year or less - I was thinking: "This is so depressing, the US is hell for workers".
But then I got angry, and thought: "Why aren't these people forming unions and going on general strikes? They used to do it in the late 19th century... that's how they got the 8-hour working day."
And then I remembered that:
1. large existing US unions are often either corrupt or decrepit
2. US culture is horribly anti-worker
3. US corporations do almost everything to disrupt unionization efforts. Years back they would do absolutely everything including hiring mercenaries/saboteurs like the Pinkerton people
... so I need to cut them some slack.
Anyway, my suggestion is to maybe try the wobblies:
Same in Switzerland, you have to take a certain amount of vacation as well as a certain amount of breaks in the work day. Even if you want to skip lunch to leave early it is not technically allowed. [1]
Also, if you get sick on vacation you get that time back as well. [2]
> Even if you want to skip lunch to leave early it is not technically allowed
That’s how it is in the US for minors (at least in my state), you have to take a 15 minute break every four hours (and work a absolute max of 40 a week). Used to drive me nuts when I had an internship and was in the middle of something.
Living in CA, I always keep a lot of accrued PTO because it is paid out to me if/when I leave the company. It's a nice buffer between jobs or whatever, which is more valuable to me than multiple-week vacations.
This is the main reason I dislike unlimited PTO policies.
In addition to company culture, that's one of the big divides. I've always maximized the vacation I took including month-long trips. The only time I got a significant payout was when I got laid-off during dot-bomb and I hadn't filed the paperwork for the vacation I had just taken yet.
I used to make the schedule for a team of about 25 tech support team members.
It was not unusual that I would assign vacation days to people who didn't use their vacation days and had reached the limit and stopped accruing vacation.
We figured assigning vacation days was better than than have them miss out on days off / get burnt out.
It was a good place to work, good people, the folks who just didn't take vacation just ... didn't. They didn't mind getting it assigned either, we always talked about it first.
I'm sure there are all sorts of reasons including "Just not getting around to it" and "The company can't do without me." (I took a few month-long vacations at a former job and would have people basically ask me "How could you do that?")
That said I'm also known people who really just didn't care to travel for the most part and got bored hanging around the house. (Though in that case, the strategy should probably be to just taking Friday's off.)
"I'd rather take vacation when the kids are in school." was also a common request ;) I always gave them whatever preference they had, it made scheduling easier anyway.
Another guy just wanted to be at home with his horses and have time off when the kids were out of school ;)
It’s harder to use PTO when you have a small amount because you’re always second guessing whether now is the correct time or whether you should save it for something later in the year. It becomes so precious that very few things in life are slam dunk worth it.
By having more PTO, each day becomes less valuable and the threshold for using a day falls back into the stuff of normal human life.
Governor JB Pritzker today signed SB208 into law, making Illinois the third state in the nation, and the first in the Midwest, to mandate paid time off to be used for any reason. The historic legislation provides employees with up to 40 hours of paid leave during a 12-month period, meaning approximately 1.5 million workers will begin earning paid time off starting in 2024."
Well, basically companies generally won't buy back vacation unless you leave. And conversely it's usually difficult to buy another week or two of vacation (though I've done so under somewhat unusual circumstances). So you're mostly stuck with everyone conforming to the same vacation plan whether it's your preference or not. Benefits are generally fairly equalized even if they're a better deal for some people than others.
I have experienced burnout. At my peak, I worked 60 hours per week for about 8 weeks. Currently, 45–50 hours is more sustainable. Many people code outside their 40 hour per week day jobs (on side projects or leet code). If I don't have side projects or interview prep to do, I would love to be compensated for my additional bandwidth.
1/ How do Asian countries with their standard 50-65 hour weeks manage burnout?
Before you reach for external statistics like birth rate, suicide rate, etc. I am saying workers have the choice of converting their time to cash instead of the current system where workers do not get to choose how many hours they work.
Taiwan - 50-60 hours is common [0]
S. Korea - current limit of 52 hours [1] and with some jobs averaging 46hr/wk [2]..
China - 996 (9a-9p; 6 days per week)[3]
Japan - 1/4 work 80 hours of overtime per mo [4]
2/ There are many people approaching retirement age with months of PTO saved up. They will use this PTO to retire months early (keeping them on employer health insurance longer).
How do retirees fit into the paradigm of you _need_ to take at least X weeks of vacation, or you will be burned out?
I'm part of the ~1 in 5 U.S. workers that can't really take all our vacation. We're long term caregivers.
Taking a week off means somehow having to find a very expensive and adequate replacement for that time. Unfortunately, that's a lot more hassle than it's worth. Honestly, it's easier to just stick to the routine than try to take time off.
I'm surprised that such data wasn't included in the Pew Research poll that the article cites. They seemed to have gotten a good cross section of the economy.
If instead the data was that some high percentage of workers use all/most of their vacation days, then the story would have been framed around workers not having enough vacation days and how they're getting screwed by not being given enough. If the data says that most workers use almost no vacation days, the story would have been framed around how the workers are overworked and screwed out of using their vacation. In the end, no matter what the situation actually is, mainstream media such as this will just spin the message however they need to push the social/political narrative they want to push.
As someone who's been in and out of work and in and out of contracts throughout their life, this sort of thing is utterly baffling to me.
I simply cannot fathom a person who spends ~all of their life at work. I don't think a single year of my adult life has been spent with over 40 weeks at work, most of them have been 30 or even less.
I use unpaid time off a ton, the entire point of me earning more than minimum wage is that it's efficient so that I can work less.
Reserved vacation days are becoming a thing of the past with “Flex PTO” or whatever any individual company might be calling it these days.
And if people really don’t use that much time, then it’s a big win-win for companies, as there are huge financial advantages in “Flex PTO” for the company, which I’d guess is why many companies are transitioning towards it or have already implemented it.
Many companies are more than happy to offer unlimited PTO but less than happy to reassign any duties so taking PTO really means just letting your work pile up and coming back to a huge backlog that makes your work-life miserable for the ensuing 2x the duration of your leave.
-- or even worse somebody take your duties on and screws up then it's not just net zero it's net negative.
I can't read the article, but there post I could read said 48% used all their vacation.
But what does "use all vacation" mean? I tried to keep a small buffer. I used all the vacation I earned in a year, but I like keeping a couple of weeks just in case. So the answer for me works have been no I don't use all my vacation.
I always find this weird as the closest big city to where I live had striking workers executed (as in gunned down in the street) for striking, so everyone takes them all, even a century later.
amazon policy will affect you rating if you use all you vacation and pto. latest is getting rid of pto option soon so no need to pay you $ if you leave.
