Ask HN: Are open vacation policies a scam?
At my company, however, it's feeling like just another typical silicon valley sweat shop. Nobody who isn't an executive seems to take any vacation days. For the most part "unlimited vacation" means being able to work from home because you have errands to run or you broke your ankle.
Every attempt I've made to take vacation days has been met with the resistance of, "You have taken more vacation than anybody else in the team". I've taken 4 days off for vacation, and 2.5 days off to ease the jetlag when I flew home to Turkey from San Francisco.
Recently I tried to take off 1/2 a day for my birthday, and I again was given this same argument. I politely reminded my boss that I make $50k/year less than anybody else in our engineering team, and that we have an open vacation policy.
After that conversation I began looking for a new position.
I'm curious, what are your experiences with companies who have open vacation policies? Are you "allowed" to take vacation days, or does it just feel like a scam to prevent you from actually taking time off?
104 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadThere have been other related HN discussions on the topic, at https://hn.algolia.com/?query=unlimited%20vacation&sort=byPo... . For example, the top comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125973 is:
> "Unlimited vacation" translates to "no vacation" ... Unlimited vacation sounds nice, but in practice it doesn't work.
There is a conflict between what they like to offer to attract talent vs. what they offer culturally. I have not experience unlimited vacation, but at my limited vacation shop I just took 6 weeks off (on the last week now) albeit some was unpaid, but I am getting market rate so that has to be a better situation.
A good way to get a lot of vacation is to take breaks between jobs and make sure the jobs are paying you what you are worth.
Taking 6.5 days off and 1/2 day off on your birthday sounds completely reasonable for every company with no "unlimited vacation". Do you have "unlimited vacation" written in your contract?
I cannot believe that the US does not have a federal legislation on annual holidays, but instead leaves it up to the employers to negotiate that with their employees.
My wife once applied for a remote working position with a quote famous US company that actually wrote a book on remote working. They offered her a 'generous' 10 days vacation a year. Here in Australia, full time worker are by law to get 20 days annual leave and 10 days fully paid public holiday leave per year as a minimum.
My feeling is that if there is no minimum quota set, then it is open to pressure from above to ignore and abuse it.
My tip? Move to Iran or Cambodia ;) [1]
[1] - http://blog.hrpartner.io/holiday-leave-around-the-world/
It's odd considering US federal employees have leave policies that most closely resemble what you see in the rest of the developed world. It's the private sector that seems to be in a race to the bottom in the last few decades.
What are avenues for US based employees to seek arbitration in cases like the OP, where leave entitlements and agreements are abused? What if someone had to take time off to, say, care for a sick family member and they had 'n' days leave owing to them and their employer would not let them take it? Can there be some non legal industrial mediation, or must they take it to court?
Full-time feds get 10 paid holidays a year, 13 days sick leave with unlimited carryover, and 13, 20, or about 28 days of annual leave (as we call it) depending on years of service. Maximum carry-over on annual leave is 240 hours.
After six years, it becomes six hours a pay period. After I think fifteen or seventeen years, it becomes 8 hours.
So while federal leave maxes out close to what the rest of the world has, it takes a long time to get there.
(Things are different for many blue collar workers, since Americans expect services to be available even - or especially - on holidays.)
I've yet to hear of a white collar employer that didn't grant New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas Day. Presidents Day, MLK Day, Columbus Day, the day after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and New Year's Eve are also common (the latter three because at least half your employees will take them as vacation days anyway, so they're not very productive.)
At an office with a decent culture, upper management will often grant an additional couple of paid holidays just because of timing (and because heck, they want to spend a long weekend with their families too!). If Christmas falls on a Weds or Independence Day on a Tues, you'll also get Monday off. If that holiday falls on a Thurs, you'll get Friday off too.
The holidays obviously don't make up for the ridiculously low number of vacation days we get, but they may be part of a miscommunication for non-Americans working for US companies, if in other countries the number of paid holidays is typically explicitly stated in an offer. If you're ever uncertain about what holidays you'd get in a job, ask.
But 10 days being "generous" is bullshit anywhere I've worked.
Has anybody tried asking up front what the average number of days actually taken is? And if you asked and then took the job - were they telling the truth?
The theme in the comments here seem to show that this policy, like other tools, can be easily abused.
At the right company it is freeing. For example, my productivity doesn't fit nicely within the box of the standard work week. So if I'm not feeling like I can get anything worthwhile done, I might take a day to recharge the batteries. Need to stay home for a contractor? No problem. Need time off to travel? Awesome.
The challenge is there is this nagging feeling of taking advantage of things that was instilled in me from working at shitty companies in a service industry notorious for bad hours (ad agencies) most of my career. That said, I've heard that mandatory time off is now on the table to help alleviate some of this "guilt" myself and others feel.
I fully recognize my experience is not the norm. It is also very hard to screen for companies that actually stand behind their policy. I had a hard time convincing a candidate I was trying to hire that it was in fact as good as it sounded and we were not lying. Hard to do when so many people are scarred from shitty experiences.
I've worked at unlimited vacation companies where nobody took more than a week per year and others where most people took at least four weeks (generally non-consecutive).
I've also worked twice at places with finite vacation policies where as long as you were responsible and productive they'd let it slide (or wouldn't even count) if you took a few extra days here and there.
I've also had friends who worked for large companies and got four weeks of vacation tell me they couldn't take more than a couple sick days per year anyway because their boss had to approve vacation dates. Any date they proposed was denied because the "timing" was "bad" for their projects.
Pick your employer for its culture, not its official vacation policy.
It sounds like you've got a job where they are using unlimited vacation as a way to limit vacation even further instead of using it to promote a great work life balance.
Being cheap is funny. In San Francisco at my last job I was around $175k before the expected bonuses which never materialized, as they tend not to @ start-ups. To no avail I tried hard to sell myself on "$100k and I only work 9 months per year", but there's such a false notion that "bodies in the seat mean productivity". I ended up finding a gig around $110k, which provides me a far better lifestyle in the cheaper part of the Balkans/Near-East than I could afford in any US city where I would want to live.
This is part of the problem: golden handcuffs.
Your problem is not that you have unlimited vacation, it's that you are working for a company that is taking advantage of you. They could (& probably would) do the same thing with limited vacation policies.
Leave as fast as you can and let your peers know why you did it.
But then, when you leave, they would hand you a check for accrued vacation.
In my experience unlimited vacation is only as unlimited as the person asking for it. Many people are too timid to actually ask for the days off. It seems like you've already done the asking, and this is more of a company culture problem and you are right to consider leaving or having a frank talk with your supervisor about what unlimited means. Perhaps you can change it to be 5 weeks a year with them and they'll feel better with a bounded number for you and you'll feel better being able to take off when you want.
Recently interviewed someone and was mentioning the work/life balance and unlimited vacation and their response was "Come on...unlimited vacation is a scam" I then explained that I had already taken off about 3 weeks this year with another 3 planned, and that it's "unlimited" if you ask for it. Maybe my situation is unique, or maybe people are too timid, I'm not sure. I'm glad I'm working at a place where taking vacation is part of the culture for long term success.
I'd also encourage anyone interviewing with a company that has unlimited vacation to talk to a non C-Level or founder employee about what vacation they've taken so far this year and their opinion of how well the unlimited policy works at their company - hopefully you can get a straight answer as this is just as important as monetary compensation.
But, in Massachusetts at least, when you leave your job, any vacation time that you've accrued is owed to you in dollars. With unlimited vacation, that means that you get nothing (since unlimited isn't something you accrue, it just exists).
In my experience with a couple of web jobs, even with non-unlimited vacation I've always been met with resistance trying to take time off. It was worse in companies where we "weren't a company, we were a family" type places. Guilt trips about saddling others with works, etc., when really it was poor scheduling and planning for 100% efficiency.
So: not a scam in a binary sense, in the way that the lottery actually will make you rich if you're lucky. I wouldn't count on it though.
- 29 days a year (fairly standard in the uk, legally required to have at least 28) - No formal approval needed. (Check with your team etc) - Can buy up to 12 days extra a year IIRC for the cost of a days salary.
The no formal approval is especially nice, I take a long weekend short notice a couple of times a year during busy periods (busy in my life not work that is) and it's fine 95% of the time, and when it's not it always for good reason.
Being able to buy extra holiday is good too. There's salary sacrifice to do so so it's considered fair to everyone.
Finally, depending on the way it's taxed, declaring it at the start of the year means it gets factored in to the monthly tax, and you don't need to get a rebate later.
Also please post your experience on Glassdoor.
Balsamiq offers mandatory vacation: 20 + 9 holidays + unlimited. I hope that is reasonably close to your 25 mandatory + unlimited. I think it's great - plus they are an amazing bunch of people with a smart & likeable boss.
Source==> http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/15/pf/mandatory-vacation/
As others have noted, almost everywhere else in the first world not only expects but legally requires far more vacation time than many US firms offer their employees.
I spent some time earlier this year scoping out the tech scene in Wellington, New Zealand and Melbourne, Australia because both have so much more emphasis on living a good life. I wasn't able to find much startup activity in those two cities. I'm not sure if it doesn't exist or if I was looking in the wrong neighborhoods.
Next time they offer you "unlimited" vacation say that's very generous of them but you don't need unlimited vacation days you know exactly how many vacation days you need and that's 28 days.
If they don't reject it straight up they might try to haggle over that which proves the point.
Bigger companies will even force you to take it once you've accrued a number of hours, as it can be a liability on the books (as unused holidays roll over indefinitely).
The US is an outlier in this regard.
Being fired over taking too much vacation time given the mentioned policy is potentially lawyer fodder.
Interestingly, in the UK, managers are also liable for health and safety to some extent. So if you get burned out because you haven't taken any holiday for the last 3 years, your manager has to be able to say "I made him aware he had holiday left and encouraged him to take it" or something along those lines, otherwise they/the company is also on the hook (possibly).
My company has unlimited vacation and I didn't take any vacation from Jan 1 to May 28, then I took off 10 consecutive weeks for the birth of my daughter and a move from Seattle back to Portland. We also treat Dec 24 - Jan 2 as company holidays because so many people use their personal vacation days for that time of year and to prevent people from trying to work through the holidays and dragging others into it with them. I then followed it up closely with a few days off for a wedding I was in, a couple of fishing trips, a couple out of office days for unexpected things. I've probably taken more vacation this year than I have in my entire career excluding my honeymoon.
We have a system for placing vacation requests that allows anyone to see what a given stretch of time looks like as far as people being gone, and we can track how managers respond to vacation requests as well. I guarantee that if we found a manager pulling the kind of shit that the OP's manager was pulling they'd be dealt with, probably even let go without a second chance unless they were stellar in every other way. Also, all requests go through the system, so there is none of this whispering back and forth and getting you to withdraw your request. The back and forth happens and is recorded for posterity.
The only problem is, just like most other culture fits at a company, how do you know until it's too late? Also, would you personally feel comfortable using an 'unlimited' amount of vacation?
My recommendation has always been to treat unlimited vacation days like bonuses and options. They are perks, but the number you're generally after is the salary, so don't discount that too much in favor of some nebulous benefits that may not materialize.
A few times, I had interviewed at such companies with unlimited vacation. I would ask about their vacations, and how many weeks they took off this year or last. Most developers would usually say they took 1-2 weeks off last year, to which I would ask that you get that everywhere, why not more? Then the answer is "oh we are so busy and we don't abuse this policy. But if we ever need to take more days off, we can".
This just seems like a warning sign. If a company is advertising unlimited vacation policy, I would expect more vacations not less. All my jobs had at least 2-3 weeks off. So I always assumed unlimited vacation means less than usual vacation time.
On a side note, I've always hated unlimited vacation. I almost think companies put it in place so they don't have to pay out unused vacation time when you leave.
I actually feel lazy because of this, so when I do work, I try to really focus. The result is, in one day I can accomplish what took me a week in previous job. Mostly, because nobody is interrupting me ( we don't have an office )
We are hiring, here is my experience: https://piszek.com/2016/04/05/automattic/
I understand they probably get a ton of applicants, especially with all the praise for work/life balance, but what chance does someone have at applying and actually being seen without any special circumstances?
I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way, it's just that as someone currently looking for remote work, it's a bit depressing.
I actually see people get hired much faster than I was. I may have been a crappy candidate. Also, I was applying in a moment when people were seriously overloaded, so thats why I needed to wait.
But it sure is a lenghtier process then in traditional company!
One consultancy I worked for had a nice policy: 30 combined sick/holiday/vacation days off per year. If you never got sick, great. If you needed a personal day, take it. If you didn't mind coming in on Memorial Day, that's one more day to use later.
Now, I am afraid to take ETO time as vacation because what happens if I get sick? I had a coworker come in with walking pneumonia because he was running short on ETO.
NOT having separated sick time is bad because you can't plan when to take vacation time because of the unknown, and you're going to show up to the office and spread your viruses because you can't take a day to rest and recover.
The point of the policy is that you're responsible for budgeting your own time. If you need less sick leave, take less sick leave. If you need more, take more.
If you're a sickly type, you might want to buy a disability policy of some sort that supports you for weeks or months.
Traditionally, companies budget sick time for their employees, yet insist that you bring in a doctor's note to "prove" you were sick. You consider that a trusting relationship?