Netflix Announces Its New ‘Unlimited’ Maternity and Paternity Leave Program

Without a minimum people are reluctant to take time off from what I've seen and read.

This is probably an indication of other issues, but half of the team didn't realize there was a new policy, one team lead thought the guidance was "generally, this means about 3 weeks", the manager thought "generally, this means about 2 weeks", the actual policy states "generally, this means about 4 weeks".

It apparently simplifies things from a financial standpoint - not having PTO on the books, etc. but I'm of the opinion that it's a very anti-employee policy.

Edit: I very much agree with the "unlimited with a minimum" concept mentioned in the sibling comment. Without something like this, it's hard to see the policy as a real perk.

You can look at a vacation cap as the same thing, where having a cap really can cause people to use more than they would if it were just whatever they could negotiate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_ceiling#Price_ceilings_t...

Just take it at face value:

    adj. not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity, or extent.

Your manager will give you yearly (or quarterly) objectives with 10 or 20 days of vacations in mind, so if you use your right to unlimited vacations to take more than that, you will most likely be off your target, and that will be reflected upon your pay raise at yearly review time.

A fixed (and high) number of holidays is the only way to go.

I'm sympathetic to your concerns, but this is still a good thing and–importantly–a very good step in the right direction.

Playing devil's advocate a little, but this "peer pressure" idea seems to come with paid vacation too. I think, to an extent, it's peoples own responsibility to resist this peer pressure, rather than the company's. I would always take paid vacation on principle, for example. If you don't want me to take it, don't offer it to me–and if you don't offer it to me, I'll take a job somewhere else, thank you. I'm quite happy for the quality of my work to be judged on its own merits. Which is not to say it's easy to do if you're working at a company with an entrenched culture of abusive expectations. But we only become complicit in it if we give into peer pressure rather than asserting our rights, no?

That said, I say this from the privileged position of living in a country where taking paid vacation is expected, so perhaps it's easy for me to say...

The industry average in the US is abysmal though. Yahoo 'doubled' theirs to 16 weeks, which is 1/3 of Canada's (and many other countries') legally mandated minimum. Taking double the industry average would still be abysmal by global standards.

And then I'd backfill them. And when they got back, I'd have an extra engineer. Chances are by that point I'll be looking to expand the team anyway.

I suspect many of these simply end up as less formal polices. However, there are large benefits to allowing for extended leave which few Americans actually use. It’s bad enough that some companies require people to take at least 2 weeks off every year.

That's simple - just keep having children. Time it right and you can take off permanently for decades.

So, does that mean you take more than 5 weeks per year?

Would you mind clarifying on:

>"I'm pressured to take vacations."

Is that as a result of the following bullet around managers being taught to be a good example? Or is it because the day-to-day is stressful and the average hours are not even close to 9-5 so the pressure to take vacation is to combat burnout? (Not saying that is actually the case at Netflix, but I've heard of other places where the day-to-day was miserable, so they forced vacation to prevent burnout vs. solving the root issue of reducing overall workload, promoting true work/life balance throughout a given week, etc.)

Any Netflix-level stats?

And how much is that?

When I worked at a BigCo (in Europe), our holidays amounted to around 10 weeks per year. Senior employees (with more than 10 years) would get even more (around 12). Which means you can take a week off every month. Now that is a lot of holidays. And these were enforced, you had to take all of these (for legal reasons, the company has to either pay the holidays to you, or force you to take them, and most of the time financial reasons dictate that it's better if they don't pay you).

Does unlimited vacation cover that?

I would love to see stats. I doubt they'll publish them. If people use less vacation than they used to (before the policy went into effect), then they would take a negative PR hit for it. If they used more than before, then it might encourage other employees to do the same.

In that light I'm reading this as essentially setting the expectations bar very low, potentially to nothing, for a year.

Basically this policy and pretty much all of Netflix's policies come down to behaving like a professional and treating other people with the same expectations. If you lose that culture and either side starts to misbehave of course things could go very badly. But that culture is very important to Netflix and they are always working consciously to preserve it.

I haven't seen any official stats about vacation (as someone else pointed out, in order to do that they'd have to track it) but I've never known anyone to have a problem with it. I've seen quite a few people take 3 weeks or so at a time because they're going overseas, and in Silicon Valley that's pretty unheard of.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, I don't speak for the company, yada, yada. I'm just a rank and file employee interpreting what I know.

We can't publish stats about vacation usage.

That's because I don't know of a single manager here who tracks vacation usage. There's a general allergy to doing that, because that can lead to trying to manage that number and then the 'unmetered vacation' is no longer so unmetered.

I suppose I could, for my people, try to find all the out of office notifications, but that'd be a silly level of effort.

(There's no consistent process across the board for dealing with vacations, but to the best of my knowledge the typical way this works -- and the way it works in my own group -- is that an engineer will at some point probably mention to me that they're taking days off casually. I try to make sure it's clear to them that they're not asking for permission, and then move on).

1. http://www.paperplanes.de/2014/12/10/from-open-to-minimum-va...

2. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/07/14/unlimited_vac...

The peer pressure is usually not explicit, it's implied by the ambiguity of the policy and the (unknown to you) true expectations from management. How do you know that your vacation time isn't secretly being counted against you? What if other people aren't comfortable taking it because they want a good performance review? This was definitely happening at the mid-size enterprise shop I used to work at where they couldn't wait to jump on the Unlimited PTO fad because they knew people would end up taking less. It's definitely anti-employee unless the company aggressively demonstrates that it's ok to take as much PTO as you like. With a more definite PTO policy, you don't have this issue as much.

Plus, it's just dumb and kind of insulting. It's not "unlimited," everyone knows that. Just set a reasonable policy so people don't have to guess.

My $.02 is that it is totally dependent on company culture as a whole. In my case, the company treats employees like responsible adults and pays them to get a job done, not fill a seat. It is an incredibly family-friendly company overall, and they really get the notion that "life happens" and that "family comes first."

As a result, I take time off when I need it, or work from home, or take a half day, or whatever. As such, I've found that I'm overall more productive, and when I'm just not feeling productive, I don't try to force myself to do work. I haven't had pressure, but that's also because I'm responsible with coverage, and effective in the outcomes of what I do.

I wouldn't be surprised if it came up as a discussion point if I was letting things fall through the cracks left and right. And that is the trade-off to this kind of policy. Basically, when there is a minimum, people take the days (especially if they don't roll-over). That is a healthy forcing mechanism. If things aren't going well, and you don't take the days, or are a workaholic (guilty), you might end up taking net fewer days.

By contrast, the relative I referenced has a manager that holds a double standard. It is fine if the manager takes whatever time they want, but if my relative wants to take time off, they get push back, despite being exceptionally good at their job and getting shit done.

That's broken IMHO, and speaks to larger cultural issues I've heard about that company.

Bottom line, I think these policies can work, but they are intrinsically tied to how a company treats their employees in general, and it can also be specific down to individual team culture.

I know a case of a manager who came into a situation like this from a much more "traditional" big company, and had trouble adjusting to their team working from home or taking frequent days off on short notice. It was alien to them. For the most part they let it slide, but they definitely pushed back some times which didn't go over well with the employees who expected the culture to be upheld.

Really? What employer doesn't offer family leave on equal terms? Certainly, this used to be quite common, but every place I've seen for many years has explicitly been equal.

All you're doing is speculating. If people don't like these policies then they have the power to leave.

Basically this. Why not just be open about it - those who don't end up working for the 'top' companies are at a considerable disadvantage.

This gives the power to these big corporations to bully their way around in all sorts of ways. The ridiculous Google hiring process is just one example of this.

Some see that as a form of slavery or extreme control, and they want the government to step in to prevent that.

Further, if companies didn't have to pay for that, that disproportionately means that lower-income workers may not be able to have kids while higher earners can because they can afford day care, only having one working parent, etc. That goes down a whole discrimination rabbit hole.

That said, while I am on the side of enforced maternity/paternity minimums, I respect that it is a complicated issue. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if this impacts the hiring of young women by startups. It wouldn't be entirely illogical to assume that a young woman has a higher likelihood of taking extended time off due to maternity leave. For an early-stage startup, that can be their death if a key employee leaves for several months.

In places where population growth is not a concern, such as in the U.S. where birth and deaths are at equilibrium, those who have and raise children and do it at least reasonably well are producing positive externalities[1]. And the better the children are raised and educated, the more the positive[2]. Policies like Netflix's thus benefit society as a whole.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Positive

[2] The flip side is that when children are raised poorly, be it the fault of the parent or the society that sets the parent up for failure, it turns negative.

LOL. Going to work is a vacation compared to taking care of an infant.