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Comment by 2trill2spill | Hacker News Reader

I guess it depends on your company, At my company we have unlimited PTO and I definitely get more PTO days then people with a set number of PTO days at other companies.

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Are you in engineering? Ask around sometime: The amount of time people feel entitled to take at “unlimited PTO” companies varies widely by department and role and how much competition there is for your position. People who feel extreme pressure to perform are likely to take much less time off, especially when they know they’re not entitled to a specific amount.

There's also this weird dynamic of not having number on paper. I once took off three weeks for vacation, first in a very long time, several years. When I got back, there was definitely this air of "so and so is finally back, working like the rest of us." Even with my direct management, it felt a lot like I had spent trust for time off.

Since then, I've worked in a large corporate job for a while now as well, and it's different. Here, management and I can look at my PTO sheet and see I've accrued X hours so I can take off Y weeks, and that's earned. It feels more like a contractual obligation at that point, and not just an off-the-cuff spree.

> I once took off three weeks for vacation, first in a very long time, several years. When I got back, there was definitely this air of "so and so is finally back, working like the rest of us." Even with my direct management, it felt a lot like I had spent trust for time off.

That's too bad. The person who sits to the left of me just got back from a 6 week long vacation and I have not noticed anyone being upset or treating them differently afterwards. We caught them up with the stuff that happened while they were gone and they went right back to helping the team.

Yea, I'm in the Engineering department and at my company it depends on your manager for the unlimited PTO. My manager is awesome so I can take time off pretty much whenever.

I was similarly skeptical about `Unlimited PTO` companies, but I am currently working at a tech startup in NYC with Unlimited PTO (we don't track time off) where the norm is for engineers to take about 4 (sometimes 5) weeks off a year.

The workload is high, but it's very common for engineers to take a week off after a big, stressful project is delivered.

Because the norm for vacation is set high, I don't feel bad about taking as much time off as I feel I need.

It really helps that our CTO also takes at least a 2 week vacation every year and takes time off for himself when he needs it.

Having said all this, I am not too optimistic, in that I don't believe this situation is very common in the industry.

When I worked for (WIFI) I got more days too, but less options and a meager wage compared to companies right down the street. They had an abusive scrum process and overly aggressive agile practices as well. Managers would coerce employees to revise and lower estimates on non-critical items thus increasing stress unecessarly and necessitating the need for a lot of people to take a lot of "mental health" days off.

That's my experience as well.

I was initially against it, but my company (or at least my department?) is now very good at making sure people get sufficient time off.

Yea I've been reminded by my manager more then once to make sure to take time off when I first started the job which is awesome, it made me feel like unlimited PTO was actually the policy.

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