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Comment by DanFeldman | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to not take enough vacation at companies w/ unlimited vacation. Anecdotally, most of my peers at companies w/ unlimited vacation take less vacation than traditionally counted vacation days.

I work at a place w/ unlimited vacation and take about 4-4.5 weeks per year. A big reason I actually get to take this much vacation is because our founders & senior leadership also take vacation. I could easily see a world where our sr leadership didn't take any time off and there was implicit pressure to not use vacation time.

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I get 4 weeks guaranteed and I make sure to take them. In Germany I had 6 weeks. If “unlimited” translates to 4 and you feel lucky that you actually get that much then “unlimited” feels like a scam to guilt trip people into less vacation and not having to pay out any when people leave. I guess you also don’t accrue any for a longer trip if you take off less one year.

That 4-4.5 weeks is less than the minimum amount of time I'm allowed to take off (not sure if it's strictly required but HR would start chasing me). Assuming weekends are taken off by default, 4.5 weeks is about 23 days, which is quite far down this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...

Looking at this table the best countries in terms of leave are muslim countries. Lots of public holidays.

4 weeks is the legal minimum where I live, so that doesn’t seem like a lot at all.

Also, the problem with unlimited vacation days is that you don’t get paid for unused days when you quit your job.

I suspect that's one of the driving factors at tech companies where many people hop between jobs every couple of years or so. The difference adds up for companies, especially if people don't take a lot of vacation anyway.

Personally, I've tended to stay at jobs for substantial periods of time although I've still gotten fairly nice vacation payouts on a couple of occasions. (Once and I think the statute of limitations is probably up on this one given the company doesn't exist--I got laid off in the dot-bomb era almost immediately after returning from a 3 week vacation I hadn't quite gotten around to entering yet.)

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