I work for a company with unlimited PTO. However, if you are in a relatively niche role, it is hard to use as you block people when away. A couple colleagues have quit over it.
It's also why many companies hate carrying vacation days over - they don't want someone to save up three months of vacation that they earned at a low wage from getting promoted, and then receiving it in cash when they quit at a higher wage.
Given the choice, an employer will always prefer to keep payroll costs predictable.
This can be a nasty carrying cost for companies.
I worked at a place that went from the standard accrual of vacation to "a minimum of 20 days/year, no carry-over."
To keep employees from engaging in open rebellion, they had to offer two tiers: either 1) you agreed to the new plan and gave your accrued time back, or 2) you keep your accrued time to date, received no more, and could join the new plan only when your vacation time balance hit zero.
The new employees, including me, quickly picked option one. The long-timers all picked option two, sat on their time, and cashed out when they went to other jobs.
Earned vacation time is earned - companies trying to reclaim it are acting dishonestly and need to be avoided at all costs.
Personally I don't have a problem with "unlimited PTO" but (big but) there really does need to be a culture of people taking a reasonable amount which I would define as a month or so.
Which is why unlimited was born, because now you never "earn" any so you never "lose" any, and thus can never accrue any either
See the government saw employers with "use it or lose it" policy as "screwing over" the employee, so they ban it believing all companies would just accept they would have to allow accrual of PTO / Vacation time
Reality is that is not tenable for most companies and many people (like me) would just rack up years of time because we never take any off (when Possible I just cash out any PTO / Vacation I get, but many company stopped doing that as well)
So in response to the government banning employee lost their access to guaranteed number of days, instead how have this "unlimited" which is also an impossibility.
IMO "unlimited" is many many times worse than use it or lose it with a guaranteed number of days every year
As for how it gets used, apparently it's very bimodal and "everyone" is either a "keeper" or "flirts with having none".
There are no federal or state laws mandating paid vacations or holidays. That's entirely at the discretion of the company.
There is no federal paid sick leave mandate. Some states have them.
We have a federal right to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for qualified medical and family situations under a law called FMLA, the Family and Medical Leave Act. Even that has limitations - small businesses, highly compensated employees, and new employees are carved out.
When you are hired, all of these are defined by the companies policies or what you can negotiate. If you have paid vacation time that accrues it'll be paid out if you quit; most companies don't like that, so they give you "unlimited time" on the approval of management. But because we have no statutory protection, your unlimited time could legally be "zero hours".
Or, you get states like here in Texas, where the state senate just passed a bill making it impossible for cities like Austin to require companies provide sick leave.
Where I am in Canada (and I imagine many states) there are legal minimum requirements so I officially get "3 weeks" vacation, but take a couple weeks on top of that using the "unlimited" policy. So "unused" vacation would be paid out according to the official 3 weeks policy in my case. I could see something similar being possible in Europe, but I think in practice europeans already take more paid time off than most North American's with unlimited vacation.
Years ago, the company I work for switched from accrued to unlimited PTO at the end of the fiscal year in order to make the books look better. When it was announced, they basically told everyone to take the remainder of the month off. The fiscal year happened to be the same as the calendar year, so most people were taking huge chunks of time off due to the holidays anyway and didn't really care. For those who had more PTO than what was left, they were told to work with their managers to arrange for as much time off as they felt was necessary in compensation.
This only worked because it was a one-time deal and the managers were (and mostly still are) very reasonable and supportive people. A while later we were merged with another company and they switched us back to regular PTO to be in line with their own HT policies.
Unlimited PTO should average 20 weeks a year to deserve to be called unlimited.
However it varies from country to country but in my understanding the difference to US is drastic.
Insanity is saying "You have unlimited PTO", when actually it's a very normal 20 days / year or whatever. Unlimited !=20 days. Just say you have 20 days leave and then it's clear to everyone involved.
And yes I agree with OP - 25 days of guaranteed PTO a year is pretty limited and nothing that special.
It's not for everyone, but it's very flexible.
No, but I expect if they won't that they do not call it "unlimited".
I think it's still a huge perk comparative to other options in America; companies that don't give unlimited typically just give 2 weeks, and you have to work your way up from there via the career ladder.
We have uPTO and never had a manager say no. But still only have taken 12 days this year. We are so brain washed here in the US.
I hate the USA for this kind of stuff.
Next thing is "unlimited" health insurance where your medical bills are paid [or not] at your manager approval :)
I worked at Atlassian, and my experience was that people were actively encouraged to take between 20-30 days off per year, and that getting vacation was usually a mere formality - telling your manager "hey I'm planning to take the week of so and so off, any issue with that?" I never had vacation or sick time checked, never had any denied, and I very much took advantage of the benefit.
Still, the manager does have to approve it, so I have heard stories about teams that are understaffed declining vacation when they don't have enough people to be on call etc. I don't know how that would work out differently if you did have accrual vacation though... somebody does have to be on-call. It's tough.
On the bad end, I quit a company that wanted me to take a report to task for using too much unlimited pto (3 weeks in a year)
What does this mean?
Companies that start out the relationship with dishonesty are bad places to work.
But hey, "freedom", yay!
To be clear, this is still very disingenuous and I believe companies should stop the practice.
It's not unlimited. It's never unlimited. It's always a lie.
This is not a great argument. Unlimited just means there isn't a pre-defined limit, not that every amount has to be approved.
Do you think there's unlimited amounts of money in the world? If yes, then by definition it's worthless (also, can I have a trillion dollars an hour?). If no, then what's the maximum amount of money?
Do you work for my ISP's marketing department?
>otherwise you'd take 100% paid time off, get a second job, and collect two paychecks in perpetuity
Even if 100% genuine, "unlimited PTO" in no way implies PTO for any reason. It's not incompatible to offer it while at the same time having eligibility requirements and other continued employment requirements. At the most simple it merely means there isn't any set limit. A 25 year veteran who gets cancer can be treated differently then someone who just skives off to go party. The latter can just as easily be fired not for exceeding some arbitrary PTO limit, but absence from work without a listed reason in the contract, defrauding the business (if they lie about it), etc.
In practice I don't think "depending on the fuzzy discretion and good will of management/HR/whomever" is a good practical deal for employees in general vs actual hard PTO which translates to money, since at scale the incentives for the business just are not normally aligned that well and even on the employee side those who abuse it will inevitably arise as well further throwing the thing into a negative spiral. It wouldn't stun me though if someone could find a few real examples of companies that had it because they wanted to offer really good sick people more time, there are lots of ideas that depend on human factors which work very badly on average but well in instances.
I believe some places pay out unused while still employed but I've never seen this.
Lie or not, it's still better.
It _can_ still be better. Or it can be worse, as in the OP's situation.
Unlimited PTO has nothing to do with it.
We are encouraged to take off at least 5 days a quarter / 20 days a year in addition to our holidays (which are flexible given culture, personal preference, etc). We don't count sick days or appointment time towards that. We can take off more, and frequently do, we just have to tell someone we're doing it.
We frequently are put on "nicely forced" vacations if our manager notices we have not taken off in a while. You'll usually get a message from your manager like "hey, schedule some time off in the next month, it's been a bit since you've been off".
This doesn't include parental leave as well, which is pretty solid compared to other places I've been.
Seems like the perfect intersection of policy and need, if you would like to work fewer hours a day or fewer days a week. (Which, ok, maybe isn’t for you.)