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Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

I'm not impressed by this hit piece. Maybe it's because I'm already jaded that "unlimited PTO" never really means that at companies, especially if it's only manager approved PTO. Offering medical leave where you keep your benefits seems reasonable to me (if not preferred? I don't see how this would qualify for PTO. Taking medical leave is something I see regularly, even at companies with "unlimited" PTO). Not being promoted while you're not working seems reasonable to me. This person is clearly very angry, to the point where they're trying to find any way to hit at Atlassian, like "there's favoritism," which is true of 99% of companies. I think the try-to-hit-from-every-angle result of the anger works against them in their main point that they were mislead into thinking they could use PTO to care for a loved one.

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What a weird perspective this is. There is a man whose wife is dying. He needs support from his employer because that's what's paying the bills for the food, shelter, and medical bills that pile up while he's taking care of her. He's put in all his time and effort into helping the company succeed, now he's asking for some leeway when shit hit the fan for him.

It's so pedantic to then point to these random rules, which are specifically designed to screw the employee over, and then say 'welp, those are the rules, too bad'. It also goes against the company mantra, of putting your health before the company (as he states in the article).

The guy in the article even stated:

> - No, it's not even a question, because you won't be using it as a vacation, right? Technically you won't be on PTO, so take a medical leave.

> It sounds very touching, but I didn't recognize the trick here. They wanted me to use my medical leave, because they didn't want to pay for the PTO I earned.

The point here is that the company didn't want to pay the guy for his hard-earned PTO. They pulled out all the stops to avoid paying him. They instead wanted to give him unpaid medical time off. Then they said they couldn't approve PTO because they didn't have enough office coverage, yet his boss took a month off.

So why can't he use his PTO? That's his money, his wife is dying, and his mental and physical health is at an all time low. Let him use his damn PTO.

Doesn't sound like he had much PTO anyway. Why wouldn't he just take leave? If he wanted to take PTO and then dip into leave when it runs out, there may be legal reasons you can't do that.

Sounds like he had unlimited PTO and had hardly used any of it to me.

They did take leave -- evidenced by the language about not being able to extend the leave by using PTO in the email from their manager.

Exactly. He's basically arguing over a few dollars (PTO vs leave), and I'm guessing it's not because he needs the money.

Because PTO needs to be approved by the manager which they weren't ready to do.

He didn't say his wife was dying. Colon cancer is not automatically fatal. The problem is that these are always one sided stories and it's impossible to get the full picture...how can you even begin to adjudicate this by assuming his claims are true?

This.

Any manager under me who refuses PTO to someone caring for a loved one in such a mentally wrenching situation like this deserves to get fired themselves. And if I have anything to say in the matter, they will be, in short order.

Yeah agreed - the emails they show also have bad grammar and misspellings too along with the general writing.

It's basically understood that unlimited PTO means untracked and within some reasonable amount - if you were at an At Will company in the US they don't owe you much. Obviously you can't just take 3 years off of 'unlimited PTO' so it's hard to claim you truly believe it's limitless imo.

Expecting a promo when you're not working and expecting to be able to just take infinite vacation (even when dealing with tragedy) is just not realistic. There are other options (medical leave, extended leave, etc.) - some companies will go out of their way to be kind, but I wouldn't have that as my expectation.

This kind of rant doesn't look great either - my take away is this person was probably just difficult in general, there may have been other reasons they were not promoted.

> my take away is this person was probably just difficult in general, there may have been other reasons they were not promoted.

My general impression is that it's the difficult people who use terms like "toxic" to describe those they clash with. His "Interesting fact 1" is also a red flag. Dirty words in some internal memo? I'm scandalized!

I don't like Atlassian for their slow software, but I'm sure it's a fine company to work for.

It's in the company values - "Open company, no bullshit" and "Don't fuck the customer". When you know the company is Australian it makes more sense.

"Gaslighting" is another one that seems quite a decent heuristic; I find that people using this to be less than reasonable in a well above-average number of cases.

Of course, as with any heuristic it's far from perfect, and the author may very well be in the right here. It's impossible to tell from this piece and there are a few eyebrow-raisers – so all I can give this story is a shrug.

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