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Comment by mrmaddog | Hacker News Reader

I like how you can click on a person's representative dot and follow them through the different sorting metrics. One point stood out to me: how does Assistant Treasurer Ms. Collier get $289,534 in "other" pay? The raw data provided didn't offer any details, and http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area/2012 classifies "Other" as lump sum payouts for vacation, sick-leave, bonuses and comp-time. How does the assistant treasurer get such a high bonus? (For reference, one other assistant treasurer was included in the data, and made a base of 150k (vs Ms Collier's $30K), but only 6k in "other" payment).

Visualizations make it very easy to spot outliers like this.

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Perhaps she retired and was awarded the value of her accrued vacation time?

That's exactly what happened. She had been employed for 21 years and accrued that much PTO over that period.

http://blog.sfgate.com/matierandross/2013/07/24/barts-golden...

I'm just going to add that I think it's silly to get paid your last salary for vacation time you earned when you were 25. While I don't care for caps on the accrued time, I see nothing unfair about scaling the time by your salary - such that if you have 100 vacation days and you get a 10% raise you now have 90 vacation days.

You should at least adjust by cost of living.

But now you know exactly why people save up vacation like this: To get a larger payout at the end of the career.

Personally I think unused vacation days should be savable for 2 years, and then are automatically paid at the current salary rate.

Personally I don't care about being paid for unused vacation days. I just want my vacation. And I don't want to have to use it all for Christmas. (Some employers I've worked for give you a week or two for Christmas automatically, some make you use your allocated days.)

I think it makes sense to pay out for vacation days one could have taken but didn't when they quit or get laid off. I'm not sure it makes sense to pay for vacation not taken in previous years, but maybe.

Well, I'd assume here vacation time from 25 years ago didn't incur compounded interest?

(I'm actually in favor of a 1~2 year cap, but I'm betting she left money on the table by not getting it paid out)

My brother is a CHP officer and they have the same type of arrangement. They get paid out vacation, sick leave, etc if they don't use it. But then they end up getting double-paid. You get paid because you worked and then you get paid again because you didn't take vacation. if they USE the vacation, then they only get paid once (no work pay + vacation pay).

There should be a vacation cap. Once you hit the cap, you can't accrue any more. The cap should be 2 years worth of vacation. You should never get paid out vacation. It's a benefit, not an entitlement.

I like following around Carl Oliver highest compensated union employee at 271k has an 80k base pay 121k in overtime, 23k in "other" (with that much overtime you better get a bonus) and 4k in "Misc" (not sure the diff between that and "other")

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