"Unlimited PTO" is a fiction created by accountants that sounds good on paper. When you need or want time off, you work it out with your manager. No debate about how many days you have left this year, or how many you have accumulated. It's undefined and technically you are supposed to work together and away you go.

Accountants like it because guaranteed time-off is a liability that appears on the company's books as a debt, especially in California where the company is required to pay it out when you leave (whether fired or voluntary).

But what happens in practice is no one feels like they are entitled to the time they should be entitled to, and negotiations from the employee side always come from a place of weakness. It's a terrible system.

Undoubtedly someone will respond to this post with just how amazing their manager is and that they have never had a problem. But you know when I have never had a problem taking time off, even a long time off? When I could point to the corporate policy that says I have X days, and I was taking those days.

And now I'm not playing manager roulette on whether or not I have the time, or how kind they are feeling. Or how buddy-buddy we are.

It's one of those things that are great in theory, and terrible in real life.

You have to manage discretionary PTO. The problem has almost never been people taking too much but taking too little.

At some companies, the directive from the top to management was to make sure people took at least 3-5 weeks of PTO every year. For legal reasons you can't keep official track of this (it will be imputed as accrual) but managers would actively nudge people to take more PTO.

If you proactively manage it, it works pretty well.

> But what happens in practice is no one feels like they are entitled to the time they should be entitled to, and negotiations from the employee side always come from a place of weakness. It's a terrible system

> Undoubtedly someone will respond to this post with just how amazing their manager is and that they have never had a problem.

That me! Except I don't think it has anything to do with my manager or company.

I've worked 5 different jobs over the last 12 years with 8 or 9 different managers and literally never had an issue with taking the time I want while taking 6-8 weeks of PTO a year. I've hit the point where when I'm looking for a new job unlimited PTO is kind of table stakes.

I manage a few teams now with some people in the US where my company does unlimited PTO and others in Canada where our company cannot give unlimited PTO. Looking at my teams, the amount of PTO people take has almost no correlation to whether they have unlimited PTO or a set number of days. I have US employees who take a ton of PTO and Canadian employees who have burned through their entire balance and then some and I have employees in both places who take essentially none.

I get that if you're in that second group it's preferable to be in a place where you'll get paid out for the days you didn't take, but I'm pretty convinced that unlimited vs set days has almost no bearing on how many PTO days someone will actually take.

Exactly- sounds great but in practice often not great. Depends on the culture. I once worked for a small but ultimately very successful start up, as a married guy with kids. Unlimited PTO sounded great. Until I planned my second week long vacation in a year and got a lot of side eyes. Two weeks per year of vacation was less then what I got when PTO was "limited". In practice under unlimited PTO you could take a week off but more than that resulted in a PIP for something else.

I worked at a small firm once where an 18 year old joined and took full advantage of the "unlimited PTO".

He was taking roughly a third of his time off.

Fired inside 6 months, and amazed it took this long.

we have "unlimited" time off, with the recommendation of taking off at least 1 week per quarter. This seems to work pretty well, and I'd rather have this than 20 days PTO. I usually try to take 1 week off, as well as 1 day here and there for an extra long weekend.

From the perspective that a company is an amoral profit-seeking automaton, it's not a "terrible system", it's a successful initiative to reduce compensation.

Is it really a financial liability part really pushing companies for these policies? I never heard this argument before and compared to salaries PTO is minuscule liability...

Seems much more likely companies just trying to squeeze employees into taking less PTO.