Was just having this conversation -- is there any precedent for offering different teams and/or differing levels of tenure different vacation packages? My husband used to work at Groupon and said it was really challenging to give all entry-level sales people unlimited vacation because they tended to abuse it. However, unlimited vacation may work well for more tenured positions or even for different types of teams (engineering / design?) We thought this might be too tricky to administrate / unfair, but it does seem that it can be a useful and underabused perk for some and a disaster for others.
In big companies, doing it by tenure with the company is common. A typical schedule is something like: start at 2 weeks/yr, and get an extra week/yr for every 5 years you stay with the company, topping out at 6 weeks/yr. That model has run into trouble as people change jobs more, and is uncommon in the Valley where people change jobs even more than that. Some companies have ditched it, while others will negotiate giving you credit for past jobs, e.g. I believe if Exxon hires you away from a 20-year career with BP, they'll often give you equivalent seniority at Exxon for benefits purposes.
It's definitely done. A traditional method is that the longer you've been at a place, the more vacation you earn. Another technique I've seen is to have a divide, eg "VP and above get an extra 5 days per year."
Facebook, Google, etc commonly use the contractor technique, where anyone you want to work for you but not give benefits becomes an independent contractor, or works for a vendor. Eg, the cooks in the Facebook kitchens.
Yeah - I've seen tiered vacation days based on seniority, but I'm wondering specifically about giving some folks unlimited and others a prescribed number of days. That seems to straddle an almost philosophical issue.
If it's possible to abuse it then it's not really unlimited. Why not just decide what is appropriate and put it in the contract, so everyone agrees how much vacation they can take?
Also there's no reason everyone has to receive the same amount. Indeed that would be very unusual.
