> one asshole engineer took 2 months off paid leave and then came back and quit immediately. We were angry at the engineer, not the CEO, because it was clear what he was doing was taking advantage of the company's generosity.
I don't understand why you're mad at someone for using a benefit he's entitled to?
Unlimited PTO means you should never have to work if you don't want to. Otherwise it's not unlimited.
Well, this is kinda like complimentary condiments or whatever. Technically you are allowed to abuse it to the wazoo, but in practice it just means "Take a reasonable amount, we're not stingy". There obviously is an unspoken "we're all grown ups here" type of social contract in these sorts of things. Abusing it is going to come at the cost of the commons, and in the GP's case it did cost them the perk, so being angry at the abuser seems justified.
One of my co-workers a few years ago decided to go to Japan for 3 months, but that didn't fly with my company and it ended up being mostly an unpaid sabbatical (despite the unlimited PTO policy). 3 months later, the guy extended his stay and let us know he wasn't coming back. There were no hard rules anywhere in sight, but the way this played out seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Some people are just missing that part of their development that helps them to intuitively grasp what counts as abuse when there are no clear written rules. You can't just ask them to be reasonable. I worked for a company that ordered free dinner for folks who stayed late. No limit to what you can eat, but if you're feeling a little hungry, grab a slice of pizza! Well, sure enough a few people ruined it for everyone by taking armfuls of pizza home with them, enough to feed 10 people. I'm talking multiple whole pizza pies, boxes and all, straight to their cars. "It was for employees, and there were no written restrictions" was the justification. So, that perk ended.
It's interesting how inconsistent and asymmetric these intuitive limits seem to be. Pushing employees to work extra hours, easily $X000 in time? Perfectly acceptable. Abusive JIRA-powered micromanagement? That's just how it is. But $60 worth of pizza!? How could a reasonable person possible justify that?
I would find not having defined benefits extremely uncomfortable.
Saying that you have unlimited paid leave when that is obviously untrue and leaves the policy open for abuse by both employee and employer. I'm sure the example stating that less leave was taken when it was "unlimited" was because people understood that there were limits but didn't know what the limit was and didn't want to trigger management. Once things are defined, of course people will think that it's ok to take the maximum leave allowed.
Consider that your employment contract doesn’t even specify how much work you will get done. Isn’t that a much more extreme degree of freedom than number of days of PTO? It’s between you and your manager to figure out what your expected amount of output is. Given that, isn’t PTO just one of many factors in that ongoing negotiation?
> Some people are just missing that part of their development that helps them to intuitively grasp what counts as abuse when there are no clear written rules.
I think the guy who quit after two months' leave knew perfectly well it was abuse; he just didn't care. Or maybe he felt slighted by the company in some way (unfair resolution of a conflict, promotion denied, underpaid, whatever) and this was his way of getting even with them.
How can it be abuse? If 2 months leave is part of package then surely it's up to them how they use it. You wouldn't criticize them for using all the money they get paid would you?
The problem isn’t taking two months off. It’s taking a large chunk of time off, then immediately quitting.
That means the team was down an engineer for basically an entire quarter, without notice. That wrecks schedules and causes headaches for your coworkers who now have to figure out how to make up for the lost time or figure out what work to cut from the schedule.
No, HR doesn’t schedule work or features. It’s practically impossible to pad timelines for the case where an engineer decides to effectively pad their two weeks notice by an additional six weeks except for large companies like Google.
> Some people are just missing that part of their development that helps them to intuitively grasp what counts as abuse when there are no clear written rules.
2 months is clearly abuse, but I'm worried my CEO or HR will have a far less generous definition of abuse. I'm already reading a thread about 4-6 week vacations where I get at most 2 weeks.
> There obviously is an unspoken "we're all grown ups here" type of social contract in these sorts of things.
It's absolutely not grown-up behavior to remove terms from an explicit business contract (employment agreement) and move them to an implicit, unwritten "I know it when I see it" social contract.
Obviously there's some actual limit that your platonic grownup has in mind, between 2 weeks and 40 weeks of PTO per year. Just write it down.
It's not, because people won't easily benefit from taking unlimited condiments, while they would easily benefit from real unlimited holidays.
Holidays should come with some limits, eg. no more than X weeks per year, like it was in the past.
I get it, the government made a stupid rule (forcing PTO accrual in the contract between employer and employee) and companies were creative enough to find a solution to bypass that rule and made it sound attractive on a job ad.
In an ideal world we would just have an explicit upfront amount and no government interference.
In a world without "government interference" you wouldn't have leave, you'd work every day of the week, and you'd work 12+ hours a day.
Being paid out leave, and having leave accrued isn't a stupid rule. It's a law that's made in reaction to companies writing an upfront amount of leave into contracts, and never allowing their employees to take that leave.
When you side with no regulation, you side with abusive employers, not for "common sense winning out". People will abuse you as much as they're legally allowed to.
Roughly 1 in 5 workers do earn just that or very close to it. Easy to forget working in tech. But labor laws aren't just for in-demand techies. They are for everyone, including your cashier.
You are moving the goal posts. The original post said:
>...In a world without "government interference" you wouldn't have leave, you'd work every day of the week, and you'd work 12+ hours a day.
The claim is that without a government rule specifying otherwise, we would be working every day of week for almost all of our working hours. The government does mandate a minimum wage - if the original point was true, we would all be paid at the minimum wage. Your "1 in 5" percentage seems high, but as you point out, most people are paid more than the minimum wage.
> Holidays should come with some limits, eg. no more than X weeks per year, like it was in the past
That's anchoring bias. Unlimited does have some nice properties (e.g. very generous allowances in many cases, and the possibility of spending unaccrued time, for example)
If we're in talking about ideals, I'd just ask for people to be more transparent about what the actual dynamics are: if taking 2 months vacation where everyone else takes 1 week affects metrics tied to promos, then say that upfront so people can make a conscious decision about whether signing up for asshat culture is worth the brand prestige or career trajectory potential or whatever it is that people value.
"In many organizations, there is an unhealthy emphasis on process and not much freedom. These organizations didn’t start that way, but the python of process squeezed harder every time something went wrong. Specifically, many organizations have freedom and responsibility when they are small. Everyone knows each other, and everyone picks up the trash. As they grow, however, the business gets more complex, and sometimes the average talent and passion level goes down. As the informal, smooth-running organization starts to break down, pockets of chaos emerge, and the general outcry is to “grow up” and add traditional management and process to reduce the chaos. As rules and procedures proliferate, the value system evolves into rule following (i.e. that is how you get rewarded). If this standard management approach is done well, then the company becomes very efficient at its business model — the system is dummy-proofed, and creative thinkers are told to stop questioning the status quo. This kind of organization is very specialized and well adapted to its business model. Eventually, however, over 10 to 100 years, the business model inevitably has to change, and most of these companies are unable to adapt." [1]
Wasn't that the point? They're talking about being mad about someone taking 2 months of PTO off and then talk about how they always take 6-8 weeks cough of PTO with no one batting an eye.
So the reason for being mad is the company and team culture. The first company had a clear unspoken culture that actually using the benefit was off limits.
On that same point, I see a lot of turnover throughout my career and would say about 50% chance someone goes on medical leave and actually comes back to work. We basically start recruiting expecting they’ll not return. It’s obviously correlated with that persons income and ability step out of their employee compensation. But, especially with first time mother’s in their >30. They’ve been saving for it and often hold a key position within the organization by this point in their career. Or perhaps that’s just what I’ve observed at several companies.
Probably because it changed the workload or leave approvals for the remaining staff
Depends on your mental model, some would say the company should be staffed to account for x% on leave, thou account for a person taking 2 months is likely out of reach for smaller companies
I don't understand why you're mad at someone for using a benefit he's entitled to?
Unlimited PTO means you should never have to work if you don't want to. Otherwise it's not unlimited.
If there's a limit just state it upfront.