As a manager I’d also hate this - it’s another thing that I would have to keep track of and weigh. I don’t want to have to discuss with people about how much PTO is okay! That’s something somebody else should decide!

If a company really wants to give people flexibility they would give X days of paid vacation plus as much unpaid as your manager will approve. Best of both worlds IMO.

Addendum: The company I work for has a “once in a lifetime opportunity” policy where if you want to do something special, like climb Everest or take a cruise around the world or whatever, they’ll work with you to figure out how to make leave work for it. It’s not actually once in a lifetime either, the policy says once every five years or so. I like that idea a lot, even if I’ve never used it.

It's so easy though, just default to yes. Is there a critical deadline coming up? Are they productive and focused at work? Then just always approve.

Either because the 'forcing mechanism of use it or lose it' is gone OR the social pressure like you mentioned.

Other countries also have rules for things like "every employee must be able to see a window" and whatnot.

Some companies do unlimited vacation like this. It's a perk.

Other companies use this to be restrictive on the vacation people take. It keeps more people working more days.

This speaks a lot to company culture.

I was cynical, but year later I'm pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong - I think we collectively all took 15% more holiday. Not a mind-boggling change, but not the "we'll all be bullied to stay at our desks" result I'd anticipated.

Anecdotally I think the largest change is people get less precious over guarding their holiday as a precious resource, even if they've no idea how they'll spend it. You finish your week's work on Friday morning? Ask if anybody needs anything from you and then just take the rest of the day off. No compulsion to find some busy-work and protect 4 hours of vacation.

My current job offers a few "extra" things on top of unlimited PTO like during the summer, a $100 bonus if you post a pic of some activity you did on PTO (literally anything, and can even opt out of sharing if you are so inclined) or more recently, a "competition" for the best use of PTO. I think someone reading a book in a hammock won.

IMO these policies should be banned at the Federal level. I worked at a company with such a policy previously, I ended up only taking 3 weeks of vacation over the course of a 2 year stint. As it turned out, other coworkers would take 6+ weeks per year. There was no canonical guidance on appropriate PTO.

In a large company, this will translate to some managers granting excess PTO for retention purposes - and other managers burning people out. It's also an effective ward against parents and others with responsibilities which do not align with whatever the delivery of the month is.

At both my current and last employer, we had unlimited PTO and employees were encouraged to use it, the only requirement being that they get their work done.

At my last employer, most people took 8-10 weeks off/year in the U.S. office and 12-16 weeks off in our European offices. At my current employer, people average 4-8 weeks and people who don't take at least 4 weeks off a year are gently encouraged to spend more time away from work. In both cases, PTO is not discretionary except where the employee's job specifically involves working on-site for a specific project or event and PTO would overlap with that period.

This is just one anecdotal example though so it's hardly proof that these programs work. I'll just say that if the managers set the culture appropriately then it can work.

I love it, and my manager has never rejected a PTO request, it’s just a formality. I took more than the UK standard 25 days in my first year and we haven’t talked about PTO once.

In fact, sometimes people say stuff like “oh I’m gonna go to $place for two weeks and I’ll just work in the daytime and vacation in the evenings and weekend” and management will actively encourage just taking the time off and enjoying it, coming back refreshed instead.

> won't get paid out for remaining balances when they quit

You can just change the company handbook to say that unused PTO is not paid out, I don't think any state (fact-check me) requires you to pay out unused PTO (you're required to follow a policy fairly, so you must pay it out if the handbook says you pay it out)

In some states, all PTO was immediately removed from the bank as of the change date and those folks immediately moved to unlimited.

In MA, removing accrued PTO wasn't possible, but it was possible to rewrite policy to disallow carryover from one year to another, so people MA stayed on the normal plan until Jan 1, at which point they'd have 0 PTO due to nothing carrying over and they'd be moved to unlimited.

In CA, neither option was allowed, so folks remained on the normal plan until Jan 1, and then were paid out for unused PTO and then moved to unlimited.

They also facilitate hard to identify discrimination, including on prohibited bases, and enable social pressure to reduce total time off taken.

And none of those effects are accidental.

I think it's a good thing but we pay it with our lower average salaries.

Some companies could be abusive with this not approving vacation at similar levels to before. That's always a risky position and impossible to tell from the outside. I know my personal experience when we switched to, flex time off they call it, It gave me an incentive to actively use my vacation as I tend to not to use it prior. The years since we've changed I routinely take 6 to 8 weeks off each year without issue. This is more than double the time off I was allowed under the accrued plan.

I thought it is quite common to accumulate a fairly large number of paid leave days and cash them out.

Four weeks is about 7% of a year. If you could make it look like (on the balance sheet) that you are not incurring that liability for all your employees, it can make some accounting things that much happier.

It does have the added bonus that you don't need to keep track of it for paying out when an employee leaves in some states (making that a consistent thing across all offices rather than a mismash that got worse with remote offices). For example, California is "Vacation is considered wages and must be paid when an employee leaves" and Oregon is "If the employee contract considers vacation to be wages, it must be paid out on separation", whereas Washington is "An employer only needs to pay out vacation if it is in the employee contract."

https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/articles/pto-payout-l...

Paying out vacation itself isn't the problem. Accumulating it, tracking it, having it on the books, and then having it as a liability is what drives the change.

Before someone claims any altruistic motives, supposing this wasn't the reason they would have allowed people to one-off use their old time off in the new policy, but they rejected that.

Maybe we can pull some accounting tricks to get 'health care' off employer books in the near future?

This was three years ago. She finds it very easy to get the first two weeks scheduled, and generally doesn't get a full third week approved.

It sucks.

Maybe we're entitled. (I know we are entitled, it's ok) But I think our time off is one of the biggest reasons to work at these places.

I have 4 weeks off, and so I have to find something to do on my own for a week and a half and although that sounds like a huge positive experience, I'd rather hang out with my wife than be solo.

On top come public holidays so that you regularly are able to stretch 6 weeks PTO to about 7 to 8 weeks of holiday per year (if for example xmas falls not so shitty as last year's).

I am always amazed how different it is in other countries.

This reads like she used to get 4 weeks and now only gets about 2.5. if so, did they give her extra money for that extra time she's now at work?

I have a sneaking suspicion they unfortunately want to make the company less appealing for people that are used to that generous work/life balance culture (i.e. the oldest employees) and have them naturally leave.

And why the hell wouldn't they? In a job market with a global shortage of talented developers, not to mention in a sector that can take 3-6 months to get a worker "productive", it's in their every interest to retain talent. It's a mutually beneficial relationship, imo.

This announcement will at least make it more fair going forward to teams that sticked to the rules and did report the days off. The teams that didn't report still get an advantage in a larger payout though.

I personally am starting up a spreadsheet today to make sure I take the same amount of leave this year as I'd usually be owed.

The old policy tended to end the year with everyone taking most of December off for the holidays (and to burn remaining PTO that wouldn't carry over). Do I expect that to change? ABSOLUTELY NOT.

This is probably going to come down quite a bit to manager discretion, and I'm extremely pleased with my manager's stance towards taking time off. I can definitely see how there'll be folks in the company where this might hurt more. I think the broad majority of managers currently are pretty chill with letting folks take vacation when they need it, and I don't expect that to change.

Overall, I think if you're proactive, and have a halfway decent human being as a manager, you'll end up better off.

And the second one had a very full-on laizes-faire attitude where as long as your work was done, he couldn't care less where you were or what you were doing. Literally told me once "if you are going to be out for a week or longer, just let me know ahead of time, otherwise it's your business".

But he was also the one who was entirely no-bs, and if you were abusing this or slacking, you won't be on his team for long. One of the very few MSFT managers I've met who actually was willing to fire people (but it happened very rarely, as people knew not to slack or mess around on his team). If you manage to get all your work done in 4 days instead of 5 or prefer to work short days and then catch up on things at late night hours? Your call, as long as the results of your work are there.

Ironically enough, he was known in the org as someone who was really smart and got his team to consistently deliver on expectations and beyond. Turns out that when you hire the people for your team who get that attitude, and then you treat them like humans and not like some cattle, the results tend to follow. I feel very fortunate to have worked with that manager, not in the least because he was also incredibly sharp on a technical level (but was also smart enough to understand that he shouldn't be spending any significant amount of his time as a manager writing code).

doesn't that explain why it's not a good policy? Basically the employee's right has changed to manager's generosity.

Based on that it'd make sense that they would ask for fewer days off.

At least the people who advance this idea should investigate unlimited PTO policies. Because if true it's akin to enforcing a policy that lower women's compensation.

Overall, this seems like a net negative for employees; add a level of stress / guilt to what used to be a simple use of earned / accrued benefits (not to mention loss of a differentiator for seniority - I'd heard you got more PTO with more years at the company).

He used to save vacation over 2 years and go on a 6-7 week Europe trip over summer break. It was painless and guilt-free (using the accrued / earned benefit he was entitled to), just logging the time off in whatever system they were using (and letting the manager know as a courtesy); now he needs to justify the time and obtain approval 5+ management layers above for it; maybe it's just a formality but it's unnecessary stress.

Yeah, I can see the new approval thing being a pain. As a manager, I've had no problem with long vacations as long as there's enough notice for the team to plan around it. Beyond that, PTO is a benefit the company provides and it's there to be used.

For myself, I'm very much in the "inform" category when it comes to vacation. I've never really asked for time off, but I have let my managers know when I'm not going to be available and have made sure it's not disruptive to my teams. That's my own small civil disobedience. ;)

Is this preparation for layoffs?

With no hard-set PTO, do they still have to reimburse outstanding time off as required by law?

2: For old policy, yes, after that, you formally get '0 PTO' by law.

Over the years the Big Tech companies have hired enormous numbers of bods and most of them are merely flab, adding nothing to the bottom line.

agree 100%. But adding to this:

in anecdotal big tech experience at two companies, many people producing no value. they know this. rest and vest is what they did.

managers were given increasing headcounts. they hire more and more managers. explosion of managerial class then hire kids out of school.

no vision..direction..why teams or even entire orgs exist. this a massive grift when you paying $200k+ in salary and rsu alone to most junior ic and $300k to most junior manager.

how you provide value is question no one asked. instead people brag ‘i have org with 60 people’ or 300 people. Ego game, broken incentive, and innovation declines. Customers lose because to show revenue growth, both me companies just show more ads.

hardworking good workers losing jobs. companies to blame but also to blame people comfortable in fake jobs especially managerial class who do nothing.

I don't like it when anything that is formally defined moves to something informally defined it usually is to obfuscate the fact someone is now getting screwed.

I'm very interested in seeing which direction this experiment takes a few more years down the line. Right now it works great for companies because they get to remove vacation accrual from their books and employees still have an idea of what constitutes reasonable time off, because that's the system they have worked in their entire lives. A new college hire at their first job though might have a completely different mindset about the "unlimited" part. Once you have enough of that demographic at your company, how are you going to guilt them into sticking to the unwritten rules?

While the balance may no longer be tracked (because there's no balance in the first place), I'm willing to bet any amount of money that there will be a record of all vacation time you have requested and taken, and managers will be able to reference that record for stuff like future approvals and performance evaluations.

If you have to ask for permission to use it, then it's no longer a benefit.

A better way to manage your managees is by maintaining a visible schedule that everyone can access. Mark the important deadlines and periods when you believe time off would impact the business. If someone would like you to mark their vacation time on that schedule, that's cool but optional.

What a scam.

If any US based Microsofties are looking for a better life, Switzerland has record low unemployment and needs foreign workers. Come on in, the fondue's fine!

If companies really think discretionary is a perk and than this is zero harm.

It is my first time to know that in US, there is a no law to make employees have minimum annul leave.

The actual reason is that if you are hourly you have to use up vacation time for those days or not get paid. It's literally pinching pennies.

To give a specific example: Imagine someone has 30-days PTO as of January 15. If they were laid off the company might be contractually obligated to pay it out at whatever rate was agreed (e.g. 50% @ 200K salary is $8K, 100% is $16K). But as of January 16 with the flick of a pen they have 0 PTO and saved thousands or even millions of dollars in layoff costs.

I don't mean this disrespectfully, but people who are "pro" this move are naive. Research has shown this reduces PTO taken and regardless it reduces the cost of layoffs/takes money out of employee's pockets.

Except they're paying out all the accrued PTO in the April paycheck.

Plus it all relies on the good-will of your direct manager. They don't want you taking time off or even want you to leave? You now have zero days a year.

That can be reported to M + 1, M + 2, or to HR as a last resort.

Managers are not computers that follow a written contract as if it's a computer program. Zero days a year is a very obvious violation of conduct.