Do you get unlimited vacation though like Salesforce employees? When I worked there nobody worked those days anyway. Will this really have an impact on when people take time off?
PTO is usually at the discretion of the managers; they're more inclined to decline requests for time off when enough people are already taking off (to avoid the situation of someone on the skeleton crew getting sick and not enough people are available to handle an emergency).
It really depends on your customer's needs; slack going down for a day or two over the holidays is unfortunate but not the end of the world. Salesforce going down could, I imagine, easily cause massive financial losses.
I'd like to think it should be easy enough to put people on emergency call rather than forcing them to put 8 hours of butts in seats for no reason, but apparently that's not how Salesforce wants to roll.
If you need bums in seats the professional way to do it is to have an oncall rota.
A rota is the positive affirmation that employee X will be here to support the team versus the negative one that well person X can’t not be here, because they’re the last one to take PTO.
Hahaha. Unlimited vacation actually means vacation only when your manager feels like it - which could be less than you'd get under a fixed vacation allotment. Many such cases.
Some companies offer unlimited PTO. The catch is the culture often discourages people from taking more than a few weeks off. It's been shown if the company just offers N weeks people take more time off than if it were unlimited, which seems ironic.
If you are consistently meeting or exceeding the expectations of an engineer at your level, you can do ridiculous things like take 60 days off a year. I know I did back when I was in a FAANG sorority^W eng team!
It also means if you are not meeting expectations, you’ll probably self-select to get zero time off.
Engineering pays well because you are supposed to work magic. If you can’t produce the magic then the dark clouds gather quickly. The elite sports team analogy is a good one. Keep up an unlucky run of bad games and you’ll get benched then sacked.
I don’t condone any of the above but this is the mindset of “unlimited PTO”. More so than that which I’m seeing others describe, here.
Effectively, it means you have to ask current employees how much vacation you get.
The theory is you can "take what you need" so long as you're getting your work done. In practice, company culture of course dictates what's considered reasonable, and as best I can tell it is highly variable between companies.
At my "unlimited" place, it seems like 3 weeks is considered reasonable, especially if split up. But I know someone at another company who has had trouble getting more than a week for a couple years running.
zdragnar|3 years ago
It really depends on your customer's needs; slack going down for a day or two over the holidays is unfortunate but not the end of the world. Salesforce going down could, I imagine, easily cause massive financial losses.
I'd like to think it should be easy enough to put people on emergency call rather than forcing them to put 8 hours of butts in seats for no reason, but apparently that's not how Salesforce wants to roll.
gorgoiler|3 years ago
A rota is the positive affirmation that employee X will be here to support the team versus the negative one that well person X can’t not be here, because they’re the last one to take PTO.
arealaccount|3 years ago
civilized|3 years ago
Hahaha. Unlimited vacation actually means vacation only when your manager feels like it - which could be less than you'd get under a fixed vacation allotment. Many such cases.
When something sounds too good to be true, it is.
colinmhayes|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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joe_guy|3 years ago
pbw|3 years ago
https://www.betterup.com/blog/unlimited-pto
gorgoiler|3 years ago
It also means if you are not meeting expectations, you’ll probably self-select to get zero time off.
Engineering pays well because you are supposed to work magic. If you can’t produce the magic then the dark clouds gather quickly. The elite sports team analogy is a good one. Keep up an unlucky run of bad games and you’ll get benched then sacked.
I don’t condone any of the above but this is the mindset of “unlimited PTO”. More so than that which I’m seeing others describe, here.
_jal|3 years ago
The theory is you can "take what you need" so long as you're getting your work done. In practice, company culture of course dictates what's considered reasonable, and as best I can tell it is highly variable between companies.
At my "unlimited" place, it seems like 3 weeks is considered reasonable, especially if split up. But I know someone at another company who has had trouble getting more than a week for a couple years running.
newaccount2021|3 years ago
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