The only times Ive gotten promotions was to get hired elsewhere. Better title, more money.
Its well known that retention budgets are laughable or nonexistant, and new hire budgets are well stocked. That means that if you want to grow from what youre doing, you gotta leave.
Of course if you don't leave they may lay you off at any time. However assuming that doesn't happen they will eventually give you a large raise.
"Just hold out until they are desperate enough that they HAVE to give you a large raise!" is laughable.
Every single day you don't quit and get paid what you are worth, is a day you are leaving money on the table. Imagine waiting years for that big raise when you could have left and made tens to hundreds of thousands more in that time.
My eldest is now 18 and starting to to into the workforce and my youngest is still about 3 years from that.
if (and thats a big if) we dont have a GFC part 2 in the next 10 years I'll be fine I think... but jeez Trump/AI is making it hard to get there.
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/pig-python-baby-b...
https://fortune.com/2026/05/31/boomer-reaction-economy-feel-...
The baby boomers have been a serious "clog" in the system at a lot of levels. It will be interesting to see how things play out once they're no longer actively involved.
It's all going to be taken by end of life care companies who charge $20k a month (yes really) to put you in a small room and have a teen with barely a highschool diploma check in on you every now and again, for minimum wage.
Every dime of wealth the boomers collected will be captured by a few private capital orgs who prepared for this. It will never flow down.
The healthcare industry will profit a great deal, but there is no way they will capture 65% of all wealth in the country. And supposing they did: ultimately, all this wealth ends up on some household's balance sheet unless it goes abroad.
The real question is will this change? Will companies start valuing long term employees thus making it not worthwhile to leave? Only time will tell (I wouldn't bet on it though).
Holding out isn't ideal, but it might be the best for you.
Why would this be any different?
You can make all sorts of hay about "Oh that money will be invested so it will still benefit normal people" but no, the vast majority of the wealth the boomers gathered will be controlled by the new aristocracy. They will do with it as they please and thus you should expect it to almost entirely benefit them first and foremost.
Private equity prepared for this windfall. Even if they scoop up only ten percent of it or so, that's an enormous transfer of wealth from average families to the hyperwealthy. That's another entire chunk of the pie that is just removed from the continually shrinking normal person economy.
A giant fraction of that wealth is in real estate: Homes. Those homes should be passed down to the next generation, alleviating our insane house prices somewhat, but instead they will come under ownership of the same companies who currently monopolize specific rental markets to ensure the price goes up as much as they want, and they will absolutely rent out those new properties, in such a way that they do not reduce prices.
That housing stock is completely and totally captured by these private equity firms that own the end of life care companies.
The big announcement is they are giving everyone one extra day off around a national holiday as a reward. We already have "unlimited" PTO but of course can't really use it. So their reward is letting us use a benefit we already supposedly had.
You're right that there can be a problem at small companies when you hire someone out of a toxic company. Some people love the fresh start and are so happy to finally be in a healthy environment that they thrive.
Some people are so broken from toxic previous employers that they can't adapt. We hired a lot of people out of a competitive Big Tech office and it was probably a 50/50 flip of the coin if they were going to be great to work with or toxic political monsters. I had to have so many difficult conversations with people who could only see their coworkers and other teams as competitors who had to be defeated that I nearly had a prepared speech on the topic. The politics and attempted backstabbing was insane. It was also weird that they thought it was going to work at a small company where we knew the people they were trying to backstab for years.
Because there's no such thing. Or rather, there are until it's unprofitable enough that caring seriously threatens the bottom line, or the nice owners sell off to someone less nice.
>All employees want, in theory, to take as much vacation as possible. But they also all want to take just slightly less vacation than each other, to be perceived as more loyal, more committed, and more dedicated (hence more promotion-worthy). Everyone looks to the others for a baseline, and will take just slightly less than that. The Nash equilibrium of this game is zero.Relevant for big companies where people intend to have decade spanning careers with multiple promotions.
But for the tech worker who is going to have a series of 1-3 year stints at different companies, their promotions are more likely to come from switching companies than from showing loyalty or commitment to their current employer.
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.
It also means that employees don't accrue PTO days, and therefore don't have to be paid out for that time when they're fired.
This creates some complications for the company where the accumulated PTO can be a liability on the books. It's a number that represents something they have to pay out with no labor in return. Depending on laws and circumstances they may also have to pay out the PTO balance when someone departs the company.
Some companies skip all of this by switching to untracked PTO, which is often sold as unlimited PTO. Employees don't accumulate a PTO balance and when they go on vacation they get paid normally, not out of a separate bucket. No extra liabilities on the book.
The trick is that PTO is now up to your manager's approval and judgment. At good companies you can actually take advantage of this for a more relaxed and flexible PTO schedule if you get your work done. I have done it and it's great when the company is good.
At bad companies, it becomes a trick where your manager always says "I don't know, now isn't really a good time to take that much time off" and then everyone gets less vacation time than they had before. I have also experienced this and it's very depressing.
https://www.businessinsider.com/unlimited-pto-vacation-scam-...
I’ve heard horror stories about unlimited equating to zero. But I’ve also heard plenty of horror stories about PTO and unpaid time off getting denied as well. There is not much for employee protections in the states.
Maybe the hate for DTO in well compensated circles like this comes from people who were already getting 6 weeks of PTO. I would imagine they’re not comparing DTO against the 4 weeks my sister has as a senior dev in a marketing firm with an extra day per year of service or the _3_ weeks my mother had at 65 working as a data analyst for a healthcare company. Or maybe my company is just a unicorn in a sea of companies abusing it with people not being able to get any time off at all.
People are talking about how it’s always busy, there’s never enough time etc. That’s true almost everywhere. The work never stops. There’s always a project, always a critical bug, always a new initiative, always the next sprint. There’s more work than could ever be done with twice the employees. Good culture just mandates that you work around peoples absence and so is fine if people are out. Likewise as a good employee you don’t abuse unlimited and take off half the year.
It's uncomfortable for employees but employers tout how comfortable it is.
We're all just hunkering down.
Maybe next they’ll give you housing from the company property, and sell groceries from the company store, and see a company doctor.
As you become more senior, the success metrics for your role change significantly. Mentoring only goes so far because there is a large element of self-awareness and a willingness to change. Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails. It is the career equivalent of trying to raise a Series B with a Series Seed pitch deck.
There are a much smaller number of senior roles than people who can be promoted into them. Above a certain level promotions are highly competitive. You are being stack-ranked against everyone else that can do the same job and tenure is only an input into that calculus to the extent it gives you unique domain expertise. A successful strategy for avoiding hyper-competitive promotions is to create a new promotion-like role that doesn't really exist. However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit, and these opportunities only exist at specific moments in time.
Raises, on the other hand, are largely impacted by complex financial and economic considerations. Many companies could do much better at this but even then I think employees significantly underestimate the network of opportunity costs that must be considered.
The world has literally become the people vs corporations. There is no soul in working any more.
I personally find the US setup where often the longest serving and oldest workers would be earning the most, strange. Even when those oldest folks are clearly past their prime and themselves admit so.
There are always exceptions. I worked with a fantastic colleague who was a highly knowledgeable technical expert and a capable PM, always punching above his weight at work. One day in a chance conversation with him I was shocked to hear that he wants to retire soon because, now that he is on the wrong side of 90, he is not that interested anymore. My jaw dropped -- I never paid attention to his age. But I suspect many folks in the last quarter of their productive life will be happy to slow down. My 2c.
They forgot the “More work, Constant threat of Unemployment” part
The reason there are no raises and no promotions is because of this "just be thankful you have a job and income at all" mentality that exists in the current environment
It’s wild how different things are at different levels over time. When I started about 8 years ago, any technical skills and experience on your resume / LinkedIn would have recruiters reaching out non-stop. That died out over the last 3 years and I didn’t have anyone reaching out for jobs. Recently I updated my profile to state I’m a staff engineer and suddenly I’m getting messages like nothing ever happened. Senior engineer? Maybe one recruiter every 3 months.
So yeah, definitely the "more work" part.
Thankfully, my company is pretty good about still giving me raises.
Not trolling, genuine question.
ALDI is great though!
There's a larger issue with that though: At some point, successful engineers _need_ to become examples or leaders if we are to continue exponential growth. If you are happy discontinuing exponential growth, then that's fine.
Why? Why should I become an example, or a leader? To be blunt: why do companies think I should do that additional work, without additional pay?
If you want to grow the company, (and all companies want to grow), or new companies want to start, we gotta train new people. That means you, too. Knowledge transfer and good culture is how the industry changes for the better. Otherwise it's all the pointy haired ones exploiting useful idiots.
If your wages are falling behind then look for opportunities in higher growth sectors.
Now obviously you can't have every employee promoted to a Sr. Architect or Fellow, but that is ok be cause not everyone can (or want to) obtain that necessary skill set. A while back I recall seeing a grid with various levels, what management title that would typically mirror, and the skills that would be required for each level.
UNIONIZE
It's fake bottom-line thinking that optimizes a few items while ignoring second and third-order effects.
Innumeracy with a finance vocabulary.
Virtually all of that happened in the first 8 years. In the last 2 years I also stalled and saw minor inflation corrections of 2% a year, so I quit.
In my experience it had everything to do with me. In the first 8 I was very hungry, and always willing to take on something more or different. In the last 2 I was very much set on just coasting and doing what I was already doing, and it translated in them paying what they had always paid me, plus a little for inflation correction.
I think the truth is usually that if others don't stall and you do, that the solution probably sits with you as well. That having been said, I think now with AI the value-add of an employee sees so much pressure, that I think stalling will be a major trend.
Lets say your company breaks even. There's a savings jar, people's salary are being met, everyone's happy, and idk, you bought your first yacht or whatever.
Shouldn't you calculate expenses on the assumption that people will get a salary increase? Or is that a weird thought? Is that just a fixed variable, and when someone asks for a raise you can say "sorry, our budget is tight"
I have a feeling many Founders/CEO's aren't honest about expenses and earnings. If my company made a million and someone earns on average 50k, then I can hire a lot of people with that money. If they all cost 60k (big promotion imo), then I need to hire like they'll earn 60k.
Maybe this is all bs, but I feel like a lot of founders can pay but won't.
Unionizing is just part of the fighting back. Only splitting the big monopolies can bring back competition and healthy salaries and promotions.
Monopolies are bad for consumers, but they are also bad for employees when that monopolies control most of the jobs of the industry.
Big tech employs less than 1% of the people in the country.
It's an international market and everybody's using the same skills and tools. It's insane to think that 6 digit salaries would forever be sustainable when the rest of the world is doing the same stuff.
Developing tech to knock down barriers also paves over moats. I think the west is going to be in for some very trying times in the coming decades. The UK is a fascinating place to look at in this regard.
Well it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the capital class, the "responsible" owners of the economy. Everyone knows that credit goes to capital and blame goes to workers!
Finding a level that suits you and being satisfied with it is an important life hack.
> > However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit
Even if some aspects of that might be true on the individual level, this take is the classic "blame the individual, but don't question the system."
Nothing about the concentration of capital by mega-corporations (enabled by tax policies they pushed). Nothing about the unfolding multigenerational disruptions by AI on the white collar job market. Just the old well laundered "bootstraps" argument.
What OP said is definitely true on the micro level-- not "even/might/some aspects", but the whole thing. It's true that in any given organization there are fewer senior roles because of hierarchical nature, it's true that as you progress up the ladder the demands change and increase, and it's true that many people fail or choose not to adapt.
The macro argument seems right as well. If you measure it longitudinally the numbers don't stay constant. It's 1 in 4 today, maybe it was 1 in 10 fifteen years ago. Anecdotally there is definitely something strange going on with the labor market that's new, and that you can't explain by micro realities alone.
> create a new promotion-like role
I do this for people on my team when I can.
I'm about maxed out for development roles compensation wise. By saving most of this compensation and investing it in the S&P 500 and similar indices, I get way more of a return for far less effort. There are days - not months, days - where I'll earn about $7,500 in stock appreciation. The long term trend has me about matching my monthly salary in earnings.
Raises are inflation adjusted so there's no erosion of the underlying capital going into investments.
Why try harder when I'm paid enough to just invest it in the stock market? The biggest problem I have right now isn't how to get a promotion or raise, it's coming up with increasingly contrived excuses to avoid up-or-out and being pushed into more responsibilities.
I don't get this framing. No one is owed a promotion. (Unless that was explicitly promised of course!)
Me, I'm worse than stalled out: I'm earning one tenth of what I used to. And I'm happy with my job! Imagine!
I prefer employment to be transactional. I think it always ultimately is. There is a role for government to not let employers unfairly take advantage of workers or cheat them, but beyond that my loyalty is to people and what I have equity in.
With some reserve on the side, a company can survive bad times and not fire people. This is the kind of behavior employee will appreciate and make some diehard loyal.
But this available money is money not making more. So that's a bad thing these days and so the only easy variable available to survive is to remove excess workforce. It took some time for people to understand loyalty has been one-way only but now employers are reaping what they've sown.
Oh, and back then a single income could support a working-class family to buy a decent house, two cars and maybe send a kid or two to college.
The British Army passed on promoting George Washington. Twice.
Nothing changes.
I'd rather take the money and not have to work while I find a new job than to have a warning that my job is going to end in 2 weeks while I'm expected to keep working.
- Job security is getting lower.
- Insurance is getting spotty, will this be covered? Maybe?
- Companies are testing dynamic pricing.
- The rise of prediction markets.
Eventually the economy is going to be constantly gambling on our lives. Every ounce of certainty is a potential money making opportunity.
Isn't the US significantly more meritocratic in this regard than other large economies? I.e. compared to Europe or Asia it would seem that Europe has much more rigid comp rules, Japan has formal mechanisms to ensure that older people are paid more. And this is a tech forum obviously where i.e. the right ML engineers are making 7 figures + right now in their late 20s.
But pure tech is a small part of all white collar jobs (the linked article references "white collar jobs", not "professionals" which the title substituded for it). And many non-tech white collar jobs are not nearly as meritocratic as those in the pure tech (I also agree that in Asia or Western Europe those jobs might be even less meritocratic, but this does not change the point above). My 2c.
I'm going to be 70 in November, and I can't wait to retire ... hopefully in 6 months, but chances are I'll keep working until I'm put out to pasture by the company I'm currently working for.
Throwing code hasn't lost its appeal, and I'm still learning new stuff every day, but the landscape has changed too much for my tastes since the early 2010's.
Nowadays we're doing "devops" instead of actual programming, the cloud has become the new mainframe, web browsers are just thin clients, buy-once-use-forever is long gone and replaced by monthly rent-seeking services and forced updates, and the sixth (seventh? eighth?) iteration of spicy autocomplete (as in "You no longer have to know how to write code!") is pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
I started writing code in the early 70's, and became a paid developer in 1975. I still love programming, but I'm completely fed up with everything else that has ruined the experience in the past 10 to 15 years. I'm sure I'll still be throwing code after I retire, but it will be for my own enjoyment, and it won't be using any of the latest fads and dead ends (pretty sure we're on the eighth iteration) from the past couple of years.
YoE only gives potential, but are not necessarily sufficient in any career. I've interviewed engineers who learned the narrow job they were doing in 6 months, and then only did that for a few years. Do they have 6 months of experience or 3 years? I'd argue closer to 6 months unless they were doing more. I imagine surgeons are similar, where I'd rather see X number of successful surgeries performed than YoE.
This issue with YoE is also why I'm bothered when HR uses YoE too heavily to base salaries around.
Career progression is of course nice, but the larger issue is just being paid a living wage. In my case, I have money, I can walk away from my job any time that I want to, but I love what I do. Most people aren’t so lucky. The politics are hard, because there is this characterization (and I have seen it here at HN) that state employees are lazy, incompetent, inefficient, have huge pensions, collect large amounts of overtime, and more. In my experience, while there are exceptions, this really isn’t true.
Some environments require progression as a sort of anti-stasis measure. Famously including army officers, not exactly a growth industry either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out
How does your union keep people focused on the job? Or is it simply that the union self-selects those who are already focused on job-related matters and wouldn't end up in the slump anyway?
These companies are not monoliths though. Statistics really matter.
It makes sense to burn reserves and keep good employees around through a temporary cyclical economic downturn. But most of the large layoffs lately have been driven by secular changes that management expects to be permanent.
Put another way, if they aren’t matching inflation, should I reduce the work I do correspondingly?
I agree it's more expensive than ever to afford to raise a family, though. There's also a malaise in the air that I don't think broader society has felt since the late 1970s, too.
Some people might not want to take responsibility for retirement savings in the same way they might not want to take responsibility for providing themselves housing but the alternative is strictly worse.
The only pensions that kind of work is government pensions because they can paper over the structural deficiencies with taxation. But even that has significant limitations as we've seen.
A 401k isn't required to be invested in the stock market. It is advisable but not required.
That said, they can work great in tandem with the stock market.
The Kensington & Chelsea local government pension scheme in London, here in the UK, is an example.
The local authority (not central government) ultimately has the responsibility on paying out these liabilities, but it's one of the few councils that just dumped their pot in to global equities, and as a result they are 200% funded relative to their commitments and have stopped making further contributions.
The money that was flowing into the pension scheme can now flow in to local services.
Asset allocations:
https://www.ft.com/content/87c321ab-e5ac-4a1d-a637-c1f7befcc...
Cutting contributions:
https://www.ft.com/content/67254bff-0e6c-407a-a24a-c34ee217d...
I prefer having the money under my control, personally.
Losing your job is bad; losing your job and your retirement is a nightmare.
Typically in US tech companies layoffs don't give employees a notice period, but they do give severance pay. So you stop working effective immediately but you either get a large check or continue to receive paychecks for a period. That period depends on the company but it's usually within the range of your notice period. You don't have to work during it, though.
The flip side is that other employers understand that you can't fill a position immediately. There's not many circumstances where a unique opportunity really appears on no notice.
In situations where you are in dispute with your employer and want to walk off, the traditional solution is to file a number of disputes and get yourself signed off as sick with "stress", then quietly negotiate a mutually agreeable exit.
Post-WW2, America had a lock on global manufacturing and was like last man standing in a burned down world.
It was/is an illusion to think that could be a permanent state.
The pre-war employment situation in America looked nothing like post-war. Your race to the bottom narrative is probably better framed as reversion to a multi-polar world with bonus features of higher global prosperity and capability, lower barriers to access foreign markets (whether laborers or consumers), and mature logistics infrastructure. In short - more people than ever want YOUR job, and to live in YOUR house, and have YOUR safety net, such as it is, it’s not just some focus on quarterly reports.
Is that how things should be handled? Nopers. Is it how things are due to employers having more power than employees? Yeahpers.
The system is reasonable in the sense that it’s explainable and predictable on both sides. Social convention seems preferable to me in this context to binding contracts.
The origin story is that "discretionary PTO" was created to enable people to take longer vacations than was feasible within the regulatory constraints of accrual-based PTO. It can be abused in other ways but the intent of the people that invented it were employee-friendly.
It's just so slimy.
It started as a positive thing, intending to trust the employees and give flexibility. Unfortunately, like a lot of things, sleazy leaders turn flexibility into manipulation.
Anytime something is marketed as unlimited, it's not.
I’m tired of all the excuses for shit leadership. They all can go to h** when they die.
out of curiosity, why would you censor that word?
I think the issue here is that you're trying to frame the issue in terms of some sort of concept of fairness. But in reality that has nothing to do with it.
* A tax on (gross revenue – wages – cogs) with rate (cpi + fedrate) ^ 0.9 would be an excellent start, with an exponential factor that halts ‘shift the tax to consumers through simple price increases’ — the more you earn, the more you have to raise prices, which raises inflation, which raises your future tax by more than your price increase; the more revenue you pay out as wages instead of shareholder dividends, the lower you can set prices, which lowers inflation, which lowers your future tax — and adding the FFER lever allows the Fed to perform their mission to control (price) inflation not only with banks but also with businesses. For example, (8% inflation + 4% fedrate) ^ .9 is ~14.8%, which is a completely acceptable surcharge for businesses having raised prices so high that it caused an 8% inflation year!
Human productivity to wages have kept pace with each other, though, so there is nothing to suggest anything has changed for the human. It is not like the robots are seeking promotions (yet).
Where did you get that idea from?
Until we have sentient robots, all that automation is simply a lever with a human laborer at the end of it.
When do we stop?
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
I mean, it's cherry picked, but still funny to see all those charts.
If you're a CTO, CEO, CxO, you have direct, in depth knowledge to how the company is doing. You also likely have insight into how that translates into free capital to spend on wages. Many companies are not public, and even when companies are, earning reports aren't easy for a line worker to fully understand.
So if you have that knowledge, it's much easier to push back when someone says a wage increase isn't possible. Such as the board, or the CEO (eg, if CTO, or whatever).
This by no means "makes it fair", it's simply that the inequality may be from knowledge, and therefore bargaining power.
Another aspect of things, is that every CxO class worker can agree, their knowledge is very very important, irreplaceable in fact! Upper management, you see, is quite valuable, as of course (from their perspective) "I'm irreplaceable and valuable!". Who doesn't think they have value, after all?
But.. those line workers, or even those engineers, well.. they're like cogs. One as another.
Some might attribute malice to the above thoughts by CxO class individuals, but it can also simply be driven by self-belief in innate value, and by good old ego.
Depends on where in the world you're looking. In India, something like 50% of the population works in agriculture. At the scale of India's population that's a significant fraction of the population of the planet, it's more than twice the population of the entire US.
> 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.
If the number of PTO days taken is the same between the groups, isn't it CLEARLY superior from an employee perspective to have a set amount? That way, you get paid out if you leave or are fired.
I know quite a few people who use their PTO as a sort of emergency fund if they are laid off... they will at least get paid that amount to hold them over until the next job.
For me, no. I take more PTO than most companies with limited PTO offer. Most big tech companies offer 20-25 days and I'm taking 30 minimum. I take 6-8 weeks a year and the year I got married, I took 10. A normal year of PTO for me is 2 weeks during the summer for a vacation, a week at Thanksgiving, a week in April or May since my family has multiple birthdays in that window, 2-3 weeks in the Christmas/NYE period, and then random days here and there for the rest of the year.
For my team, for the people on the low end banked PTO is probably better. For the people on the high end they often take more than the allotment for CA employees, so no.
Everyone's experience will be different, but in my career I've always found that unlimited PTO often means no one cares how much PTO you take as long as you're getting your work done. I value that freedom. I know it's not for everyone and I'm not saying that every company should be unlimited PTO, but I just hate this narrative that it's a scam.
But adding all that manager and corporate discretion sets one up for abuse when things go wrong at either the manager or corporate level. For some, I suppose the benefit is worth it--but if "unlimited vs set days has almost no bearing on how many PTO days someone will actually take", then people are giving up a lot of guarantees for very little benefit on their side. Especially the payout when you leave.
I have never worked at a place where I didn't need manager approval for my PTO. That includes places where I had a set PTO balance.
In my experience, having banked PTO days doesn't actually give you any real protection from abuse. A manager can still deny every single PTO request or load you up with so much work that taking any PTO will result in you falling behind. The only difference is that the company then needs to pay you out for those days, which isn't nothing, but it's also not a ton of protection from abuse.
He was taking roughly a third of his time off.
Fired inside 6 months, and amazed it took this long.
Different people have different temperaments. Unlimited PTO works great for me because I am more likely to actually take time off when I don't have to meter it. When vacation days are limited, they feel scarce and precious, so I avoid using them if at all possible - what if something more important were to come up later in the year, after I'd run out? It's stressful. There are never enough PTO days.
When I don't have to count days or worry about whether I have enough left, I'll just take time off, whenever the occasion arises. Taking all the time I want doesn't actually end up being much more than I'd be allowed if I had to ration it out.
Of course, it’s well in advance, and nearly always avoids big company plans.
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.
The management culture in the US (other places too, but I'm most familiar with the US) is such that any time the employee (particularly ICs/line employees) wants to spend outside of work is automatically considered suspect.
This is because non-management employees are considered to be inherently lazy and constantly seeking to get as much out of the organization as possible for as little work as possible. And when they do work, they're considered to be incompetent and malicious (requiring constant supervision).
I wondered how real those stories were, but that is probably what companies are thinking everyone is like.
In other words, it is roughly the same way as regular PTO except "unused" PTO doesn't accumulate, and you won't get paid for any unused PTO at the end of your employment - which is the the whole point of "unlimited PTO"
Seems much more likely companies just trying to squeeze employees into taking less PTO.
A somewhat random example:
https://www.higginbotham.com/blog/unlimited-pto-pros-cons/
"Cost efficiency. Traditional PTO policies can result in financial liabilities due to unused vacation payouts when employees leave the company. With unlimited PTO, these liabilities are eliminated. This can be particularly advantageous for companies looking to manage their finances more effectively."
But surely it can't be a significant amount of make sense to implement this kind of police only for this unless the company has insane turnover (so "unpaid" PTO is not paid out as cash). The reduced amount of PTO staff takes must be the main reason.
Unpaid PTO is (assuming that the employee _doesn't_ leave the company) essentially debt in the company books with 0% interest rate.
Maybe there is a new frontier where humans can start to become more productive again. Some say that is AI, but that remains to be seen. For now, we've hit our known limit. There is no longer anything outside of human control, like waiting for a crop to grow, that limits our human productivity. The only limiting us is ourselves, and it may be a fundamental limit.
I don't know what that means. When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow? The only thing that changed for the production side was requiring less humans as machines could do the work of many laborers.
Why not take 10 weeks or 12 weeks? If it's unlimited?
And how many other employees are only taking half of what they would be taking because they feel silently pressured to - and do all of those missing weeks make up for the single extra week you're taking?
I was once on a team where the manager thought he was being tough by really discouraging PTO taking in their team, and it was all great until we got to the end of the year with pretty much everyone on the team still having 20+ days of PTO left. HR just made everyone take the entire december off to use those days up, after that once incident no one had any issues booking PTO the following year.
> When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow?
part of modern agricultural automation includes year round seasons, which means essentially you are no longer waiting for crops to grow in the way that was first discussed.
This of course is what allows us to have fresh tomatoes year round, and many other fruits and vegetables. Obviously these are not perfect, tomatoes as the example already given, quality of the automated output is significantly less in comparison to the natural - nonetheless we do not wait for many crops to grow in the same way that people did before the 1990s (when computerized climate management, hydroponics and advanced greenhouse tech took off, as some later advances on the already mentioned PLC, and enabled automation in that field of human endeavor)
When we started producing more than basic things like food that are heavily dependent on the environment. In the knowledge-based economy, the only thing that meaningfully stops you from producing continually is you collapsing from exhaustion. However, even if you never got tired, you can still only produce so much per second, if you will, which caps your total productivity. That is the human limit; probably a fundamental one.
Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population have to wait on crops growing now in order to offer that line of productivity. And of them, like myself, we can now do other productive things while we're waiting. I, for one, work in the tech industry when I'm not farming. Today, 96% of farmers in the USA are productive off of the farm in at least some capacity. Whereas, historically, farmers were busy trying to survive when they weren't being productive on the farm. Many a day were spent in the bush chopping wood so that they didn't freeze in the winter, for example. Interestingly, idle farmers staring to produce salable things during that cold winter downtime is when we first started seeing early signs of human productivity gains over the stagnant agricultural baseline.
Productivity can keep increasing beyond the human limit, but we have achieved that by introducing more and more non-human workers. Humans are already at the very top of their game, at least as we know it. 17th century farmers probably thought they were also as productive as humanly possible, so who knows what the future holds, but for now we have no idea how to make humans even more productive than they already are. We don't have any more obvious "winter downtimes" to expand into. Hence why the measure of human productivity is no longer increasing.
This was recognized a long time ago. It was the basis of the "go to college to make more money" script you may be familiar with if you are old enough to remember. It was well understood way back then that relying on human productivity gains had reached a dead end. The thinking was that colleges would enable people to move away from labor and into leveraging automation, where productivity is effectively unbounded, with college research labs having played and still playing a pivotal role in that, but somehow along the way that got twisted into "go to college to get a job", so here we are... Now people spend god knows how much money to go to college to get the same job, at the same pay, that they would have gotten anyway. Which is pretty hilarious, but also sad.