I wonder if it’ll come to have the same meaning as “unlimited vacation”, a vague policy that in practice, is used unofficially in job evaluations to implicitly punish employees who take advantage of the policy.
That could be, although the difference between vacation time and remote work is that any loss in productivity/value with remote work is either nil or hard to calculate. Vacation time is different in that it's clearly time that the employer has to pay for work to not be done. So the optimist in me thinks that tech employers will have difficulty credibly taking employees that have performed well as remote workers and coercing them to come into the office, which doesn't really provide a clear benefit.
Kickstarter cut its unlimited/flexible vacation policy because "it's typically not a problem" still can be too much ambiguity:
> "It's always been important to us to ensure that our team is able to enjoy a quality work/life balance," the Kickstarter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. "What we found was that by setting specific parameters around the number of days, there was no question about how much time was appropriate to take from work to engage in personal, creative, and family activities."
Re: perks, based on my own experience working remotely, in traditional offices, and those with very nice perks I have to respectfully disagree.
Invitations to "casual chats" over breakfast or dinner in the office cafeteria are IME quite common in the latter, especially if you're seeking access to senior leadership or flagged as someone whose opinion/buy-off is important to a project.
Even without an explicit invitation, if you're at the office already there's no real barrier to someone pulling you in to a project-related discussion. At that point you're effectively on the clock whether you intended/wanted to be or not.
It really comes down to the fact that commitments, decisions, and requests for assistance made across a cafeteria table are not considered any less binding, which means you can't just "relax and enjoy the free food" when it's provided at work by your employer.
(Conversely, if you're someone who tries to protect your personal time and set clear boundaries between work and non-work hours, you miss out on a lot of these ad-hoc meetings, which can result in a persistent lack of access and influence compared to your colleagues who spend 12+ hours a day on-site.)
But see I don't see how that has to do with perks. That seems to have everything to do with your toxic culture at your job, or your inability to push back. I've never ever stayed for dinner or got sucked into breakfast to talk shop at my company (big tech).
I wouldn't be surprised if you were forced to go to a local restaurant or bar to talk shop with your company culture if the free food didn't exist.
Except for I think California, it means no payout whatsoever. Fun!
I've had unlimited policies before and I'm much happier having a specific number of days now that I use every year.
Banks often require that employees take vacation, typically around 2 weeks a year. An employee-focused software company should implement a similar policy of "required minimum vacation" [1].
The connections I have in Germany working in relatively "low-skill" fields are taking over 5 weeks a year of PTO. Even the most generous companies in the US are a joke by comparison to the most barebones companies in many EU nations. Without collective bargaining, we will always be far behind in benefits.
Anectdote, but I've worked for both a company that does PTO accrual and one that does unlimited vacation. I was not paid out anything at the latter (this was less than a year ago).
From my perspective, unlimited policies have a lot of upside on the financial front — they don't have to keep accrued PTO cash on the books. Of course, it has a benefit to workers, but only to those who take advantage of it and don't feel pressured by management or their peers to meet a certain number. It's been my experience so far that my peers at unlimited PTO companies take less time off, and that their "time off" is less valuable (meaning they are not completely logged out/tuned out of work) because it's coming from an infinite pool. At the end of the day, I think the balance of these policies shifts towards the financial side of the business rather than the employee's side.
I was surprised to read California, as I thought the state provides pretty strong worker protections. This site [0] seems to say that you are owed the vacation time upon separation in CA. IANAL and all that.
