Infinite vacation just means at managers discretion. If you have awful managers it's going to be bad. Otherwise it's one less thing to worry about.

Although it means that if you quit or get fired you don't have that nice little payout from your accrued vacation days

maybe the hope is that not having to accrue vacay days will make it less likely you'll want to quit

I can already see this effecting how I feel about vacation. I am taking an extra day off over 4th of July weekend, and was planning on also taking the entire following week off to go on vacation with my wife's family -- and now I am wondering whether it will look bad to request that week off right after taking a day the previous week. If it was accrued hours, I wouldn't think twice about it.

crossposting from CTH in case anyone has experience with this sort of thing:

if i wanted to turn a spare laptop into a sort of linux webserver, how difficult would that be? what all is the process that i would need to do to be able to, say, register a dns name (assuming my IP changes periodically) and host a web page that basically acts as a media player for everything we have on network storage?

anyone done this sort of thing before?

Are you dead set on Linux?

Just install Emby Server or Subsonic or both for media and duckdns for dns.

Would prefer Linux as that's what I have on a home PC for Odin/Ruby and being able to take it to work would be nice

Y Putting Linux on a laptop is easy. Ditto the DNS name. Web page probably not too hard. The packages KatoKrazy mentioned are all available for Linux. Software/systems integration challenge, should be fun.

We have an official 3 weeks vacation (until 5 years service) since Microsoft acquired the company a few years ago. I heard people never took vacation in the past because the unlimited vacation created weird system of peer pressure to work.

However, nobody tracks vacation even now even though there is a 3 week limit. A small % of people book days but most of us are using the honor system.

Honestly, seeing you do this and having it go over well will probably be reassuring and thus empowering to a lot of your peers.

You give this company a massive % of your limited time here, feel free to stand up for your quality of life within reason.

Also, on the same topic, we basically always allow people to take time or even close the office on minor vacations, not on our official schedule. It's so much more productive to have days with either everyone in or everyone out, versus random people missing on a nondescript weekday.

I don't get how vacation is not tracked. Don't you have a time entry system? Do these systems lack a feature to track vacation/sick/personal days?

Maybe it's because my company has many government clients and I'm pretty sure strict time entry for the whole company, even if you have nothing to do with that part of the business, is a condition of working with them. But I always thought everyone had something similar.

I've only ever had to do time tracking when we were doing external contracting work.

No time tracking whatsoever.

Essentially it stops being part of your salary+benefits package, simplifying the accounting the company has to do. You can take as much vacation as your managers approve and when you get fired for taking too many vacations you don't have to repay any of it...

Ha, yes. This will become the norm I'm guessing. My company has had some tight quarters recently and encouraged people to use vacation to lower the company's liabilities to spruce up the financial results.

Except this is rarely how it works. People feel awkward taking 'too much' vacation time and generally take less than what most non-unlimited vacation time places offer.

I'd actually bet against it. Or at least bet against the pure 'just take as much time as you need' approach.

There is no better feeling than when someone takes a week off and comes back with full energy and dominates.

In that sense I feel like people forget how positive taking vacation is. I think the best approach is having a non accounted for policy (for financial reasons) where the managers make sure people are not getting burned out. The people who take advantage of the unlimited vacation policy are so rare as to make it a non-factor. Managers need to be able to deal with that, and it results in way less management around the topic.

Took Friday and Saturday to install and configure my ancient version of eclipse and I guess I was still using Java 6 so that took ****ing forever to download the Java 8 SDK on my DSL era connection.

Last night was up all night trying to fix this horrific mess of code. She had made separate classes for every single button and then classes for each ActionListener she used for the buttons... static global variables for just about everything and then couldn't understand why when she tried to switch to a different table's order pane it still had the order from the previous table still on it.

Ugh. I got rid of most of it, streamlined as best as I could, implemented all the classes I need and got the thing to be able to track and display separate orders from separate tables and display if a table is occupied/reserved/whatever by changing its color.

Just need to work on a function to format a String to look like a restaurant receipt inside of a JTextArea and I've got 90% of our basic functionalities done. Not bad for a weekend. I may get this done after all.

It's not gonna be as pretty or functional as the rest of the class' projects but not bad for a 1 man thing.

my company has this policy also, and it definitely doesn't seem like people take many vacation days.

I heard ebay adopted this a few years ago, and then actually started penalizing people for not taking enough days off, because so few people were taking vacation.

"homework" interview assignment completed - feeling pretty good about it

So much. And for me if I can ever take two weeks off, it's even more of a boost.

My company sent me to India for 2 weeks and it was all I could do to get them to approve me taking 2 more weeks afterwards to see the country. Like that one extra week is going to make or break the company.

I know, I went a couple of years having to use vacation or lose it because I took so little vacation time. That's a little the fault of my managers but mostly my fault for not taking it. If you aren't taking advantage of what your company is offering that's not the companies fault.

Sure it can be. Because obviously most companies doesn't actually support employees taking unlimited vacation time. So by giving no guidance on what they actually feel is appropriate people generally err on the side of not looking like they're abusing the policy and take less time off.

There's lots of evidence of this type of human nature too. For example in high school we use to do charity car washes and you always raised more money when you made it a complete pay-what-you-want system. Because people really worry about looking cheap and so they'll usually pay more than what a reasonable price is for a car wash.

Edit: Here's another example. I'm having a kid in a few months. Our current paternity policy is "whatever you want". What I want is 3-12 months. What I'll probably take is 2 weeks. Meanwhile other tech companies with actual paternity policies will offer something like 1-3 months. But I don't feel comfortable taking that time without an explicit policy saying that's reasonable. It's also made a bit more awkward by the fact that as a Canadian I have a very different cultural outlook on paternity leave than most American companies. So what I feel might be reasonable could easily be frowned upon by my American co-workers.

I don't disagree, but why would you care what your coworkers think about how much time you spend with your newborn?