> If you have accrued vacation, you "earned" your vacation and they can't take it away from you without compensation... If they fire you, they should even have to pay you your salary for those vacation days.

This is the law in California but not most other states.

In most states, vacation time is a benefit that can expire, evaporate, or be rescinded. The company is just deciding not to assign you job duties during your time off. How generous of them! But it's totally their right to decide not to do that, or to put a bunch of boxes around how they will do that. So it's legal, and common, that unused vacation time will actually be lost.

In CA, accrued vacation time is classified as "deferred compensation." It is legally money that is owed to you. It will be paid at a later date, but it must be paid.

It strikes me as no coincidence that the "unlimited vacation" fad started in tech companies with a large chunk of their workforce in California.

Nebraska goes a step further. Lots of companies have a "use it or lose it" policy for vacation time, so they won't have a ton of liability on the books. Nebraska courts have declared that vacation time is compensation that can't be taken away from you, so "lose it" isn't an option. I worked for a company with half its workforce in Nebraska even though I'm in Minnesota. To comply with the law, the company didn't pay out your vacation at the end of the year - they locked you out and forced you to take it, now.

Bingo: unlimited vacation is a scam

It's highly dependent on company (and team) culture. If you can actually take a generous amount of vacation, personal, and sick (if you need it) time, I have no real problem with it. (Then, I haven't moved around a lot--I know some people who move jobs every year or two count on a payout from accrued vacation when they do.)

Someone I know who retired from a fairly senior position at Netflix rather liked it and took some fairly long vacations but said there really was a good tradition of umplugging at least as he observed that came from the top.

Minimum / mandatory PTO is the answer.

https://namely.com/blog/minimum-pto-what-is-it-why-you-shoul...

I don't really disagree although you can't really keep people from working on their days off if they want to, at least in a remote/WFH situation.

You most certainly can. I work for a US company where when you're out on (paid, six month) parental leave, your system access is disabled.

They don't do that for normal PTO but it's certainly feasible.

There are a lot of reasons to cut access for people out for an extended period who may not even come back.

Pretty much no one (outside of maybe something regulated who may mandate two week PTOs for security purposes) is going to do that every time an employee takes PTO. In any case, if I really want to do work I don't even need access to my employer's computers.

It really depends. The company I work for - doesn’t even have a time-keeping system. Taking vacation is a matter of sending a slack or email, or simply verbally letting your manager and team mates know that you won’t be available. So far this year I’ve taken more than 3 weeks at least. I know it’s not a ton, but the point is - that I don’t know the actual exact count, I strongly suspect that nobody really tracks it in any way, and I am planning to take few weeks more before the next year.

I replied to the sibling comment, minimum vacation policies are more employee friendly and can offer the same flexibility as "unlimited".

> If you have accrued vacation, you "earned" your vacation and they can't take it away from you without compensation... If they fire you, they should even have to pay you your salary for those vacation days.

This is indeed the law in Israel. What happens is that people are allowed to accrue a number of vacation days up to a limit, typically however many days of vacation you earn in a year, times two. Then the company forces you to take, at the end of the year, a number of vacation days down to the limit.

Companies where this limit wasn't put in place introduced a moral hazard, whereby people would wink-and-handshake with their superiors when they would take a reasonable amount of vacation without actually reporting the vacation days to HR, wherein HR didn't really have the means to detect and enforce against the fraud. Thus people would work for decades, retire, and take compensation for decades of "untaken" vacation days, on top of the normal retirement packages. These policies represented usually $1+ million in obligation per worker and thus were clearly unsustainable without some kind of enforceable limit.

Why would a company allow that, can't they put a limit on that themselves? All my employment contracts in the Netherlands had a clause about that.

Legacy mistakes from decades ago that cannot be fixed because the employment contracts are collective contracts signed with unions who refuse to introduce limits into new collective contracts.

Legacy legal mistakes, the worst kind.

Since everyone’s discussing the inverse, I shall mention that long ago I worked for a 100 person, 5 year old, startup who's policy was: your vacation is your year-end bonus. No one could take vacation ever, it just got paid out in December. They did give you Christmas and New Year’s off.

Getting sick was jokingly referred to as a firing offense, though people did take sick leave. Burnout was a real thing – and I barely lasted a year, though that may well have been unrelated.

> If they fire you, they should even have to pay you your salary for those vacation days.

This is required in the US. That's the point of unlimited vacation - since it doesn't accrue, the company doesn't have to pay it out when you leave.

It is not required in the US as it varies by state.

Enough states require it that most companies large enough to be multistate in employment go ahead and standardize it into their policies.

Apparently 27 states require it, but New York does which makes it more likely a large employer would.