Unlimited vacation is a somewhat-mislabeled thing because the benefit obviously is not that you could take unlimited time off. Instead, the benefit is that you don't have to think about it. That day you take off somewhat spontaneously because some friends or family members came into town? You don't have to think about if it'll affect your banked vacation hours w.r.t. that big trip you were planning on taking. That week you were home sick because of a nasty flu? Again, not taking anything away from anything else (I think shared vacation+sick PTO pools are just about the worst policy I could imagine).

It requires you to be a mature adult about it, and not take off huge amounts of time that put the rest of your team into bad situations, or disappear for long trips on short notice, or such, or the company will have to address that. And the company has to have management willing to address edge cases or abuses rationally.

But it's pretty awesome if you're working with mature adults who don't take advantage of the system on either end (to take excessive time off OR to try to keep employees from taking adequate time off).

And at my current employer I do accrue some regular, paid-out-on-leaving-but-never-deducted-from "vacation" hours too. So that's extra nice. I didn't have this part of it at the company where I was previously, but frankly I wouldn't want to go back to tracked vacation even in exchange for that accrual (maybe with the exception if I expected to stay somewhere for decades and they had unlimited accrual...).

> Instead, the benefit is that you don't have to think about it.

But that benefit is in no way realized. The opposite is clearly true. With a set number of vacation days, it's incredibly easy to know how many days I have remaining, and it's fairly easy to pre-plan extended vacations while leaving some days for spontaneous breaks. With "unlimited" days, I have to essentially guess whether or not I'm "abusing" the system.

Compare it to another employment benefit: salary. What if a company offered "unlimited salary"? You could say it's great, because you don't have to think about whether you can afford a neat guitar you spontaneously found on craigslist, while still being able to pay for rent and other fixed costs. But with a fixed salary, assuming you have a decent job with a "living wage," it's pretty easy to balance how much you spend on fixed costs with how much disposable income you want for spontaneous purchases.

I think most people would have no problem recognizing the ludicrousness of an "unlimited salary" policy.

For me this comparison falls apart because I've seen very few companies as generous with vacation days as with salary, compared with the two companies in a row I've now been at with unlimited policies. I rarely see more than 3 weeks offered for new employees, and many feel that that's generous ("it's more than two"). So I'm not comparing it to a generous metered vacation policy, I'm comparing it to what I usually see for "peer"-type roles. And I haven't had any trouble whatsoever taking more than 3 weeks, or seen other people get into hot water over it. :)

So the benefit is definitely realized for me. I don't think about it. I couldn't tell you exactly how many days I took off with all the incidental ones here and there, but I can tell you it's more than I was allowed to at my first job because there were enough larger, multi-day trips in there.

I would have no problem if they instead switched it to, say, five weeks + a separate generous sick time pool, but at that point the math also gets more messy with accrual and all since that money would be coming from somewhere... and frankly, I like that I don't make relatively less money because someone else was a workaholic and accrued a bunch of vacation they never take but will eventually get paid for, if I can be at my most productive with a healthy amount of time off.

It is a downside, though, in that it may require some more negotiation skills to make sure you get a fair amount of time off. However, I've also seen people get denied time off at certain times under metered plans—they're no panacea for "but it's crunch time for the project, you can't take off now!" tactics.

There's a solution for that, though. Just like a minimum wage, allow for a minimum vacation. IIRC Europe does exactly this, specifying a given number of days that non-temporary workers have to be given off.

Unlimited vacation is not a benefit to the employee, but to the employer who can socially limit vacations (isn't the standard 3 weeks too much?) AND can use fuzzy accounting that prevents being paid for unused vacation on termination or carrying over vacation between years (I have about five weeks right now, with a lot carried over from last year).

I laugh when a company mentions "unlimited vacation" as a benefit as if it was a good thing for the employee and not something they were doi as a cost cutting measure that absolutely does not benefit the employees. It should be illegal to do vacation that way, it is definitely unethical.