I work for a company that offers unlimited vacation, and I am skeptical of the skepticism around this. To me it feels like some kind of backdoor justification for the standard, shitty two weeks most American firms offer. While I certainly agree that unlimited vacation can become a defacto way to prevent employees from leaving at all, why would you work at a place that does that to their employees?

In the case of my company, it's a long-standing practice and works very well. People just say they're not gonna be around, and then they aren't. There's no grousing about who takes too much time off. That actually would be working against one's own interests -- I don't bitch about people taking time off because I want to take time off too. (And yes, people can take really really long vacations to pray on a mountain in India or whatever)

I agree about the decoupling of unlimited and untracked, though. It could be useful to have numbers about who takes how much time, as long as it's used to encourage people who are working too hard to take time off, and not in the other direction.

I think a company thinking of offering this benefit should make sure they really mean it. Because if they don't, that's where all the trouble starts. You probably need to be big enough to be in a position where Steve or Grace can take a week or two off without dire consequences. High bus numbers.