The Netflix slide deck makes it clear that the company seeks to reward performance only, not poor proxies for performance like number of days worked. So if you took 100 days off, yet were still as useful to the team as the guy who didn't take any, you'd be treated the same way as him in reviews.

Whether this is possible is up to you. Also, having not worked at Netflix or Heroku, I can't speak to how well it works out in practice.

The problem is that it is often very hard even for experienced managers to guess how long a software development task should take. So you do end up measuring proxies such as how many hours a day you have been working, plus your reputation and so on.

Estimation is hard, but, In most places I worked, after a couple of days it was very obvious which people were the solid contributors and which people were just along for the ride. Granted, those jobs were in the trenches where I was working along side people so I would see what they were doing day in and out, but I think that if you're a programmer, it's pretty obvious whose productive and who isn't.

If there is a candid performance tracking system in place, I don't think any of our complaints about vacation policy would hold. But a candid performance tracking system is probably at least as difficult to implement as an "unlimited" vacation policy. How do you quantify individual performance? How do you decide what the minimum acceptable performance is? What do you do if one employee has 1.5x the performance of another?

Exactly I couldn't agree more. In a computer sense. Hopefully everyone knows that the lines of code is a bad metric. The number of bugs is a bad metric. Number of new features is a bad metric. Meetings attended another bad metric.

In the world most people in HN lives in. Most metrics are Mediocre at best. There is always a struggle to define quality and quantity of work.

It'd be great if there though.

I agree that "untracked" is probably the better term. The point of such policies is that if you need to take say, 90 days off because of family issues, the official company policy stipulates that this is ok to do.

If this had happened in a company with a fixed e.g 20 day vacation policy, then the outcome depends on your manager. Now, many would have no issue giving the extra time off "unofficially" in such cases, but there are also many who might deny that request - see other example in this thread about a company denying an extra 1 day of vacation!

This policy is a way to empower employees against such managers. Now, there are several other downsides to this policy, as OP has pointed out, and as I've witnessed first-hand as well, but unlimited/untracked vacation policies certainly merit a discussion vs. outright dismissal.

> if you need to take say, 90 days off because of family issues, the official company policy stipulates that this is ok to do.

Depending on the nature of the family issues, in the US they're required to by the Family and Medical Leave Act (http://www.dol.gov/whd/fmla/)

> 20 day vacation policy

In my experience in California, 20 days is pretty generous. Most companies with vacation policies start you at two work weeks per year, not including sick days. While this increases slightly with seniority in larger companies, tech companies tend to have high turnover so seniority is kind of meaningless

> This policy is a way to empower employees against such managers

Other than some high profile large companies, most companies that I'm aware of with untracked vacation are small. The manager/employee dynamic at small companies is very different and the manager and employee have little empowerment over each other at all (in both a good and bad way)

Personally, I'm at a small company with untracked vacation and it creates a lot of social pressure not to use it. Some is imagined pressure in that it it turns it into a "can I take..." favour-type question instead of "I'm taking..." declarative form to fill out, but also real pressure in that the small-team dynamic means that I know personally everyone that will be inconvenienced by my not being around. This gives them a sort of social veto power that does happen in real life anywhere near an event like a release. Since no company is sitting around doing nothing all of the time, there's always a release of some sort on the visible horizon and of course those have "real" veto power rather than just social.

It also creates a significant disparity in how much employees at the same company take. Some employees feel the social pressure and don't take any, and some seem to not feel it and never seem to be around. IME vacation taken tends to be inversely correlated to general employee quality which is exactly the opposite of what you want.

As a result, I probably take half the vacation I could if I just knew the magic "okay" number to take and generally only for something that I can articulate like a trip somewhere or because family is in town. When I had tracked vacation, I'd take off an arbitrary Friday to sleep in or run the errand queue or just hang out. Now I don't do that and the difference in mood that creates is palpable.

I didn't think that burnout was real until I got "unlimited" vacation.

It's not a BS trend at all, maybe phrased incorrectly using the term "unlimited", but it's actually a great benefit if you're capable of understanding that there are socially acceptable limits to these "no policy" benefits and that timing long vacations takes planning around your work load. Getting ready to ship a big feature or tool? Maybe once it's been in prod for a week it's a good time to take off for a couple weeks before you get tossed into the next big thing. Let the PM's know you're going to be out so they can schedule around your absence and it's not going to be a big deal. Obviously, the company has expectations about your availability, but also respects your need for a work-life balance. So, you have to be the kind of person who is aware of whats going on around them, what your needs are and what the company's needs are, and finding a balance. "No vacation policy" is not an all-you-can-eat buffet.

What if you're a PM? or a Senior Eng or Director etc. Someone who is there to actually manage a team? Can you just leave 'for a few weeks'?

This is like Unlimited Webhosting. It is unlimited as long as you are within limits set by board that you cannot know what exactly they are. It is extremely confusing. Better yet - just do 1 week mandatory holiday every 3 months. This way all employees would get fair amount of holidays, they would not take long leaves hurting company workflow and would allow employees to recharge batteries every quarter. Not only you would get rid of people abusing holiday system, but also get workaholics to leave the office for 7 days every 3 months with de-activated entry card so they couldn't just "pop in" for some documents etc. If there is deadline you are worried about - then work late for few days but take freaking holidays. Spend some time with kids. Travel. Sort your issues and re-think your work strategy from safety of house.

If the vacation is "unlimited" at my company and I end up taking 3 weeks off in a year, and your company gives you two weeks per year, who's the sucker -- Me? Because the nominally unlimited vacation is not actually literally unlimited?

Well, I suppose that is one way to look at it.