How to use PTO:
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Text boss I’m not coming in today.
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Go back to bed.
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When I “request” time off, it’s not a request. It’s a notification. I will be gone. The work needed to be done is done or will be done by the deadlines. Any emergencies that arise in the meantime will be dealt with when I’m back. If my request is denied, that’s not my problem, I will still be gone.
Exactly. If I give you sufficient notice, 2 weeks is probably a good minimum, and no one else is taking off at that time, that’s a you problem if you can’t cover it. If your team is not structured such that you can honor PTO with sufficient notice, you are not offering PTO. You are lying about benefits.
As an employer (and thus an evil capitalist pigdog etc.) I’ve always applied the rule of the thumb that “twice the holiday duration as notice” is polite to the employer and your colleagues who will cover for you - so two days notice for a day off, two weeks notice for a week off, a month’s notice for two weeks off, etc.
“Polite” does not mean “mandatory” of course - circumstances can dictate that sometimes you have to break the rule of thumb and that’s fine.
Yeah that’s my approach too. If I want to be available then I will be, but if I’m off, I’m off, the pto is my right to turn off work and do “me” for the day.
You will also be without a job. Requests can be honored if they are timely and follow the rules but everyone can’t be off before forth of July or Christmas. There’s usually a process to be fair to others and the business.
everyone can’t be off before forth of July or Christmas
Why not? I’d argue most work isn’t so important it absolutely must be done on Christmas.
They need me more than I need them. I put in a little extra time here and there. I roll with management’s last minute emergencies that arise from their lack of planning and communication, and I course correct with knowledge of real world logistics that they never think of, saving their bacon and making them look better than they should. I am flexible and agreeable and get my work done regularly and efficiently.
If they fire me I’ll happily collect unemployment and watch them implode.
You will also be without a job.
Then I guess they’ll have to find someone to cover when I’m gone. either way, it’s a notice not a request.
It’s always funny to read
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You can’t use your PTO without coverage. You’re too critical to business functions to miss even a single day.
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We’ll fire you for any reason or no reason at all. We don’t even need you. You should be grateful we let you work here.
And folks wonder why 90% of businesses fail.
Attendance is not any reason. You are literally hired for attending. If you cannot be consistent how can you expect to be valuable?
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I don’t find that as a professional attitude. It is not a team attitude as well. I understand there are certain events that cannot be missed and I would work with my employees to accommodate.
However, that attitude never lasts. Anywhere I have ever managed or been an employee. It is a roadblock to promotion or worse. And you can have the attitude “that’s not my problem”. But remember that next time you have an issue you bring to your boss and they say “it’s not my problem”. They are people too that report to supervisors.
Let me make something extremely fucking clear.
There are plenty of places to get a paycheck.
Time with my family is irreplaceable. We’re only on the same team as long as you understand that you will never be as important as home life.
Go ahead. That sounds like a threat and I wouldn’t trust you. My boss wouldn’t trust you either. Go find that other job. I’m not your mother.
The sad part you don’t seem to understand is that you and people like you are the problem. Those insisting on taking days of are fighting for worker rights most of the world already has, the reason the US doesn’t is that there are to many people who betray their colleges like you do
Yup. I’m totally holding up the whole infrastructure of work. It was my idea to work and not have a working system. Hit that nail on the head. Thanks for looking deeper into my soul and giving me insight.
Who gives an actual fuck what your boss thinks?
You speak like someone who has been beaten down so much that lifting your head up seems like treachery to you.
If your work is important to you, good for you, but your boss is not thinking about you when you aren’t around.
Grow up and join the real world.
Wow. You sound really jaded. That cooperative work equates to some kind of negative. In fact you sound like a teenager that has not fully formed their emotions. I’m telling you how it comes off and what are the consequences from an upper management perspective. Since I sit in on meetings from a multi-billion company with them, maybe hear it out. Or don’t. It’s really up to you if you think I’m out to get you from telling you what happens in today’s business world.
Do I wish we could all take every single day we want and not work 50 hours a week and do what my boss says? Yes. But I am not more in control of those strings than anyone else here and just play the game just like everyone else.
You know what a professional attitude would be? Organising your team in a way that doesn’t make everything fall apart because of one person being unavailable.
My team does not. But that’s because I am the one that organized it and has redundancies. However I realize normally businesses do not have that luxury.
It’s not a luxury, it’s a basic prerequisite. What you call normal is a failure.
Well I’m not in charge of them. I wish you the best in finding a leader that helps with your schedule.
I too write in the notes “this is a notification, not a request”. It obviously depends on the type of job you have but I’ve never gotten flak for it.
I ALWAYS told any of my employees that if you got PTO denied outside of actual blackout times, it’d be ashame if you happened to be sick for those exact days you requested.
Ive done that. Sucked though because i didn’t have sick time left and ended up losing money that day instead of getting paid like i should have.
The concept of having limited sick days is crazy.
Since they said PTO, ili would expect that sick and vacation come out of the same pool.
Another thing I’m not American enough to understand.
American here, so you have paid time off but greedy American capitalism boss can deny for any reason. Not enough staff, busy company time, favoritism, or simply fuck you I dont like you.
Some companies can give you monies at the end of year for your paid time off, but some don’t and it’s wasted due to greedy capitalism boss and given to the company casue companies have better rights then people.
For example my company and boss I work for is cool about giving time off when requested, however starting next year my company will not pay out unused PTO because reasons.
Hope this helps!
Such a weird thing from a european perspective. Here in Germany, you as a worker are obligated to take your vacation days. It even can happen that your boss asks you to take your vacation if you forget to.
Can you get me a job at your company? Is your boss willing to fill out the paperwork to hire from outside the EU?
I wish it was like that, I even work for a German company, but don’t get treated quite as nice. I guess for American standards, and it’s low unfortunately, it’s a good company to work for.
I guess that’s cause our laws force companies to make their employees take the mandated pto else they’d get into trouble. But they can aparently get away with treating overseas workers worse
In the Netherlands you’re only obligated to take the days that your employer is mandated to give you (20 days per year). But most employers give more, and if you don’t take those up, you can often have them paid out or save them for later years.
I had 30 days for my jobs in Germany and the Netherlands. In some jobs you “earn” more with age or staying a certain amount of years in the company.
Thank you for the explanation. But isn’t the phrasing in the meme totally soul-crushing?
You get 40 hours this year - all year - where you don’t have to work for us.
(uttered by some company suit)
seems to be the implication.
In Europe, even part-time workers’ time off is counted in “days off.” Even if the end result were the same, I just think it sounds a lot nicer for the employee. “Hey boss, I won’t be coming in for the next two weeks. Nah, make that three.”Which state do you live in? It’s very illegal to not pay out unused PTO in many states.
Stupid Texas.
I think PTO is just like regular vacation in other civilized countries? Just less of it
PTO is just like regular vacation in
othercivilized countriesJust stands for Paid Time Off.
You aren’t required to use it for vacation, specifically.
Sort of. There is no legal requirement for any time off in the US. But PTO is a very common arrangement.
It is what it sounds like: Paid Time Off. Basically you have some hours available your will be paid for but you don’t have to work. You earn PTO at a certain rate for every hour you do actual work, so you have to earn it.
You don’t have the right to use them whenever you want; that’s up to your boss, usually. You usually have to trade any kind of time off for your PTO: vacation, holidays (even mandatory ones), sick days, etc. There is usually a minimum amount of hours you have to take at a time, so you can’t always take an hour here and there, but sometimes you can agree to make up time with you boss.
For extended time off, like if you have surgery, you can usually work with your employer to use a reduced rate of PTO to make it last longer, like get 40% pay. When it runs out, you don’t get paid. You may still be able to keep your job, within the rules of FMLA (12 weeks), but you have no income. I am not sure what happens to insurance at that point, but I think you’re covered as long as you’re employed and pay premiums.
Of course this is not legally required and it’s rare that it’s even offered if you’re part time or work for a small company, since those aren’t required to offer any benefits.
I don’t work in HR, I’m not a lawyer or doctor, my experience is my own, this is not legal advice, your state laws may be different, etc, etc. YMMV.
I’ve had a couple of jobs where the PTO was issued in one big block once a year in a use-it-or-lose-it system instead of accruing week by week. I’m not sure how common it is; I was kind of surprised by it the first time I encountered it.
Yeah I had that in my previous job, but they didn’t call it PTO. Also we didn’t use PTO for our official holidays. It was really stupid: we would get 12 months worth of time off on January 1st and all of it expired December 31st. This naturally caused everyone to basically take December off, which meant our busiest months of December and January were super fun.
In my current job, PTO is earned for each working hour at a rate decided by your seniority, so you gain more PTO per hour the longer you work there, and you can bank up to a certain amount and the excess is lost. It’s a pretty big bank, so I think it’s an okay-ish balance between stealing our PTO and encouraging us to use it. I guess it could be worse.
This is different from when I lived in Norway, where I had “unlimited” sick days, all bank holidays off, and an additional 5 weeks of time off a year + vacation bonus in the summer, plus time and a half for any overtime beyond 37.5hrs/wk with double pay on Sundays and holidays.
Norway’s system sounds like a dream.
The first company that did the all-at-once system was at least smart about having the refresh date be your hire anniversary date. The December effect you described would have wrecked them (retailer).
Yep, it eventually dawned on them that it wasn’t smart to force everyone to take off at the busiest time of year, so they started using the employee’s work anniversary instead. But, by that time I already had one foot out the door.
Is 40 hours the entire entitlement for the year? I’ve heard that USians don’t get much leave, but just a week seems ridiculous. Or is that what they’re booking this time, that seems more reasonable. Still shouldn’t be an issue just to book a week off. I’d get it if they were trying to do a three week block or something.
Some jobs have zero pto! Its not required federally, and most states dont have regulations about it afaik.
How does that work? Do you just have to throw a sicky and use your sick pay if you want to go on holiday?
Assuming you get any or have any left, yeah. That or you can take unpaid time off. Though some places frown on that as well.
Someone else explained that PTO is combined paid company sick days and holiday allowance. I assumed it was just the US term for holiday allowance.
Some places do have it split out, so pto and sick days are seperate, just really heavily depends on the company because there aren’t any regulations about it.
It depends on a lot of factors. For software development I’ve had anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks per year. One job was 4 weeks of PTO (includes sick time) and they only had 6 holiday days per year. That job sucked.
So PTO is combined sick pay and holiday? You don’t separate it?
So my holiday entitlement is 35 days, and my sick pay is 10 days so my equivalent PTO would be 9 weeks or 360 hours.
By holiday do you mean strictly vacation or does that include holiday days like Christmas and new years?
It includes public holiday days yeah. It’s about 6 weeks that I can take anytime.
Some employers do PTO others do separate vacation and sick. Generally I just count the combined days off – vacation, sick, and holidays when making a decision on an offer.
Several of the software jobs I had offered “unlimited” PTO, where as long as your shit was done, you could take off as much as you liked. Of course, that meant that they didn’t have to pay out your remaining days when you left, but it was a good reason to stay.
I had one job where they switched to the unlimited PTO scam.
Some don’t get any PTO. Zero.
Yes 40 for the year, and 40 isn’t even guaranteed. It is typically what you could earn over an entire year of full time work. A lot of jobs don’t even give you the hours up front, you earn it as you work.
I’ve got 168 hrs of PTO and another 40 hrs sick leave.
A lot of that is from seniority (I’ve been at the company 10 years and was hired as a 5 year due to prior experience). But 40 hrs is on the low end of what you should expect, overall. Unless you’re an entry level hire, you should expect more.
I get 120 and wfh but I think I’ve reached privileged status.
My god damn team has a giant spreadsheet where all planned absences are logged, and shows how many people can still be out per week.
It’s awful and I hate it and literally 2/3rds of the teams have no real reason to not have overlapping holidays.
I work for a global company and they use purpose built software to track absences and it wasn’t as sophisticated as your spreadsheet. They only started to put in rules like that after some director of an entire continent got a request to approve a work order for some trivial one-off handyman type job at some office. The dozen or so managers under them were all on PTO at the same time so the request just kept rolling up the chain. That pissed them off and now we have restrictions.
Unrelated, but I’m going be sick those days. Strange coincidence.
I used to love when my boss would deny PTO. I told him straight up after a while that my PTO request was a polite notification that I will not be there during that time, and whether he solved that problem now or when it rolled around was up to him.
There are a lot of things wrong with my company, but we do have unlimited PTO. I’m in a place where I can just tell them I won’t be here, and it’s up to them to figure it out.
I’m about to start a job with unlimited PTO and I’m honestly unsure. I had 3 weeks at my last place. I’d like more, but at least I never felt judged using what I was allotted. They also never denied a request.
“Unlimited” feels like a trap. But I guess I’m doing that to myself? Idk, I’m probably gonna aim for 3ish weeks for my first year and see how it feels.
Damn. Less than 4 weeks/year would be illegal here (it’s also mandatory that an employee can take at least 2 weeks of that as a continuous single block, if they wish.) Employers are also not permitted to buy holiday allowance back (except when an employee leaves) and must roll any unused over year on year - which means employers are strongly motivated to have their staff actually take their holidays.
“Here” is, obviously, not the US…
Honestly it depends on the company.
Thanks for logging in so we can see this, I guess?
