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Netflix Announces Its New ‘Unlimited’ Maternity and Paternity Leave Program

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Re: Netflix Announces Its New ‘Unlimited’ Maternity and Paternity Leave Program

#61

Post by icebraining »

rosser wrote: post #27
icebraining wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "the US" is usually not helpful here, since many of these issues are simply not legislated at the national/federal level. Some states do have paid leave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternity_leave_in_the_United_...

GP is talking about parity between maternity and paternity leave. Citing statistics about the existence (or, as is demonstrably more common, non -existence) of maternity leave is pretty orthogonal to that. Unless you're claiming that the fact that most states don't offer any paid maternity leave (and almost certainly no paid paternity leave, either) counts as the kind of parity the GP was arguing for, I guess.

GP is talking about parity between maternity and paternity leave.

Not when talking about the US, otherwise it wouldn't just be two countries, since many -if not most- countries in the world don't have any paternity leave at all (even in Western Europe - see Switzerland).

Re: Netflix Announces Its New ‘Unlimited’ Maternity and Paternity Leave Program

#62

Post by knicholes »

ghughes wrote: post #16

I'm highly suspicious of "unlimited" vacation or leave policies because the line between reasonable and not is still there, it's just way less visible and ultimately arbitrary, depending on your management chain and workload. I can't wait for this fad to die. Let's just have generous, well-defined leave policies that don't put the onus on the employee to figure out what is OK and what isn't. "Experience shows people…

I'm suspicious that they don't specify how much vacation you get so you can't "cash out" the vacation time. I too have an unspecified amount of PTO at Adobe. Recently people have been cracked-down upon because they were taking a month off every year to go visit family back in India (without doing any work whilst there).

Re: Netflix Announces Its New ‘Unlimited’ Maternity and Paternity Leave Program

#63

Post by kapitalx »

haswell wrote: post #41
ghughes wrote: post #16

I'm highly suspicious of "unlimited" vacation or leave policies because the line between reasonable and not is still there, it's just way less visible and ultimately arbitrary, depending on your management chain and workload. I can't wait for this fad to die. Let's just have generous, well-defined leave policies that don't put the onus on the employee to figure out what is OK and what isn't. "Experience shows people…

Working at a SV company that recently instituted an unlimited vacation policy, I can't agree more. This is probably an indication of other issues, but half of the team didn't realize there was a new policy, one team lead thought the guidance was "generally, this means about 3 weeks", the manager thought "generally, this means about 2 weeks", the actual policy states "generally, this means about 4 weeks". It apparentl…

Netflix employee here. I've been at a company that changed vacation policy to unlimited from 20 days [Nvidia] and now at netflix which has the freedom and responsibility culture and unlimited vacation policy quite established in the culture and it's a different experience. During the interview I asked our VP what he thinks of the unlimited vacation policy and his response was along the lines of `When I got back to [far away country] to visit family I can't just go for a week, it takes me 2 days to get there and the rest of the week to recover, and again on the way back, so I take the whole month`. Having been here 2 years now, I can tell you it is quite common to take long vacations at netflix and no one has blinked an eye or tried to make me feel guilty when I take them.

My experience at Nvidia's was more like what you describe, where my manager said that even though the vacation policy was unlimited now, he thought it would be unfair to others if I were to go over 20 days, and it was always a guilt trip taking a few days off.

Re: Netflix Announces Its New ‘Unlimited’ Maternity and Paternity Leave Program

#64

Post by jrs235 »

userbinator wrote: post #54
ghughes wrote: post #16

I'm highly suspicious of "unlimited" vacation or leave policies because the line between reasonable and not is still there, it's just way less visible and ultimately arbitrary, depending on your management chain and workload. I can't wait for this fad to die. Let's just have generous, well-defined leave policies that don't put the onus on the employee to figure out what is OK and what isn't. "Experience shows people…

I'm highly suspicious of "unlimited" anything . In practice the term usually means "there is a limit, but we won't tell you until you've almost reached it."

Or worse, "there is a limit, but we won't tell you until you've gone over it and now there are marks in your file against you."

Re: Netflix Announces Its New ‘Unlimited’ Maternity and Paternity Leave Program

#65

Post by abhorrence »

haswell wrote: post #41
ghughes wrote: post #16

I'm highly suspicious of "unlimited" vacation or leave policies because the line between reasonable and not is still there, it's just way less visible and ultimately arbitrary, depending on your management chain and workload. I can't wait for this fad to die. Let's just have generous, well-defined leave policies that don't put the onus on the employee to figure out what is OK and what isn't. "Experience shows people…

Working at a SV company that recently instituted an unlimited vacation policy, I can't agree more. This is probably an indication of other issues, but half of the team didn't realize there was a new policy, one team lead thought the guidance was "generally, this means about 3 weeks", the manager thought "generally, this means about 2 weeks", the actual policy states "generally, this means about 4 weeks". It apparentl…

"not having PTO on the books" inherently makes it an anti-employee policy, since the employee no longer will receive anything upon leaving. In theory it could come out better for the employee, because they may get more vacation time than they would otherwise, but my experience has been that unlimited vacation means less vacation.

Re: Netflix Announces Its New ‘Unlimited’ Maternity and Paternity Leave Program

#66

Post by raldi »

rmordoff wrote: post #28
dragonwriter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm glad to see paternity leave included and given equal weight to maternity. So many employers don't offer this important benefit. Really? What employer doesn't offer family leave on equal terms? Certainly, this used to be quite common, but every place I've seen for many years has explicitly been equal.

The link references an article about yahoo that states yahoo and google give more time off for maternity leave (the article is from 2013 so it may have changed since then). "Yahoo will give mothers after the birth of a child from 8 weeks to 16 weeks. Fathers of newborns will get 8 weeks paid leave. Google gives mothers five months off and fathers seven weeks off." http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-doubles-…

Google gives non-birth-mother parents 12 weeks of paid parental leave if they're the primary or equal caregiver during that time.

For example, if you work at Google and both you and your wife work full time, and then she has a baby (or you adopt) and you'd like to both stay home to be equal caregivers, you get 12 weeks of paid leave with basically no questions asked.

Re: Netflix Announces Its New ‘Unlimited’ Maternity and Paternity Leave Program

#67

Post by [deleted] »

danudey wrote: post #49
caoilte wrote: post #10

Unlimited leave policies encourage employees to self-police and conform to peer pressure. At a place like Netflix I can imagine the result being that people end up taking less than the industry average. A better gimmick would be if Netflix picked one of the Nordics and announced that they were going to adopt all of the social policies provided by that country's government.

> I can imagine the result being that people end up taking less than the industry average The industry average in the US is abysmal though. Yahoo 'doubled' theirs to 16 weeks, which is 1/3 of Canada's (and many other countries') legally mandated minimum. Taking double the industry average would still be abysmal by global standards.

[deleted]

Re: Netflix Announces Its New ‘Unlimited’ Maternity and Paternity Leave Program

#68

Post by relix42 »

I've seen quite a few reactions to the Netflix unlimited PTO policy that are similar to the reactions to the new Maternity and Paternity policy. Many of these opinions are the likes of:

* "I'm suspicious of this."

* "No one takes any vacation at Netflix because of this."

* "Unlimited == None"

* "Peer pressure means that everyone works 52 weeks a year."

* "Without a PTO policy you can't cash out unused vacation. This is a rip off."

The thing I haven't seen in these statements are "I work at Netflix and this is what it is really like"...

Here we go - I work at Netflix (as an engineer) and this is what is really like:

* I'm pressured to take vacations.

* Managers are taught that they are examples to the teams therefore they must take regular vacations.

* I take more vacation now than I did when I had 2/3/4/5 weeks a year of stated, paid, vacation.

Questions I've answered about this: * Does my team fall apart when someone leaves for 4 weeks? No. They're adults and they know how to prepare to be away for a while.

* People must raise their eyebrows at you when you leave! No.

* You get called all the time right so you keep your laptop with you on vacation? No. They're adults and they know how to get along without me for a while.

* You must do tons of extra work when people go on vacation! No. People don't just drop stuff and run. They prepare, get stuff ready, postpone things until they're back, etc.

* Managers must "encourage" you not to take vacations. Nope, opposite.

* You feel irresponsible taking time off then. No I don't.

* People must leave for months a time right? The policy gets really abused! No, stop it. Assuming the extreme case must be the common case is silly. You're smarter than that.

* This can't possibly be true. You're a liar/shill/idiot! Next.

* This doesn't/can't work at my company. Therefore, it can't work at yours! Netflix corporate culture is likely very different than your company. Take a look at the culture deck presentation.

This type of policy likely can't work everywhere.

It may not work everywhere in the valley.

It does work here.

[edit] formatting fail

Re: Netflix Announces Its New ‘Unlimited’ Maternity and Paternity Leave Program

#69

Post by Spoom »

kethinov wrote: post #52
omarforgotpwd wrote: post #2

"With this in mind, today we’re introducing an unlimited leave policy for new moms and dads that allows them to take off as much time as they want during the first year after a child’s birth or adoption" Ah, unlimited for a year. So no taking 30 years off after your child is born then.

You've got to wonder what would happen if someone tried to take that full year off, then was fired for taking "too much" of their "unlimited (up to a year)" time off after having a child.

If they're an at-will employee in the US, probably nothing.

Re: Netflix Announces Its New ‘Unlimited’ Maternity and Paternity Leave Program

#70

Post by s0uthPaw88 »

dglass wrote: post #53

I don't get all the backlash in these comments around the "unlimited" policies. Do any of the people opposing the unlimited policies have them in place at their own company? I've had unlimited vacation at my last two companies. I've seen it abused as my previous employer but it's worked out great at my current job. I'm not "peer pressured" by my other coworkers like everyone here seems to think I would be. As long as…

Some reports of companies where a change to unlimited vacation caused employees to take less time off:

1. http://www.paperplanes.de/2014/12/10/from-open-to-minimum-va...

2. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/07/14/unlimited_vac...

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