Bryce Yehl

My company’s paid time-off plan is pretty generous (for the US, at least). The accrual method was pretty foreign to me but those 6.5 hours per semi-monthly paycheck add up to 19.5 days per year, plus two “floating” holidays. Company holidays are pretty light but that’s sadly the norm for young-ish technology companies.

The PTO plan is actually something that has kept from from looking too hard at other jobs. It’s easy to hop jobs every few years and take home a bigger paycheck but in this field you get strange looks when your salary requirements included a minimum of four weeks vacation. At a previous job I’d tried to negotiate for an extra week’s vacation time in lieu of a raise and they opted to give me 9.1% instead (nearly five week’s pay!) and refused to negotiate for the time off. I’d have eventually quit and brought this up during my exit interview but not long after they offered me a ton of money to stop working for them.

For most people it’s probably not that easy to put a precise dollar value on a vacation day, but since that raise I’ve known that a vacation day must be worth no less than $1,000. So if I’m looking at a job offer that only includes two weeks of vacation per year, if that offer isn’t at least $9,500 over what I make now then I would effectively be taking a pay cut.

Getting back to where I work now, we unfortunately have a maximum number of vacation hours that may be accrued. Once you hit 160 hours you stop earning time off. While my finances and weak dollar haven’t agreed for the past two years, my goal has been to take three weeks in Europe every year so I want to keep my balance relatively high so that I have flexibility in choosing the dates. We used to get our balance printed on our pay stubs so it was easy to keep track of and to schedule some days off to stay under 160 hours, but now we have to visit an external web site to check the balance.

AND I CAN NEVER FIND THE DAMNED URL!!!!

I lost something like 100 hours last year due to the cap, which by my previous math I would value at no less than $12,500. I was pretty pissed when I finally noticed — no matter how you value vacation time, 100 hours is a lot of money — but I scheduled 168 hours off for Q4 to get my balance down and kinda got over it.

Until tonight when I wanted to check my balance and wasted an hour hunting down the stupid URL again. You would think it would be linked to on our intranet with all the other HR stuff, but it is not. Nor is it mentioned in the Employee Handbook.

Which leads me to wonder why I should be punished for not keeping track of information that HR has made incredibly difficult to find. They should give me back my hours or pay me for them.

Enough venting. My new Dell is here. Minus the tuners.