> Back in the 1-Hour-Photo Minilab days, the tech was doing more or the less the same thing as well, or just hitting 'auto' and the Noritsu or Frontier was making adjustments to each frame before printing it.
This takes me back. I worked in a one-hour photo place way back in the day, operating a Noritsu. We had a film school in town and students would often come in with their C-41 or their Tri-X and complain about the colors or saturation of their prints. Which was totally fair, because tapping the right CMYK buttons on the machine was more art than science. Ah, memories.
Yeah—and do you know what happens when you print it on color paper? You get inconsistent colors between the highlights and shadows. So, people would complain about it.
The "not just salary" bit is very often used as a mirage intended to fool employees to take a lower compensation than what they can get, and then tag a bunch of conditions that can't possibly or realistically be met.
There is certainly a balance to be struck. Being in a meat grinder that pays well is not super fun, and a lot of people would gladly take 70-80% of that in exchange for work/life balance and strong PTO.
TBH that's one of the reasons I chose the company I'm at now. I had other options, but having a team that I love and very healthy PTO won me over. To each their own!
> For people with family, I believe a good insurance plan and flexibility in hours also mean a lot.
Healthcare is one of those things that's a perk in the US, but is not such a big deal in most western countries. Hopefully the US will be able to benefit from that someday.
Healthcare isn't much of a differentiator in the kinds of jobs being discussed here. Pretty much all of them will have good healthcare plans that are as close to free for the employee as the IRS and insurers will allow.
You still have to interact with the insanity of the American healthcare system, but you're not being financially ruined by it.
When I was a consultant, I could not find a health insurance plan that was even vaguely the equal of my current job's health insurance. Not too expensive, but simply not offered.
That's not to say that job insurance is automatically good -- the job I had before being a consultant had worse health insurance that was a little worse than the plans I had as a consultant.
My plan next time I'm doing any kind of c2c type work will be to setup with trinet or another similar company to handle payroll benefits, even if it is just me.
Good luck with that... I don't know what your definition of "good" is, but in looking around when my cobra policy ran out, there were definitely limited options, none of which came close to what most of the worker policies offered, and none covered my retina doctor. The eye injections I get would be more out of pocket than my net income right now... and after 7 months out of work, I was seriously considering jobs paying roughly half of where I'd been the past few years just to maintain a good insurance plan.
I had about 12 months of buffer, but several unplanned home and auto repairs ate into that.
Members of my family have serious health problems, and the company’s PPO plans cover medical treatments with world-class providers. It would probably be prohibitively expensive for us to purchase such a plan on the open market.
Instead of being indentured by spending company scrip at the company store you're staying because of health insurance that would otherwise be unaffordable to you.
When I was younger, the salary definitely would have been the top deciding factor. These days I'd willingly give up $50K for an extra 4 weeks of PTO. And none of that "unlimited PTO" bullshit either.
I am part of the group that misses unlimited PTO. I was averaging 8-9 weeks of time off under the unlimited model while I am capped at 5 weeks at a company with actual PTO.
The only difference is that I get paid out any remaining PTO, should I leave, whereas with unlimited, there was no expectation that it will be paid out on departure.
I also came from a place with unlimited and I loved it. Makes me wonder if the people that regurgitate the notion that it's a trap actually have worked in places with unlimited.
Agreed. I was skeptical at first, but I've worked at several companies with unlimited PTO and they all specifically encouraged people to take time off. One place was explicit that the reason they switched to unlimited was to get people to take vacations: "PTO is not meant to be a bonus when you leave the company. We want you to rest and recharge."
My current company recently made a rule that you have to apply for time off through the HR software. Not make it harder to take PTO—all requests are auto-approved-just so HR can track it. At the next all-hands the CEO said something like "You guys work really hard... we're, uh, worried." My manager has been bugging me to take a proper vacation instead of my usual day off here and there.
There are certainly awful, exploitative workplaces out there. But there are also great companies run by good people.
There are three situations from what I've seen, one is toxic workplaces where PTO is closely tracked and people who use it are punished (socially or otherwise). That happens more often in unlimited PTO places, but absolutely happens in places with traditional PTO plans too. Second you have the more common situation where without a use-it-or-lose-it resource people end up taking less PTO than they would normally, this happens naturally A LOT. Third are people who have never worked somewhere with unlimited PTO who are justifying to themselves and others why it's bad :)
I've only heard bad things about unlimited PTO, but I've only experienced good things. I've worked at two places with unlimited PTO, and at both, I typically took ~5 weeks and nobody had an issue.
At one place I worked at, they only gave 3 weeks, but with the option to "buy" a 4th week with a slight salary reduction that effectively made that 4th week unpaid, but with the loss of pay spread out over the year. It was nice, though I actually wish I could have taken more, especially since the company did a shutdown between Christmas and New Years and forced you to burn a week of PTO at that time, which meant that you really only got 2 or 3 weeks throughout the year to do what you wanted.
Depends on the work culture certainly. Unlimited is, if course, not really unlimited. But whether (for a good performer) it's culturally 2 weeks or 6 weeks matters a lot. Even in an old-fashioned regular PTO company, I had people--though not my managers--incredulous that I would take 4 weeks of out-of-contact time.
More recently, someone I know who worked at a well-known unlimited PTO company told me that a newly hired head of corporate communications quit in short order because the CEO would actually go radio silence on vacation and they couldn't deal with that.
I've heard from friends who worked at an "unlimited" place who said there was a soft threshold at 4 weeks. If you took more than that your boss would very quickly give you a call to discuss it.
FWIW, no I have not worked in a place with unlimited PTO. Heard a lot of negatives though and that's what scares me off it. The peer pressure to not take PTO would make it difficult for me to actually relax. Everyone is different though and I'm sure there are places where it works. But it's hard to determine that during the interview process. So I'd rather have the guarantee of x number of weeks of PTO where x>5.
It is fairly common, it has been my experience and that of others I talked to, that unlimited in many companies means that you can take 3/4 weeks per year of time off, but you need the authorization of your manager or HR for any additional day. Which is not unlimited, but that's the word these companies use.
I believe it's not intended to be a trap; it's not to encourage taking more or less than a typical amount. Rather, it's done to avoid paying out on termination in places that require doing so as mentioned earlier.
Yeah, when you're young, salary being top factor makes sense. You want to build up a savings, put a down payment on a house, buy a nice car.
10 years later, the car is paid off, you've got a sizable savings, and your increased salary over the years means your mortgage payment represents a much smaller portion of your salary, and you're already capping out the 401(k) contribution limit. At that point, you're ready to start relaxing a bit. You'd rather have the PTO. Alternatively, your savings account is now a decent safety net and you're ready to take a job that has a lower salary in favor of more stock, or even play the startup lottery.
That’s literally the only substantive information in the article. Aside from that sentence the article can be summarized as “we saw some changes and it is outside the scope of this study to figure out what, if any, impact they have”
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