I hope you enjoyed the holiday shutdown because it’s the last one. The company is switching salaried employees from PTO to DTO. Rather than pay out now, you will retain your accrued balance and be paid out when you eventually leave.
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Discretionary time off. The secret is in the name. It’s taken at the discretion of your management. The hardest workers will find it harder and harder to take any at all. All the Gen Z from the Fussball table will be gone most of the time.
I think this Dilbert strip sums it all up:
https://dilbert.com/strip/2013-10-22
I’m curious as to the source here or is it just some troll trying to stir sh-t. I’ve heard nothing.
"Just because we have unlimited time off now does not mean you can take 10-days off without a strong business justification."
Why do I need a business justification to take "personal" time off?
Your reply is spot on, but I'd be asking my manager the above question when I ask for time off. DTO is, as long as I'm taking the same type of time off as I did under the PTO system, not really any different in that someone has to cover my work or deliverable schedules have to have enough slack in them or be pushed back to cover my absence. The only real difference is that the company no longer has to pay me for my unused time when I leave and they don't show liabilities on their earnings statements.
Given that your work has to be covered, which means your backup (if any) has to pick up the slack on top of their normal duties, or the project manager has to find enough slack in the delivery schedule to cover your absence, you're not going to be a popular person and at the top of the LR list.
DTO is a scam. For a company like Cisco, it will be even worse.
https://20somethingfinance.com/unlimited-vacation-days/
The studies show that people tends to take less vacation with DTO due to peer pressure. Once the switch happens, manager will just keep hammering the point, "Just because we have unlimited time off now does not mean you can take 10-days off without a strong business justification." Which really means "...doesn't mean you can take time off".
Also, giving the constant LR, the fear of "they can get rid of me if I take time off" attitude will get worse. In the end, it's just a scam to get people to take less vacation and save the company money by keeping PTO hours off the books.
DTO in a company like Cisco that does LRs every year (quarter??) and also has no sick leave would completely fu----g suck.
"Is unlimited time off paid? Can I take 20 days off every month and still be paid for the entire month?"
Sure, you can take 29 days off and Cisco will happily pay you for 30 days. Money grows on trees at Cisco. Enjoy your DTO.
Is unlimited time off paid? Can I take 20 days off every month and still be paid for the entire month?
For those of you worried about the current PTO hours accrued. It will be a one-time pay out (company will take a one time charge, which won't hurt the book that much); otherwise, they will face many law suits and bad publicity. I think that is all other companies did - one time pay out.
ELT will mandate employee to use the already accrued PTO or lose it by a date when DTO is in place. Mandatory shutdown becomes companies holiday.
Do ELT dare to announce and enforce DTO in the next checkin?
@1yrs+1kDhLj53, I totally disagree w/ DTO vs. PTO.
When I was in the service, we had "leave" and could only roll over 90 days at the end of any given Fiscal year. Unlike Cisco, we could accrue more than the "max limit", but we had to be down to 90 by Sep 30. Most people cut it to 89 days just to be safe.
Once you hit your "limit", you were forced to take each year's annual limit so you were taking your full amount of PTO/leave each year, but you had 90-days of "terminal leave" when you still had all your military benefits to deal w/ finding a new job, moving to a new location (especially if you were living in military housing, you had no choice but to move even if it was just across town), etc. while still having income. I was lucky enough to plan my military exit for late summer (Aug), and I didn't take any leave that year leading up to my separation so I had the 90 days I rolled over plus 25-ish days accrued between 1 Oct - ## Aug, and had roughly 120 days terminal leave.
I've always taken minimal PTO until my PTO bank was maxed out and I could then take more time off than I wanted or needed so that I always had that extra "termination" cushion because every place I've been part of mass LRs before were nowhere near as generous as Cisco is. Most of them, the package was 2 weeks (state required), plus 2 weeks if you signed the waiver agreeing not sue hold the company liable for anything, and if lucky, they added 1 week of service per year of service. I had one company place me on two weeks "furlough", and when we returned, they paid us that two weeks and terminated us on the spot in lieu of notice. If you were d-mb enough not to start looking during that two weeks period, you were suddenly out of a job and had no income immediately. And they didn't provide PTO, so there was no banked PTO to fall back on.
IF Cisco goes to DTO, and drops the year-end shutdown, it's going to be a sh-t show with a majority of everyone wanting to take the Dec holidays off at the same time, but because the company is now operating, not everyone can take off and we go back to the days of deciding how to fairly choose who gets the holidays off and who has to work. At least schools across the nation don't all take spring break at the same time, so whole teams won't be understaffed when everyone wants to take time off when their kids are out of school.
Completely see this happening. Question is, what happens to existing banked PTO?
First the Bonus Remix SCAM and now this. Best place to work, not by far.
Fran teased this on the last check in.
This is finally going to be a trend to do this globally in tech company. I think it is going to be implemented with folks with higher grade level first(L12 up). I had the honor to experience that in one of my previous life. Gone will be trying to banked the PTO as an extra raining day fund when leaving. Company will also not accrue short-term debt - a thing they really like.
Main reasons by those work/life balance experts on supporting DTO are:
(1) Employee (workers) need break - not taking or taking too little is not good - banking
PTO is determinant to personal well being.
(2) Too many people are doing this: I will be gone for 4 weeks but will work from X-X for
two weeks. Majority of the time - due to timezone problem - those working days are
grossly inefficient for the entire team. So, if you are going to visit your home country
or whatever, focus on that and only make yourself available in emergency if you and
your manager together determine that is needed.
(3) This allows management/team to plan ahead of time for long DTO better because you
are unlikely to a long PTO (2 weeks or +) every year.
agree or not? probably opinions will be different.
PTO is a pending expense on the books - the reason holiday shut down started during the financial crisis was to reduce expenses. DTO means that this pending line item expense will be eliminated to show a higher net profit.
Cisco copies everything Microsoft does. Licensing, subscriptions, and remember that ex-Microsoft stack ranking clown about 10 years ago that came to Cisco.
Cisco’s stack ranking clown was John Chambers who copied his hero Jack Welch at GE and those with their ear to the ground knew quarterly layoffs were a common event at least 15 years ago.
Licensing and subscriptions aren’t exactly Microsoft inventions although Cisco continues to implement them more poorly than any other company I’ve ever encountered. At this point even the free software vendors are trying to require questionably secured links to the public internet at all times. A pox on everyone’s house for this.
When a company goes to unlimited PTO they don’t have to pay out anything to an employee when they leave since employees no longer bank PTO hours
Try Google
Discretionary Time Off - unlimited time off
They already announced shutdown dates for next year. So, no, this won't be the last shutdown. They even confirmed the day for me in January 2024 already.
wtf is DTO ?
@twa+1kDhLj53 No they don’t want to make a giant payout all at once.
Cisco copies everything Microsoft does. Licensing, subscriptions, and remember that ex-Microsoft stack ranking clown about 10 years ago that came to Cisco.
I see "Unlimited PTO" trending on Twitter because Microsoft just announced they are transitioning from PTO to DTO and, funny, within hours, someone comes on here to say Cisco is doing the same. Beware the internet trolls...
Does not make sense for the company to wait until you leave to pay out PTO balance. Accrued PTO is a liability and they would want that off the books same quarter as they switch to DTO.
@pdn+1kDhLj53 Read the OP. Banked is paid out when you leave the company.
If you banked a lot of PTO, does this mean you lose it? That would be like stealing payroll benefits.
@wvd+1kDhLj53 what do you mean? It makes perfect sense. Saves the company a lot of money.
that makes no sense.