Measuring my "Unlimited" Time Off

In late 2019 my company switched to an "unlimited" time off policy. Plans such as it have become common in the tech industry over the past several years. The basic idea is that, instead of traditional, vested time-off policies where you accrue a set number of hours or days of leave every payday, every month, or every year, and can get those hours paid out if you leave before being able to use them (that's the vested part), you just ask your boss for time off whenever you want and as much as you want, and maybe you get it. Employers call it "unlimited" because there's no set accrual amount. I quote "unlimited" because there will always be a limit— just this limit is arbitrary and undisclosed. It's actually just an unguaranteed time off policy.

How's it working so far, in practice? My boss— now my previous boss; he left the company a week ago and hasn't been replaced yet— was pretty mellow about it. He gave our team guidance that we should take off 4 weeks (20 days) per year. "Take a week a quarter," he suggested. That's a nice target as it's an increase from the 3 weeks per year benefit we had under the old, accrual based system.

Last year I came in short of my boss's 4 weeks/year recommendation. I took only 15 days off as there wasn't much value to having time off while so many things were closed due to Coronavirus and there was often too much work to really have a day off. For this year I'm behind the pace at the moment with only 3.5 days spent YTD. I've got  6.5 days off booked in June, though. That will get me up to the recommend pace with 10 days off at midyear.

Making sure I get my due in the second half of the year shouldn't be too difficult. I'm already figuring on 3 days around Thanksgiving to make it a full week off and 4 days between the Christmas and New Year holidays. Add a few more days across July, August, and September to make three-day weekends, and I'll get to 10. Maybe I'll even try getting to 11 or 12. Then I'll see if this much-ballyhooed "unlimited" time off plan truly is unlimited!

Are We Still in a Recession? (Answer Depends on Who You Are)

Are we still in a recession? That question occurred to me recently. It's kind of surprising there hasn't been much about it either way in the news lately. On the one hand, parts of the economy have been doing quite well. Others... maybe not so much? It's unclear.

Clearly things were bad last year in the spring. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) determined that the recession started in February 2020. They haven't said anything about when it has ended. I know; I checked.

While checking I found this Reuters article, "Is it over yet?" from a month ago (4 May 2021) stating, among other things, that yeah, the NBER is very cautious in declaring a beginning or end to things. Indeed, they only concluded in June that the recession had started in February. Even that four-month lag was quick compared to their past calls. It took them a year to determine that the Great Recession had started!

Okay, so if officials are only going to tell us officially when something is over when it's "No shit, Sherlock!" obvious, what can we figure for ourselves? Well, let's look at the stock market.



I obtained this chart from Yahoo! Finance showing the S&P 500 Index from November, 2019 to present. You can see the precipitous drop following a market high on Feb. 19. That's a key indicator, possibly the only key indicator, the NBER used to determine the beginning of the recession. Of course, by the time they figured that out in June, 2020, the market was already well on its way to a recovery. By August the market had already eclipsed its previous high (trace across the dotted line I provided) and has gone on to grow 20% beyond a full recovery.

So, by stock market indicators, the pandemic recession ended 10 months ago. For the rich the pain was short lived, and the rich are now richer than ever. As I've noted before, though, the market is not the economy. While the rich have done well, others may still suffer.

What's another indicator? How about unemployment. I looked up unemployment statistics and found this bare-bones but effective chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:



Unemployment hit a high of almost 15% in April, 2020. Since then it has recovered... but not to its pre-pandemic levels. In late 2019 unemployment stood at about 3.6%. Today it remains just above 6%. That's still a lot of people who aren't back to work yet. ...And coming out of recessions these figures are generally considered an under-count. That's because people who've been out of work long term and have given up looking for work are not counted in the statistic.

So, for the investor class, the recession ended months ago. For the working class, especially those working in sectors hard hit by shutdowns, we're not over it yet.


Take-home essay question: Why, when these charts took me less than a minute each to find, has there been so little coverage in the news?