Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

by Dan Lyons

tech companies know how to spin negatives and present them as positives. HubSpot offers unlimited vacation time and pitches this as a perk. The truth is that this policy saves money for HubSpot. When a company has a traditional vacation plan, it is required by law to set aside a cash reserve to cover the cost of all of the vacation days that it owes to its workers. When employees quit or get fired, the company must pay them for the vacation time they have accrued. But if a company has no vacation plan, it doesn’t have to set aside the cash reserve. Better yet, the company can fire people without having to pay them for any accrued vacation time. Paige, who got canned after eleven months, had taken only five days of vacation. At a traditional company she would have been owed a week or two of vacation pay, but from HubSpot, she got nothing. Think about how many hundreds of people churn in and out of a place like HubSpot, and you can see how the savings add up.

Not just limited to tech companies either A lot of big cos do this accounting exercise