Oracle has just taken away all salaried employees accrued vacation and replaced it with "flex" vacation. When you have "unlimited" vacation, you have no vacation.
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OMCS former employee here - got the ax on Monday April 24. My final paycheck did include my accrued vacation hours in it. Flex/unlimited vacation policy was to go into effect for all salaried employees June 1.
And that tells you all you need to know about how the top three think about you and all other employees. Get out asap!
IMO, this is an outright theft of employee earned benefit. The right way to implement this is
to pay out all accrued vacations before starting this rule. BTW, I did an rough calculation
based on the estimated numbers of engineers in Oracle US and rough salary rate - worked out to be
about 400-600M $$, Oracle will be saving (or taking away) from its employees each year.
No more employee benefit liability to be kept on the books => auto increase of 400-600M
of profit a year to report. Wow. I guess big bonuses for LE and his cohorts.
It's an employee rip off not to compensate for accrued vacation prior to implementing
And you think that the three stooges want to part with all that cash? Dream on my friend. The whole point here is to screw people like you.
It is worth noting that if they wipe it clean they get to reverse all the accruals which will in read oracle's profits. So that's another reason this is done now - cloud not that profitable but oracle wants to show good profits so they can now do that be screwing the employees out of accrued vacation which had already been recorded as an expense and can now reversed.
Always follow the money!
In my humble opinion, if there must be a change in vacation policy, whatever accrued vacations needed to be converted to cash and paid out to employee before commencing the new policy.
Thanks for the information. I just read the new policy. So, for now at least, it applies to director and above, .but I would expect that it will eventually apply to everyone, I'm sure. At least they gave people some notice so that they could hopefully use some of their hard-earned vacation before it disappears.
4vle - if you work for Oracle, check the US HR and Benefits site on the intranet for the new policy (spells out who it applies to).
I work for Oracle and have not seen the flex time in place of vacation yet. I thought Oracle might go to a policy of not allowing vacation carryover from year to year (happened to me at Avaya), but to just take away employees' accrued hours without notification seems really horrible.
Was this announced in any way prior to changing the vacation policy to flex time instead of time accrued? And what groups have seen this happen? Thanks!!
Those three have zero morals, ethics, or concern for anybody but themselves
What a rip off - cha Ching Chang Ching for LE, SC, MH; everybody else gets royally screwed
welp, it looks like getting laid off 2 years ago, with a hefty vacay balance paid out, was a silver lining. Going back to the Olden Days of Sun Microsystems, most people kept as much unused time as possible as a small financial hedge against layoff. Another prop that has been cruelly removed.
Instructions were give to managers during this transition. Directors and above already had this for 6 months. Anyone below suggesting otherwise is wrong just like most info on here.
The real issue is those who had large accrued vacation were just levelset to those with 0 vacation.
When this rolled out to directors and above I was at max accrued. Certainly was t happy.
Ah, but geriatric LE wants to do what the cool kids in the Valley do to impress his much too young new girlfriend, so you get to pay the price. Time to leave oracle!
"flex" vacation works quite well for the younger millenials, who work in progressive young/new companies, where the management is quite flexible and itself takes enough/reasonable time-off so is OK with employees taking "unlimited" time-off. In a big established "old" company like Oracle, "flex" vacation usually means it's subject to whims and fancy of management, employees now will be more at the mercy of their managers and hence more potential for favoritism and "abuse"; "flex" is meant to take the accrued vacation off the books and thus make the company balance sheet and P&L look so very slightly better but not beneficial to employees at all, at least not at a company like Oracle.
I guess/hope employees will have some control over their vacation till they exhaust their accrued vacation fully but after that it's anyone's guess.
Dear oracle employees, especially those of you who will be laid off during the next couple of years: thank you so much for your involuntary contributions to the obscenely excessive compensation plans of SC and MH. Rest assured that neither of them will think of you or thank you for a single second.
re tracking vacation taken under new policy, in theory , it is NOT supposed to be tracked so work is now results based.
vacation is we earn and entitle to it, but a lot of bad manager out there, I heard some managers won't approve it unless employee find someone to cover their work and make sure nothing happen. Some manager won't allow two week vacation in a role. Even year end shut down, is employee, not manager responsibility to find someone cover.
Let me give you guys some info, actually unlimited vacation time is a good policy, it's efficient, usually you still get maybe 3 weeks per year and managers will help track it. It prevents companies having to put the vacation time in the bank and make the earnings reports look bad. Actually a lot of other great companies were already doing it. But, if this reform happened to Oracle, it kinda means oppositely... because oracle is a fan of cutting costs, anything it does is not related to efficiency, but purely cost. Next time when you get the FedEx package after they fire you in the morning, you will not see the untaken vacation in your paycheck.
Nice, way to go oracle, let managers do whatever they want with no supervision of their abusive behaviors whatsoever
No instructions were given to managers.
As you probably know, managers above a certain level had this benefit (?) since Dec 1. There were no guidelines to managers then either.
Hey, for those of you who are managers, what instructions has oracle given you for approving, or not, vacation requests?
This is a scam so that they don't have to pay you accrued vacation when they lay you off. Take note more layoffs coming your way and oracle just make it cheaper for itself to lay off lots of people.
Id like to see what guidance managers are given when it comes to authorizing the time off.
Its bound to result in favoritism and benefits employees who the company can do without.
I work at a major retailer who recently adopted this vacation policy for certain upper levels of management. I suspect that soon the policy will roll out to all salary folks. Let's face it, this policy is a shrewd but effective business move. The company gets to paint it as wide open unlimited vacation. The truth is that people take less vacation because of peer competition and manager approval or pressure to be at work. HR is NOT in the business of making things awesome for the workers, whether salary or hourly. Labor is like equipment. HR wants to buy the best performing equipment for the lowest price, or lowest cost of ownership. But they don't want to say that. Unlimited vacation looks and sounds great. But the reality is they hope to lower the cost of ownership for the equipment, us. If a piece of equipment acts up or doesn't function well, or performs when you need it, what do you do? You replace it with a newer cheaper version that will do what you need it to, and you do what you can to lower your TCO or total cost of ownership.
Thats insane that you got a 1 week holiday rejected for July.
Id be fighting that decision of i were you. There needs to be a good reason and there is no way they can come up with one when its over 3 months away.
Policy says it's unlimited, as long as your manager approves it. That's they key factor. It's not like you can take off whenever just because your work is getting done, which is the true spirit behind this industry trend. Your manager can deny it for any reason he chooses. Yesterday, I already got my 1 week vacation (for July!!!) denied yesterday because . It would still have come out of my already accrued balance.
As for cashing out your vacation balance when you leave, that is true. However, considering that the amount that you have already accrued will NEVER go up again, only down. It means that you only get to cash this out if you leave before you use up the balance from the previous accrued vacation policy. After you use your ~180hrs you might have saved up from before, you'll get nothing.
2 month vacation? Where do I sign up for that?
If you're dumb enough not to take vacation that's your issue not the company's.
Oracle is finally catching up to an industry trend (for once). If you read the policy it also stated that you would get paid any unused balance if you leave.
Both spot on. It looks like a good policy for the employees but it's actually in Oracle's favor. If there is a choice between 2 folks to lay off, do you choose the guy who took 2 days vacation or the guy who took 2 months vacation to hike the Appalachian Trail !
Yup. They learned from what happened to Kickstarter (people ended up using less vacation)
If they really wanted to make people take vacation, the new policy should have defined a minimum mandatory number of days to take, to really encourage people to do it. This new policy is only good for Oracle's pocket.
I'll miss the idea that when (not if) I get laid off, that they would cash my unused vacation. So much for that.