Kickstarter Gave Employees Unlimited Vacation. They Started Taking Less.
Kickstarter once offered its employees unlimited vacation — no cap, no tracking, take what you need. In September 2015, the company admitted the policy had backfired so thoroughly that it replaced "unlimited" with a mandatory minimum. The problem with infinite vacation, it turns out, is that nobody can tell how much of infinity is actually acceptable to use.
The Perk That Was Supposed to Signal Trust
Unlimited vacation policies became a fashionable tech-industry perk in the 2010s, marketed as a sign of a company that trusted its employees enough not to count their days off. The pitch was freedom: no more rationing a fixed allotment, no more losing unused days at year's end. Kickstarter adopted the model for exactly that reason — a benefit that cost the company nothing on paper and looked generous on a recruiting page.
Without a Number, Nobody Picks One
The trouble was psychological, not financial: without a stated benchmark, employees had no reference point for what "reasonable" time off actually looked like, and erred toward taking less rather than risk seeming like the person who takes the most. Kickstarter found its own staff were, in aggregate, using less vacation under the unlimited policy than they had under a fixed allotment — the exact opposite of what "unlimited" was supposed to produce. Removing the ceiling didn't remove anxiety about the floor.
The Fix Was a Number
Kickstarter's solution was to reintroduce structure: a mandatory minimum of roughly three weeks of vacation per year, with a cap around 25 days, communicated internally as a way to guarantee people actually took time off rather than quietly accumulating burnout under a policy that looked unlimited on paper. The company's own reasoning, as reported at the time, was almost apologetic — removing ambiguity about what was "appropriate" was what finally got people to take the days, not removing the cap.
Infinite Freedom, Reduced to a Checklist
Kickstarter wasn't alone in learning this the hard way — the "unlimited vacation paradox" became its own minor genre of HR case study, cited by outlets covering workplace policy for years afterward. The nice thing that got taken away here wasn't time off itself; it was the assumption that removing a limit automatically makes people more free to use what's on the other side of it. Sometimes a boundary is the thing that makes the good part usable at all.
Filed from public reporting:
