I would expect that paying people for unused vacation would incentivize employees overworking themselves leading to reduced quality of output. In a sense, I expect that it would magnify the existing issues with unlimited PTO. It seems like this would be neither good for employee or employer.
Most companies only let you bank so many pto (Paid Time Off) hours and carry them over year to year. I think this came about because of accounting change where employee hours are considered a liability (Hours/Money owed for nothing in return), but I might be wrong on that.
As a result employees can't just bank their vacation hours and get a big payday when they leave. It tends to only take a couple years to get up to the max, and you end up with "use it or loose it" pto.
It's been accounting rules for a very long time. It's pretty much Accounting 101. If you accrue liabilities that you're obligated to provide (either in the form of employee time off or pay-out upon departure), that's a textbook liability.
Which is why employers almost always cap in some form or another; the exact mechanism is partially determined by state law.
I worked for a company once that, during a bad spell, eliminated an accrual cap to encourage people to bank vacation. The result was that a not small number of people who weren't really into taking vacation just let their balances balloon. The company eventually forced people to work down their balances.
People are technically already paid for their unused PTO when they leave a company with an allocated PTO/year (although this may vary between states). That was one of the reasons why I chose my current company, because I figured I'd make a little 'extra' money leaving after a year without taking any PTO. Personally, I did end up feeling a little burned out so I opted to actually start using my PTO, but it's nice to have the freedom either way.
An unfortunate reason to see a former university classmate of mine in the news. It always feels strange to see this story come up every so often.
I was never a friend of Jha's, nor was I every really close to him, but I remember him exactly as his attorney described him: "Paras Jha is a brilliant young man whose intellect and technical skills far exceeded his emotional maturity." Jha was not the only former classmate of mine whom I felt lacked emotional maturity, and it is harrowing to imagine how a command of technology can give anyone the power to do something like this if he chose.
Jha intentionally used his skills to inconvenience those around him and he was able to do a great deal of harm to the world at large. While technology makes us better suited to solve problems and help those less fortunate, it also amplifies an individual's ability to do harm.
Intentional malice aside, all of us have the ability to greatly effect the world around us. It is imperative that we consider the impact of our actions. While I was a student at Rutgers, there was no mandatory ethics class for computer science, nor do I remember a class on ethics for computer scientists being offered.
I've been told the administration at my university plans to move the compsci department out of the engineering department and in to the business school. I really haven't heard any pro to that yet other than "it makes the business people happy and there are more of them."
I don't buy your insinuation that he was just a brilliant mind who was immature enough to inconvenience others. I'm reading through https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/who-is-anna-senpai-the-m... and Jha's actions sound like a real criminal. Yes criminal: he was using his technical prowess to bring down minecraft servers and steal customers, effectively running an online protection racket.
I know this sounds harsh but: I'm glad he has been charged with this law and I really really want this guy to be behind bars and think for a long time about what he did. Hopefully it will seriously discourage others from doing the same stuff he did.
On a slightly related note: I can't help but think how this dude could have had a highly successful career in computer security. But he chose to be a criminal. Why?
I read op's commentary more along the lines of emotional immaturity being present, he wasn't really surprised at the nature of the crimes. A lot of these emotionally immature individuals often times are part of the "do things for lulz" mindset. The fact that this started as Minecraft DDOS attacks, re-iterates the immaturity of the individual based on initial targets. I'm not defending these criminals by any means, but I would agree with OP that people whom fit the mental profile of potential asshat hackers are way more common than we'd like to admit. If every crazed rick and morty fan had the technical prowess to pull this stuff off... just imagine the chaos.
This has caught me as well, but it can be avoided by using `:set paste!` to toggle paste mode before pasting. This isn't something I need to worry about often enough but you can map that command if pasting external content is something you do often.
