In my girlfriend's current job, all PTO always expires on January 1st, no matter how old it is, no matter how much or how little you have saved up.

Which is just fucking madness.

• If you want to take a vacation in the springtime? Go fuck yourself. Nobody can take a substantial vacation in the early months of the year because nobody has accrued very much PTO yet.

• If you want to take a vacation in the summer (as many people do), you can only ever use about half of your yearly PTO for it, so if she wants to go on a summer vacation, she's limited to about 1 week instead of the 2 weeks she supposedly gets. A full 2-week vacation could only ever be taken in December.

• Pretty much everybody there will have some PTO wasted, because even if you earned that PTO on December 31st, it sill expires on January 1st. The only way you could theoretically use up all your PTO is if you had one day's worth left and took December 31st as your day off.

And add to all of that bullshit, they still do the other bullshit of having to pretty-please request PTO, which the bosses will often deny because they're (deliberately) understaffed and apparently incapable of operating the business at all if they're missing even one employee. And even worse on top of that, their management structure is very shitty and every manager always wants to pass the buck -- there isn't just one person she needs to get permission from: she needs to ask at least 4 different managers, including the company owner, and they all need to agree on the schedule for time off.

Yeah I had that in my previous job, but they didn't call it PTO. Also we didn't use PTO for our official holidays. It was really stupid: we would get 12 months worth of time off on January 1st and all of it expired December 31st. This naturally caused everyone to basically take December off, which meant our busiest months of December and January were super fun.

In my current job, PTO is earned for each working hour at a rate decided by your seniority, so you gain more PTO per hour the longer you work there, and you can bank up to a certain amount and the excess is lost. It's a pretty big bank, so I think it's an okay-ish balance between stealing our PTO and encouraging us to use it. I guess it could be worse.

This is different from when I lived in Norway, where I had "unlimited" sick days, all bank holidays off, and an additional 5 weeks of time off a year + vacation bonus in the summer, plus time and a half for any overtime beyond 37.5hrs/wk with double pay on Sundays and holidays.