Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow speaks during a Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit on Oct. 4, 2022, in Detroit. His startup was, at one point, a face of the four-day workweek movement.

San Francisco payments tech startup Bolt is ripping up its unlimited paid time off policy, CEO Ryan Breslow announced on Tuesday. It’s one of the highest-profile instances so far of backlash to a workplace vacation scheme that’s drawn heaps of discourse alongside its rising popularity, largely in the tech industry.

Unlimited PTO sounds like the utopian ideal of modern work freedom — take off whenever and for however long you like, without a dip in pay. A few years ago, the Harris Poll surveyed workers for Fortune and heard that half would take a pay cut in exchange for unlimited time off. 

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Silicon Valley even gets credit for sparking the trend. But Breslow skewered the policy in his LinkedIn post about the change: “When time off is undefined, the good ones don't take PTO. The bad ones take too much. This leads to A-performer burnout. B-performer luxuries. And feelings of unfairness across the board.”

Earlier, “It sounds progressive, but it's totally broken,” Breslow wrote. Bolt’s move to........

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