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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

> It was a big relief that I could take a sick child with me to work (of course only when the illness was not serious).

Please don't bring a sick person into the office for any reason. This is why work-from-home policies are so important.

As a mother with children, the idea of a sick room is terrifying. It's bad enough to bring a sick kid (or even post-sick kid) into an office full of otherwise healthy people, but the idea of my kid then being incubated in a room with everyone else's sick-kid germs, touching things and sleeping in the same sleeping bag... ick.

As a manager, my policy is that the worse thing you can do is infect us all. If you are sick, please, quarantine yourself! Work from home. You will not be dinged for working at home, but if I end up sick, I will be grumpy indeed ;)

This was my first thought also. Dealing with illness is always hard, but the idea of having a room full of hard-to-sanitize objects like sleeping bags, specifically for sick people, is downright alarming.

Daycares, schools, and hospitals are already excellent at spreading illness. Setting aside a non-sanitized room for sick kids (or adults) seems like a way to ensure that everyone leaves sicker than they came in.

You guys are looking at it all wrong. A sick kid room is like a little workout gym for their immune systems.

EDIT: while this is somewhat true, I was trying to make a joke

And like lifting weights, if you go too hard too fast you'll get yourself into trouble. Except lifting doesn't make your neighbors' muscles sore.

Yeah. It's like a trading card game except the cards automatically copy themselves and make people miserable. "I'll give you my strain of the cold if you give me your strain of the flu."

It seems people think that if you're already sick you can't get another illness added on top.

of course only when the illness was not serious

Yeah, it's "just a cold", not tuberculosis. Stay home, that's why you have sick days.

If you can work at work with a sick child, you can work at home with a sick child.

(For the record, I've had to stay at home with my sub-year-old kid for several days, and I cannot work from home even if she's well. I can't imagine getting anything done with her at the office, either.)

Exactly. Anyone suggesting you can work while looking after a small child has clearly never looked after a small child. I can barely make an occasional cup of tea and put some laundry on when looking after our toddler, the thought of doing productive work is hilarious!

Having worked both at places with "sick days" (tracked or not), and lumped-all-together PTO policies, I loathe PTO arrangements. Extremely ill people dragging themselves into work because they have no PTO or feel the reasonable need to preserve it... It places an unfortunate choice on the employee.

I loathe PTO arrangements.

Oh, thanks for picking that scab. Worked at a place with the "all-in-one-bucket" PTO. Hated it for the exact reason you outline. I rarely get sick (about once a year), and it seemed like I was sick on a monthly basis working there.

Wait a minute: If you have 10 sick days, then (in theory) you can only take them if you're sick. If you have 10 PTO days, you can take them for any reason, including if you're sick. Isn't that more flexible?

EDIT: Ahh, good point, thanks repliers! I forgot the case where PTO comes out of your vacation days (which I have been subject to in several jobs). Yea, those jobs suck.

Only if the PTO doesn't come at the expense of other holidays, or with the expectation that you'll use less of your "unlimited holidays" because of it.

When you have sick days, you typically also have PTO days.

When you just have a set number of PTO days, you're forced to decide whether it's worth dealing with a couple of days at work with a slight fever in exchange for being able to go on a family trip in the summer.

If you have 10 PTO days, you can take them for any reason, including if you're sick.

Or I can take those 10 days on a nice vacation to Europe with the spouse...but only if I come into work on days that I'm sick.

EDIT: and to clarify for any confusion that I might just be imagining that you might have, the PTO arrangement to which I refer is where you get a lump of days to do with what you wish, be it vacation/holiday or illness. Versus x days for vacation/holiday and y days for illness.

It is, but employees count all flexible PTO as vacation and resent wasting a vacation day on being sick.

Similarly to "unlimited" vacation, it takes a bit of work to get yourself in the right mindset to use generic PTO well.

Perhaps for the individual (all else being equal), but for the group it is detrimental. It incentivizes your coworkers to come in sick (to conserve precious PTO days they can use for actual vacations/traveling), potentially getting you sick and eliminating some of your precious PTO.

I am from Europe. What are limited sick days? When I am sick I get a paper from my GP saying that I am sick (sic!) and when I'll be able to work again (this is filled in on the day I start working again). My vacation days (25 per year where I work) are not affected by this.

I wonder what happens when the vacation days are used up. Do you go to work with a fever? Are you staying in bed and getting paid less?

Where I've worked, if you're completely out of PTO then you stay home and take unpaid leave.

To me, putting this much pressure on a sick employee seems really harsh and detrimental in the long run. I hope employees with such contracts just get paid more in general, so they have more financial wiggle room to account for bad streaks.

> Do you go to work with a fever? Are you staying in bed and getting paid less?

Yes and yes, unless your employer is especially gracious. Welcome to the good old US of A!

That's unfortunate. I know how stressful it is even here to be sick, because despite getting infinite sick leave in theory, you still fall behind at work, which is already unpleasant enough by itself. But it's also frowned upon to come to work when you're sick, because you're either risking other people's health, or simply not taking care of your recovery (which will have a negative impact on your productivity).

If someone I work with brings their sick kid to work then I am working from home.

Honestly wtf kind of idiot thinks bringing a sick person into an office is a good idea??

One person's toxic biological WMD is another person's precious unique snowflake.

I'd probably go a step further. If you have a sick child with an infectious disease, and even if you have arrangements that would allow you to come to work, don't come to work. Work from home.

Why? Because you can be an asymptomatic carrier.

15 years ago, I caught chicken pox thanks to someone whose kid had it coming to work. (and chicken pox is more severe and dangerous in adults... it was a "fun" week)

How about a dont-work-when-your-child-is-sick policy.

My daycare has a policy where kids have to go home if their temps are over a certain number, and can't come back for 24 hours, even if they are not sick. I have to take a handful of days off a year to stay home with a kid who isn't sick.

You also have to remember that little kids frequently get sick from things adults are already immune to. Both of our kids went to daycare at about 6 months, both were frequently sick for that first month with things there were exposed to for the first time.

This just isn't true.

Kids' developing immune systems enable them to pick up things that we would be immune to, then cultivate those things until they reach a basically a weaponized status. Kids are all kinds of infectious to adults.

I've never in my adult life been sick so frequently as when I shared an office with a parent who'd moved his young school age kids from the east coast to the west. I really liked him, but the experience was awful. Every 8 weeks I was sick.

As a person with a child and many small nieces and nephews, and multiple teachers in the family, I will tell you that you're wrong.

The disease they bring home may be something you were exposed to but it will ~~mutate~~ grow stronger in the child as the weak ones are killed off and infect you anyway.

And there is a reason you can't come back for 24 hours. Many diseases are still contagious after your symptoms have cleared. If you throw up and feel better, it doesn't mean the disease is now gone.

So please respect the science and herd mentality and keep sick kids away from kids and adults for at least 24 hours after symptoms subside, or at least make sure the other adults are explicitly ok with you being around them.

>The disease they bring home may be something you were exposed to but it will mutate in the child and infect you anyway.

Not true, viruses do not mutate at such a rapid pace. If they did vaccines would be entirely ineffective.

>And there is a reason you can't come back for 24 hours. Many diseases are still contagious after your symptoms have cleared. If you throw up and feel better, it doesn't mean the disease is now gone.

With influenza and the common cold children are no longer contagious after the symptoms have faded. Anything else that is infectious should be treated by a doctor and you should ask him.

"How long can I spread it?

About a week. You’re contagious from 1 day before you have any symptoms. You stay that way for 5 to 7 days after you start feeling sick. Kids may be able to spread the virus for even longer, until all of their symptoms fade."

http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/how-long-flu-contagious

Look at the sentence you posted. You are contagious for one day before you have symptoms and then you are contagious until all the symptoms go away. Usually the sick day that you stay at home for is the second day of seven. So really, you should stay out for the week. But 24 hours is a nice compromise.

Also, how do you know they influenza and not something else?

And as to mutation, you're right, they don't actually mutate. But what happens is the weaker bacteria/virus will not affect you but will affect your child. After a while, the child starts to kill off the weaker ones and then the concentration of strong ones increase, and those are the ones that neither you nor your child can fight, and that's when adults get sick too.

Most laymen call that mutation which isn't correct, but it's still correct to say that the bacteria/virus that are stronger increase their concentration in the child until it is potent enough to infect the adult too.

>And as to mutation, you're right, they don't actually mutate. But what happens is the weaker bacteria/virus will not affect you but will affect your child. After a while, the child starts to kill off the weaker ones and then the concentration of strong ones increase, and those are the ones that neither you nor your child can fight, and that's when adults get sick too.

Source?

You also have to remember that little kids frequently get sick from things adults are already immune to.

Which would explain why every parent I know is sick certainly more often than my wife and I are with no kids, and usually sick every time the kids drag something home.

This doesn't sound like my experience. New parents maybe, but with 3 kids, I have taken literally 0 sick days in the past year (I did WFH 1-2 days last year where I wasn't sure but turned out I could even workout on those days).

Back when we had a single kid we did get sick more FWIW.

Seriously. Ask any elementary school teacher you know how often they and their families get sick - it might well be an order of magnitude more than other people.

It's pretty possible to avoid (contagious) illness for a year at a time if you don't have kids and don't spend time at schools/campuses/conventions. Change one of those things and you'll be sick in a month.

Yes, I get sick more often now that I have kids (once or twice a year instead of none) - but they still get sick 10 times more than I do.

This is why we send our kids to a home daycare (mixed with a couple days a week at a more formal french immersion preschool).

Our home daycare teacher is fine if they've got a bit of a temp or sniffles, and I think my kids are stronger for it (other kids there get sick too, but we haven't had many bigtime infections passed around).

> You also have to remember that little kids frequently get sick from things adults are already immune to.

...but also things that could kill my elderly parent.

oh man, my little kid is a biological terror.

He got my parents sick. then He got my wife sick. then He got me sick. then He got the nanny sick.

It's going to be a long 20+ years.

When you employee others you do so on the understanding that if they have kids then they are going to take a bit more "sick" leave than someone without a kid. That is just life.

Actually saying "if they have kids" isn't actually correct, it is if they have any dependants. Almost everyone has dependants at some point in their lives and you have to accept that.

> You also have to remember that little kids frequently get sick from things adults are already immune to.

And they also spread things that many adults (and children) are severely impaired by. A "mild" chest infection to you or your child is a cough, to me it's a week in bed and antibiotics.

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