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Comment by geff82 | Hacker News Reader

Just a personal observation: when I first moved into a giant-open plan office in 2015 in a big German company, I got significantly more sick. It was horror. Also, bathrooms were unusually crowded, probably helping spread diseases. Since then, it seems my body got a bit used to it and I am sick less often. But is is still more than the times before.

What might also increase days that people are not there: at least in our office we actively encourage people not to come back from sickness soon. We urge them to stay at home to avoid spreading disease further. While I personally might come back to a single office after 2-3 days, as I can't that easily infect other people in my private office, I stay away for a week more often now.

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This fits with my experience. My department has some cubicle farms and some shared but much more private office suites. The cube farm people are always getting sick. Somebody comes in with a cough and promptly spreads it. It then can take weeks before there's a week without somebody sick.

Getting people to stay home when they are sick has been harder to implement than you'd think. I've tried with my work team. A number of the developers are from cultures that have what I would call a very stubborn "must work at all costs" mentality. It can take some persuasion (berating?) to get some of them to see that taking a sick day doesn't make them a "bad worker," but showing up sick, getting other people sick, and pushing buggy code because they're sick does.

Ever since companies ditched vacation and sick leave in favor of combined PTO, I work while sick. When I had sick leave, I used it.

It may well be that they don't want to cut their July vacation short by a day because they caught a cold in January. And to compound the issue, it was probably a cold they caught at work, because the company leave policy reinforces the behavior. People who stay home when sick are punished with shorter vacations.

That is very US specific. In Europe, in a lot of office-based work if you get sick you take some days off and it doesn't impact your normal yearly 20-30 day vacation allowance. If you need more than X days (in my case 5), you need a paper from your doctor, otherwise you self declare as sick. At my workplace, people tend to work from home if they are just feeling a bit sick.

It's mostly a fairly recent trend even in the US. For most of my career, I had separate vacation and sick days (as well as, possibly, personal/floating holidays). I'm not sure when the shift occurred but apparently a combined pool is pretty much the norm these days.

The new trend is 'unlimited' vacation days, where nothing can impact you vacation time, because you have to fight with your manager for it.

Fortunately, it's a trend that seems to have had fairly limited pickup. It really does seem like a bad system in practice. I have always, other than the odd day lost when I've hit a cap or whatever, used every day of vacation I've been allotted. In past roles, I've even taken month long vacations where I was totally out of touch.

I would not want to be in a situation where my vacation time depended on some prevailing sense among coworkers of the appropriate number of days to take off.

> Fortunately, it's a trend that seems to have had fairly limited pickup

It's been the case at the last four places I worked: large corporations who knew their H1B workforce wouldn't ask for time off, and startups where I wouldn't get any spare moments to meet with my managers to ask for vacation.

(Fwiw, the vacation time at the start ups was perfectly decent, given the situation. I think I took ~3 weeks off each year. At the big company, it was a total fiddle.)

It's smallish things like this which make me realise how lucky I am not to live in America.

In this particular case though, possibly just how lucky I am to live in Australia. Here it's either just common practice at most companies, or possibly required by law, but everywhere I've seen the leave policies provides 52 weeks a year of sick/carers leave.

Usually this is broken up into ~20 days of leave where one isn't really required to provide any justification beyond "I felt bad that day" and beyond that a doctors certificate may be required.

But that's always entirely separate to annual leave.

Yeah, well, the biggest spiders I ever typically see are wolf spiders smaller than my thumbnail, so there is that.

Very, very tiny consolation. I'd live with a dog-sized spider if it would mean that corporate management wasn't filled with cold-blooded monsters.

Okay I am not understanding, would help enlighten me please?

I read this and go '52 weeks a year for sick leave? Aren't there 52 weeks in a year total?'

Here in the Netherlands you can get back your vacation days if you get sick during your vacation. Might not earn as much in the US, but some benefits...

It's like that in Germany too. Days you are sick during a vacation are counted as sick days, not vacation days. (Why not, you're sick aren't you?)

Some uptight employers require a doctor's note but most just roll with it.

That always stuck me as a profoundly civilized attitude.

That's not the case everywhere. My sick days aren't bundled into my PTO, and it's still a problem getting people to stay home when they're sick.

My employer has taken it to the next step and even all the holidays are floating and part of my combined PTO.

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