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Comment by kross | Hacker News Reader

Root cause: bad sickness/time off/work from home policies.

I think this is a big part of it. I currently have 15 PTO days per year, which includes sick leave. If I'm feeling off, I'll ask if I can work from home, which I always get denied (which is odd, since I do after-hours maintenance and on-call incidents remotely).

So rather than piss away PTO, I dose up on drugs and drag my ass to the office. If I had dedicated sick leave, I'd just take the day off. But this miserly PTO policy results in me hoarding it.

What is PTO?

Paid time off

"Personal time off" or "paid time off". It is an informal term that is usually synonymous to a more formal term such as "casual leave" in many companies.

A bastardization of leave policies that lumps pleasure and rest time in with convalescence such that people new to an office often don't get to take real vacations after having spent all of their PTO on gaining immunity to a new germ pool.

Vacation leave and sick leave are mentioned in law, and companies are required to keep funds in reserve to pay for those balances. PTO was invented to stop people from using sick leave when they weren't sick, and to avoid having to keep the cash liability for leave balances on the books.

Usually, the combination results in fewer days of available leave, and since vacations are often planned months in advance, people are forced to come in to the office while sick or spoil their entire vacation by screwing up the itinerary.

PTO balances are typically still liabilities because they're owed to employees when they leave modulo accumulation caps or use it/lose it policies.

It's pretty much inevitable that pooling sick time and vacation time results in a lower total. People aren't really expected to use all their sick time in a given year if ever. But for those who do plan to maximize their use of vacation, it means there's not a lot of margin when they do get sick and it encourages behaviors that aren't good for anyone.

Even worse: so-called "unlimited" leave policies. It's basically "no obligation for leave at all". Hence why it's very popular with the startup crowd these days.

From an accounting perspective, there's also no (or very limited) liability associated with accrued vacation time. (There may be some associated with required sick days.) If someone leaves the company, there's no accrued time to pay off.

Paid Time Off, so vacation time

I'd say it's time to look for another job. There are better places to work at.

The place (federal government) is great, but my current contract employer has some puzzling policies. I've never had a better work/life balance than this place.

In a few years, the contract will be rebid and I'll roll the dice with my next employer. I rarely get sick, so it's not that big of a deal, but I was highlighting how poor policy can induce sub-optimal choices by the employee.

Although it's mostly worked to my personal advantage, I generally loathe the combined PTO plan that's the current style. It's somewhat understandable from an employer's perspective--time you're not working is time you're not working and they don't need to potentially police abuses of sick time--but I still don't like it. "Sorry kids. We can't take that family vacation this year because daddy caught that bad flu last Spring."

But a non-trivial number of people have historically abused dedicated sick time; there are even people cheerfully admitting to it on this thread.

I find combined PTO is great as long as you have enough of it. I get 35 days PTO and I don't have a problem taking a day off when I'm sick.

Now if I only had 15 days PTO....

Yeah, if I had that much I'd be much less conservative for sure. You work for a European company or do you just have clout to ask for that much?

Compounding this is the fact that I can only carry over 5 days per year, so at most I can only use 20 days in a calendar year). In a few years my PTO gets a bump to 20 days a year.

That is indeed a nice chunk of time. I wouldn't have any issue in that case either. I can't really complain too much about mine but 15 days is basically just middling vacation time for a mid-career US professional with no sick/personal time on top of it.

Why on earth are sick days included in your paid time off? If you're sick, you're sick? I assume you're in the USA, given that barbaric policy?

Common barbaric policy here in the States, I am afraid.

The root problem I think is that the US has too few vacation days. This resulted in many people abusing sick day policies by taking sick days off for things that really should be "vacation" days. But management fought the symptom, not the cause, by just pooling vacation and sick days.

It's especially barbaric considering this policy leads to more sickness in the workplace by encouraging contagious people to come in and infect everyone else.

Now you must spend your own time recovering from illness that your employer was the primary cause of. That's brilliant right there. U-freakin-S-A.

Perhaps the next time you get sick, you should avoid the cough suppressants and decongestants, and have a few excuses to stop by the boss's office, and the HR offices, just to chat and incidentally spray infections fluids everywhere.

"Sorry, I'm out of sick days - but as long as I'm here, let's have that lengthy meeting about X. Here, I even brought you a cup of coffee!"

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