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Comment by rbadaro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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