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Comment by abarringer | Hacker News Reader

When I left AVG Technologies (now owned by Avast) I figured they would try to screw me on this. I copied a line out of the employee handbook, that I had to sign a receipt for and acknowledge I had read, that said "All accrued unused vacation will be paid out in full on an employees termination" sent that line to HR and asked them if they would pay my vacation if I left. They replied, you work in FL which does not legally require us to pay it so no. Anyways, I showed my direct supervisor the email from HR, worked two weeks then took three weeks off. When "I got back from vacation" I turned in my notice and walked out even though the handbook said a two week notice was required... because FL is a right to work state and you do not legally have to turn in a two week notice. We each enjoyed our own groups at AVG but "Corporate" was just evil.

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Good for you. Too many people don't stand up for themselves in situations like these. My grandmother had more than 125 sick days built up when she retired after 40 years of teaching elementary school.

They told her that a recent change in policy would mean she would only be paid for a maximum of 30 of those days.

I told her that alone would be enough to make me sick to my stomach for about 125 days (pretty much an entire school year), after which I would be ready to retire.

Luckily she is at least aging gracefully and goes to the gym daily. She's been collecting that sweet defined benefit pension for 25 years and will probably get another 10 out of it at least.

The biggest lesson here is - take more time off!

I've personally had a year where I only took 8 days of vacation and I'm already regretting it a few months into the next year.

I’d love to know how all these people manage to accrue all this PTO! Most jobs I’ve had give you 10 days. So, after a handful of sick days, you really only have a single digit of vacation days a year. You don’t use any of these? Year after year? I don’t believe it! How do you work it so you’re not out of PTO by the end of the year? Don’t get sick and don’t take a day off?

At my company you get I believe 10 days of PTO but you can still take vacation it just won't be paid.

Are you in the us? Previously in consulting, I've always had 4 to 5 weeks off pto, plus an allowance for sick leave, bereavement, carers leave and other allowances. Along with bench time, i had almost 2 months paid off a year. Formerly based in Australia, now in the us and not looking forward to the working conditions here :( you guys get treated like slaves...

For professional jobs, 10 days + a separate pool of sick days was pretty much the norm in the US as I understood it. For experienced people, more like 3 weeks (and possibly longer as you get to the 10 year or so mark).

These days with pooled sick and vacation/personal, my personal experience suggests 20 or so days as a starting point for large-ish tech companies. I'm sure there are some/many that give less but I know what I've personally seen that wasn't considered extraordinarily generous.

In our state, we accrue 1 hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked. This comes out to approximately 8 sick days per year.

These are separate from PTO. At the very minimum, I would expect 10 PTO days in addition to 8 sick days. You might lose some goodwill if you max out your sick day use, but you are owed those days by law regardless.

Single digit vacation days would be insane. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

A lot of places turn asking for vacation days into a tense social interaction with your boss.

I worked at a place where we got bought out and the new owners tried to give us 2 extra weeks of vacation a year. We all laughed. Because nobody was getting to take the 2 weeks they already had.

As a data point, I get 20 days a year that accrue and roll over every year up to a maximum of 25, plus 7 sick days that don't roll over.

Personally, I like to let them accrue so I can take one very long holiday overseas every couple of years. I'm lucky to have a good immune system that leads to only missing maybe a single day a year due to sickness, allowing the others to be used for last-minute errands and mental health days.

Most companies institute limits on accrued holiday because at some point it's a liability you don't want on your books and screws with resourcing in the general case. So, they did the right thing... I agree it's intolerable to apply limits retro-actively though.

If the right thing to do is fucking over their employees, they definitely did the right thing. I'm sure plenty of people agree with you and don't see a problem fucking over employees, especially on HN. But the actual right thing to do would be to make sure their employees take time off every year and can't accrue so much vacation. Problem solved without anyone getting fucked over and with happier, more productive employees and a better business outcome. Clearly such solutions are beyond the grasp of the average business owner / CEO / COO. No, let's work them to death and then fuck them over, they are not people, they don't deserve better, seems to be the default philosophy and the one you are espousing here. Just because the law allows one to be the asshole you describe doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. Far from it.

I don’t agree with your characterization of the parent comment, which makes your comment seem almost entirely non sequitur. Perhaps you should reread the parent.

> Most companies institute limits on accrued holiday

Sick days are not holiday/vacation, and have additional restriction on use where they exist instead of combined PTO. But, in any cases there wasn't an accrual limit here, they just had a limit on cash out at separation.

>Too many people don't stand up for themselves in situations like these.

I think you've got it backwards.

The issue is that too many companies in position of power too readily screw over their employees from whom they expect loyalty but give none.

I'm glad your grandmother is doing fine, but you probably shouldn't portray it like your grandmother is getting back her employer since her employer is ultimately the taxpayer.

Also, the fact that 125 days pretty much covers her entire working year as a teacher is rather astounding for people who work in the private sector. Most of us have to put in 220+ days each year to justify our salaries.

Do you think teachers are working solely during the school year? Do you understand that the private sector already pays significantly more? There's a reason teachers have been striking across the country.

Because they don't know what the median income is or understand the hidden cost of all of the benefits they get?

They are generally still below market wages even when accounting for benefits. The one place where things get a bit wonky is the job security in areas that have teacher's unions.

You don't get to trample over people's lives just because it's the government. If the government has unfair employment practices, I'm happy when those who are treated unfairly get even.

And that's a full year of "teaching", as in, with a classroom of kids. Teachers usually have a few weeks of training and work during the summer as well. But this is all offset by the fact that they are usually paid less than market wages, even when accounting for benefits. Although, defined benefit plans are becoming rare in both the private and public sector.

Why should people be paid for sick days that they didn't use because they weren't sick? Otherwise what is the distinction between sick days and vacation days?

If the employer is applying a limit to how many you're allowed to take then they're acknowledging that they're really vacation days (that you can take at short notice). Otherwise there would be no limit, because it's not like you control how often you get sick.

Not really. The point of calling them sick days is that there is an understanding that an employee will use them only if she is sick. The limit is there because the business needs someone doing the job and after a person is sick for long enough, the business will have to find a replacement.

No, but you can go on short-term (or long-term) disability at many companies. There's an unfortunate pooling of sick time/personal time/vacation time at many companies today. But, in the US, it used to be absolutely the norm to have separate PTO and sick days and you were only expected to use the sick days if you were sick. (And they typically didn't roll over.)

And, if you left for whatever reason, you were paid out your accrued PTO (which often had an accrual cap) but not sick time.

Basically because that's what your contract agreed to. I have something similar. I have 3 sick days per year and if I don't use them they become vacation PTO for next year. Regular pto doesn't roll over but sick days do.

OK. It seems like it would be clearer if those were just called accruable vacation days or something.

They are often separated by the employer, including different rollover amounts and rules, for..... reasons I guess?

There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. With combined sick + vacation, usually called PTO, workers are more likely to try to save PTO for vacation and work when they are sick, and they end up transmitting infections to other workers. Personally, I am a big fan of separate vacation + sick leave.

The counterargument is that some people abuse sick time. (I think there have even been studies that show a large excess of sick days on Monday.) And from a purely utilitarian perspective, why should an employer care if you're in bed with the flu or climbing a mountain somewhere?

That said, I'm not a fan of the combined system. In a lot of other ways, we expect employers to accommodate employees who may have issues of various kinds. Accommodating employees who get sick more often seems a reasonable extension of that. (And I say that as someone who, touch wood, has largely benefited from a combined system over the past decade or so.)

> And from a purely utilitarian perspective, why should an employer care if you're in bed with the flu

Because the alternative to being in bed with the flu is being at work with the flu, and the employer doesn't want to catch the flu? It kinda makes utilitarian sense.

What I meant was that you're not working so you should simply forgo that day of climbing the mountain. It's a day off work in any case.

As I said, I'm not a fan of the combined vacation and sick time in any case (in part for the reason you say). And, yes, people will drag themselves into work because they don't want to lose a vacation day.

If you use up your combined PTO on vacation, you don't have any left when you actually get sick.

If you hoard your PTO in case you get sick, you don't get to enjoy vacations.

There's a middle ground, but the spot where you draw the line and say "I need to save this many days in case I get sick" is going to be different for everyone, and most people are not going to calculate it correctly.

Not to mention the employee isn't incentivized properly here. The employee that takes too much vacation and goes to work sick, they're not the one who pays the cost of them going to work sick, it's the other employees who do. So a combined PTO scheme like this actually incentivizes employees to err on the side of taking more of it as vacation than they should.

People can typically borrow against future PTO if they get sick and don't have time banked. Again, I don't advocate a combined system and I actually agree the incentives are mostly wrong (for everyone except those who abuse sick time when they're tracked separately which are probably less common among readers here than in the general population).

Indeed, approximately 40% of sick days are used to create effectively 3day weekends (Monday or Friday)

I get the joke but I’ve seen references to at least one study that found 35% of sick days were taken on Monday which is more than random chance.

People get sick doing stupid stuff in the weekend?

This doesn't seem odd to me. People go out on weekends and are in contact with people they aren't normally around.

I honestly don't understand the concept of sick days. If you happen to get sick more often than you have the day... What then? Are you expected to come in to work? Hwy on earth would _anyone_ want that, including your employer? I've been fortunate enough to only work places where you can "wfh" if sick and do as little work as you feel up to, so I honestly don't know how it works in the typical case.

This doesn't seem so hard to understand. In the limit, you can see that an employer can't keep paying someone who is sick all the time and who is not working. The employer is providing a guideline about the amount of sick time it can accommodate before the situation becomes untenable.

So to answer my direct question... That means that the employee should come into work and get everyone else sick? Maybe I'm dumb, but I'm still not understanding how that benefits the employer. "Tenable" or not, it's the reality of the situation, and what you're describing sounds more like saying that the employment of that person isn't viable due to their health issues. Which has nothing to do with pretending that the employee isn't sick.

> because FL is a right to work state and you do not legally have to turn in a two week notice

right to work or not, is there any state where you have to "legally" give 2 weeks notice? i don't think there is.

From the states or government: No, there is nothing. You might have something in a contract that requires it (and is actually enforceable)

My understanding is that at-will states usually override anything in a contract stating to the contrary, unless there is an agreed-upon employment duration (that overrides at-will on both sides, i.e., they can't fire you without compensation), and this is quite rare outside of executives. Not a lawyer, do not rely on this as legal advice, etc.

I mean I don't expect a lot of baseball players or CEO's to be reading my comments, but it's still possible.

IANAL, but there are enforceable terms in employment contracts occasionally. I agree they're rare from my understanding of how things usually wind up shaking out.

Loads of people are singers, actors, voice actors, PR flacks etc., though. All kinds of shows and performances want to hang on to the specific person who is the "face" or voice or otherwise represents a brand.

There is no such thing as an "at-will" state. At-will is the national baseline for employment, states and contracts can add additional requirements on top of it, such as mandatory notice, good-faith exeptions, implied contracts, etc.

All states are "at-will" states. There is no state in the US that over-rides this, and many explicitly state it in their own labor laws. Only company contracts can modify the at-will nature of employment.

Yeah, company contracts can add their own restrictions on top of at-will, and so can state laws.

In 42 states, you can't fire someone for acting in a way that's compliant with public policy, like for saying "I won't ship these defective airplane parts".

36 states have an "implied contract" exception, meaning that if you've informally written or said that you won't quit or fire without good reason, then you can be bound by that as if it were a contract.

11 states have "good faith" exemptions, meaning you can't fire for mean or selfish reasons, like to avoid paying retirement benefits.

I don’t think that right to work has anything to do with it. Perhaps the commenter meant at-will employment?

I once worked at a walmart florida as an associate in the store getting paid crap hourly and they paid out my vacation time when I quit. I didn't even know that was a thing at that point in my life and was shocked by the extra money. This was in 2009.

I have a feeling you're less likely to have a company try to pull something on you when it's a very large company, especially one that operates in multiple states. That's likely because there might be a state where the law is a bit more specific and clear cut and having to deal with the resulting PR disaster from a case being brought pretty quickly overshadows most the money that might have been saved.

Additionally, Walmart in particular is no stranger to class-action suits brought from it's employees. Given how little Walmart pays the average employee and how profitable it is, this behavior would have a very little and well bounded guaranteed upside (saved money), but a large unknown possible downside (lawsuits, bad PR, etc). When profits are good, that risk reward ratio probably just doesn't look very worthwhile to most companies.

At-will.

Right to work has to do with if you have to join a union or not if your workplace has one, most states are at will employment.

I think you meant "employment at will"? Right-to-work refers to unions.

Do you mean at-will employment, rather than right to work? AFAIK, right to work means that union membership/dues cannot be a requirement of employment.

Probably could of sued them for violating their own policy. But my guess is its better to just leave.

Yeah, OP did the thing with zero legal costs and headaches.

> because FL is a right to work state and you do not legally have to turn in a two week notice

What you're describing is called "at-will employment" and it is totally unrelated to right-to-work (which has to do with unions and collective bargaining).

At-will employment is the default everywhere in the United States unless an exception is provided by law (Florida is one of a few states with no exceptions), or if the contract states otherwise. IE, At-will is the baseline, laws and contracts can add additional requirements.

So, in other words, what you did was not legal, and they totally could have come after you for breach of contract, they just decided not to.

If you are suggesting an employee is obliged to give two weeks notice, you are incorrect. That is not how it works in the United States. We do not have forced labor.

I am suggesting that you are bound by the terms of contracts that you sign.

The law says "unless you've explicitly agreed otherwise, you can end an employment relationship with no conditions". This person explicitly agreed otherwise, then reneged on their agreement, that's a breach of contract.

Most places give you a paycheck trailing 2 weeks anyway. So you could always quit, but I'm not sure how many states would be required to send you your check.

What is required by states or not is irrelevant if you signed a contract.

If the contract says "I will give two weeks notice before I leave" and you sign on the dotted line, then you need to give two weeks notice before you leave or else suffer the penalties described in the contract.

You can't cite laws to get out of contractual obligations unless the contract demands you do something illegal.

Jobs in the US generally do not have such contracts, as this job did not.

> You can't cite laws to get out of contractual obligations unless the contract demands you do something illegal.

That is simply untrue. There are a number of reasons a contract can be deemed invalid or unenforceable. Illegality is only one such reason.

> What is required by states or not is irrelevant if you signed a contract.

Employers cannot get out of legal requirements just by having employees sign contracts. Not all rights can be waived.

> If the contract says "I will give two weeks notice before I leave" and you sign on the dotted line, then you need to give two weeks notice before you leave or else suffer the penalties described in the contract.

Well, it would have to be a valid contract, and the penalties described in the contract would have to be legal (you can't put punitive damages in a contract). If, some time after you are hired, the employer asks you to sign a contract that says that you will give two weeks notice, and you sign on the dotted line, that's not actually a valid contract (because there's no consideration).

> You can't cite laws to get out of contractual obligations unless the contract demands you do something illegal.

In general you can breach any contract, there are many laws which give reasons why a contract would be void, or laws which prevent employers from entering into certain types of contracts, and reasons why a contract would not be enforced or possibly unenforceable.

So, yes, you can cite laws.

I think OP pretty clearly states that both the two-week notice requirement and the unused vacation time payout were in the employee handbook, rather than in the employment contract. Employees probably just had to sign a form indicating they've read and understood the handbook.

If both provisions were in the contract, then what you're stating would suggest that the company could not refuse to pay for the unused vacation time, either. But, again, that doesn't appear to be the case here.

Right right. Should've read more carefully.

For completeness's sake, there are 38 states with an "implied contract exception" to at-will employment, where statements in the employee handbook would count as implied contract and be binding, but Florida is not one of them.

This is where arm-chair lawyering is dangerous.

The statements in an employee handbook can be binding on the employer, but never the employee. This is well-settled case law in the US. (Whether it is actually binding depends on the specific language used, so I edited my comment from "is" to "can be".)

Right: the company said explicitly they didn't have to abide by their own employee handbook because Florida law trumped it, so the employee said the same.

So, in other words, what you did was not legal, and they totally could have come after you for breach of contract, they just decided not to.

This is so completely wrong that it's almost exactly the opposite of the truth. Two weeks notice is a courtesy except for term-defined employment contracts where the length of employment is an explicit, defined term of finite duration.

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