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Comment by jjeaff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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