Hacker News Reader

Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with your assessment in the strongest terms as I have personally experienced them being separate as achieving the opposite most of my 15 year career.

Places I had worked including my current employer, vacation days need to be scheduled at least a week+ in advance. As a person who gets sick a lot I almost always end up having to take unpaid days off when I’m sick because I blew though my 3-5 sick days.

Places with PTO I can take my entire pool off as sick time. Never took an unpaid day at a PTO business.

Right now. I have 400+ hours of banked vacation time, but I have used all of my sick days for the year. If I get sick I have to take it unpaid or work. It doesn’t make any sense.

Honestly I think they should outlaw having them separate.

View on HN

There should not be a hard limit on sick days - that's how it works in many countries. If you are sick for too long it might not be your employer that pays, but you should never be cheated out of your vacation for it. Even if you get sick during your vacation, you get those vacation days back here.

It sounds like the problem is in having such a small pool of sick days, not in the concept of separation. By no fault of your own, by getting sick more often, you are forced to give up income (current situation) or to give up your vacation (merged PTO). Neither of those is an acceptable situation, and the solution is to have more reasonable sick leave policies.

PTO is the more reasonable policy. I have weeks of sick days, it’s great.

Even better solution: As much sick leave as you need while sick, without taking away your vacation time as a result.

It isn't a reasonable policy at all. If you are sick for weeks you have no vacation time. That's bad for everyone involved.

I'm pretty sure the people ITT are going to disagree with me, but vacation is a luxury, sick days are a necessity. If I missed weeks of work I wouldn't also take a vacation that year regardless.

Interesting axiomatic basis for your argument, and thank you for explaining where we are seeing differences. You are correct that I would disagree with you on that, and place both as necessities. Sick days are necessary for short-term physical and mental health. Vacation days are necessary for long-term mental health.

If you missed weeks of work from an illness, those weeks aren't time where you could see family, see the world, relax, and be human. They don't satisfy the same long-term needs as fully-disconnected vacation time satisfies.

>If I missed weeks of work I wouldn't also take a vacation that year regardless.

Why wouldn't you?

>vacation is a luxury, sick days are a necessity.

In many places (Europe, generally?), vacation days are earned. At least in the Netherlands if you were absent for weeks due to illness (for which there is no fixed pool of days), and decided not to take any vacation days, you'd either have some of your vacation days rolled over to the next year or they'd be paid out to you with salary and taxed.

It's not a luxury in the slightest. You'd have earned them just as you earned your wages.

How's it in Netherlands in case of long term sickness? In Czech Republic we have the time off accrued based on worked hours. If you are out sick 2 weeks, you don't earn holiday time for these days. So instead of they yearly 25 days off you'll only have 24.

But parental leave is considered as work, so if you come back after your parental leave, you have your full amount.

>In Czech Republic we have the time off accrued based on worked hours.

There's no distinction, at least not with the statutory holidays. You earn them as you earn your wages and there is no adjustment for illness.

See, this just tells me that 3-5 sick days is completely inadequate. I've been fortunate to generally have virtually unlimited sick days, and I very much prefer that to having to use up my limited vacation days.

It does point out that they'd need to enforce a reasonable minimum number of sick days if they're forcing them to be separate from PTO.

From a perspective of many other places of the world, the idea that you can "use up" your sick days if you are actually sick just doesn't make any sense. So the unspoken assumption is "sick days shouldn't cut into your vacation, and obviously sick days are effectively unlimited"

Or require more than 3-5 sick days. Hardly seems adequate.

Like give me three weeks of sick days. And no vacation. And you can call it PTO if you want, sounds great.

I don’t disagree. In general, I believe employees should have more control over their hours worked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com