TikTok tells staff impacted by wildfires to use sick hours if they can't work
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
So was this just headline bait? It's a sick day but not counted against you.
Sure, if you're in the hospital with an emergency they'll hopefully forgive that you couldn't notify them, but if you're sick it's expected you tell somebody.
I can still access internet, but I'd be unable to if I lived even 10 miles south
People seem to be taking this aspect in the worst possible way, when it also functions as a way to let your coworkers know you're ok.
Not that I have strong feelings about that. But none of the companies I worked at have ever felt like I could trust having a job if I had to spend a few days in the hospital.
> Employees who can work from home still must go into their “My RTO” portal, where they manage their sick time, and change their work-from-home status to “natural disaster” to not be penalized.
You're talking about the second paragraph here. This article's headline is talking about the first one.
1. If you are able to work from home, set the proper code to avoid losing PSSL days 2. If you aren’t able to work, you need to use a PSSL day.
What’s not fully clear to me is whether the expectation is normally that you work on a PSSL day, as it seems to be the case that you get paid on those days whether you work or not.
I would expect a good leader to decide otherwise, but who knows, maybe leaders deciding otherwise might get penalized.
So that means you have to work from home. BUT
if there are power outages / connectivity issues as there might be in a natural disaster they cannot work from home or if they are being evacuated then they cannot work from home, in these cases then they use their sick days. (but how - because they can't register those? Do they call in or something)
But of course what is the main problem then is they have 10 sick days in the year and
>This leaves them fewer days later in the year to use in case of an actual illness or other personal emergency, like staying home to care for a sick child...
There is also some stuff about the manual not actually allowing anyone to use "natural disaster" as an excuse, but I guess that will be cleared up.
>This leaves them fewer days later in the year to use in case of an actual illness or other personal emergency, like staying home to care for a sick child... <<
What was the usual allotment of sick days in the before times when regular wfh wasn't common? What's the current usual allotment for jobs that can't be done remotely?
I can’t remember ever coming close to using those. But I can’t imagine any company I have worked for being a stickler for my going over slightly. But besides Amazon and General Electric, I’ve always worked for small companies
Funny enough, the company I work for now only gives us 9 sick days. But we have “unlimited” PTO.
It’s weird that they do that they do that
Ya know, like leaders worth following.
Like a steam roller? Sorry, but that was the first picture that came to mind when I read that sentence.
An intern in his last week got smashed up by a car riding a bike and by this and that quirk I ended up playing a very minor role in passing the message up the chain.
In under an hour Sheryl Sandberg not only knew but was directly involved in pledging all of Facebook’s resources to the medical care and the travel for the family and just everything.
It was truly inspiring. The intern in question made a full recovery and everyone on the team saw that they could look forward all the time, trusting their leadership to watch their back.
Well done friend.
Speaking for myself it’s a pleasant trip down memory lane in spite of a pretty iffy situation: we had leaders who cared about people, leaders who got you out of bed in the morning with a passion, and HN was full of people like yourself who combined wit and charm with humanity and grace.
Inappropriate for a global company. Send targeted emails to those you know are affected, and be specific about how you're putting the "full weight of the company behind them." Maybe put a note on one internal landing for everyone to see in case they e.g. have family affected you didn't know about.
There are a lot of ways to say “we support you completely” and none of them are “here’s a weird liability motivated form on top of losing everything else”.
Why? They've done local stuff like this for PR points before. Not much politically incensed about this.
You're also missing the obvious lede here that these portals probably are already separated by region. If not, definitely localized.
Indeed. Some years ago, also during a California wildfire, I was at a company with honorable leadership. Not only did people impacted by evacuations get all the time off they needed but the company paid for hotel accommodations if necessary.
The word honorable is definitely applicable. But I’d contend that substantially similar values and actions are also effective: they’re also good business.
If you’re selling some innovation it behooves you to advocate for people being prosperous enough to enjoy your innovation. It behooves you to maximize the potential of the people working on the innovation.
Good treatment of workers creates effective workers who in turn are consumers: a wealthy and prosperous society is good for business if you take a long view.
This weird 5-20 year horizon around outcomes is just a small clique of serial killers who have captured the levers quite recently.
And it doesn’t matter how many blood boys that Thiel or Altman or whoever leech from: they’re going to grow old and die.
And so we should be optimistic.
I hear ya and all, but what does anyone expect from TikTok?
It's not a product worth building, why would it have leaders worth following? You go there to get in, make some money, and get out.
They don’t. They care about having legal cause to terminate employment, as is the style at the time
I was using “I think” as a conversational affordance to give OP a less confrontational way in to disagreeing with me, if even in an at-will state, termination for cause is better for the employer for some reason (I couldn’t find one when searching, but it’s not an area I am knowledge about).
I don't know the exact laws, but given California I would not be surprised if there's a "no, you cannot fire someone who's in the hospital over a state of emergency" clause. Similar to how you can't fire an employee to avoid workman's comp.
Or worse, it's not there and they set precedent.
Also not updating the RTO portal won't cause any penalty from what I've heard, and ppl can update the WFH status anytime, e.g. marking their whole month as natural disaster WFH in advance if they really care, which no one really does
There's also no penalty for forgetting to update the portal in time, from what I have heard
Update: and ppl can set their status in advance e.g. setting the whole January to "natural disaster" to avoid using personal paid sick leave
Update 2: There's a separate announcement showing some support and asking everyone in LA to WFH, which is omitted in the article
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705091...
Needless to say, both of these are trivially bypassable.
I think most of us are more concerned about the potential presence of invisible watermarks, obviously submitting a picture with "JOHN SMITH ACME CORP 2025-01-09" blatantly strewn across the screen will be trivially traced back to you
Printers and copiers have hidden "tracking dots" that can ID the specific device used. Introduced by Xerox in the mid 80s and not known to the public until 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
Sorry but this wouldn't be "next level" spyware.
https://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-...
difficult to spot if you didnt know what to look for
How does that even work? I assume the unique identifiers are generated along the lines of https://zws.im but do they send a different version of the same email to each unique recipient? Or does the watermark get inserted by some email client when copying text?
Would it be? I was implementing similar stuff for a crappy PHP forum 15+ years ago that wanted to track which users were sharing private posts outside their community. It started with screenshot-tracking by embedding small 1xN base64 images that were almost completely transparent except for some tinting on each pixel to represent a 1 or a 0 bit at the edges of several elements where they wouldn't be noticed. That didn't survive jpeg compression or photos, so I added text transforms that represented tracking bits as well. Things like one vs two spaces after a period or an expanded contraction would correspond to a bit of the ID of the user the text was served to.
That worked fine since the site was mostly prose, but I couldn't help but think about generalizing it to encode tracking bits as page styling information as well. Never ended up finishing that implementation because I got too in the weeds trying to account for rendering differences in customized user agents by adding error correction bits to the IDs. That way it wouldn't matter if a few styles were overridden or obscured.
I don't think any of these ideas were particularly novel or difficult to think of, so I'd expect plenty of independent implementations over the years. If they do their job right you'd never know about them, so there's likely more than you expect.
This gives them flexibility and usability as different softwares can interact seamlessly. For example you can click open a link to the document that other people are screen sharing during a meeting. But it also embeds your name on the screen so you probably don't want to take a screenshot or a photo.
I know many companies also use techniques that generate invisible watermarks that are difficult to remove without breaking the image. I don't know exactly what the technique is, but maybe this is close:
The only remarkable thing is that this policy is bad for a tech company. Tech is special because demand for specialized workers is high and supply is low. But in most other industries, this would be standard behavior.
Workers in other industries deserve better, but it’s also important to remember that the HN bubble isn’t the norm.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-state-of-paid-s...
The H1-B logically displaces offshoring, not citizens. Otherwise it’s a massive coincidence that the H1-B visa happens to be used overwhelmingly by the industry that has seen the highest increase in salaries by far for Americans over the past 2 decades.
Firstly, you seem to be conflating H1-B with obtaining a foreign contractor. That's an accounting burden, often comes with time zone issues, and does damage to a company's return-to-office agenda unless they are hired for something completely divorced from other teams. This puts the contractor in a considerable position as they can maneuver with effectively zero oversight. Great for the contractor, bad for the employer (at least the first time; after a rapport is established it could be fine).
If that's not what you meant, then the engineer(s) being hired are from a staffing agency or similar. But now you are at the behest of who the staffing agency pulls for local talent and their ability to retain said talent. Often, while incoming engineers can be vetted the employer doesn't have the latitude of choosing any engineer from the region and plucking them like they would s contractor or H1-B.
An H1-B gives the employer the best of all worlds at the cost of sponsorship. The employee works for them and has considerably less options as many companies do not sponsor H1-B visas, so they have less opportunities. Between the value of the US dollar and engineers being salaried much lower elsewhere you could likely pull an H1-B for half the price of a US engineer and in many cases they would still come out very well ahead. As well, by bringing them to the US you fix any time zone issues and RTO questions.
FWIW, I think a lot of US engineers tend to have a negative view on both being in-office AND having compensation reduced; I think most would be fine with a reduction in comp if it meant remote work - but most companies seem much more interested in maximum control AND minimal investment.
But you're missing the real reason. It's not about salaries by itself. It's control. People like musk would even pay H1b's more than an American when they lack the leverage to easily hop to another job or can threaten to end their visa if they get uppity. Even under American soil, he can coerce them to work to the bone easier than a citizen.
US Tech has the highest salaries world.
https://www.epi.org/press/a-majority-of-migrant-workers-empl...
We've had decades of STEM hype but somehow can't produce college grads to do entry level tech work?
Cool, let's just accelerate to the inevitable lawsuits when the government questions why so many Americans can't get work but we're importing more people than ever.
Give Trump's whole narrative, that will be an interesting show to watch.
And honestly in a lot of cases Amazon pays for the privilege of doing that thing.
We’re free to increase our employment standards, we just have to outbid the American oligarchs for political power.
Did you know that there is actually no US federal requirement for lunch breaks or rest breaks?
Though i gotta be honest, i have no idea what the rules are where i live (Denmark)...
Having said that bad stories get attention, others don't.
I've worked at a places where we don't even track PTO, you take what you need, we all just work it out. It's not Amazon pay... but it's a better lifestyle.
Luckily their employees don't have phones.
The actual article could be misleading (it's not obvious if setting their RTO status to "natural disaster" status means they expend their sick days or not), but this is so clearly petty micromanagement that there's really no ambiguity.
If they can still work from home, they can use the "natural disaster" exception.
Our HQ (over 3k people) is in the LA area, CEO posted on slack offering up to 10k for any fire related relocation costs during this time.
It look like that has just changed maybe last year? When I left in 2023 it was still 15 days
It is exuberantly clear that some companies will treat their workers with the minimum amount of decency up to the point of illegality, or past that if they can get away with it.
How about an “asshole employer” gov program? Society needs to fight back against those doing harm to society.
There’s a Netflix documentary called American Factory that illustrates just how different the work culture is in China vs the U.S.
Hope they change their mind and give these folks free PTO.
This is the kind of abuse USA citizens think is: deserved, earned, self-inflicted.
Is this amount of strictness normal for the large tech companies? I’ve only worked for one - Amazon - and my position was “field by design” and didn’t come under any RTO mandates until this year. I left in late 2023.
Both comments are now deleted/taken down. Do we have a Chinese gov shill in the mix?
Edit: I mean yes of course, this is the internet, but I doubt that’s what cma was doing.
And I kind of did a mental “well, yeah… you’d have to be a real ghoul to think otherwise,” perplexed by the very idea that HR would feel the need to say it at all.
Guess I was wrong.
I worked at a place where I made the 24/7 schedule for a team. Part of my job was to make sure everyone took a minimum of PTO.
Lotta people would take none, ever if given the chance.
Now, today is a very different story, and I use it responsibly, but I'm at a very different stage in my life.
Just so I know, what’s the proper utilization of PTO?
The whole point of compelling people to take PTO is for the mental health benefits associated with not working- decompressing, resetting, call it whatever you want. I didn't have other hobbies, didn't have money for traveling, and didn't have anyone to do those things with. My social circle was more or less as obsessed as I was. Most evenings were spent watching TV together while we worked on our laptops, either on side projects for fun or actual work.
Had I taken more PTO, my behavior in my off time would not have been any different than that of my work time. I wouldn't have gotten the benefit supposedly derived from being forced to take PTO. The one exception was a few days off to do some home renovation work that I didn't want to try to fit into evenings or weekends.
It’s your time, you can use it how you want.
The way you want to use it is how you end up using it. You’re welcome to use your time to do things that others see as destructive. Of course there may be consequences.
I do believe in forced PTO because it creates an opportunity for someone to think about what to do with that time (which like you said, hopefully many people choose to use that time to decompress or rest). Up to them what decision they make. It tells a company what happens when a specific person is gone (Is Kelly the only one who knows how to do X? Is Chris stealing?).
I think there’s possibly a company culture argument where you don’t want a person on PTO logging into Slack, grabbing Jira tickets, going to meetings, or whatever. In that case you maybe end up firing the person if they cross whatever line too many times. But of course if the person is valuable enough, you might look the other way. Or your culture might be such that you don’t care. Up to the company.
I don’t doubt it, but the employer does get to decide how long you’re at work…. even in the hopes that the employee might make a good choice.
AT&T wrote me up for missing pages while I was battling cancer! And I supposedly had std/ltd/fmla/etc. my current job , which I’m grateful for beyond words , would just about be sick at the idea of treating anyone like that.
> TikTok’s LA employees have 10 paid sick/personal (PSSL) days per year in addition to 15 PTO (paid time off/vacation) days
> This week, TikTok’s LA staff are being asked to use their personal/sick days if they cannot work from home due to power or Wi-Fi outages, or if they’re under evacuation orders ... This leaves them fewer days later in the year to use in case of an actual illness or other personal emergency, like staying home to care for a sick child.
https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles...
FMLA is also only good for 12 weeks a year. And FMLA only says that they can't fire you or cancel your benefits for being sick or caring for a family member, it doesn't give you any other benefits.
In a few states, there is a state-run short-term disability insurance program that pays if you are sick. Some employers offer short-term disability insurance as part of their benefits package, which is also available to purchase privately. If you don't have this, you are on your own in the short term. If you or a family member are sick, your employer must give you job-protected unpaid leave for up to six months.
If you have a long-term disability, which is expected to last longer than a year or result in death, you are eligible for Social Security Disability payments and Medicare health insurance from the federal government. Again, some employers offer supplemental term disability insurance as part of their benefits package, and it is also available to purchase privately.
If there is context you feel is missing, you should add it.
Treat others how you would like to be treated. Respect breeds respect.
But if you need a discrete answer, probably a few months? If we're in an emergency situation as a tech industry for more than a month, something much dire than business has happened. Many tech companies rebounded from COVID in a few months times.
My perspective may be colored a bit by working in an environment with strict labor cost accounting where labor is accounted for down to the tenth hour (even for salaried-exempt employees), and there isn't some magical slush fund that can be used to pay for what would otherwise be unpaid leave. We do have "disaster leave" for salaried employees, but it's on a "work extra hours over the next X weeks to make up for it" basis, where X is a reasonable number given the nature of the disaster. For run-of-the-mill "snow days," it's typically 4 weeks. Taking PTO is also an option, including running up to a 40-hour negative balance. Thankfully, I don't have to deal with any of these RTO shenanigans.
In other words, in this case, employer is unable to provide a safe work environment (i.e., is not even "on their feet" at the moment) and their answer to that is to force employees to compensate for it using their own time off.
I would call this behavior vindictive but in my book, to be vindictive first you need to have a soul.
If an employer wants to pay employees to stay home and do nothing because no work is available, potentially to avoid losing valuable employees, they can do that, but they are not expected to. If working remotely is feasible, it can be mutually beneficial to both the employer and employee, but like everything employment-related, it's also voluntary on both sides of the deal.
1. Even in a logistics level, that's pretty much an abuse of "salaried" positions. Especially exempt ones. You get to suck out 60-80 hours of someone's time, but when they need to not get burned alive it's suddenly "furlough"? No.
2. A business that cannot survive for a few weeks without production is one that deserves to shit down. Individuals that don't have a savings is judged as unsafe, but companies can getaway with that behavior? It's a double standard.
>they can do that, but they are not expected to.
I'd definitely look up state laws about this one before spouting as fact. Federal may not care, but states have an incentive to not lose their entire workforce because businesses don't want to support the econimy in an emergency situation.
There is.
You're one of those people saying the system is set up a certain way, and it can't be changed. It was built by people, they can fix it and figure out how to make it work.
I don't give a fuck about your accounting system. These are real people that work for your company, not numbers in a computer. You can't figure out how to give them some paid time off during a huge rare disaster like this? Figure it out, and fuck this whole attitude.
Making people make up their work time during a disaster. Fuck me... seriously?
Are you doing satire? This is already the status quo for American employers. Do you mean American employers of the labor aristocracy? It is hideously evil, but your wording conjures the idea that US company culture hasn't been corrupted (even with the "any further" part). It has already gone too far. The only thing that's truly interesting to me is that it's a Chinese-influenced company and China hasn't used the last decade to do socialism diplomacy through TikTok.