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Comment by declan_roberts | Hacker News Reader

> 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. This won’t subtract from their PSSL hours, though.

So was this just headline bait? It's a sick day but not counted against you.

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> 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 (unless their entire team has been given time off, which is not the case for many impacted by the fires).

> 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.

The "being asked to use their personal/sick days" is the reporter's interpretation of having to go to the "My RTO" portal to set their status.

Are you sure? It seems like staying home due to the wildfire uses up sick days if you cannot WFH, but if you can WFH then it does not use up sick days.

They're essentially the same from what I heard. No one's expected to work and ppl can avoid using sick days by setting their status in that portal in advance

There are two points made, but the article makes it easy to conflate them.

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.

Or they could just be like “anyone affected by the fires should know we are behind them completely with the full weight of the company behind them” pinned to the top of every internal page.

Ya know, like leaders worth following.

> “anyone affected by the fires should know we are behind them completely with the full weight of the company behind them”

Like a steam roller? Sorry, but that was the first picture that came to mind when I read that sentence.

The best thing I ever saw in Silicon Valley was when I was a middle manager at glory days FB.

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.

An excellent example of why cars should never ride bikes.

I can’t speak for the person in question but I strongly suspect they’d thank you for keeping it light.

Well done friend.

Yes, I perhaps would have passed on the joke if OP hadn’t clarified the ending of the story.

Well, I am the GP, but knowing the person who got smashed up I can say that he had a sense of humor about it, great guy, real legend.

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.

Ahhh sorry, I misunderstood! That’s a very kind thing to say to a stranger, thank you. Thanks as well for sharing your story (or, the story you were involved in), I enjoyed reading it.

> “anyone affected by the fires should know we are behind them completely with the full weight of the company behind them” pinned to the top of every internal page

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.

That’s maybe fair, the details of the paperwork in a tricky situation are a question for senior leadership.

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”.

>Inappropriate for a global company.

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.

Search them in another country

> Ya know, like leaders worth following.

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.

Thanks for bringing the community another example of a better way and a better time.

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.

Obligatory nag at @pg to renounce these sociopaths.

Snapchat paid private security teams to help evacuate employees and their relatives from war-affected regions of Ukraine . Never saw a press coverage of this, but know it from those who were helped.

Yeah, maybe I'll get one of those one day. Sadly not my current career trajectory though.

>Ya know, like leaders worth following.

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.

So to clarify the language - >The days the office is closed are being made Work From Home days as opposed to days off, however — unless an individual team leader decides otherwise.

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.

>> 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... <<

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?

Every company I worked for had 10 sick days. I’m on my 10th job

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

no idea as this is discussion of U.S, but there is also consideration of industry standards. From an IT perspective this is a big warning sign, don't work for this company! Of course maybe they pay double what others do in which case it would be worth it. But probably not.

Still very strange, no? Changing my WFH status wouldn’t be top of mind in a disaster situation.

Is it really any more of an imposition than your employer wanting to be notified of you need to take bereavement leave or spend a few days in the hospital?

If I’m in the hospital unexpectedly the last thing on my mind is logging into a “my RTO portal”, Jesus

Notifying your employer that you can't work is the most basic of things.

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.

Disasters also burn down cell towers and other power outlets go off for safety. I haven't had power in nearly 24 hours and I fortunately haven't had to be evacuated.

I can still access internet, but I'd be unable to if I lived even 10 miles south

"I had no internet or power" is an emergency situation they'd hopefully be lenient about.

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.

Well, if I'm being a bit cold: I haven't has a coworker check up on me in 7 years. It's only a natural extreme to move towards after the rejection of the whole "we're a family" narrative off yester-decade.

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.

I wouldn’t log into a portal. But if I could, I would at least send my manager/team a Slack message.

Not really. It’s around an equal level of evil, uncaring imposition.

If I have no power or worse, am in the hospital: yes. There's emotional factors with others, but you may not physically be able to access such contacts and portals.

I read this as they still need to WFH and just need to indicate they’re doing so in the portal so they aren’t penalized.

That says if they can work, not if they can't.

That "my RTO" portal will automatically be updated to "on leave" status when on leave

Right, these are additional paid sick days, just need to be manually claimed through the "My RTO" portal

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

It’s a wash IMO. Both the actual situation and the article are unclear. The article probably should have been shorter with limited information but there’s pressure to make an article not be very short. The gist of it is that TikTok is at least somewhat hassling their already stressed employees which seems it needed to be said, but it’s unclear whether they’ll be charged these hours once things settle down.

Holy shit though, who thought this email (or Slack message or whatever) in the middle of an ongoing disaster was a good idea? This is the equivalent of asking you to make sure you file your TPS report. Honestly why do they give a shit about the knobs in the RTO portal? They can see if people are based in LA already. Benefit of the doubt, etc.

> why do they give a shit about the knobs in the RTO portal

They don’t. They care about having legal cause to terminate employment, as is the style at the time

I think California is an at-will state, so you wouldn’t need cause to terminate.

Every state in the US is an at will state except for one.

Yes, I know, and in fact I checked before posting.

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).

You don't. But they want to minimize avenues to get sued because people can and probably will file an wrongful termination lawsuit.

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.

There's a separate announcement showing some support and asking everyone in LA to WFH, which isn't mentioned in the article

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

That's if they are working, not if they need the time off.

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