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Comment by petterroea | Hacker News Reader

Is it an American thing to work even when you are sick?

There's no federal entitlement to being paid if you're sick, so companies come up with their own policies.

So companies often have a strange concept of "sick days", a specific number of days a year you're allowed to be sick. If you're sick more than that you have to use your vacation days, or unpaid leave when you're sick.

(And of course American companies often have weirdness around vacations too. More so in companies where there is allegedly "unlimited time off". But that's kinda off-topic now.)

Thank you for the explanation.

During COVID my company had mandatory days off (I think 14) if you reported any COVID symptoms. Those days were unpaid of course. The cherry on top is the people paid the lowest were the ones who couldn't work from home and were most likely to get COVID. This was pretty common at other places too.

Depends entirely on the workplace and the individual. You can tell people not to work when they're sick, but it's not like they're not aware of deadlines for things that, in some cases, only they can reasonably do.

As someone who has deadlines, and is occasionally sick, if I have a high fever I am not working. Nor would my manager thank me for it if I did. If you have a high fever, you’re mentally impaired and shouldn’t be doing anything important if it can possibly be avoided.

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