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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1329 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 28, 2025

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Many employers have just a single pool of PTO, so days you take off for being sick come at the expense of days you could have taken off for fun.

Which country is this? In the US, I have never seen an employer who groups sick days and PTO. Of course, I'm in hi-tec where the standard of benefits is usually high. Not luxurious - like, I have a pretty decent benefit package now and it has just 5 sick days a year (there's also short-term disability but that's whole other story) - but still a separate benefit from PTO.

A single pool of PTO would be a high side of average deal in the trades- the alternative is usually to have no paid sick time at all(vacation needing to be scheduled in advance, in one day increments, often counting the weekends in between vacation days as part of it).

very common these days in the US. Sick days are notoriously underutilized (see above discussion).

Strong agree, I have about ten months of sick leave at this point. Nice if I ever get a lingering illness whilst still employed but otherwise? EH!

This is the U.S. I work for a company that provides B2B IT services. I get 5 weeks of undifferentiated PTO per year and can roll over 1 week. Most of my work can be done from home, meaning I very infrequently need to take sick days, so this works out well for me IMO. The company has also been pretty lenient with letting people borrow from future PTO in the case of genuine medical necessity to avoid having to use FMLA leave.

I'm American, and I've known a lot of people with PTO that combines vacation and sick days. It may be a difference in state labor laws.

Could be, I have worked either in California or with companies that have significant California presence, and California requires sick days.

I really dislike the trend of companies playing around with sick and vacation days to force more work out of people - this and unlimited* vacation days are both horrible policies.

*if your supervisor approves them, which they coincidentally will not because more vacation makes them look bad to their supervisors.

"Unlimited" vacation is always a scam. I get why companies do it - e.g. tech workers, unfortunately, under-utilize vacations, and the culture, unfortunately, often encourages it - and with "unlimited" vacation you do not have any monetary liability left to cover. And it doesn't even take the supervisor to explicitly deny vacations - absence of defined benefit already creates an expectation that it's something additional to what you're normally owed, so if you're taking more of it, you're more "greedy" than then next guy who doesn't. If you have X days defined by contract, then you taking X days is normal. But if there's nothing in contract and you take X days and the other guy takes X/2 days then clearly the other guy is a better worker than you. That's not a healthy dynamics to be in.

This. "Unlimited" just means "at the supervisor's discretion", and I'd prefer at-will days off instead. At my current job, I have X weeks of vacation, and they ask us to book two weeks in advance. Some things I had happen were:

  1. On Monday, I learned about something for the coming Friday. I emailed the manager and explained that I wanted that time off, why I couldn't follow the regular procedures, and why it was valuable to me. (It was quickly approved with no issues)
  2. I had a normal vacation that I saw coming a month away. I filled out the request on the employee portal and was approved with no further scrutiny. (I told everyone what was happening via watercooler talk, of course. Community/interpersonal conversations are different than corporate/administrative ones.)
  3. I had an extra week, and they would prefer not to carry the days over to next year, so I took some more time off in December.

Under an "unlimited" scheme, I'd have to justify each day off (like scenario 1), and the reasoning for #3 is probably not strong enough to get approved without pushback.

I agree 100% about "unlimited" vacation, but the single pool doesn't bother me as much as an alternative to being either paid out for unused sick days or having to malinger to get use out of them.

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