In my case, the employer had a great "take what you need" policy when it came to sick leave. Vacation hours were earned, up to 6 weeks worth of hours a year, bu

In my case, the employer had a great "take what you need" policy when it came to sick leave. Vacation hours were earned, up to 6 weeks worth of hours a year, but you could bank up to 8 weeks of hours. The only catch was "be responsible". As a father with two little kids who are always getting sick, this was great. It was useable for their visits for shots and times when my wife could not change her schedule easily (she does by appointment, in-home yoga/physical therapy, can be tricky to bail on a person that needs your help on short notice). I still had the ability to stay home if I got sick at some point (which happens way more with kids). This was the way for years. Until this year. Now it's a hard 5 weeks of combined sick and vacation time. With plans already set up for the year, plane tickets booked, for weddings, vacation, etc. I'd burned it all up by June. So here I am with 3 days of vacation/sick leave left. If I get sick now I'm going to work. That, coupled with losing a non-trivial amount of vacation hours has caused people to leave here in droves (with other mgmt issues coming in after the sick/vacay policy change and doubling the insurance premium). I don't really know what they were thinking as every other high tech company around us has a much better sick/vacation policy, better insurance. They can afford it, according to HR/accounting folks I talked to at happy hours. They're just making the numbers look better for their own benefit. So TL;DR (and having read this article, far too frequently) the real answer management screws us out of it.