My experience: the three companies I've worked for as a Software Engineer in the USA all tracked vacation and sick leave as two distinct buckets. Vacation gets

My experience: the three companies I've worked for as a Software Engineer in the USA all tracked vacation and sick leave as two distinct buckets. Vacation gets paid out when you leave the company, sick leave does not. If I'm sick and out of sick days I can either go in to work (infecting everyone else), burn a vacation day, or (presumably) not get paid. I've never been willing to risk trying the third option, and since I don't have a ton of vacations days, I'm most likely to pick the first one.