11 ms·

For vacation days, your point makes sense to me. For sick days, people don't get to choose when they get sick. Someone can just as easily get sick on day 1 or 2

For vacation days, your point makes sense to me. For sick days, people don't get to choose when they get sick. Someone can just as easily get sick on day 1 or 2 of a job as on day 401 or 402.

kbenson 7y ago
I've seen and heard about many different sick pay schedules because of this. From ones that accrue like vacation and PTO from zero as hours are worked, ro ones where the days are all allocated on the first of the year to be used (I assume pro-rated for mid-year hires) to ones that are a hybrid where some portion of the yearly sick days are allocated at the beginning of the year and the rest are accrued. There are benefits and drawbacks to each, and probably a lot of interesting behavioral nudges in each scheme that affect different types of work in different ways.
WalterBright 7y ago
I once talked to a manager about how he handed out raises. He mentioned one engineer who was sick exactly 10 days out of each year. Coincidentally, the company offered 10 days of paid sick leave a year. He laughed, and said she wasn't fooling anyone, and didn't give her a raise.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Here in NL employees get 2 full consecutive years of paid sick leave before you are allowed to terminate the contract.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    I honestly think that's a terrible idea, and that paid sick leave should be paid not by the employer, but from taxes. Which should be raised slightly to cover such a policy. Otherwise, hiring someone presents a gigantic risk for smaller companies. Getting unlucky even once with someone that will use 1-2 years of sick leave (legitimately or not) would be enough to bankrupt them. In general I think making employers pay for a safety net, instead of funding it from taxes paid by those employers, is universally bad. What it does is make employers discriminate against potential hires likely to need that safety net, which makes those in need even worse off.
    - Sebb767 7y ago
      I like the way it's handled in Germany: Your employer is on the hook for 6 weeks, after that insurance takes over. Cases like being sick for the same reason again are covered as well. And the employer may demand a signed statement from a special doctor if he suspects cheating (this will only say wether the person may work, no details). It could however be that he's talking about firing the person, in which case it's pretty hard in Germany as well. As far as I know early retirement or a termination from the employee are pretty much the only way. Social security mitigates this risk, however, and the protections are lower for part time/student jobs, so hiring is not made too risky.
    - Retric 7y ago
      Risks like that are begging for insurance policies. Net result it may not actually change much in practice.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      You can insure against the risk.
    - merb 7y ago
      to add to the other german poster. in germany you are required to see a doctor to have a sick day. because a signed statement is needed for the company. they get money back from the insurance for the singed doctor statement.
- jkaplowitz 7y ago
  I'm not defending that kind of employee misbehaviour, but how to handle that doesn't need to be factored into the sick leave policy beyond making the allowed usage clear and reserving the right to ask for proof when the company has reason to be suspicious. How to handle that, more broadly, is the same as how to handle any other pattern of employee misbehaviour: some appropriate level of employee discipline according to the misbehaviour's severity and the history of past incidents, ranging from an informal conversation to what the manager in your story did to firing, with many intermediate possibilities.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Asking for a doctor's note is for children. These are professional adults. Often people who behave unethically at work believe they are getting away with it. But then they wonder why they don't get raises, are passed over for promotions, are let go in the first round of layoffs, and don't have the respect of their peers.
    - wool_gather 7y ago
      I mean, if that's the path we're going down...is telling someone they can only be sick for 10 days in a year treating them like a professional adult person in the first place?
      - giaour 7y ago
        You can take an unpaid leave if you need more. If you have temporary disability insurance through work (and I would imagine most US software developers do), you can file a claim to compensate you for lost wages due to a medical condition.
        jkaplowitz 7y ago
        I've never in my full-time tech industry career had government-mandated disability insurance with a maximum benefit anywhere near my actual earnings, and voluntary plans were not offered at most of my smaller employers. Additionally most disability insurance has a nontrivial waiting period that only covers cases where it's a single absence lasting weeks or months.
- lkey 7y ago
  So he decided he'd figured out her scam without ever bringing it up in yearly or monthly review. He also never asked for proof of the 10 days of sick leave after the first year, which is reasonable to do if he had a suspicion she was flouting a rule. If he wanted to factor sick days into his pay decision, he had a responsibility to make sure he was correct using the proper internal channels. An alternate and equally plausible view is that she had a condition that rendered her borderline ill more than 10 days a year, but couldn't afford to take unpaid leave. So she just 'toughed it out' instead for the remaining days. Laughing vindictively as you deny a raise to someone isn't something be lauded or emulated under any circumstance.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - capex 7y ago
    I come to HN for comments like this.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Fair enough, I agree he was being passive aggressive, but on the other hand, if someone is doing something that has the appearance of impropriety, it's a good idea to proactively bring it up with the boss to head off the suspicions.
    - CPLX 7y ago
      There’s not a fucking thing that’s even slightly improper about taking your allotted PTO days.
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        It is improper to take sick leave if you're not sick. It wouldn't be improper if it is labeled PTO. I.e. it depends on how the policy is written.
        7y ago
- chrsstrm 7y ago
  We seem to believe that sick always means some type of physical illness that means we can't work, which is completely wrong. Taking a sick day for mental health is totally OK. Taking a sick day to deal with a sick child or spouse or s.o. is totally OK. Leaving sick days on the table at the end of the year is not something that should be valued, whether they are paid or not. I'm sure HR makes every attempt to spend their entire budget before the year is out, so why should employees be held to a different standard? If you get 10 days, take all 10 days. If your bonus is determined by the number of sick days you take vs. the number given, then you need to find another employer. We need to stop letting this bullshit slide - you should never be penalized for accepting and using the resources given to you.
  - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
    > If you get 10 days, take all 10 days. So you don't agree with vharuck who said If a person's sick, they're sick. If they're faking, they're faking? Are you really suggesting faking sickness, or am I misreading you?
    - Retric 7y ago
      Taking a sick day and calling on sick are two different things. I had a job where all unscheduled days off where taken from sick days based on company policy. Vacation days needed or be scheduled ahead of time therefore people valued sick days a little more than vacation days. Others just put them all into the same pool. It’s more about what the policy actually is than what you call it.
      - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
        > Taking a sick day and calling on sick are two different things. I think there's a locale difference here. Here in the UK, they very much are the same thing (faking sickness could get you fired if you're somehow found out), and we don't generally treat sick days as a pool to be drawn from.
    - chrsstrm 7y ago
- barrkel 7y ago
  I reckon results should be rewarded, not presenteeism. I might be more interested in results, who knows.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    I'd be the first to agree with you. However, allowing a stellar performer to come and go as they please tends to have a bad effect on morale of the rest and impairs team cohesiveness.
    - fountainofage 7y ago
      Sounds like they're not a stellar performer then? Unless they're a solo founder with no funding, they don't work in a vacuum. Edit: changed you's to they
    - barrkel 7y ago
      I guess it depends on the team dynamics. If someone's good and show up for the big pushes, I'd take a lot. We had a chap on our team at my current company who worked from home every Friday, even though it was sub-optimal for planning meetings around sprint boundaries. But he was very productive. One of the reasons I decided not to move to the US after I got my H-1B was because of the parsimonious approach to vacation days. Only 10 days of paid leave, for someone who's moving across the Atlantic. If I wanted to spend some time with my friends and family, it would need to be two weeks to make the flight time worthwhile, and that would take 100% of my vacation for a whole year. And it was non-negotiable. Vacation increases beyond a one-off for the first year was a perk for tenure, not a negotiable form of compensation. And even if I didn't want to come back to Europe; why would I take a job that only gave me 10 days a year to do with what I want? Life is for living, not just working. It was a crunch point, a decisive factor in not moving to SV for me.
- jetti 7y ago
  That seems plausible to me, especially if they have a chronic illness. Places I have been would make you use PTO if you had no sick days so then it becomes a cost/benefit analysis. Do you feel bad enough to use up PTO or can you "suffer through it".
- zarify 7y ago
  I can believe someone taking 10 sick days off a year and no more. You take the paid time off if you're sick without much hesitation, and after that you weigh up whether you're sick enough to cost you a day's pay. People should use their sick leave - that's what it's for. This "no raise for using sick leave" argument is no better than the overwork culture that's been discussed at length lately. Mind you, I'm not an engineer, I'm a teacher. Unless it's seriously contagious or I'm basically unable to function I don't tend to use my sick leave because it's more work to prepare lessons for a replacement teacher than it is to come to work and teach.
  - track_me_now 7y ago
    Well, I'm an engineering manager and there's a little more to then someone just taking 10 sick days per year. I see when my direct reports are run down or if they're fighting something, versus if they're always "sick" on Monday morning. I known when they stay home because they don't want to get everyone else sick but they are still in contact; that's different from when they call in sick, I hear nothing all day and then they're fine the next day and back at work. I keep a tally of when someone who's never sick is really down for an entire week vs. those who consistently get "food poisoning". The whole reason I have a job is because we're a tight-knit team that works closely and there's no room to bullshit. It would be like faking out your parents when you're a kid; you could get away with it for a day or two but I'm going to be able to tell when you just want to stay home to play video games. I don't think this makes me passive-aggressive or a shitty manager; we're a tight team that cares about each other and as a result we know when people are treating each other with respect and honesty. I give people a lot of leeway and ask them not to wreck it for everyone. If someone threatens this it makes me both mad and sad, because once it's gone we'll never get it back.
- fountainofage 7y ago
  Lots of comments, but no one has just come out and said it: Fuck. That. Manager. They care about butts in seats more than results, and they've deliberately sought out the metrics to justify it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- rolltiide 7y ago
  Paid sick days aren't just for when someone is contagious Taking all 10 and just those has no indication on anything
  - track_me_now 7y ago
    however taking exactly one sick day a month sure looks suspicious
- newshorts 7y ago
  Sounds like a horrible manager.
- buro9 7y ago
  Wow. A male manager denies a raise to a female engineer on the basis that the female engineer takes 10 sick days per year that their contract says they are entitled to. Why is it important to emphasise sex in this? Periods. The experience is different for each person but the fact that they didn't feel able to take 12 may itself be a problem. And even 10 would only allow the taking of a single day each month during the worst symptoms. Whilst at the same time leaving yourself with no days were you to get a cold later in the year.
- cambaceres 7y ago
  I'm from Sweden and I used to work at a warehouse before and between my stuides. Here, everything if focused about the rights for the employee. As soon as you have worked for 6 months at one place, you have what we call "permanent employment", which basically means that you can't be fired unless you repeatedly fuck up big time (coming drunk to work repeatedly, steal from the company etc). Anyway, here you can be sick for 5 days in a row (and get 80% of your salary), after that you have to go to a doctor and get a paper that you are in fact sick. Futhermore, you can be sick for 6 times a year, after that you have to talk to the boss and explain yourself. People used this to the maximum, meaning that on top of the 5 weeks per year people got payed vacation, they were all "sick" an additional 6 weeks, always 5 days at a time. The employers can't do anything, as people with permanent employment can't be fired.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Then he is an absolute idiot. The engineer could be sickly and be sick 20 or more days in a year, but only take the minimum allowed (to not lose her paycheck). I'm down with flu, stomach issues, gout and a few other things far more days in a year than the company's paid sick leave. And while I might not take all of them, and go to work sick, it's within the rights of anybody to do so. If the company is offering 10 paid sick days, and he is discriminating based on using those, then he should be sued to extinction...
Kye 7y ago
A new environment with exciting new microorganisms seems especially likely to cause this.

For vacation days, your point makes sense to me. For sick days, people don't get to choose when they get sick. Someone can just as easily get sick on day 1 or 2 of a job as on day 401 or 402.

kbenson 7y ago

I've seen and heard about many different sick pay schedules because of this. From ones that accrue like vacation and PTO from zero as hours are worked, ro ones where the days are all allocated on the first of the year to be used (I assume pro-rated for mid-year hires) to ones that are a hybrid where some portion of the yearly sick days are allocated at the beginning of the year and the rest are accrued. There are benefits and drawbacks to each, and probably a lot of interesting behavioral nudges in each scheme that affect different types of work in different ways.

WalterBright 7y ago

I once talked to a manager about how he handed out raises. He mentioned one engineer who was sick exactly 10 days out of each year. Coincidentally, the company offered 10 days of paid sick leave a year. He laughed, and said she wasn't fooling anyone, and didn't give her a raise.

jacquesm 7y ago
Here in NL employees get 2 full consecutive years of paid sick leave before you are allowed to terminate the contract.
- deogeo 7y ago
  I honestly think that's a terrible idea, and that paid sick leave should be paid not by the employer, but from taxes. Which should be raised slightly to cover such a policy. Otherwise, hiring someone presents a gigantic risk for smaller companies. Getting unlucky even once with someone that will use 1-2 years of sick leave (legitimately or not) would be enough to bankrupt them. In general I think making employers pay for a safety net, instead of funding it from taxes paid by those employers, is universally bad. What it does is make employers discriminate against potential hires likely to need that safety net, which makes those in need even worse off.
  - Sebb767 7y ago
    I like the way it's handled in Germany: Your employer is on the hook for 6 weeks, after that insurance takes over. Cases like being sick for the same reason again are covered as well. And the employer may demand a signed statement from a special doctor if he suspects cheating (this will only say wether the person may work, no details). It could however be that he's talking about firing the person, in which case it's pretty hard in Germany as well. As far as I know early retirement or a termination from the employee are pretty much the only way. Social security mitigates this risk, however, and the protections are lower for part time/student jobs, so hiring is not made too risky.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Risks like that are begging for insurance policies. Net result it may not actually change much in practice.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    You can insure against the risk.
  - merb 7y ago
    to add to the other german poster. in germany you are required to see a doctor to have a sick day. because a signed statement is needed for the company. they get money back from the insurance for the singed doctor statement.
jkaplowitz 7y ago
I'm not defending that kind of employee misbehaviour, but how to handle that doesn't need to be factored into the sick leave policy beyond making the allowed usage clear and reserving the right to ask for proof when the company has reason to be suspicious. How to handle that, more broadly, is the same as how to handle any other pattern of employee misbehaviour: some appropriate level of employee discipline according to the misbehaviour's severity and the history of past incidents, ranging from an informal conversation to what the manager in your story did to firing, with many intermediate possibilities.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Asking for a doctor's note is for children. These are professional adults. Often people who behave unethically at work believe they are getting away with it. But then they wonder why they don't get raises, are passed over for promotions, are let go in the first round of layoffs, and don't have the respect of their peers.
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    I mean, if that's the path we're going down...is telling someone they can only be sick for 10 days in a year treating them like a professional adult person in the first place?
    - giaour 7y ago
      You can take an unpaid leave if you need more. If you have temporary disability insurance through work (and I would imagine most US software developers do), you can file a claim to compensate you for lost wages due to a medical condition.
      - jkaplowitz 7y ago
        I've never in my full-time tech industry career had government-mandated disability insurance with a maximum benefit anywhere near my actual earnings, and voluntary plans were not offered at most of my smaller employers. Additionally most disability insurance has a nontrivial waiting period that only covers cases where it's a single absence lasting weeks or months.
lkey 7y ago
So he decided he'd figured out her scam without ever bringing it up in yearly or monthly review. He also never asked for proof of the 10 days of sick leave after the first year, which is reasonable to do if he had a suspicion she was flouting a rule. If he wanted to factor sick days into his pay decision, he had a responsibility to make sure he was correct using the proper internal channels. An alternate and equally plausible view is that she had a condition that rendered her borderline ill more than 10 days a year, but couldn't afford to take unpaid leave. So she just 'toughed it out' instead for the remaining days. Laughing vindictively as you deny a raise to someone isn't something be lauded or emulated under any circumstance.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- capex 7y ago
  I come to HN for comments like this.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Fair enough, I agree he was being passive aggressive, but on the other hand, if someone is doing something that has the appearance of impropriety, it's a good idea to proactively bring it up with the boss to head off the suspicions.
  - CPLX 7y ago
    There’s not a fucking thing that’s even slightly improper about taking your allotted PTO days.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      It is improper to take sick leave if you're not sick. It wouldn't be improper if it is labeled PTO. I.e. it depends on how the policy is written.
      - 7y ago
chrsstrm 7y ago
We seem to believe that sick always means some type of physical illness that means we can't work, which is completely wrong. Taking a sick day for mental health is totally OK. Taking a sick day to deal with a sick child or spouse or s.o. is totally OK. Leaving sick days on the table at the end of the year is not something that should be valued, whether they are paid or not. I'm sure HR makes every attempt to spend their entire budget before the year is out, so why should employees be held to a different standard? If you get 10 days, take all 10 days. If your bonus is determined by the number of sick days you take vs. the number given, then you need to find another employer. We need to stop letting this bullshit slide - you should never be penalized for accepting and using the resources given to you.
- MaxBarraclough 7y ago
  > If you get 10 days, take all 10 days. So you don't agree with vharuck who said If a person's sick, they're sick. If they're faking, they're faking? Are you really suggesting faking sickness, or am I misreading you?
  - Retric 7y ago
    Taking a sick day and calling on sick are two different things. I had a job where all unscheduled days off where taken from sick days based on company policy. Vacation days needed or be scheduled ahead of time therefore people valued sick days a little more than vacation days. Others just put them all into the same pool. It’s more about what the policy actually is than what you call it.
    - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
      > Taking a sick day and calling on sick are two different things. I think there's a locale difference here. Here in the UK, they very much are the same thing (faking sickness could get you fired if you're somehow found out), and we don't generally treat sick days as a pool to be drawn from.
  - chrsstrm 7y ago
barrkel 7y ago
I reckon results should be rewarded, not presenteeism. I might be more interested in results, who knows.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  I'd be the first to agree with you. However, allowing a stellar performer to come and go as they please tends to have a bad effect on morale of the rest and impairs team cohesiveness.
  - fountainofage 7y ago
    Sounds like they're not a stellar performer then? Unless they're a solo founder with no funding, they don't work in a vacuum. Edit: changed you's to they
  - barrkel 7y ago
    I guess it depends on the team dynamics. If someone's good and show up for the big pushes, I'd take a lot. We had a chap on our team at my current company who worked from home every Friday, even though it was sub-optimal for planning meetings around sprint boundaries. But he was very productive. One of the reasons I decided not to move to the US after I got my H-1B was because of the parsimonious approach to vacation days. Only 10 days of paid leave, for someone who's moving across the Atlantic. If I wanted to spend some time with my friends and family, it would need to be two weeks to make the flight time worthwhile, and that would take 100% of my vacation for a whole year. And it was non-negotiable. Vacation increases beyond a one-off for the first year was a perk for tenure, not a negotiable form of compensation. And even if I didn't want to come back to Europe; why would I take a job that only gave me 10 days a year to do with what I want? Life is for living, not just working. It was a crunch point, a decisive factor in not moving to SV for me.
jetti 7y ago
That seems plausible to me, especially if they have a chronic illness. Places I have been would make you use PTO if you had no sick days so then it becomes a cost/benefit analysis. Do you feel bad enough to use up PTO or can you "suffer through it".
zarify 7y ago
I can believe someone taking 10 sick days off a year and no more. You take the paid time off if you're sick without much hesitation, and after that you weigh up whether you're sick enough to cost you a day's pay. People should use their sick leave - that's what it's for. This "no raise for using sick leave" argument is no better than the overwork culture that's been discussed at length lately. Mind you, I'm not an engineer, I'm a teacher. Unless it's seriously contagious or I'm basically unable to function I don't tend to use my sick leave because it's more work to prepare lessons for a replacement teacher than it is to come to work and teach.
- track_me_now 7y ago
  Well, I'm an engineering manager and there's a little more to then someone just taking 10 sick days per year. I see when my direct reports are run down or if they're fighting something, versus if they're always "sick" on Monday morning. I known when they stay home because they don't want to get everyone else sick but they are still in contact; that's different from when they call in sick, I hear nothing all day and then they're fine the next day and back at work. I keep a tally of when someone who's never sick is really down for an entire week vs. those who consistently get "food poisoning". The whole reason I have a job is because we're a tight-knit team that works closely and there's no room to bullshit. It would be like faking out your parents when you're a kid; you could get away with it for a day or two but I'm going to be able to tell when you just want to stay home to play video games. I don't think this makes me passive-aggressive or a shitty manager; we're a tight team that cares about each other and as a result we know when people are treating each other with respect and honesty. I give people a lot of leeway and ask them not to wreck it for everyone. If someone threatens this it makes me both mad and sad, because once it's gone we'll never get it back.
fountainofage 7y ago
Lots of comments, but no one has just come out and said it: Fuck. That. Manager. They care about butts in seats more than results, and they've deliberately sought out the metrics to justify it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
rolltiide 7y ago
Paid sick days aren't just for when someone is contagious Taking all 10 and just those has no indication on anything
- track_me_now 7y ago
  however taking exactly one sick day a month sure looks suspicious
newshorts 7y ago
Sounds like a horrible manager.
buro9 7y ago
Wow. A male manager denies a raise to a female engineer on the basis that the female engineer takes 10 sick days per year that their contract says they are entitled to. Why is it important to emphasise sex in this? Periods. The experience is different for each person but the fact that they didn't feel able to take 12 may itself be a problem. And even 10 would only allow the taking of a single day each month during the worst symptoms. Whilst at the same time leaving yourself with no days were you to get a cold later in the year.
cambaceres 7y ago
I'm from Sweden and I used to work at a warehouse before and between my stuides. Here, everything if focused about the rights for the employee. As soon as you have worked for 6 months at one place, you have what we call "permanent employment", which basically means that you can't be fired unless you repeatedly fuck up big time (coming drunk to work repeatedly, steal from the company etc). Anyway, here you can be sick for 5 days in a row (and get 80% of your salary), after that you have to go to a doctor and get a paper that you are in fact sick. Futhermore, you can be sick for 6 times a year, after that you have to talk to the boss and explain yourself. People used this to the maximum, meaning that on top of the 5 weeks per year people got payed vacation, they were all "sick" an additional 6 weeks, always 5 days at a time. The employers can't do anything, as people with permanent employment can't be fired.
coldtea 7y ago
Then he is an absolute idiot. The engineer could be sickly and be sick 20 or more days in a year, but only take the minimum allowed (to not lose her paycheck). I'm down with flu, stomach issues, gout and a few other things far more days in a year than the company's paid sick leave. And while I might not take all of them, and go to work sick, it's within the rights of anybody to do so. If the company is offering 10 paid sick days, and he is discriminating based on using those, then he should be sued to extinction...

Kye 7y ago

A new environment with exciting new microorganisms seems especially likely to cause this.