[ghaff]

Although it's mostly worked to my personal advantage, I generally loathe the combined PTO plan that's the current style. It's somewhat understandable from an employer's perspective--time you're not working is time you're not working and they don't need to potentially police abuses of sick time--but I still don't like it. "Sorry kids. We can't take that family vacation this year because daddy caught that bad flu last Spring."

But a non-trivial number of people have historically abused dedicated sick time; there are even people cheerfully admitting to it on this thread.

[sheepmullet]

I find combined PTO is great as long as you have enough of it. I get 35 days PTO and I don't have a problem taking a day off when I'm sick.

Now if I only had 15 days PTO....

[fizgig]

Yeah, if I had that much I'd be much less conservative for sure. You work for a European company or do you just have clout to ask for that much?

Compounding this is the fact that I can only carry over 5 days per year, so at most I can only use 20 days in a calendar year). In a few years my PTO gets a bump to 20 days a year.

[ghaff]

That is indeed a nice chunk of time. I wouldn't have any issue in that case either. I can't really complain too much about mine but 15 days is basically just middling vacation time for a mid-career US professional with no sick/personal time on top of it.