[rbadaro]

That is very US specific. In Europe, in a lot of office-based work if you get sick you take some days off and it doesn't impact your normal yearly 20-30 day vacation allowance. If you need more than X days (in my case 5), you need a paper from your doctor, otherwise you self declare as sick. At my workplace, people tend to work from home if they are just feeling a bit sick.

[ghaff]

It's mostly a fairly recent trend even in the US. For most of my career, I had separate vacation and sick days (as well as, possibly, personal/floating holidays). I'm not sure when the shift occurred but apparently a combined pool is pretty much the norm these days.

[WalterSear]

The new trend is 'unlimited' vacation days, where nothing can impact you vacation time, because you have to fight with your manager for it.

[ghaff]

Fortunately, it's a trend that seems to have had fairly limited pickup. It really does seem like a bad system in practice. I have always, other than the odd day lost when I've hit a cap or whatever, used every day of vacation I've been allotted. In past roles, I've even taken month long vacations where I was totally out of touch.

I would not want to be in a situation where my vacation time depended on some prevailing sense among coworkers of the appropriate number of days to take off.

[WalterSear]

> Fortunately, it's a trend that seems to have had fairly limited pickup

It's been the case at the last four places I worked: large corporations who knew their H1B workforce wouldn't ask for time off, and startups where I wouldn't get any spare moments to meet with my managers to ask for vacation.

(Fwiw, the vacation time at the start ups was perfectly decent, given the situation. I think I took ~3 weeks off each year. At the big company, it was a total fiddle.)