[joncrane]

Benefits have indeed gotten worse on average in my experience, and here are two hard examples. Leave and healthcare.

Leave: It used to be that most companies had a formula for accruing leave, and that vacation and sick were separate buckets and you could accumulate quite a bit. You earn X hours of vacation and Y hours of sick leave per 40 hours worked. This was nice because it was an asset that belonged to the employee and had to be paid out upon separation. Most companies also paid out unused leave over the rollover amount at each year end, and working overtime meant more leave would accrue. Now most companies put everything in the same bucket, give you 30 days, and it's "use it or lose it." This amounts to financial engineering on the company's part, as it makes their balance sheet look better by not carrying all those liabilities, and they generally twist it to make it seem better for the employee.

Health insurance: this just adds to the cacophony of voices lamenting the state of health care in the US today. When I first entered the workforce in 2002 health insurance provided way better benefits, more doctors took the typical insurance plans provided, you didn't have to fight the insurance company, file pre-authorization paperwork, etc. Now every time I get a medical procedure it's a battle waged via paperwork.

[kayodelycaon]

> 30 days

Where can I find a job with 30 days of leave? A lot of places seem to think 15 days is beyond generous because they treat all PTO as vacation time and ignore that sick time used to exist. Meanwhile, my health issues make it extremely difficult to bank any amount of PTO.

[cr1895]

Unfortunately it’s not helpful to your situation, but these issues are handled much better in many countries. For example, in Netherlands there are statutory holidays (20 or so?) then many companies give additional days on top of that. 28+ isn’t uncommon.

Being absent due to illness has no bearing on holidays either…even if you’re sick in one of your holidays it doesn’t count against your holiday time. There’s no concept of a fixed number of sick days.

[fernandotakai]

or even worse: "infinite PTO" aka you never take time off because you are scared of overusing the perk.

[hallway_monitor]

Untracked time off is a double-edged sword for sure. I just make sure to take more time off than I would have gotten at my last job, and I tell my employees to do the same.

[ghaff]

There need to be cultural norms set from the top around its use for sure. Though I'm not sure, in general, it's worse than pooled vacation/sick time.

I would hope that coming out of the pandemic there would be some rethink of a system that basically provides a strong incentive to come into the office sick. (OTOH, there may be more flexibility in terms of WFH so that may do the job at least partway on its own.)

[duckfang]

And the trick behind that is when you leave a company, they have to normally pay for unused PTO.... Unless the PTO is "unlimited" aka not accruing.

And much research done academically and in business magazines shows that people use LESS PTO when it's "unlimited".

Tl;Dr. It's another scam companies use to bilk workers.

[wirrbel]

fairly standard in Germany. And sick leave unlimited (doctor's note required).

[joncrane]

the 30 includes federal holidays so it works out to about 20 in practice.