Ask HN: Do you have more sick time than you can use?

It’s like an insurance policy. You are not expected to crash your car every month, but you nevertheless have to pay the prime and it covers up to a certain amount. And if you don’t crash. you can’t carry the amount to the next month.

If you ever have kids, you might be glad to be able to take a day off to care for a sick kid or take them to the doctor.

If you ever catch a nasty case of the flu or are in a car accident, you could easily be out for more than a couple of days. Being healthy isn't a guarantee that something bad won't happen to you.

Sick days are also designed to protect employees who are not sick by keeping sick people out of the office where they could infect others. To make this effective, the company needs to provide enough sick days to cover the illness of an average person, not just the healthiest person. So you're actually benefiting from other employees having more sick days than you yourself could use. (There also needs to be a corporate culture where people are not discouraged from using sick days because there's "too much work to do".)

At my job we can donate to others who have run out of time. Not everyone is nice, but enough are to help out each other when there are critical illnesses.

At my job we don't accrue sick time. We therefore don't feel like we are missing out if we don't get sick. We are given a set number of holiday days and just get sick pay as standard. The longer we are off pay gets gradually reduced until it becomes unpaid leave.

The upside of your company is if you ever had a larger injury you would be covered, where as after 6 weeks my pay would be a lot lower than full amount.

As long as it rolls over to the next year I think that's reasonable enough that you can't cash it out.

A company I used to work for allowed its staff 12 sick days per year. These were used as ad-hoc no-notice holiday days. That was sub-optimal for colleagues.

The company also introduced a rule that any sick days taken on a Monday; or on the day before / after a bank holiday weekend, would need a doctor's note. Legally self certification was all that should have been required. So, this required a visit to a doctor to get a note. Since, at the time, it was hard to get an appointment within that time frame the person would require extra time off to get the note. And by that time they were uealthy and just asking their GP to write a letter to say that they had been ill with some unspecified illness; which the GP would do for a £60 charge. So it didn't stop anyone abusing the sick leave system and increased costs dramatically and made people take even more time off.

That was a lousy place to work.

My first question would be 'Are you sure you are accruing sick time?'

It differs around the world, of course, but having worked with many businesses in the UK and Australia I'm amazed at how many staff think Sick Leave carries over into a new year (like vacation leave usually does), even though it does not. Use it or lose it.

I've even seen staff quit after ten years in a job, point out no sick days ever and ask to be paid out for those 100 days. (10 days pa x 10 years) They then get surprised to 'learn' that's not how their contracts or the system works, and usually a little angry (especially if they had already spent those 5 months' salary!).

You know, there are countries where there's no such ridiculous thing as fixed number of sick leaves in a year. Do you really plan all your sickness in January each year?

In case of sickness, your physician signs your sick leave and you just need to inform your employer that you take a day (or several days) off because of that.

i dont have sick time. i just stay home when im sick and need a doctors notice if its above 3 days. but thats pretty much german standard

Just curious, how does that work?

What happens if you use all your sick time, it dont sound like you have too much of it, happens happens if you get really unlucky?

Where I come from you dont have a number of sick days like that (if you have more than 3 consecutive days you technically need a doctors certification) but if you have more than 120 in a year they can fire you.