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Comment by the_lonely_road | Hacker News Reader

They probably get paid out for unused PTO (common in US) and I would guess a very small number ever use up their vacation time, an exceedingly difficult thing to do in any American job outside of tech (and maybe even for a lot of tech workers).

So taking away vacation days from those people would be literally equivalent to fining them the payout of their days wage.

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Most US jobs don't allow you to accrue unlimited unused vacation time. Police, at least where I live, are allowed to. You often hear stories of large six-figure payouts on retirement, from years of accrued vacation time.

> [snip] I would guess a very small number ever use up their vacation time, an exceedingly difficult thing to do in any American job outside of tech (and maybe even for a lot of tech workers).

It is? Maybe I've just been very lucky in my jobs- even before I was in tech, when working night shift stocking shelves at Walmart or doing customer retention at a call center, I've never had a problem using PTO. I'm sure everyone's experience is different so I'm not saying you're wrong, just that this is a surprise to me.

Depends on the company. It isn't unusual for some companies to have a few key people who can't take vacation because nobody else can do their job. Large companies like WalMart have learned that you dare not have such people (they can die unexpectedly - maybe you can stop them from quitting but death doesn't care) and so take effort to ensure everyone can be replaced as needed and so time off isn't an issue. Smaller companies often haven't learned this lesson and so will sometimes have people who can't be allowed to take time off.

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