> I sit at my desk and that's apparently what's important.

After everything it indeed sometimes feels like it comes down to this. They want to see you physically sitting at your desk for at least 8 full hours, that's the only 'measurement' in productivity that most companies seem to care about.

What is the consequence of the OP not showing up at work? Does he lose paid days? Does he get fired? How does his company track sick days? At every company I've worked for there's usually a formal sick day arrangement, but often sick days are less formal; you email or call your boss and tell them you're sick and they tell you to stay home. Rarely does the boss actually record that event. This is different company to company but I'm betting a lot of people put more on themselves about staying home than they should.

It's fairly formalized here. I work at an architectural lighting manufacturer, and the construction industry is very phone-based. I'm sure most electrical contractors have smartphones by now, but most of the questions from the field still come in as phone calls. So we're expected to keep good coverage of the phones, and if I'm not around then everyone needs to know to direct technical calls to someone else's desk.

Sick days do get logged, and if I really need more time off I can start burning vacation days. Given the choice, I'd rather spend a shitty sleep deprived unproductive day at work.

Eventually goes up to 10 sick days, but I don't remember when the threshold is. Frankly it's a strange thing to base on seniority, as if newer employees somehow get sick less?

Where I work, days off are logged but only to make sure you aren't "abusing" the informal policy. Abuse means you get treated more formally and may be told "No, you need to come in today."

Email/call in sick, stay at home. There is an implicit "stay a little later when you're feeling better and/or make up lost time on the weekend". As long as nothing falls behind it isn't an issue. That's the informal policy. If you were ahead or don't fall behind - the extra hours don't need to be picked up. The only important thing is that things remain on schedule.

Hungover, sick, just don't feel like coming in that day, doesn't really matter.

Ridiculous sick day policies are sort of covered here: http://www.inc.com/lolly-daskal/10-dumb-rules-that-make-your...

They only discourage people from keeping contagious colds away and at home which means more get affected and hurt office productivity more!

I had a similar setup at a late stage tech startup that ended up going public while I was there. So not all companies in any industry will fit the mold of how you might expect them to behave.

Also, I recall my time in Japan where I had 0 sick days and 10 PTO days for the year. The explicitly communicated expectation was that PTO was to be reserved for weddings, funerals, and sick days. Also, doing everything possible to not get sick was described as part of your professional obligation.

So even my relatively poor benefits at said SV startup was leagues beyond what I had as a salaryman soldier. ;)

The idea that you have a certain number of sick days per year baffles me. It's not like you have a full control of when you get sick.

Your employer also doesn't have control of when you get sick.

They can encourage presenteeism (e.g. by a fixed number of sick days, policies requiring doctor notes for just one day ill) so sick people spread their germs. They can overwork you and cause stress.

In my experience, managers are particularly good at coming in and spreading germs because they "had an important meeting and so much to do."!

Ugh, yes. At the beginning of last winter, one manager INSISTED on coming in with this really horrible, wracking, deep cough, and the resultant spread managed to take out about half the management team and a ton of floor staff variously over the next month or so (including myself - how grateful I was). I'm sure it was totally worth it for the one or two meetings they attended..

They've gotta show up. How else would anyone know they were doing stuff if they didn't make up meetings to attend?

Of course, and that's why in EU the government pays your salary(or % of it) after couple weeks of being sick, so your employer does't have to.

I work in tech, and in almost all of my engineering jobs I've had, if someone is sick they just work from home.

"Work", yup, I see this too. To fully pull it off though you still need to be somewhat responsive to emails / IMs for the 'normal business hours'. Sometimes it's worth burning a PTO day to just go back to sleep, sick or not, and really start the day around 3pm without thinking about work at all until the next day's morning.

I wouldn't work if I used PTO; makes no sense. I'd rather arrange a shifted schedule for the day

I take it you can't WFH? because that's what it's for. I just don't take time off because we have "unlimited", I just let my coworkers and customers know when I'm unavailable, but never really report it as it doesn't affect my pay whatsoever.

Conceivably all of my work could be done from home. But one portion of it would require a company provided cell phone that they could forward my extension to, and the other part would require me to run a bunch of expensive commercial software (yay CAD) on my home computer, with license servers set up to support it. Or if they don't want to let personal computers on the network, I'd need a relatively beefy company PC.

None of that's impossible, but doing it for the whole company is apparently enough effort/money that we haven't done it.

We do have a couple of remote employees, and they're a hassle with our ancient phone system. Once you transfer a call out to them there's no way for them to pass it back to the internal system. It's not a good setup for people who are frequently taking technical calls but need to send ordering/pricing questions to coworkers in customer service and quotations.

And the fact that most companies claw back your granted vacation at the end of the year means you can't save a couple of days for colds over the winter.