Wait, what? No place I've seen (and all have been open office) has taken sick leave out of vacation PTO. That's crazy. Employees have to draw the line somewhere.
Did the company give you a bucket of days and say, "use it however you want!"? Then they're taking sick days out of vacation days. I'm guessing that you're either not in the U. S., or you've just never looked at it that way before. The last two places I've worked full-time work that way.
Currently at Facebook as an FTE I get a sizable number of vacation days which is the “use it however you want” bucket. Off the top of my head, sick days, jury duty, parental leave, and taking time off to care for a sick family member all do not count towards that vacation bucket.
My last workplace (Asana) has untracked PTO. All the places I got offers from (established companies) had either untracked PTO or seperate vacation and sick leave.
All-in-one-bucket PTO plans are extremely common including at large tech companies. I think it's a bad system but it's increasingly the norm outside of "unlimited" PTO plans. It's definitely not some weird outlier.
