It's mostly a fairly recent trend even in the US. For most of my career, I had separate vacation and sick days (as well as, possibly, personal/floating holidays). I'm not sure when the shift occurred but apparently a combined pool is pretty much the norm these days.
Fortunately, it's a trend that seems to have had fairly limited pickup. It really does seem like a bad system in practice. I have always, other than the odd day lost when I've hit a cap or whatever, used every day of vacation I've been allotted. In past roles, I've even taken month long vacations where I was totally out of touch.
I would not want to be in a situation where my vacation time depended on some prevailing sense among coworkers of the appropriate number of days to take off.
> Fortunately, it's a trend that seems to have had fairly limited pickup
It's been the case at the last four places I worked: large corporations who knew their H1B workforce wouldn't ask for time off, and startups where I wouldn't get any spare moments to meet with my managers to ask for vacation.
(Fwiw, the vacation time at the start ups was perfectly decent, given the situation. I think I took ~3 weeks off each year. At the big company, it was a total fiddle.)
