Well... yes. I think that for most HN commenters, who work for a non-hourly salary and provide hard-to-quantify value in a seller's market for labor, it's generally possible to get a day off if you need it.
Many tech companies have gone to "unlimited" PTO, so there's no cost to taking a few days off. But even outside that, almost no managers are following the letter of the law. Last time I changed jobs, my employer at the time had explicit PTO time, but unlimited sick leave, and in practice during COVID (and especially near any holiday) was pretty lax with accounting for "I need to be out on Friday afternoon" as long as work was getting done and you were somewhat responsive to email/pings on the day in question. I wasn't hunting very actively, so it was just the one day of interviews with one potential new employer - I concede that if you needed to do many full-day interviews, it would eventually become conspicuous.
Many tech companies have gone to "unlimited" PTO, so there's no cost to taking a few days off. But even outside that, almost no managers are following the letter of the law. Last time I changed jobs, my employer at the time had explicit PTO time, but unlimited sick leave, and in practice during COVID (and especially near any holiday) was pretty lax with accounting for "I need to be out on Friday afternoon" as long as work was getting done and you were somewhat responsive to email/pings on the day in question. I wasn't hunting very actively, so it was just the one day of interviews with one potential new employer - I concede that if you needed to do many full-day interviews, it would eventually become conspicuous.