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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

eBay did a great thing in this regard -- they offered a sabbatical every five years. It was a win for the employee because they got a nice long vacation and it was a win for the organization because it forced everyone to figure out how to get along without that employee for an extended amount of time.

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I really like that!

One of the problems I see in my company is the "hero" vs. "process" mentality. We don't setup processes that any employee can handle, we just have a few "heroes" who rush in to save the day any time there is an issue. This leads to huge problems when the heroes want time off because we have no idea how they do what they do.

A sabbatical program like this would force a shift towards processes. At least I hope...

Every place I've ever worked relied on heroics to some degree. Some more so than others. Project is way behind schedule? CRUNCH TIME! Only one person knows the code base? Give him all the work! Critical bugs found close to release? All nighters until they're fixed! In all cases, what was needed was more discipline and process. But if you ask people, they'll often tell you "process is bad and project managers should go off and make their spreadsheets and let me write my code in peace!"

The other reasons why processes are not adopted is that most employees are not thinking in terms of 'processes'. Secondly typical process/BPM tools are geared towards I.T. rather than regular workers.

Both problems can be solved by gearing tools towards end-users rather than I.T. and allowing processes to emerge from lower-level constructs like (say) discussion threads that workers normally participate in. This would gently steer workers towards a process mindset.

My former employer, HubSpot, just started offering a sabbatical to employees at the five year mark too. The only rule was that you had to share what you did on your sabbatical with the rest of the company on the wiki. One of the earliest employees shared a picture of the sweaters she knit, and other people shared images from the trip they took. It was really a cool experience seeing the experiences people earned from working there for five years.

I never considered it as a forcing function to make sure no one employee is a linchpin to a team though. Very interesting point.

(edit - spelling)

How long does this sabbatical last? I suspect not as long as the academic term of the same name (which is one full year for every seven years of work).

It's one month, so 30 days.

Google did the same, until they realised everyone was leaving immediately afterwards.

Yeah eBay had that problem too. People would save up all their vacation, add it to their sabbatical and then use the time to job search.

I think they changed their rules so that you couldn't add your vacation time to it and you had to pay them back if you left within in X months.

It worked really well for Tandem Computers.

People felt pretty happy with the company for about a year after their sabbatical, and didn't want to leave for about 2 years before their sabbatical (and miss it).

Don't know why this didn't work as well for Google.

This is purely anecdotal, but I have a handful of friends who left google after their sabbaticals. They all explained it with some form of "I was surprised how much happier I was when I didn't have to go to work, and I didn't miss it at all." A couple of them actually chose to not work at all for a while, and one started his own company (a small lifestyle business, not a unicorn-bound startup). Using the time to interview and heading off for another full time job is not a pattern I've noticed at all...

Maybe the Google folks are more likely to apply somewhere with insane, multi-day interview processes that can stretch out over weeks, so the Tandem folks who wanted to leave didn't feel like they had to wait until they had a huge chunk of time off to look for a new job?

I think Google was unique in that most of the people who were hitting their sabbatical had done very well with their stock options, and realized that they didn't need to work anymore and were quite happy not working, or working on their own stuff.

Do you have a source for this?

My company has been looking into implementing something similar and I'd be interested in reading more. Thanks!

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