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Comment by dominicr | Hacker News Reader

One effect of this in the Nordic culture is that often a lot of these holidays are taken at the same time. People take 3 or 4 weeks off at once between the end of June and early August, especially in Norway. Productivity for the company effectively hits zero for 6 weeks whilst the Norwegians have their holiday, then the Swedish and Danish have their turn.

Although the few people that do work get a lot done due to having no meetings or interruptions. There were days in the summer where there were 3 of us in the office, out of 200 in the department. Bliss!

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There's an important second-order benefit to this though:

Companies are forced to ensure that their business works without key personnel for weeks at a time. It forces the company to really think about what situations are emergencies where you have to disturb key personnel on their vacation, and which ones you can actually handle anyway.

In contrast in the US, a common office-politics anti-pattern is that individuals make themselves indispensable to the business, as a form of employment protection. This is ultimately bad for the company, because people quit, people change jobs, and then the business is threatened every time such an individual quits.

When every employee is gone for weeks at a time every year, it gives the company opportunity to identify weak spots like this and work around them. And this pays off whenever key personnel leaves their job, for whatever reason.

I worked in Finland in 2001-2002 in what we would call now startup and even lead managers or scientists in company were not in the office in July-August. They simply worked more during winter and spent as much of Finnish summer outside as possible. But as article mentions, it was usual to take long vacations even in government jobs - if you needed visa for your relative, you'd better have it before June, or you would get it in September, since clerks were out of office :).

I worked for a year in an incubator in Oslo, full of start ups that talked about “work hard, play hard” & having to put in extra effort. The building was practically empty by 6pm.

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