Ask HN: Why not give unpaid leaves? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why not give unpaid leaves?

27 pointstechsin10130 comments

Imagine your life if you could get a month or two, or maybe even 4 months of unpaid leave from the job. It'd be incredible change in your life. You'd be able to LIVE every year. Get taxed less, sure make less, but in exchange live more. I'd always take May to Aug off. Travel, vacation, and play sports. Watch sunsets, camp, connect with family, and experience new cultures.

This would allow me to come back to work REFRESHED!!!. Maybe even have new ideas.

This would be better than paid vacation for companies.

Deep down all entrepreneurs want this, freedom. This is freedom.

Tech salary is high enough if spent conservatively to last few months easily.

Maybe some countries have laws that require employers to give unpaid leave.

Makes for better knowledge sharing as well. No risk of one employee leaving with entire knowledge. 4 months leave would naturally expose others in team to his/her problem space.

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A couple of reasons come to mind:

1. Your employer should be making more money off your work than they pay you. This means that they are worse off if they employ you less often. The reduced output will hurt them more than the reduced salary will help.

2. The business keeps going when you are gone. If you are a tech worker, part of your value is the ongoing development and maintenance of systems, or more generally your handling of some issues. This work has to be transferred while you are gone, which is disruptive. It’s like the switching cost of hiring and training, which your employer would prefer to avoid. Other commenters bring up consulting, where this can be clearly defined as not your job.

3. Although it’s a valuable benefit that could help attract talent, it could also select for less committed candidates. Asking for this in a negotiation suggests you don’t really want to be there.

Maybe one day, but it involves changing the entire system. Example: I’ve been an attorney for a decade, have paid off my debt, have a very manageable mortgage and rental income, and could easily take a 40% paycut to work fewer hours. I would love to do this. I could not have done this 10 years ago though when I started practice - I had too much debt, rented a condo, and had no assets to speak of. So employers are in a bind because filling part-time positions can be difficult as most people entering the professional labor market for the first time need full-time work because of the debt required to get there. So if I get to work part-time now, once I leave my office my employer would struggle to fill my job. Tech is a little a different, maybe, but most people that start a family and buy a home want/need at least one person working 40+ hours/wk to pay the bills and get insurance (another poorly managed but intertwined issue). Also, even considering this proposition is truly a luxury that only a tiny fraction of the population has. Which doesn’t add to the conversation, but I find it depressing.

I know lots of people who do this. They are contract labor (or consultants if you prefer that term). The contract is negotiated before work begins. Many employers like to make the initial term short so they can terminate the folks that don't work out. Most US states have "at will" employment laws so either party can terminate at any time.

The drawback is of course that you will have no job stability/security, and no benefits (unless you go with a big body shop).

If you have the skills and reputation, employers will want you on your terms.

I had a friend who took 4-5 months off unpaid leave every year at our large enterprise tech company. He had no dependents and was sufficiently independently wealthy that he didn't particularly care if HR threw a fit and didn't want him back. But he always came back, no issues.

I always wanted to do the same but I needed the income so didn't dare try. Which is exactly how the companies want it.

Screw taking 4 months off, I'd take every Monday and Friday off for the 40% pay cut any day.

No one will offer me that job though.

I'm doing 4 10 hour days a week and can swap my day off for whatever day when I want. That's almost what you said, but without a pay cut lol.

thats not at all the same thing.

granted it is cool that you get 3 days off every week, but the other poster (and me) would much rather work three 8 hours days than four 10 hour days.

I could barely muster a 4 hour day, lol. I don't know how you could get more done with a 10 hour day.

10 hours/day would leave me K.O for the rest of the day. What's the point? It's probably not even healthy.

I worked a "9/80" schedule for a few years, in which we nominally worked 9 hours per day, but had every other Friday off. Even that was enough to significantly improve my quality of life.

In many European countries this is doable and employers are required to accommodate a shorter schedule in some cases.

I know a Google dev that did this. In other words he asked if he could switch to 3 days a week at 60% pay. They said "yes".

You may have a hard time getting a new job at 60% time, but I bet you’d have better luck starting full time at a company and working your way up to it. That’s what father did for the last 10ish years of his career as a programmer. He started working full time then transitioned to 80% time at 80% pay, then 60%, then 40%. He says it was a really good way to ease into retirement.

I'm working 70% part-time (5.6 hours per day). Overall, it's really nice for work-life balance. My biggest gripe is that the communication overhead does not scale proportionally. I'm expending the same time on communication (reading e-mail, reading chat, reading tickets, attending meetings) as if I were employed full-time, so the actual time I get to spend on the actual "work" part of work (designing systems, writing code, responding to incidents, etc.) is less than 70% of hypothetical full-time me.

I suspect that this is the reason why part-time is not more widely adopted. Theoretically, you can replace two full-time workers with three 66% part-time workers or ten 20% part-time workers. In practice, communication overhead destroys that equation.

My former project manager used to take every Friday off, probably because they couldn't pay him the right salary and he got things done fast anyway. Maybe try somewhere you're overqualified for. A lot of places would rather hire a cheap senior than a couple of juniors, and they'll be less suspicious of you offering to take a low salary.

I've freelanced at 3 days/week but it's too little for me IMO. I really liked taking Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays off. Many groceries restock on Friday, Saturday evenings, or Monday so those were good times to find fresh food. I could also extend that to a 4 day weekend if I wanted a quick vacation.

I negotiated such arrangement once as a software dev (well, Thursday and Friday off). It's doable as long as the employer really does not want to lose you.

Because...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24077391

Google allows 3 months of unpaid leave at request.

You don’t have be google to allow this. My employer does this as well.

Anecdotally, I've heard companies that tried this (something like 3 months unpaid after 5 years tenure) found that most of the employees who take this end up leaving soon after coming back.

This might also be because the employee stayed longer than they would have to get these 3 months? https://danluu.com/discontinuities/

Those months are unpaid, is there any practical reason why you would wait until they give you 3 unpaid months rather than just quitting at any point?

Nope, I misread unpaid as paid.

Because healthcare is tied to your employment 35 hours a week in the US.

In other countries, similar laws trap employees into necessarily working even if they could do the job part year.

Employers can continue and pay healthcare, social security or pension (where applicable), but that will make the vacation more costly for them.

Perhaps this would work for some people, but the majority of people don't have the luxury of living life without responsibilities. If everyone took long breaks, companies would be stuck in a cycle of handovers and making sure that certain people aren't given anything important before their long break. If you want that kind of lifestyle it may be a good idea to look into part time consulting.

Less extreme, but my first couple years out of college, the company I worked for had a habit of running low on money during the summers. So we would end up with about a week off unpaid each month June - Sept.

It was actually really nice. Kind of miss it. I guess alternately, I could just get a job somewhere with a decent vacation policy.

Because work and life doesn’t revolve around your schedule?

If you are entrepreneur, it just gets worse unless you are the ~5-10% of the super successful ones

Most Teachers get summers off

Oh paper it might seem so, but a teacher works far more hours outside the butt-in-chair hours during in session and out of sessions. At least my AP teachers did.

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