To prevent burnout, LinkedIn is giving its entire company the week off | Hacker News Reader

To prevent burnout, LinkedIn is giving its entire company the week off

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57 pointsrustoo55 comments

I think this is a good thing provided it doesn’t take from people’s annual leave allowance.

Many people feel pressure to always be “on” and are tied endlessly to programs like Slack. Many people also aren’t good at managing their own time in a remote setting or properly stepping away from work when it ends. This will likely be a welcome break for those people.

> I think this is a good thing provided it doesn’t take from people’s annual leave allowance.

They switched to discretionary time off (no formal accounting of paid time off) a few years ago. They also have a one week company shutdown in July and another one week shutdown in December.

> I think this is a good thing provided it doesn’t take from people’s annual leave allowance.

I work at a place that, while not academia, is heavily linked to it via research, and so given that many of our external collaborators at educational institutions have a 'winter break', the company has been giving us between Christmas and New Year's off—in addition to our vacation time.

It's "ad hoc" in that the time off is not officially in any one's contracts, and is announced in Q4 sometime, but I've been here several years and everyone just expects it. Us IT folks do still need to be vigilant of alarms and such.

Vacation is nice, but if you do truly go offline, one tends to have to dig out of one's INBOX when getting back. If everyone is off at once, that's less of an ordeal.

Can LinkedIn also give their members (victims?) a week off from annoying and badly targeted emails?

I’m not sure, but I’d love to share an important story with you. Yesterday I was walking to an interview. There was a starving dog on the road. I stopped to feed him & missed the interview. The next day I got a call asking to come in to do the interview. I was surprised, but I went. Then the interviewer came in. He was the dog.

(Kidding aside, I’d love some way to filter out low effort connection requests.)

For anyone who is not aware of the context in this comment, this might help :) https://www.boredpanda.com/linkedin-influencers-meme-roastin...

I'd be curious to know how much time off they give their staff normally? I hear that 2 weeks is standard in the US and if so no wonder everyone's burned out. In the UK we get 6 weeks minimum and I honestly can't imagine going without that, particularly during covid.

Tech tends to be more friendly with vacation time in the US than most other industries. It still varies a lot, but it’s not uncommon for a tech company to start you with 3-5 weeks of vacation time plus 8-12 paid holidays throughout the year. It still could be a lot better though, and I agree that it contributes greatly to burn out.

Iit is more and more common for tech companies in Bay Area to have "unlimited" PTO. For me, this translated to 5-6 weeks vacation a year at my last 3 companies.

That 6 week minimum (actually 28 days) includes bank holidays, doesn't it? I suspect the 2 week standard in the US does not include public holidays.

Yes. It’s 28 days, but employers aren’t required to give public holidays off. 25 + bank holidays is fairly common in my experience, which ends up being more than 28 days.

Yes, though some companies (finance normally) give 5+ weeks on top of bank holidays and very very few employers make you take bank holidays.

At least in Germany we have 30 days without including public holidays.

Same here in France, 30 days on top of public holidays, and if you work more than 35 hours/week, you get the difference in a special type of time off that has some limitations

Are pubic holidays guaranteed on top of that? The UK allowance includes pubic holidays but very few employers make you take them.

They just behave like a randomly-placed Sunday. Most normal work in Germany is not allowed on Sunday (exceptions are mostly work that already operates in shifts).

They are not guaranteed if they land on a weekend, you just have a normal weekend where you cannot shop :)

For the rest of us not working at LinkedIn I can wholeheartedly recommend the following to prevent burnout:

Don't use social media (like LinkedIn) for a week.

I very rarely go on linkedin now as it's just a shell of its former self with very little value compared to when I first joined up. In past years I got headhunted twice through linkedin and landed some good roles and built up a really good network of other engineers, but now its just like a quasi mix of instagram and facebook. It's full of these annoying fuckers who call themselves 'influencers' and post cheesy inspiration / motivation crap all day like a video of some Indian construction worker who found a way to optimise how they pick up bricks or someone rescuing a puppy from the side of river.

The only contact I get now, is not around job opportunities, but people wanting to sell me some product or service 'hey, let's have a 5 minute call to talk about how our companies can help accelerate growth in exciting new ways, let me know when you're available. Let's talk!'.

I live in the UK - London too, in a flat in a nice part but no garden. We’ve been in lockdown since forever (feels like it at least...) and this particular one since December. I’ve been avoiding taking leave until after now as was waiting for things to open up. It was my birthday yesterday, as well as Good Friday bank holiday thus a long weekend. When I woke up I was so crushingly exhausted I could barely move. I haven’t stopped since mid December, and also had covid over NY.

I think this is a good thing because it forces people to stop. People need breaks and if pushed too hard something will give eventually. I’m ok now, got through yesterday. But it was a wake-up call.

I'm in a very similar situation - I basically just slept through almost all of Good Friday. I really regret not spending a bit more for a flat with a garden or terrace - I used to mock my friends in London for being so proud of their pathetic little gardens, but since the lockdowns it doesn't seem so silly at all.

Glad to hear you got yourself back on track bruv and happy birthday!

Plus ça change... in some European countries, back in the mid-1900s, most factories would just shut down for a month in Summer (in Italy it was August). This was loosely coordinated, but it worked - everyone, up and down the chain, knew that in August nothing would get done, and in turn they would take the month off.

Then the 80s happened - with the rise of toyotism and "greed is good". Now they'll barely shut a week around mid-August, if they do at all.

A company whose product is sufficiently inessential that they can just send everyone home and no one would know the difference.

A company whose product is sufficiently self-sustaining and automated that they can just send everyone home for the well-being of the workers.

What essential need does LinkedIn meet?

Filling up your inbox

> no one would know the difference.

Where are you getting that from?

Wonder if all the deadlines will be pushed back a week too?

Why do these website keep forcing autoplay vids on you ffs.

Who decided that was a good idea, whose brainwave was that. That;s exactly what I want is to be greeted by a loud, unexpected screeching voice when i visit your shitty website.

If you're using Firefox you can block autoplay: Settings > Privacy & Security > Permissions > Autoplay > Block Audio and Video

Not sure about Chrome, but it may have a similar option.

Does this work for all sites? I'm pretty sure I've done that but now and again I get a site that seems to ignore it.

Chrome does not, but Edge lets you do it.

Well, which Edge and how? Because I'm using Chromium Edge, have enabled the option "Show block option in autoplay settings" in edge://flags/, changed the "Media autoplay" option to "Block"... and it still autoplays videos.

Is that the case for all websites? I wouldn't be surprised if some particularly abusive websites are exploiting a bug to keep their videos playing

> Why... > Who...

Money. It's always money.

So they can boost their watch time and get more advertisers.

The same logic that leads them to a/b test different styles of 'close popup' button and choose the smallest one.

The novelty here is that (almost) the entire company is getting time off, but it doesn't justify why. The closest thing to a reason is

> Since everyone is off at the same time, that means workers aren't inundated by emails, meeting notes and project requests piling up in their absence.

Which seems weak, at best.

Also, it's not clear if this week consumes days out of the PTO allowance. If it does, then it's basically the company telling you when to take your time off, which is a worse deal than having the flexibility of taking PTO whenever.

They aren't the first to be doing this, just the largest so far. I'm aware of a few companies that have done this multiple times over the past year, with similar lines of thought.

I'm not sure why you think justification is required or why it needs to be strong. They are humans, getting some time off, it's as simple as that.

Seems like they have no discipline. In the org I worked mailing or otherwise contacting someone while on holiday was one of the biggest sins. Both ways contact was forbidden. That was really good for recharging as you could switch your mind completely.

That doesn't stop the stuff that goes to multiple people, and work in general piling up.

"To all users of $service, we're deprecating it, please migrate."

"New HR policy"

"[ACTION REQUIRED] Fill out this form if you want to continue to use service X"

"Meeting notes: Global team meeting on Friday"

"All-hands next week - please attend"

You had to log out from email and ideally leave work phone and laptop in the office. You were also given about a week to catch up with stuff. It was pretty good.

great way to recognize bottlenecks in processes too

Exactly, training the employee going under a bus scenario.

Why does that seem weak? One of the annoying things about taking time off is coming back and having to catch up on what you missed. Without that issue, your time off will be less stressful, and you will be less likely to try and check in on what's going on at work.

Everyone? Hmm... that‘s going to be a fascinating week if a bug appears on Monday morning and nobody is in the office to first detect it and second fix it.

So, no, many people will still be at work just because a plattform requires work to stay online.

Oh, the devs and ops backbenchers in Bangalore will still be on...

Because it’s easier than telling people individually to take time off if they need it, because doing so often results in being more stressed because the work piled up and you missed important things when you were away.

> being more stressed because the work piled up

that sounds like a badly managed workplace.

Most workplaces are badly managed in my experience.

Sure, could be. My main point was just that it’s simpler to give everyone a week off together than come up with some rotation of coverage and make sure nobody falls behind.

You work piles off while people take time off, then it suggests that management is sabotaging peoples vacancies. For most people and situations, whether or piles up or is organizational choice.

Maybe the company wants to remind them how unnecessary they are. Not just individually, but also as a group.

Yeah, that must be it. Crush the remainder of morale during the pandemic just as a power exercise.

I'm all for being critical of corporate decisions, but this is going a bit far, isn't it?

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