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Comment by decebalus1 | Hacker News Reader

Bullshit. Vacation [1] IS the answer for burnout. Long vacations are even more ok for burnout. Sabbaticals are the most ok. Guess what a doctor would recommend you do if you're having health issues from burnout?

If there's chronic burnout in your company/org then indeed, no amount of vacation will fix that. But neither would flexible work hours or mental health support.

[1] Vacation means complete and total disconnect from work or work related activities. That goes beyond not checking work emails. I'm talking no leetcode or learning some new JS framework.

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Agreed. We need European-style month-long vacations in the US. And sabbaticals every few years. Also we should start looking at 36 and 32-hour workweeks.

We're 20x more productive than 40 years ago, yet still work the same hours or more for pay increases that barely keep up with inflation.

As a European living in the US since a decade. It starts to impact my mental health.

I went from 8 weeks / years to 4 or 5. Currently 3. Ha.

I cannot recharge the same way ( meaning : travel for weeks at a time, or chill hard for 2 weeks in a row )

It’s flexible all right. But I feel like I’m always working somehow. Work is near, lurking.

I’m nursing a nice little depression that I feel a road trip would cure easily. Too bad I need to keep my last week of vacation for Christmas week.

Mind sharing where exactly in Europe is 8 weeks vacation the norm? In Austria it's 5 weeks for everyone but law and that's what most tech companies will give you as well.

I don't think there are 8 weeks, but 6 weeks? Spain has 30 days vacation if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah I’ve redone the Math in a sibling comment.

1) it was 7 and some change. Not 8w 2 ) due to a special arrangement with my employer.

I’m French. 5 weeks is the minimum. Then we work 40h/week but legally we should do 35h. So that give us a extra week.

Those 6 weeks are the norm.

But it become increasingly common to ask for another week as a perk it you are a skill worker.

I my last French job I had weird hours and overtime in the weekend because of the industry I was in. It’s leads 7 and some changes weeks.

So, not 8.

That sounds really bad man. I'm originally from Germany,but lived previously in Asia(Singapore/Hong Kong), New Zealand and now Australia. I never got less than 3 weeks vacation.

The US is a good environment to innovate, but it's mostly good for companies and not people.

Yes, and let's stress _long_ vacations.

We need our brains to disconnect and we need at least 4 days to a week to start feeling "on vacation" [citation needed], so anythin less than say two weeks or whatever (milage may vary) and you just came from work or are worrying about going back to work. Last time I went on vacation I forgot for a moment where I worked :-)

I'm 3 months into a sabbatical / gap year [1]. Feels great. The water is fine. Come on in!

[1] https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue

One week of vacation is just not worth bothering with. It's not enough time to even disengage before you turn around and come back.

For me a vacation, it's every day, every time I take my bike, go in the nature, it's something short and intense. I don't need to cut off several week from a job, take a plane to an exotic island. No, not only for environmental reasons, but I don't need it, just working less every day will be more efficient for me when I need to regenerate

I will agree that a sufficiently long vacation is an answer to burnout.

It'll never prevent burnout, though, and having "job satisfaction" will, as many of the other commands are saying.

It's not a either-or situation. You should have both.

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