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Comment by frontman1988 | Hacker News Reader

frontman1988

I would rather have a 6 day work week with 2 months of paid holidays every year. There isn't much you can do on a 3 day break that you can't do in a 1 day or 2 day break. But a month long break and you can do crazy stuff like hiking in Papua New Guinea or sailing across an ocean.

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What you can do with 3 days per week instead of a month per year is to set good habbits. Fit a sport into your schedule, learn music. Anything requiring discipline is gonna be much easier if you're able to build a daily/weekly schedule around it.

Haven't done this long of a pure personal trip in a while but in a previous (US) job I took several month long trips with an otherwise conventional vacation/work schedule. Combination of fairly long tenure at the company, some unpaid leave from taking leave for a Christmas shutdown, and concentrating almost all my vacation on those trips.

A 6-day work week means you basically have to take time off to go away for weekends at all.

That said, I'm not convinced a 3 day weekend is much better than a 2 day weekend on a routine basis, certainly compared to have the same time allocated more flexibly.

Arguably that's what savings and sabbaticals are for. I've had several colleges take an extended (albeit unpaid) holiday to go travelling or sailing or something.

I'm not saying a load more PTO isn't worth it, but there are definitely ways to do this kind of thing, and it's worth asking your company about it.

We could just have 8 weeks of paid vacation by law and not also work 6-day weeks. That's not so far from what other countries do as to be obviously crazy or unreasonable.

Why trade away your year for 2 months?

40 hour per week with 40 days PTO is not very common but in larger companies in Europe is not unheard of specially for senior ICs.

Life happens outside of two months a year, though.

Yet those two months will be more memorable than the ten months of monotonous life. I just feel work and related city life bullshit stays with you even on the weekends. There is some fun in just escaping. Or maybe I am too much vacation starved due to covid lol.

I would urge you to reconsider your work/life balance. Trading 10 months for 2 seems like a poor trade. A 4 day work week automatically gets you 52 extra days a year. If you have flexibility in the day of the week, it's very compelling.

I don't feel the same way but that's totally fair enough. Do you have any opportunities to take unpaid leave and use some savings for that 1-2 month period?

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