Embracing sabbaticals, sunsetting retirement age | Hacker News Reader

Embracing sabbaticals, sunsetting retirement age

jacek.migdal.pl

83 pointsmatesz118 comments

I would love to see sabbaticals become more the norm, but I see a few problems with this particular plan and other problems with how they are generally implemented.

For this specific plan, it asks a 35-year-old to agree to work an additional year in their 60s for 3 months' sabbatical in their 30s. That's a pretty bad deal, not only because of the imbalance between what you gain and what you sacrifice, but also because there are so many unknowns about your ability to work in your 60s. And how do you really enforce something like that?

But in general, one major problem with sabbaticals is that they are almost always tied to your employer and require you to rack up multiple years of experience to qualify for them. But the trend over the past several generations is toward greater job mobility. It is relatively rare for Gen X and Gen Y workers to have stayed with one employer for decades, as many of their parents may have done. Job hopping is often the best way to increase one's compensation, and the loyalty that used to be shown between employers/employees has largely dissipated.

Thus, many people's only realistic chance at a sabbatical is to do an unofficial one by taking some time off between jobs -- but this has its own problems. Since health insurance and many other benefits in the US are tied to employment, it can be extremely costly to not be constantly employed.

> It is relatively rare for Gen X and Gen Y workers to have stayed with one employer for decades, as many of their parents may have done.

I’ve seen more people take them in between jobs than during, which works fine within the job hopping expectations that companies have created.

Yes, "fun-employment" is essentially the new sabbatical.

You'll probably find that "fun-employment" as a term is mostly used by people who were collecting a very nice paycheck and don't have a lot of serious responsibilities.

Half-right. In my experience, it's often younger folks out of school, with no kids, who make low wages and live with their parents. It's folks for whom unemployment insurance is a great benefit, assuming they were at their previous job long enough to collect it.

That's probably another category for whom employment seems like sort of an optional activity at least for a bit. I admit I hear it--at least in my circles--from decently-paid tech workers who are ready to take some time off,

I see folks take them when they're laid off because it takes so long for folks to get a job offer.

The/one problem is it's not predictable. It might take a year. You might get an offer next week. When I was a month between jobs in the dot-com aftermath, it would have been nice to have known that I'd have something like 6 weeks between jobs. But, of course, at the time it could have been either a very long time or I'd better take whatever was on offer.

It's only really an option if you've been paid handsomely enough to rack up some savings beforehand though, and being able to take 6 months or a year out of work entirely at your own expense isn't an opportunity affordable to everyone.

I managed a month and it wasn't enough. Not a chance I could have managed much more than that though without eating into my emergency funds and becoming anxious.

Voluntarily taking unpaid time off is a massive luxury.

As far as enforcement goes, I think that "raising the retirement age" would basically be "raising the age where you can draw on government benefits."

So it's not that you would be ""forced"" to work an extra year, but you won't have benefits for an extra year. Which, y'know, is still pretty bad depending on your situation.

You might be dead before 60.

> And how do you really enforce something like that?

Retirement age refers to when you're eligible for government retirement benefits.

The proposal is to let people draw their retirement benefits early, basically.

Practically speaking, drawing 3 months of expenses at age 35 might be equivalent to something like drawing 1 year of expenses at age 65, assuming the money is invested. You'd have to do the math to see the real numbers, but that's essentially what the author is proposing.

Time value of money.

The root cause is that retirement is not something the government should be doing in the first place. It should be your individual responsibility to save, and your individual choice what to do with that money. There exist very safe financial instruments like target-date funds that would be perfectly up to the task, with only a tiny bit of regulation on top.

None of these problems exist in that world.

Naturally, in countries that implement compulsory pension schemes, it's also not something you can easily remove: lots of people depend on government pensions and/or have planned their lives around them, it would be an unmitigated disaster to just say "we aren't doing this any longer".

Social security was implemented so that old people wouldn't be destitute and literally dying of hunger or lack of care.

Right, so I guess in your eyes the only people who should be allowed to retire are the ones who can afford it? I guess this is along the same lines of the only wealthy people are entitled to education and healthcare.

Anyway, you’re wrong with regards to removing pension schemes. Look at Australia with compulsory superannuation. The government forces people to save up enough money to put them over a threshold where they won’t be entitled to a pension. Thankfully, this is fully paid for by employers. The UK is going the same way but sadly more of a user-pays type scenario. Not difficult at all and only takes about 50 years before the majority of the population is ineligible for whatever pension still exists, but it is still there for people who fall through the cracks. No need to remove the pension at all - just price out the wealthy.

> Right, so I guess in your eyes the only people who should be allowed to retire are the ones who can afford it?

Yes, it's already like this under any system. In what other way can it possibly work?

> I guess this is along the same lines of the only wealthy people are entitled to education and healthcare.

You are making shit up. Education and healthcare have nothing to do with being forced to pay for the pensions of people who retired at 50 because they were friends with politicians. Public education is good. Public healthcare is good. Public pensions are not, as a matter of theory and practice.

> Not difficult at all and only takes about 50 years

Something that takes 50 years to remove sounds like the very definition of something that's difficult to remove.

Okay then what happens when those people reach the retirement age and have no retirement benefits left? They either die (not so fast), or become a burden for social services (in countries with those), or get into crime (of some kind). Maybe I am missing something, but I only see drawbacks for society and for the individual.

They have to work an extra year per sabbatical, and the number of sabbaticals is capped to some small number. Say, 3 for example.

In the US you can start drawing retirement benefits at 62 at a lower rate, or at 65 at a higher rate. So this would be similar. Eligible for benefits at 62 with no sabbaticals. Or 65 with 3 sabbaticals.

A lot of individuals don't really live long past retirement age. In the U.S., men live to be 73.5 years on average. So extending your retirement age until you're 85 at the proposed 1:4 ratio gives you 5 years of retirement benefits when you're younger, vs an average of 8.5 years when you're older.

I don't see this as a terrible deal.

Of course, you then have to work past the standard retirement age, but I see this as a given for a lot of people anyway (you might even live longer if you get frequent sabbaticals)

The life expectancy of a US male at age 65 is an additional 17 years, from the government's actuarial tables [0]. Average life expectancies include people that die young, which primarily include risk factors that rarely affect people at retirement age.

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

Survivor bias. The average age of death for a 40 year old is 81 years. And 75 years for a 20-year old.

So yes, if you continue surviving your chances of living to your delayed retirement age increase, but I still posit you'll enjoy time off work more when you're younger.

The other issue with implementing sabbaticals is that it's really hard to do so retroactively at a large company that already has a lot of long-term employees.

Now you have a bunch of people who suddenly get a benefit at the same time at least somewhat at the expense of everyone else. And, as you say, like defined benefit pensions, they're inherently designed for at least relative long-termers.

But, yeah, it's hard to take a big chunk of time off otherwise. Unless you hit it big, it's risky to say I'm not going to even job hunt for 6 months. COBRA (and the Exchanges) does cover health insurance in the US to some degree but you're still taking a financial hit if you're without a job for a year--very possibly at a point in life when your financial needs are greatest.

Am I reading this comment correctly - don’t US workers get pensions that aren’t tied to their employers?

Nope!

Pensions if a person gets them which is rare (in the US) is typically tied to their company or the government if they were employed by the government.

"Pensions" in the US generally refer to defined-benefit pensions, i.e. you worked here 10 years with a terminal salary of $100K so you get $X/month starting at age 65 (or whatever).

In general, private sector companies have switched to defined-contribution schemes like 401Ks, which are tied to an employer but can be (and generally should be) rolled over to IRAs when you leave the company.

Social Security is something else again that comes from the government but isn't usually called a pension.

Nope. My dad worked for a company for most of his life. They dropped pensions during his tenure and he got nothing.

That's odd. Usually an employee is vested after five years. That means that even if they leave before "retirement" age (defined by the employer), they still get an annuity based on their vesting.

When a company eliminates pensions, it applies to new hires and perhaps future contributions but does not retroactively eliminate benefits already accrued.

Effectively yes, it is called Social Security. No one in the US refers to it as a "pension" even though it is equivalent to what many Europeans call pensions. The term "pension" is reserved for other defined-benefit retirement plans, which are no longer common in the US. Americans are consistently messaged and incentivized to save for retirement separate from their Social Security pension.

Social Security is relative generous by the standards of the industrialized world. For example, I will receive $3600/month from the government at the standard retirement age, in addition to any other retirement savings I may have. Similarly, the government will pay for my healthcare when I reach retirement age.

>Social Security is relative generous by the standards of the industrialized world. For example, I will receive $3600/month from the government at the standard retirement age, in addition to any other retirement savings I may have. Similarly, the government will pay for my healthcare when I reach retirement age.

That amount is near the max, and not typical at all.[0] You must have had at least 35 high-earning years in your wage/earnings record.

Also, the government only pays for part of your healthcare (Medicare Part A = hospitalization), you still pay for all the rest (routine checkups, treatment not requiring hospitalization, preventive care, prescription drugs). You don't get any coverage at all unless you enroll and pay your share of the premiums.

[0]https://faq.ssa.gov/en-US/Topic/article/KA-01897

> You must have had at least 35 high-earning years in your wage/earnings record.

Almost half of those years were the opposite of high-earning, and I don’t have 35 years yet. If it is near the max then it is because the fraction of years that are high-earning are carrying a lot of weight. I have been quite poor for a large fraction of my working life.

Not by the time anyone in their 30s (or younger) now will retire. Social Security is running out of money. It’s also barely a pension.

The tail is wagging the dog. You claim “unofficial” sabbaticals are problematic because in the US health insurance and pension are tied to your employer. But the problem isn’t the sabbatical, it’s the way things are done in the US.

I’m from Australia, I quit my job last year due to burnout. Regardless of whether I choose to return to work or not, I get free public healthcare, private healthcare if I pay for it, and a guaranteed government funded pension once I reach retirement age.

The US needs to fix the problem, not the symptom.

> I would love to see sabbaticals become more the norm

Just take your own, you don't need anyone's permission.

Save for a few years and you'll have enough money to take a year or two off (my ratio is 2 years work for 1.5 years of freedom).

Quit your job and do what you want with your life - I drive around the world having massive adventures.

When you get back just find another job - it's not hard, and the gap in your resume is extremely easy to explain - learning languages, self-reliance, health, research, side passion projects etc. etc.

Sure, I'm not at Director level or working at FAANG like some of the guys I studied Software Engineering with, but they've been going to work every single day for the last 20 years since we graduated, I only sat at a desk for 6 of those years, otherwise I've been driving around the world hiking, surfing, snowboarding, poking lava with a stick, climbing 20,000 ft volcanoes, etc. etc. [1]

Do what you want with your life, don't let someone else dictate it to you.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/theroadchoseme

I think you have a vastly different experience than some of us. It has not once been easy to find a job in this field for me. I assume you've been in the industry for much longer and have been able to experience that. But there are many of us that got into this line of work much later and have had to deal with differing circumstances. Instead there are bottom of the barrel positions with comparatively low pay and high demands and you're expected to be grateful for such an opportunity as it squeezes the life out of you.

Not at all, I had only been in the industry for 2 years the first time I took 2 years off.. then did another 4 years at a desk and took many years off.

One of my secrets is being willing to relocate to really random and fun locations around the world - i.e. I moved to the Yukon where it was -40 for a few months every year. Every day was an adventure, and I got paid to live/work there.

Don't settle for good enough, go find something that enables the life you want to live.

As someone considering a sabbatical, let's clarify one thing. Yes, health benefits are tied to the employer and getting health insurance privately (or through CORBA) is expensive, but wages are higher in the US. You can buy health insurance, and if you time things right you can get "Obamacare" which won't make your premiums too high.

It's possible to save money on a tech salary in the US for staying a few months, or even a year, on a sabbatical. Maybe it will cost you 100K or so for a year in an average city in the US, assuming a family of 3 and no other income, a third of that being health costs. But it's possible to save 100K to do that. Hey, we're asking for the entirety of society to work to provide us a ton of services/products (even beyond healthcare) while we're resting, so that shouldn't be so surprising, right?

One thing that I read a lot on HN are arguments talking about how having to pay for health insurance makes things impossible, as if people didn't have other expenses. For most people, rent is more expensive than health insurance, so are we going to say we can't go on sabbaticals because we don't have public housing? I understand that it's not easy to deal with private health insurance, but millions of self employed people in the US do exactly that, some of them with top notch (and expensive) health insurance.

In a country with public healthcare, you don't need to save the healthcare part. But you still need to save for all other expenses - rent, childcare, bills, transportation, books etc. So maybe it would cost half as much to go on a Sabbatical in other places, but in general tech wages in "other places" aren't nearly as high as in the US. So in the end it is kind of the same.

No, it wouldn't be only half as cheap if healthcare was taken care of. For many of us it'd be significantly more. I just got quoted for COBRA recently and it was more than double my current monthly expenses. That wasn't even for a family plan but rather for an individual one. And it isn't like it paid for 100% of medical care anyway. Luckily I was able to secure a job and got a much more reasonable rate instead.

>I was able to secure a job and got a much more reasonable rate instead

Sure. It's going to be a lot cheaper if someone else is picking up the majority of the tab. Leaving aside some tax effects and a small administrative fee, COBRA is basically priced at your contribution plus your employer's contribution to a group insurance plan. When I've looked it's not been much different from a comparable plan on the exchanges.

It's not necessarily a bad deal because the benefit of being able to do the sabbatical while young has its own benefit. You can see more places and enjoy different types of experiences. And there is no guarantee you will live that long or be physically able to do the things you may want to do when younger. So it could be worth the trade off.

I’m 100% on board with this if this means people will be able to actually save for a sabbatical. The reasons why pensions existed to begin with is that workers were pretty poor savers. Then the biggest pension generation voted that it’s pensions for me but not for thee and changed everything to 401k/IRA/Big Mattress and turned it back on the worker to figure out. All while keeping wages down as the world costs increase. One of the best things you can do is live debt free. Even if that means living in an RV or on a boat or tiny house or grandmas basement. Live debt free. Don’t become entangled in needing to work to survive. Living paycheck to paycheck because Bank of Pain needs their flesh.

> Live debt free. Don’t become entangled in needing to work to survive

I don't know about you but with no debt and no income I wouldn't survive very long, as I need annoying things like food.

I never said don’t work

> Don’t become entangled in needing to work to survive

If you need to work to get food, you need to work to survive

You’re right. So don’t let it get to that point. Work and live below your means. If you are working full time and struggling to put food on the table then take a look at your debt.

Work and save so you have 2x more days not working than you do working.

Which is fair if you don't like your job or don't get intrinsic satisfaction from making more money/increasing your lifestyle.

If you're working full time and struggling to put food on your table, that probably means you're trapped in one of the various poverty traps or financial spirals like healthcare costs that plague this country. These are very hard to get out of and telling ordinary people to just be the kind of extraordinary person who can escape that situation is not just utterly useless but also counterproductive. We point to the folks that have either through extraordinary skill or effort or luck gotten out of those situations and use them to justify perpetuating broken and exploitative systems that trap people in poverty and debt by claiming that clearly people can get out. "Just take a look at your debt" is among the most infuriating things you could say to someone in that situation. Oh it's that easy is it? Just "look at my debt"?

Ive gotten enough exposure to the flip side, the lender side, of these stories to see how we (meaning literally the people I went to school with) deliberately engineer these systems to exploit you. You're not just "looking at your debt." You have to escape a system engineered by Yale lawyers and Wharton mbas and internet grifters and psychologists and marketers and financiers and salespeople and mortgage companies and private equity (who owns your land, hi appolo!) and Berkshire Hathaway (who owns your mobile home) and hospital administrator and so so so so many other people

We are all presented the same choices (granted from different levels of privilege) and we all make decisions. Health care costs are ridiculous, I agree, and people shouldn’t go broke if they get sick. That said, they shouldn’t be eating garbage and things that make them sick. You can’t complain that your finances are drained from cancer all while your whole life you ate Taco Bell and McDonalds. Choices have consequences. Debt is a result of that. There’s really only two maybe three kinds of good debt. Everything else is a salesman trying to get you roped into a payment scheme like you describe. It’s the ultimate bazaar, backed by the lawyers and justice system saying you agreed to pay. Don’t agree to pay for things. Stop buying crap off Facebook. Buy a used car instead of making payments on a new one. Love yourself and stop trying to keep up with the neighbors.

I see this take as completely out of touch. It seems like you come from an entirely different world. Have you ever had to use the McDonald's apps for deals cheap enough to afford dinner? I love to cook and it generally saves me a lot of money but I've still been put in this situation before. Not eating garbage? That's a luxury not everyone can afford. Yes, many can afford it and still do so but that isn't all that is happening.

When it comes to debt sometimes you have to. I had the option to stay where I was where I would still be making <$10/hr or take on student loan debt for a chance to have a better life. I drive a hunk of junk I paid $300 that makes me feel unsafe every time I get in it. It wobbles to hell and I have to deathgrip it to maintain control. It's probably endangering everyone on the road too. But that's what I can afford at this point in my life. Although I'd rather not own one at all because it causes a lot of financial stress to maintain.

I don't buy much beyond the essentials and it's taken me a decade of constant effort to get to even this point. I've also been incredibly fortunate in many ways. There are a lot of people much worse off.

I grew up poor, by every measure I still am. However, I don’t have the debt that others do. It’s actually cheaper to eat healthy than eat McDonald’s. I’m not talking Non-GMO, certified organic overpriced food for a guilt sale. I mean cans, beans, rice, flour, etc.

Those who are struggling are continuing to attempt to do the same thing and it isn’t working for them. If you worked hard for a decade, without getting anywhere, whose fault is that? Society for keeping you down? Or you for staying so long? Everything is constant effort. I’m not talking FIRE movement, I’m just saying you don’t need that TV. You don’t need that Apple Watch. You don’t need that Tesla. I realize making atonement for your financial troubles is going to hurt even more. The other option is, like many here, start a company. I do know that it was extremely painful for me to become debt free, it’s still a struggle not to fall into it for all the reasons you describe. I choose to ignore ads, not watch media, ignore the pressures to buy buy buy, and I’m doing fine. Not rich, but not hurting anymore.

Have you considered eating the rich?

Get your iOs-flavored socialism outs here

You should work on building up savings then.

That's what people spend their entire working lives doing, so they can retire on those savings.

And this thread is about changing that...

At a population level that's where rent increases to extract every spare cent from workers.

Sure an individual worker can earn more and spend less, but at scale if everyone does that means that the excess money is taken by land owners.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It didn’t used to be this way. Rent control helps not just renters but keeps runaway property values from occurring due to renters. Without control to keep the industry from raising rents to 99% of what you can afford, we’ll continue to see what you describe. If I know humanity, it’s that they will always find the next sucker.

I could feed my family with part-time odd jobs, not a “real job”. Still working, but less and with more freedom.

Health insurance and healthcare bills would be what made it impossible, even with no debt.

The idea of the post is based on the fact that this period would be covered by the same social security fund that covers retirements right now in most of social-democratic european systems, so you don't need to save for sabbatical the same way you don't need to save for retirement under these conditions.

I’m aware, and I’m 100% behind it. It’s the right move. For Poland, for mental health, for invigorating the workforce. I complain about the US system because it’s sooo backwards and it’s what I know. It’s also being used to model other European efforts to eliminate pensions and retirement efforts.

Living debt free feels great, and is a huge privilege. Debt is perhaps the biggest economic driver humans have invented. It gives people leverage they would not otherwise have. College. Small business. Home improvement. Of course there is the downside of usury, payday loans, cc debt, medical debt, inflated education expenses, and all the other troubles caused by debt. But well-chosen debt can be a godsend.

Especially when it's interest free - thanks, BNPL startups and venture capital! I appreciate interest free loans at your expense.

>Then the biggest pension generation voted that it’s pensions for me but not for thee and changed everything to 401k/IRA/Big Mattress and turned it back on the worker to figure out.

With very low cost target date retirement funds and near free index funds, there is no difference other than cutting out middlemen defined benefit pension fund administrators. All the money is going to the same place, backed by the same federal government.

The bigger problem is that while it is easy to vote more money into existence, it is not easy to vote more labor and materials into existence.

Defined-benefit plans do not work. Maybe you can pick out some arbitrary 20/30/40 year window where they did, but with current demographics and projects demographic changes the math just doesn't add up.

At least with defined-contribution plans you are able to save for yourself rather than just hoping your retirement fund is still there in 50 years and having to save for yourself on top of that.

>Defined-benefit plans do not work.

Or at least they were generally oriented towards multi-decade employment with the government or a large manufacturing company. There were pension fund protections put in place over time and I won't personally regret having a modest payout from a long-ago employer whose pension fund has made it through a couple acquisitions.

But defined benefit pensions are another case of tying important benefits to an employer which people shouldn't generally favor, especially today. It's nice having a small lottery ticket I was probably only vaguely aware of at the time but it's not really good policy.

At 46, I am taking a one-year Sabbatical and I can assure you it’s refreshing. However, I don’t see most people being able to take one - both financially and mentally.

Many people are lifers on a job, and the prospect of being out of their job for 3 months is scary at hell to them. They feel they won’t be able to reconnect with the market. Not everyone in society is the HN crowd, switching jobs for better paying alternatives every few years.

On the other hand, even though I had prepared for 12 months in advance having “stuff” to do on day 1 of my sabbatical, I can say the prospect of waking up on day 1 and not having a job to go, can be overwhelming for many after a few weeks. After a few months, you become terrified you are being left behind in the market, even if not the case.

I try to learn from this so when retirement hits me in 20 years I can be more prepared for the required mental adjustment. I have seen my parents generation taking a toll on their health by stopping cold turkey and feeling irrelevant in society…

I've been seeing reports like this daily from people close to me, especially in the tech world.

I increasingly feel that we need these breaks, and it leads me to conclude that we've really messed up the work model we've built in society.

Perhaps a part-time model would be more humane and mentally sound for a healthier society where people can enjoy their short time on this planet.

Just popping in to say: me too! I feel like there needs to be a community or forum for people like us. I know at least one other person in my circle doing the same. Seems to be rare but more common than I realized...

I’ve been on sabbatical for 18 months now so my son wouldn’t have to go to daycare and so that I could also tackle some large remodeling projects around the house and re-invent myself as a web developer.

The value added to my home and the time spent with my son was far more than I would have earned during those 18 months.

However, now that I’m ready to go back to work, I’m finding it difficult to land an entry level web development job. We are fine financially but I need to find something with benefits or else I’ll have to keeping spending $1700 per month to insure my family.

> However, now that I’m ready to go back to work, I’m finding it difficult to land an entry level web development job.

This is the risk.

A year ago you would have been fine, but in this environment you're competing against a lot of people who have been working the entire time.

From an interviewer's perspective: I've hired a few people after long gaps with very mixed results. Some people get right back into the job with renewed career vigor. Some people really, really struggle to get back to work after a long break. Some of them aren't interested in anything more than collecting a paycheck and benefits to restore their savings for the next sabbatical, which will occur whenever the company finally gets tired of their non-performance and fires them.

That's the risk for employers: It's hard to know the real reason that somebody had a gap on their resume because everyone has a good story to tell in the interview.

What's the difference that you see between people that had a gap and ones that didn't? I would expect an analogous grouping (struggling to continue working without a break, being in the "groove", just being interested in the paycheck) among people without a gap.

I think part of the problem is that very few people have a large gap, or at least very few people are honest about it. It's hard to compare two groups when one of them is N=9997 and the other is N=3.

I’ve still had income during the 18 months. I’ve been doing small freelance websites and also consulting for a friend of mine that owns multiple auto repair businesses.

I helped him adopt a new CRM and completely changed his SOP for his shops all from my computer.

Now I’m aiming for something that will allow me to progress as a web developer. I started coding in the 90s with HTML, QBasic, and IRC scripting. But I chose to pursue a careers in the trades because there simply weren’t any development jobs in my area back then.

I made a decent career out of construction which has allowed me to comfortably be at home for 18 months while handling smaller tasks when I wasn’t busy with my son or remodeling our home.

I will add that being a full time parent was far more stressful than anything else I have ever encountered in my 21 year career.

Wishing you success and a minimum of frustration and despair in your searching. It's taken me 18 months to get a job offer worth taking, and I would not wish 18 months of unemployment on anyone, no matter their ability to survive.

Thank you. My son began school 3 weeks ago and I’m beginning to go a little stir crazy. It’s been far too hot to work out in the yard so I’m presently redoing my portfolio site and working on a unique full stack project that is relative to the construction industry.

I told myself that I’m not employed by the end of the year I’m going to go back into construction management.

I don't wish to minimise your frustration, nor to imply that the following is easy.

But, unless the job search has consumed all of your free time, 18 months off work to pursue your passions is quite a gift.

The lack of income is a downer but if you can compartmentalize that, along with your fear of the future, then that time off could be spent taking up new hobbies, developing new skills, helping out family, working on fitness, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I've tried to make the most of my time for positive pursuits, but in my experience, I'd still rather have had a job and the income to be able to do literally everything else required by modern capitalism to survive while also being able to potentially pursue such passions.

I appreciate your positivity, but I wish you a bit more clarity about the downsides of 18 months without job income.

The working age is typically higher than what's shown on this page. It lists "Work" as age 25-64. 25 is chosen because "Teenager" goes up to 20 instead of 18, and "Studies" go through 24 instead of 22 (roughly considering that about half of the college-aged population attends it [1]). Roughly a third of high schoolers already have jobs [2]. If these students have been working 35 hours per week part time while still in school [3], that could tack on an extra 1.25 years of "work" by the time the students have graduated, assuming they had been working for about 6 years

[1] https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-enrollment-sta...

[2] https://www.zippia.com/advice/high-school-job-statistics/

[3] https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles...

I retired early (age 49), but I took a four month leave of absence about 5 years before that. Trying a leave instead of retiring was one of the few things I read about early retirement that made a lot of sense. I gather some people "miss" work or get bored. I didn't miss it when I took the leave and definitely was not worried about being bored when I did retire. Anyway if you are thinking of early retirement I highly recommend trying to take a leave of absence first. You might have to be willing to quit to make it happen though.

For individual people, this policy sounds fantastic. For the macroeconomy, this sounds kind of disastrous.

A policy that encourages less prime-age employment in a society that is already falling off the demographic cliff [1] seems really bad if your goal is to allow more people to spend more time using government benefits.

Poland is already going to struggle to support an aging population, and encouraging 35-year-olds to periodically remove themselves from the workforce feels like it will just accelerate the issue.

[1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/poland/2020/

The point is they'd compensate for working till later. I believe this should be more politically doable than raising retirement age, in agreement with the post. Under your argument all we can do is raise the retirement age to compensate the older demographic.

For some reason, hiring culture considers any employment gap as signaling a poor candidate. I’m not sure why, but I wonder if it is that someone who can take a year off work doesn’t have enough debt to make for a captive employee.

Or those hiring are just suspicious of people who don't make the same mistakes they do.

I think that opinion is changing. I regularly see engineers come in with gaps, and rarely do they not have a good explanation for it that anyone but the worst managers would be ok with. Whether it's child-rearing, testing early retirement, starting their own thing, whatever. About the only thing that would raise a flag for me was "I was in prison" and only because for regulatory reasons in my industry it's not possible to employ convicted felons.

Lucky you. 18 months job searching here, 10 years of experience - I absolutely could tell that I was seeing fewer contacts, interviews, offers, etc. in months 7-18 than months 1-6.

I'm not sure that sabbaticals solves the problem, though. The problem, I think, being that people are retiring at the same age but living longer and expecting better, more expensive, health care. Somehow that needs to be paid for. If there's an economic equivalence between the sabbatical I take now versus the extra time I work later (5% interest is assumed in the article), then there's no overall increase in value, is there?

I think the benefits of growth are still too biased towards people who already have money. The poor might not be getting poorer, but they're wealth isn't growing at nearly the rate of the rich. Somehow that needs to be evened out so that even the working class see more improvement in their lifestyle in a more natural way.

I just think this proposal solves a different problem than the one you’re talking about. Presumably it would be designed to be overall revenue neutral, depending on how well future growth can be predicted of course.

Whether it’s 3 month’s sabbatical to 1 year retirement, or 2 months to 1 year, or 4 months to 1 year, etc.

"After working full-time for at least five years, you can take extended paid leave financed from retirement savings. In return, you voluntarily agree to increase your retirement age.

For example, you can take three months extra paid leave while you are 35 by agreeing to increase your retirement age by one year."

In the US, it wouldn't fly with a corporation doing this because the expense would be on them. It'd make more sense to revise IRS rules to allow these sabbatical periods (by allowing portioned access to your IRA / 401k with tax rules adjustments) with government-mandated unpaid time off in exchange for retirement age adjustments. I'm not saying I agree with what I've just said, I'm thinking about how corporations and the government would allow playing ball with the exchange idea to begin with.

The company my wife works at allows paid sabbaticals (that gives a month / month-half off) after 5 years of employment, and her's will start in a few month. However, there's no guarantee that you still will have your job by the end of it, but because it's sanctioned by the company, I'd imagine there's less of a likelihood that happens.

I’m 39. I’ve taken a 2-month-long sabbatical this year, and it was one of the best things I ever did for myself.

I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD/AS just before Christmas, after having seen a psychiatrist complaining about chronic fatigue (cf. my Ask HN from two years ago [0]). The medications initially helped, but it was obvious to me that I also needed a substantial amount of rest. So when my company instituted a sabbatical policy soon after, I was first in line to take advantage of it.

I split it in two parts. The first one was a long-distance cycle trip that I’d been fantasizing about for years but never had time; I did it this June and thoroughly enjoyed three weeks of exercising my body physically and letting my head rest for a change. After that, July was pretty much a staycation, do-whatever-I-feel-like month. I read books, met friends, played with my pet projects, started learning Rust.

I also read more about ADHD and had some key insights which turned into some new habits after I returned to work this month. It might have been my most productive ever, even more so than January after diagnosis. Most importantly, I’ve been maintaining an emotional balance throughout that time; I don’t feel the weariness growing on me anymore.

I think all that would be impossible had I not taken the sabbatical. This is just a datapoint, but I highly recommend it if you can afford it.

As for the article, I’m not sure what I think about replacing retirement with sabbaticals. The idea is certainly interesting, but to me, while the two can supplant each other, they are not necessarily interchangeable.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768418

Mid-40s here. I do contract work and it’s fine. I take 5 or 6 months off every few years and am planning to take a full year off to travel in the next five years.

We could die any given day so try to enjoy them.

This is excellent reasoning. "Retirement" as it is thought of today, is a fairly recent phenomenon and was originally thought to be quite brief.

From my experience long periods scattered through your life is better. I was able to retire in my early 30s and have just engaged in intense multi-year periods of work since, always with gaps of a year or more afterwards. It allowed me to spend more time as a parent, more time with my spouse, and to spend time doing fun activities I will not be able to do in my 70s.

I think some professionals will have trouble adapting to this because there will be a strong impetus to "advance their career" rather than take a gap. But encouraging this mode may encourage people to take these gaps, and in fact improve the balance vs today's system in which it's mostly women who have trouble advancing because of time off with the kids.

I have had a bit of a forced mid-life (37) retirement for the last 6 months due to being laid off.

It's actually been really nice because I'm lucky enough to have enough savings accessable, so it's been a nice low-stress time to recover from working at a start up.

What's absurd to me is much of the money I've saved is in a traditional IRA that I reasonably can't touch without penalty until I'm 65 without doing some advanced financial planning like a Roth ladder which requires planning at least 5 years in advance. Hard to plan for being laid off....

My parents died at 68. That they paid social security for their entire careers and got so little is absurd.

It's such a shame to me that culturally we emphasize career over life experiences and expect people to wait until their life is ending to enjoy it.

> My parents died at 68. That they paid social security for their entire careers and got so little is absurd.

Do their children (i.e. you and your siblings if any) get to access it? If yes, it’s not a complete waste.

Nope, my brothers and I inherited their private savings, but no public benefits.

My mom received a portion of my father's air force pension after he passed, but not us since we weren't dependents any longer.

I take it contributing to SS is voluntary? Else it’s kind of like robbery.

When you take a job with a pension, you run the risk of not being able to collect that pension if you die early. But it’s your choice to take the job.

SS is withheld in every paycheck by your employer and you can't opt out. The employer pays half and the other (6.2%) is withheld from the employee's gross income. Currently totaling 12.4% of income.

https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc751

Wishing you better luck getting back into a job than I had - months 1-6 of job searching were straightforward enough, but after that, each successive month started making me feel like I was being judged for continuing to look for a job instead of taking the first thing that would give me "current" experience.

Yeah, starting to feel that for sure.

I don’t think that was the point of Social Security.

It was so that people no longer physically able to work wouldn’t starve to death.

And yes it’s very sad that some people don’t live long enough to get the benefits of the program.

If i remember correctly the Canadian system for this seems sensible; there is a tax deferred account but you can pull it out at any time without additional penalty (you pay income tax of course). I think you can't put it back in though. At some age (70ish?) you have to start taking it out somewhere in the 5-10% range.

It is unfortunate that the modern retirement, in the US, is "work until you're incapable of working", then survive your last lingering years using up whatever savings you managed to stash away.

Yes, it was always thus for the poor, but the poor is now almost all of us. Whatever happened to the middle class?

> Yes, it was always thus for the poor, but the poor is now almost all of us.

The poor has, for all of history, always been almost all of us.

> Whatever happened to the middle class?

The petit bourgeois middle class of capitalist(-ish, in the case of the modern mixed economy, but it does not differ on this point) society has always been a narrow segment, it is “middle” between the working class and the haut bourgeoisie, not “middle” in the sense of median or modal experience.

The working class have generally been insecure; there was a brief period of broader, particularly white, working class prosperity post-WWII that the right, particular since Reagan, has both attacked via anti-labor policy and used the effects of their attacks on the White working class to fuel racial resentment that they’ve used as the cover for further attacks on the working class behind racist appeals.

I'd like to hear from people that have done sabbaticals or even a longish unpaid time off (say 6 weeks or more).

How many times have you done it?

How did you manager take it?

How did you colleagues react?

I'd like to take a few weeks off, unpaid but I'm quite fearful about how the business will react.

A friend of mine at Intel got a sabbatical after a few years. IIRC, they are the “default” path, at least for engineers, although I don’t know if everybody does it or what.

It seems like an awesome perk.

A well run company shouldn’t have a big problem if a single engineer vanishes. If management has trouble getting you time for a sabbatical, it would seem you are in a position to ask them for a ton of money.

I did a total of four 3-month sabbaticals - three of them via quitting, one time I got fired and was too burned out to immediately look for a job.

The most common reaction was surprise that I don't have anything lined up mixed with only half-joking displays of envy that I have the means to just do nothing for this long(which was somewhat of a headscratcher considering we all had similar salaries).

Nevertheless my current employer(or actually middleman, since I'm a contractor) is fine with them as long as they're betweeen projects - I need to notify them two months in advance and can pick up where I left. No guarantee that I'll end up in the same organisation though.

I wholeheartedly recommend doing them at least once every three years.

Not only you get to focus on other things in life than just work, you can time your job hunt for the hottest moments of the year - typically last months of each quarter except for Q2.

6 weeks is honestly not that much. In a long-ago product management job I took several month long vacations. I planned things around product schedules as best I could. I could probably have added some time with unpaid leave (though I didn't) but it was never an issue. Some colleagues were shocked that I could just go off and do this but no one responsible for actually paying me ever had a problem.

If you can share -- how big was the company you were working for?

It was one of the big minicomputer companies (Data General). Certainly something over 10K employees.

Yes, this sort of thing is harder with smaller firms and I never tried more than 2-3 weeks when I was an analyst at small firms. Could probably do the same thing in my current role but work and personal travel have been sufficiently intertwined I've never really tried. (You also don't generally need to be off-the-grid as completely as you used to be.)

This only helps if your demographic problems are far in the future, because you need to catch your workers when they are young enough to make this trade. In many places, the cohort they are worried about is already too old for this to work.

Also, I would totally expect people to game this system when they get older in order find ways to get out of that extra year or two of work that they promised. Expect a lot of 65 year olds to suddenly develop this or that disability that makes them unable to continue working.

Or maybe we can go further with a personal qualification salary for everyone, stopping the run for economic growth at all cost before it's too late for our planet (and us) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Qualification_Salar...

This seems more complex than UBI with no clear advantages.

Would love to see parternity/maternity leave for non parents, and normalization of 4 day work weeks.

> Would love to see parternity/maternity leave for non parents

Do you mean for an individual supporting a new parent, or something like that? How would it be particularly different than a general family medical leave? (other than getting appropriately paid, which we definitely need)

With the sword of unemployment hanging above my head? No I'll prefer FIRE than this.

Previous post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148898

In a world with something UBI-like, sabbaticals are handled by default via the safety net of everyone having a minimum viable income to fallback on.

> Whether you like to use that time to explore the world, build bonds with your family or brainstorm a new project is up to you.

Sadly I think that is an optimistic view. Many will watch daytime TV and get drunk.

Why is your pessimistic view any more valid or probable?

if we all did work we loved, we wouldn't need to retire. sadly the world has created a machine that feeds souls to produce profit for the elite to fed grapes.

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