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Comment by wdrw | Hacker News Reader

At least in North America (and the author seems to be from Canada), having a company give you any sabbatical at all is pretty rare, and 6+ months is pure fantasy:) And not everyone likes travel, the post actually explains his reasoning pretty well.

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> and 6+ months is pure fantasy:)

I've seen this before. Had a vendor become helpless after their only engineer took a 6 month sabbatical. Had to cancel orders and switch vendors because they stated "Until the engineer returns, we can not quote a delivery time." Imagine being that company...

Kinda surprising they weren’t able to plan around that, surely The Engineer didn’t just decide randomly to go on a 6 month sabbatical all of a sudden.

It was a small vendor that was bought up into a larger umbrella parent so I'm sure there was no one at the helm capable of thinking ahead of making this months numbers.

"Just so you know, our bus number is 1. Now, about your order..."

Intel at one time did 6 month sabbatical if you worked 10 years.

I work in the US and every year I take 17 days off over the July period which works out (with another company holiday) to be 4 continuous weeks. The first year I did it I told my manager "I'm going to take three weeks off, but what do you think about four?". I got my three weeks and made myself indispensable enough to get the four the next year.

This stuff can be negotiable if asked for and planned correctly. It won't be offered.

The Danes do it best, they basically shut down the country for 3 months every summer and have an unspoken agreement that nothing will get done.

>The Danes do it best, they basically shut down the country for 3 months every summer and have an unspoken agreement that nothing will get done.

Is there a skeleton crew to run grocery and fuel?

OP was talking about white-collar jobs, not service industry.

Yes, but something like 90% of the workforce is unionized, and 5 weeks vacation per year is by law, with a "sixth week" being a common perk.

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