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Are you due for a sabbatical Not to detract from your advice, but what's with that question? Virtually no engineer has a job that offers sabbaticals. Even the

Are you due for a sabbatical Not to detract from your advice, but what's with that question? Virtually no engineer has a job that offers sabbaticals. Even the companies that family used to don't anymore. I don't doubt someone will chime in and say "my job offers me a sabbatical", but they're in the extreme minority. You might as well ask, "does you job offer free massages? If so, I recommend you go for the shiatsu"

wjossey 8y ago
YMMV. A lot of the startups in my circle now offer sabbaticals. I get it’s not even remotely common in non tech related jobs, but in tech jobs in the US it’s absolutely on the rise. I wouldn’t call it rare anymore. I get that’s a very heavy anecdotal answer but my day job has me interact with a lot of companies from a people / performance perspective, so I see a lot of these policies first hand. It’s also come up in five of the fifteen most recent mentoring conversations I’ve had (just went and double checked my notes). Can’t really produce anything more concrete than that for you, unfortunately. No clue what the hard data is. Might just be some weird bias based on the type of work I do. -- EDIT -- Switched to my laptop and found an HBR article saying it's about 17% of companies. So, doesn't seem that rare. https://hbr.org/2017/08/research-shows-that-organizations-benefit-when-employees-take-sabbaticals https://hbr.org/2017/08/research-shows-that-organizations-be...
ido 8y ago
Keep in mind that in America a "sabbatical" may mean something like 2-3 weeks off...I.e. what in Europe would just be a normal vacation (most every job I ever had in Austria or Germany included ~25 days [5 weeks] off per year - it is common for people to take 2-3 weeks of those in the summer in one go). The original meaning (and the one that will probably throw europeans off) was 1 year every 7, which I would venture a guess is so rare outside of academia/education as to basically be irrelevant.
- solipsism 8y ago
  No, it doesn't.

wjossey 8y ago

YMMV. A lot of the startups in my circle now offer sabbaticals. I get it’s not even remotely common in non tech related jobs, but in tech jobs in the US it’s absolutely on the rise. I wouldn’t call it rare anymore. I get that’s a very heavy anecdotal answer but my day job has me interact with a lot of companies from a people / performance perspective, so I see a lot of these policies first hand. It’s also come up in five of the fifteen most recent mentoring conversations I’ve had (just went and double checked my notes). Can’t really produce anything more concrete than that for you, unfortunately. No clue what the hard data is. Might just be some weird bias based on the type of work I do. -- EDIT -- Switched to my laptop and found an HBR article saying it's about 17% of companies. So, doesn't seem that rare. https://hbr.org/2017/08/research-shows-that-organizations-benefit-when-employees-take-sabbaticals https://hbr.org/2017/08/research-shows-that-organizations-be...

ido 8y ago

Keep in mind that in America a "sabbatical" may mean something like 2-3 weeks off...I.e. what in Europe would just be a normal vacation (most every job I ever had in Austria or Germany included ~25 days [5 weeks] off per year - it is common for people to take 2-3 weeks of those in the summer in one go). The original meaning (and the one that will probably throw europeans off) was 1 year every 7, which I would venture a guess is so rare outside of academia/education as to basically be irrelevant.

solipsism 8y ago
No, it doesn't.