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Comment by kindfellow92 | Hacker News Reader

This “Sabbatical” trend in software companies is really toxic. It’s a justification that allows companies to burn people out without looking bad. A sustainable interesting career doesn’t need a break. It’s a subtle admission that you’re overworked and your work is monotonous, which are both signs of a poorly managed company.

Sabbaticals are reserved for tenured professors who have been working for a lifetime so they can achieve something non-academic. It should not become a euphemism for breaks that burnt out programmers who lack time management skills take so they can get their life together.

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> Sabbaticals are reserved for tenured professors

Why do you think so? Sabbatical means a break. It's common for professors, but why prevent other people from taking it? I took a sabbatical from my uni to do some real work (and ended up moving unis, countries as a result), then took a sabbatical from work for personal reasons and did other things I wanted to do.

If that prevents a burn out for someone, great! Not every company has enough projects going on to reshuffle you to the place you enjoy. (Or may not want to for valid reasons) Not every sabbatical is about burnout either.

> Why do you think so?

Because... that's what they actually are. A sabbatical was a very specific thing that was hijacked by HR people in tech companies. What you did was take a break; that has very different connotations than what a sabbatical is supposed to be.

This may be a cultural thing, but I've always understood sabbatical as a long break - nothing explicitly related to academia. Multiple definitions I see on the internet seem to agree.

Well then I suggest you take a look at "The Origin and Early History of Sabbatical Leave"[1] -- its roots lie firmly in academia. It was re-appropriated (in probably the last ~10 years) by tech HR departments which are typically enamored with academia, so that's no surprise.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/40222893

I worked in an investment bank in the 1990s and they offered a sabbatical (and called it that) after 10 years and every 5 years thereafter IIRC. I think it was 2 months. At least 6 weeks. You had to take it all at once you could not subdivide it.

Let me rephrase: yes, the origins are in academia. What I meant is that the current definitions lost that bit. I think the meaning changed over time and often it's understood differently than in the 60s. I.e. currently it's not connected explicitly to academia, but rather a long term break from your current position in whatever sector.

Companies shouldn’t burn people out in the first place. Calling this bandaid a “Sabbatical” is just marketing to avoid looking bad for their poor management. They should use another word and not tarnish the very old tradition of academic sabbaticals.

Again, why do you think that "academic sabbaticals" are any different? Academics work hard and get burned out, just like programmers. It's not a coincidence that professors take their first sabbatical not long after getting tenure.

A sabbatical is a break where you do something different with your life. If it's good for the mind of an academic, it's good for the mind of a programmer too. Having just taken a gap year myself, I recommend it to anyone. It should be more available.

Well, some people use the word specifically for academia and not white collars with white collar jobs and white collar burnouts and white collar lives thinking they are somehow worthy of being called a "scientist", an "architect", an "engineer" because they wrote a bunch of loops and felt tired and accomplished.

I couldn’t disagree more!

This sabbatical seems exactly like something design to allow an expert focus on something outside the general scope of work. To really dedicate oneself to an academic pursuit.

I fully support providing engineers a conduit to build something that helps everyone!

> A sustainable interesting career doesn’t need a break.

That's absurd.

Traditional "vacation time" in software companies is really toxic. It's a justification that allows companies to burn people out without looking bad. A sustainable interesting career doesn't need breaks scattered across the year. It's a subtle admission that workers are so burnt out they need a break every few weeks just to continue to function, which is a sign of a poorly managed company.

Contrast this with sabbaticals, which are given to tenured professors who have been working for a lifetime so they can achieve something non-academic. Why do we acknowledge that professors may want to achieve something outside of their workplace, while not giving programmers a sabbatical to do the same?

>Sabbaticals are reserved for tenured professors who have been working for a lifetime so they can achieve something non-academic.

For devs it could also be to work on something that isn't profitable.

I don't believe it's a trend. There were "sabbaticals" at companies I worked at in the 1990s. "Sabbatical" typically just means a longer-than-normal vacation that you don't get routinely and don't get until after you've worked at a company for a long time.

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