We found a unicorn!

Jokes aside, that's a really admirable - and in my experience, rare - thing you're doing. Your employees are really lucky.

Thanks. Our business is well set up for it and it makes sense. I think more businesses can do it than they think. We all need hard reset now and again. It doesn’t take six weeks. Probably more like 2, but it is super important.

6 weeks is a long vacation, not a sabbatical. Those would be 6 months plus. I say this not to be pedantic but because I worry about the concept of a sabbatical being watered down before it becomes more commonplace.

6 weeks isnt a sabbatical. Thats a normal vacation in europe.

Interesting. I guess most Americans would call a sabbatical longer than that too, but it is a decent, hard disconnect from work well beyond a typical vacation. I don’t think I have taken that long off in 20 years.

Sabbatical is 1 year or more. 6 weeks is a vacation. You should also look up an article about bragging that was on HN few days ago.

Good article on bragging. I do it some of the time and without any shame. Part of being a business owner is promoting it with honesty. It blurs the line with bragging IMO. I do try to avoid it on HN, but pride, etc. I almost never share IRL, most people will not understand the context or effort or sacrifices required, and, a lot of it is luck too, so bragging obviously is self servicing to some extent. Thanks for pointing it out though, genuinely, it is good to think about. I think this fell under item (6) of the article.

6 weeks isn't a normal vacation. 20 to 30 days vacation allowance (excluding public holidays) is the norm in the private sector and while in theory you could use 30 days to take 6 weeks off, you'd have nothing for the rest of the year. 2 weeks is a normal big vacation, over summer, often in August.

Overlap it with public holidays, and you can get 17 or 18 days off in a row for 10 vacation days - 10 weekdays, three weekends and a public holiday or two. But it's usually better to plan a public holiday somewhere in the middle because of the extra traffic.

As terminology though it's not a sabbatical either. 6 weeks off sounds more like a gap between jobs with gardening leave or travel or some other project that wouldn't fit in a work vacation.

Normal in the sense that they get vacation time last, unlike in the USA (outside of the middle class+ bubble).