Why Aren't There More Schelling Holidays?

One big problem is the disparity between people with kids and those without - those with kids tend to take all their vacation days when school's out.

Those without kids spread theirs around the year so they get cheaper prices.

In practice this means things are very quiet during the summer/winter vacations and then there's a smearing of one or two people out each week for the rest of the year.

The company incentives would have to be more than the difference in prices for planes and hotels between on and off peak seasons - often thousands of dollars.

But there’s a much less costly strategy which gains a decent chunk of the same benefits: coordinate vacation. If everyone goes on vacation 3 weeks per year on the same 3 weeks, then that’s only 3 weeks of nonproductivity for the team; the other 49 weeks are full steam.

Isn't that what happens, de facto, in places like France, where the month of August is socially designated holiday month, and more or less every office worker takes their vacation at that time?

The holiday industry would have to have separate Schelling holidays.

I worked for a company that tried this one year: one week off in July and two weeks off around Christmas and New Years. About half the company loved it, the other half hated it.

The half that loved it liked that everyone else was off, so they felt like they had permission to disconnect. Other than a handful of people who had to work essential functions, everyone else was off for the week and didn't have to worry about what was going on back at the office and gave people a needed break.

The half that hated it disliked that they felt forced to take vacation at a time that didn't meet their needs, and so then they felt bad about taking additional vacation that impacted the team because they had been forced to take vacation at a time that wasn't useful to them. It was nice enough to get more time off, but didn't solve any of the problems you describe because the time off was still needed at other times.

We backed off and chose not to continue.

The main reason I think to have more coordinated time off is if people aren't taking enough time off. For example, my understanding is that in Japan people typically don't take their PTO, so the government and companies coordinate to have a large number of holidays when it's socially sanctioned to take time off.

I suspect this would cause more problems than it solves.  There are usually enough daily or on-demand tasks that at least a skeleton crew needs to be available always, and the nature of crowds and pricing is such that many people want to take vacation when others AREN'T.  And in-company coordination fails when people at different companies want to vacation together.  

Combine this with the general desirability of building businesses/teams that DON'T stop working when any one employee is missing, and the intent (even if not the execution) to remove those bottlenecks, and it's very difficult to stand up and say it's worth any inconvenience to reduce the impacts, instead of working to reduce the causes.

I've done this at a small startup before; it worked pretty well.

What about weekends? There are currently 104 days in a year where you're not supposed to work.

The big difference is that these days are uniformly distributed through the year, and aren't in a one or two week block.

Software companies usually want to be able to directly respond when a critical bug appears and not have to wait three weeks till everybody is back from holidays. 

FWIW, this post strikes me as a very characteristically 'Hansonian' insight.

Any industry with public exposure is going to run into problems. Take retail; having the store open at all possible profitable hours is much more important than having a full complement of staff at any given moment. My job is only adjacent to retail but even so, having a whole team go on vacation would put the supply chain on pause. That move might technically be possible with advance planning but it would have major impacts on throughput.

I think any sector that relies on moving physical matter (including people) through space is a bad candidate because you're often dealing with a cap on the amount of effective capacity your capital has, so having a team of people go dark will lead to underutilization. Consider maintenance jobs, shipping, manufacturing, food, emergency services, transport, and I'm sure a dozen others.

A middle ground version of this happens (in the US) over the summer when almost all kids are out of school for 8 weeks between June 15 and Aug 15 (plus or minus), so families that can often take thier long vacations during that time.

On my 10 person team, that led to the entire 8 weeks having 1-4 people off.

Coinbase does a quarterly weeklong shutdown and everyone I spoke with there was deeply grateful for it.  We would sprint to the shutdown, try to get everything finished / to a reasonable stopping point, then reevaluate projects on the other side.

Matt Yglesias makes a very similar case for more holidays here, including some interesting references to literature about the benefits of weekends and etc: https://www.slowboring.com/p/happy-juneteenth-observed

Basically unrelated, but I really enjoy the niche rationalist holidays of the Solstices, and to a lesser extent Petrov Day, Giving Tuesday, etc. We ought to come up with more of these!

In Italy we have this, in the Ferragosto week (around the 15 of August) a huge percentage of people is on vacation. In general a lot of people take vacations in August and schools of all order and levels (including university) are closed the whole month.

you cite software. turnover in that industry tends to be pretty high, which means the successful companies end up with some structure where when any particular engineer leaves, their responsibilities are re-distributed quickly. so (1) if a team member is out for a week their most urgent responsibilities can already be picked up by their peers and (2) wherever this isn’t the case, the employer is likely to see that as a failure in need of fixing.

unaligned week-long holidays sort of serve as a dry run to ensure that things are set up such that when the employee on leave were to leave permanently things would still continue.

there’s another way to address this coordination, btw: ask that employees schedule their time away 2 weeks in advance: when the team plans the next chunk of work, sequence things such that this employee won’t be working on a blocking task near the interval where they’re away.

regardless, certain Schelling points do arise naturally. it’s far more common for someone to take individual Fridays off than it is to take Tuesdays off, for example. weekends themselves are some example of what you’re getting at: extending those (by occasionally adding Fridays or Mondays) seems an easy course to follow.

But in practice, most people take a lot more vacation days than there are national holidays - which suggests that the current number of holidays is too small.

Wait, what? You're arguing that – from the business perspective – vacation days would be inferior to holidays. But now you're using that claim as an argument for itself.