My aim with this question here is not to solicit suggestions on whether a break is good or not career-wise. I am also not concerned about employers seeing a gap in my resume, since I feel I would not do well anyway with employers who raise it as a red flag, and I would avoid them.
I am just trying to get an idea of what you did during a break like that, and whether you thought it was worth it, or if it helped you in some way when you got back to the grind. I would be more interested if your activity during the break was somehow related to tech, as that's what I am aiming to do. I am aware that traveling and unplugging/digital detoxing and all are excellent options - just not something I have in mind for this iteration :)
Thanks in advance!
I've won the lottery. There's no other way to describe it. Every day is Saturday. I wake up on most days deciding what I want to do. It rekindled my passion for programming. I travelled more, went on more bicycle rides, cooked more, and spent more time messing in the garage. I always have time for friends too.
The downside is constantly feeling that I am squandering that time, that I'm not adding enough bullet points to my life resume to justify my lifestyle. It's trivially easy to do things "next Saturday" when I have 7 times more of them, but I end up feeling like I should still use every single one of them.
Digital detox is extra important. I keep an eye on time spent on the computer. It's too easy to browse mindlessly for hours, instead of doing something rewarding and meaningful. The Internet is the biggest threat to my goals, and I try to keep it tamed.
Another problems is that my friends are still at work. They're busy, then tired. They're also not super interested to hear about my weekday adventures, obviously. It's a little lonely in that sense.
Career-wise, I am still writing code (an average of two commits a day), but not in a team context. My skills are still fresh. I'm still running a website too. I often get job opportunities through contacts, so I don't think I would struggle to find work.
I decided I needed to partner with someone with domain expertise in an application area to really find a viable business model and ended up cofounding a VR surgical training company with an orthopedic surgeon I connected with on the Oculus forums.
Five years later we just passed 100 full time employees and the business is growing rapidly. I was lucky in how everything worked out but definitely think taking the time out was instrumental in getting to this point and it was a great experience anyway.
Having your mind free of the same routine and exploring interesting fields will really make your thinking process more elastic and new ideas will pop up more easily. But depends on why you want to take a long break.
Coming back to work, I found multiple HR compelling or asking more about my two years gap and telling me that I've to get a step back in my career. *uck them, is full of jobs at the moment and as always my rule is: if they talk about degree or career position instead of abilities is not worth it.
Going back to work is exactly as the last day that I left. Technology is evolving but not that fast, and filling a knowledge gap is quick. And you will not forget what you did for years ahah.
I traveled a lot, of the grid, did some project, read topics etc. So I obviously kept active at coding and technology.
If you have the gut is an experience that I recommend and I will do that again one day.
P.S. I'm learning Clojure. Rich Hickey developed it in two years off in his career as a hobby. So something good can came out from a long break sometimes.
I used my free time to write personal software. My second deployment gave me the opportunity to build the skills to move from a junior to a senior developer almost instantly. Otherwise, this extra practice has made me a stronger and more confident developer. Such confidence and portability has put me completely out of alignment with norms of corporate software developer practices which has made me a less attractive hire.
Now I am bored with life after watching people continuously fail in software in the same ways over and over again. After years of experience I have learned to just step back let those predictable failures happen, because the only thing worse is a solution that challenges people assumptions.
The only analogy I can think of is having a dumbass teenage child. You tell them not to do something stupid, they do it anyways, and then there are consequences. Then when you try to help they yell at you because their fragile ego is bruised, so you step back and let them fail but when they bitch at you about it you go do something else.
I took about a year off, in the end... I began by reading and running... I ran a few ultramarathons, which require 15-25 hours of training per week. I read a lot, particularly intense and complex books that require you to invest the time to actually read them and reflect on them.
In the second half of the year, I ended up traveling quite a bit -- Norway, China, Malaysia, Peru... Mainly to hike, but in every city I tried to set up meetings with startups and businesses to learn what the culture was like around work.
I think I learned more that year than in any year of my life.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZY23TS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
I don't expect to get much done apart from enjoying the summer with the kids, tbh :-)
It has been nice so far, though.
I now work at a faang. That said, I don’t think our recruiters would care about a gap. They only care about hiring enough people that are at or raise the bar. In fact, once you’re in the process, I don’t think anyone actually looks at your resume - we base it on signal from the interviews.
I connected with a startup with a complementary product, and we had some success before the company was acquired in late dotcom madness.
The travelling was great. I was out of the country for about 3 months and visited friends for the other 3. I filled my calendar during this and was constantly moving. I was in the best shape of my life by the end of it.
When I was done travelling, I came back and lived out of Airbnbs in the Bay Area until I found a job. This was really expensive, and gave me urgency in the job hunt. I was able to fully dedicate myself to job hunting, and interviewed at a lot of companies. This let me price my labor well and negotiate effectively as a result. No companies had a concern with the time off.
The income bump from the aggressive job hunting meant the 8 months didn't hurt me financially at all. This let me have an experience I'll remember for the rest of my life without much downside.
The travel was great and unforgettable. I would suggest taking it slow if you are thinking of something similar. We enjoyed places when we were there for at least a week or more. We both eventually got fatigued from the constant moving and planning. I would certainly do it again but I would try to spend more time in total and longer stays at fewer places.
When I got back and my wife was working again, I tried to stay physically active to take up as much time as possible. I committed to expanding some of my knowledge by working in languages and frameworks that I wasn't exposed to in my last position.
Even with the effort to keep active and learning there is still a lot of time on your hands when you are not working. This tends to get filled with more low potential pastimes like video games, TV, etc. Everyone I know who had a similar non-compete leaned on these pastimes more than they wanted to, but its really hard to fill that much time with productive activities. If you want to avoid your vices I would suggest setting out a plan for 3, 6, 9 months and revisiting it every month. I'm not saying you have to stick to your goals but you should stay long term oriented to be productive.
A friend needed someone to tour the country teaching programming to educational institutions, so that's how I got back into tech. I picked up JS and Node by teaching it, somehow.
I'm not sure if the break helped my career but I got a lot of stuff out of my system. I also used Kotlin for Android before Google officially adopted it. It didn't change anything but it looks good on the resume.
It took those couple of years to get a solid diagnosis and treatment, and to become functional again. When I returned to looking for work, I found it easier to get contracts as a consultant than to get hired as an employee. I had been thinking of trying that route for some time, but didn't really have an idea how to get started. The illness and loss of work forced me to learn how to do it.
It's now been my main mode of business for about sixteen years, longer than the time I spent as a full-time employee.
Working as a contract consultant has given me occasional breaks of anywhere from a few months up to almost two years. I know how to manage my finances now to weather those dry spells, and I use them to work on my own projects and to educate myself further. It works well for me.
As for me- I travelled quite a bit, completed a game project 5 years in a making, read some books, watched lot of movies, after last one of these "vacations" moved from permanent employment to freelance, to be able to have more time "in between". Not too positive on returning "pemanent" anymore. :D
I'd say- plan for it. Leave place for unexpected, but build a list of things you want to accomplish (for yourself, for your family, for people around you, ...), this way it'll feel more meaningful afterwards.
ps. afterwards You'll be same, but different, so it doesn't make much sense trying to hypothesize about that. Just do it! :D
ps. in CV you can always list it as a "gap year" & add some projects / hackatons you did during that time.
The first time was to launch my on consulting in a new city (Denver). I networked a ton and learned new technologies for 6 months. It yielded me the largest fee I've ever secured.
The second time I took 7 months off (once again after moving to a new city). I traveled to Singapore, the Netherlands, and Korea (twice). I was in different states visiting friends 2-3 weekends a month.
Both instances were incredibly fruitful. I got into incredible shape (I worked with two trainers, 5x per week) and inhaled books (fiction and business). These stretches are the best investment I've made in myself.
Some of the time (30-40%?) I spent recovering from burnout by relaxing or pursuing musical interests. The rest I spent working very hard on tech that I care about, alone and on my own terms. I enjoyed that very much, and it played a big part in my landing jobs I wanted. On the downside, I had always dreamed of monetizing my stuff, but never managed to do that. Oh well.
In summary, some of the time off was boring or depressing, but most of it was enjoyable and valuable.