HACKER Q&A
📣 8bit-curser

Creative Sabbatical Yes or No?


My question is concise I been working since Im 16 and in software since I'm 17 now I am 29 and I feel burnt out. I have been considering taking a 6 months sabbatical but Im worried this might look bad on my CV. During this time I wanted to rest and learn new techs, do projects and take care a bit of myself. What do you guys think?


  👤 thesuperbigfrog Accepted Answer ✓
It would probably good for your mental health.

If you came away from the sabbatical refreshed and ready for new things that alone would be worthwhile.

Rich Hickey's creative sabbatical gave us Clojure:

"I started working on Clojure in 2005, during a sabbatical I funded out of retirement savings. The purpose of the sabbatical was to give myself the opportunity to work on whatever I found interesting, without regard to outcome, commercial viability or the opinions of others. One might say these are prerequisites for working on Lisps or functional languages. I budgeted for two years of self-directed work, and Clojure was one of two projects I pursued. After about a year I decided the other project (a cochlear modeling and machine listening problem) was more of a research endeavor that might require two to five more years, so I dedicated myself at that point to getting Clojure to a useful state."

Source: https://download.clojure.org/papers/clojure-hopl-iv-final.pd...

As long as you have the savings to do it, I say go for it.