[NikolaNovak]

I think the advice is a reasonable thing to consider; a lot of responses (and presumably downvotes) are either "It doesn't matter to potential employers", which is categorically untrue - it'll matter to some, raise a question to others, and be irrelevant to others yet. How you answer that question is important, and it's fascinating that other half of comments is, basically, "Lie!".

When I'm interviewing candidates, a gap year is a data point - no more, no less. It may lead to more substantial data points, or it may be a non-issue. If you do as many here suggest and lie through your teeth about it ("I was a CTO! I was working on startup! Independent consulting"), you may get away with it, but likely not (even if you think you did); and if caught in prevaricating or lying about your experience and work activities, that is a far far bigger and more immediate red flag than the gap year itself.

Also - sure, knowledge doesn't expire, but oh boy skills do get rusty! A year into my new management-y role, I felt how rusty my sysadmin skills were getting. Two years in and you shouldn't give me root access again without some catchup :-).

[ahelwer]

You mind seems to be trapped in the employment binary where you're either a full-time W-2 employee or you're unemployed. With contracting and startups it isn't so simple. Contractors (especially ones working in boutique niches on scoped projects) might work for a month with much time between contracts. During that down time maybe they write blog posts or contribute to OSS or hang out with someone else prototyping some neat ideas that don't pan out (which might reasonably be called a startup after the fact) or just do literally nothing so as to recover from burnout, which is lethal to the contractor in a way it isn't to an employee. All of which feed into more people dropping into their inbox inquiring about their contracting availability. It isn't "lying" to say time spent not working on a paid contract is time spent in service of contracting.

[NikolaNovak]

1. All of it is true in general and explicitly not the case for the OP/GP I was responding to, which indicated a traveling/no-work year, so it feels you're fighting a straw man.

As well, all of it is easily discussable during interview, and my team and myself will not see any of these in a negative light.

2. >> "It isn't "lying" to say time spent not working on a paid contract is time spent in service of contracting."

Of course not. At the time of my post however, a lot of advice in comments was explicitly to lie and "Say you were in a startup / independent consulting / working on OSS / CTO even if you weren't, rather than admitting to gap / traveling year", and my reaction to them is: That lie will harm you much more than any honest discussion of the gap year.

So again, I feel we are talking past each other here a bit. I've been a contractor, I've been a consultant, and I'm a full-time employee now; I've taken a time to write a book/techmanual, I've run a photography business for a bit,and I've taken extended paternity leave; so I don't think my mind is trapped into thinking of employment as binary. But I do think honesty during interview is paramount - on my team, I don't care how good your technical or functional skillset is, if we cannot trust your integrity. I understand that this is a tricky position for the candidate as market at times rewards dishonesty; but I try to be convincingly upfront in what we're looking for.

[ghaff]

Someone who has been doing "independent consulting" for six months or a year is pretty transparently obfuscating that they were unemployed. I'd probably view it in a better light--not that there's anything wrong with doing or trying to do some consulting on the side--if they were just open about taking some time off.

[jen20]

> Someone who has been doing "independent consulting" for six months or a year is pretty transparently obfuscating that they were unemployed.

Lol, what? I did exactly that after getting pissed off with $LARGE_CRAPPY_EMPLOYER. Worked for 3-4 companies for 6-8 week periods over that time on a short term basis, and made more than $LARGE_CRAPPY_EMPLOYER by a factor n > 2, and did some work on a startup. But then $LARGE_EMPLOYER came along with an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Don’t project what “independent consulting” might mean for you onto everyone. It would be interview-ending if I caught a hiring manager suggested this was a euphemism, and I’d subsequently recommend every person that asked me about said company steered clear.

[jlokier]

Heh, I did "independent consulting" for over a decade.

It's also the most densely packed section of my resume because it was by far the most interesting and diverse range of work in that time.

[ghaff]

I didn't express things very well, Sure, I know lots of independent consultants who are legitimately work full-time or at least on a regular basis. I was more referring to someone who just sticks "consulting" on their resume so they don't have a gap but didn't actually do anything.