Ask HN: Have you ever taken a 6-month to 1 yr break anytime during your career?

[captmorrel]

I have been working in the software field 20+ years. During all this time, I have never really taken a long break. I have thought about it a lot recently, and feel that stepping away from a 9-to-5 grind for some time (with the intent of getting back) would be helpful for the following reasons: 1) Exploring tech you are interested in on your own schedule. If you are exploring something deep, I feel like its very beneficial to set your own pace and schedule. 2) Having a free mind might allow some ideas to emerge that you can refine and work on. And maybe set a track for a new job when you get back.

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!

[nicbou]

Yes, to ride a motorbike from Germany to Central Asia. At some point during the trip, the website I run became profitable enough to live from, so I'm extending that break until it's no longer possible.

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.

[captmorrel]

Great that you are extending your break, congrats!

"Every day is Saturday"."It rekindled my passion for programming". "...constantly feeling that I am squandering that time". "I end up feeling like I should still use every single one of them". All very valid feelings that I expect to have. Thanks for elucidating this. I think the best we can do is be aware of them, and any amount of planning is not going to mitigate these. The point about friends being busy is also very valid.

Very valuable, helpful inputs. Much thanks!

[rainygold]

I'm curious as to how you monetised the site? Your site would have been so useful when I moved to the city a few years back.

[nicbou]

Moving to another city leads to a few necessary purchases. I help people find the right services and get a commission. That includes things like health insurance, a bank account and an apartment.

It's just good ol' affiliate marketing, except that I don't build the content around monetisation. I built the sort of honest website I wanted to find when I moved here.

[lm28469]

> At some point during the trip, the website I run became profitable enough to live from

What's that website if I may ask ?

[nicbou]

allaboutberlin.com

[lm28469]

Pretty nice, I live here and never heard of your site. I'll keep it in my favs

[mattnewport]

I backed the Oculus Kickstarter and decided VR was going to be big. I quit my games industry job, moved to a ski resort for 6 months and snowboarded and did a lot of VR experiments.

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.

[captmorrel]

This is an excellent example of how these things could not have happened unless you took a step away from the grind. I know some people would say you could do that while working, but somehow I dont think so :) Thanks for sharing!

[elias94]

Yes, I came back as engineer after this last two years off.

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.

[captmorrel]

Thanks for your input! My main aim for the break is to be a better programmer. During my short breaks, I always started something which I believed help me get better. A long break would probably be the same, but at a different scale. Btw, I love Clojure! Have had the fortune to work with it in my professional career for a couple of years (worked and contributed to the "metabase" project), and it would definitely be something I would love to explore in depth!

[austincheney]

I have been on 5 military deployments to the Middle East of which 4 of those have occurred during my corporate software career.

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.

[MyHypatia]

>> the only worse thing worse is a solution that challenges peoples assumptions.

I was naive and thought that if I actually solve the problem, people would be happy to have the problem solved. It turns out, people just get really angry because they feel embarrassed and humiliated that they weren't the one to solve the problem.

[cl42]

After my first startup, my CEO coach recommended I take a "transition period" that lasts as long as I want, to reflect, internalize the learnings from my experiences, and not rush into whatever I wanted to do next. I also used a book called "Transitions"[1] to help me with my reflection.

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?...

[captmorrel]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I have to ask, how did it feel to come back to the grind after that period (if you did)?

[cl42]

Yes, I did... It's a great question.

I think I'm a much better leader, negotiator, and advisor now. By taking the year to think about what I did right and wrong over the prior 7 years, I was able to synthesize the lessons learned and make them stick.

As a result, I'm (a) much more picky with the projects/jobs/etc. that I do, and (b) am significantly more intentional with my time. As a result, I work on fewer things but get paid more, and the things I work on are significantly more rewarding.

I should note, however, that I've always been a workoholic and enjoy working -- plus, my wife is the same -- so it makes it easier to get back into the grind.

[luxurytent]

I'm on a 3 month paternity leave right now. I had a rough idea of what projects I wanted to complete but so far, it's been full throttle with my two kids (one being an infant)

I don't expect to get much done apart from enjoying the summer with the kids, tbh :-)

It has been nice so far, though.

[stevekemp]

I loved my paternity leave. After a few years I quit my fulltime job to take care of the child more too.

Unfortunately things didn't work out, and I had to go back to a full-time job, but I cherish the memories of that period. Babies are awesome, of course, but it was much more interesting and rewarding spending time as a stay-at-home parent with an older child, since we could talk and interact much more than was possible with a newborn.

[captmorrel]

Heh, you already have your priorities laid out. Must be liberating :)

[edmundsauto]

Yes, I saved up and lived on my own, doing some things that interested me. I put a little effort into creating a LLC, and took a couple clients (sub $10k contracts). That let me tel FAANG recruiters (truthfully) that I was consulting for that period, thus no resume gap.

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.

[sp332]

Yeah, I got laid off around 2011 and couldn't find a job for about 9 months. I think 6 months of sitting around doing nothing was really nice, but 9 was kinda pushing it. Definitely could have felt better about a longer break if I had worked on being more social, but I was barely leaving my house during this time.

[captmorrel]

Yeah I can understand - its a different mindset when you didn't intentionally take the break and it was forced on you. I have been laid-off and gone through the resulting emotions. I think I handle it much better now. Plus I have some runway to take a break.

[sp332]

Yeah the stress was at a different level when I was coming to the end of unemployment benefits (which were extended due to one of those economic disasters), but that didn't seem relevant to your question :)

[captmorrel]

Appreciate your being on point. Hope you are doing well now!

[geophile]

I had a product idea, my company didn’t want to do it, so I took off 9 months to create it. I am an engineer and had no real sales or marketing plan, just software. I was scratching a really bad itch.

I connected with a startup with a complementary product, and we had some success before the company was acquired in late dotcom madness.

[captmorrel]

Sounds like it worked out well for you. Congrats!

[nick0garvey]

I took around 6 months off and travelled for a while.

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.

[smoorman1024]

Yes, I had a 15 month non-compete after leaving a high frequency trading firm. I got married and traveled 3 months around Asia (Japan, Korea, S.E. Asia, Australia). We came back and did some domestic travel then she went back to work and I started to concentrate on job search and personal projects.

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.

[captmorrel]

Yes, agreed, planning to a certain extent is vital. Thanks for your input!

[muzani]

I sold a company, bought an Alienware, a proper desk and chair, wrote up a bunch of Java templates, learned Kotlin, found that templates were not worth the effort. I bought an expensive ergonomic keyboard, realized that my typing style was all wrong and spent a month correcting it. I took on freelance jobs that were well paid and impossible, then returned the money when it was clear why nobody else took the jobs. I tried to learn JS and Node but didn't. I tried to start a startup with an accelerator buddy salvaging old tech from the startup I sold, but it became clear why they "survived" for 4 years instead of growing exponentially. I tried to help the acquiring company of my startup get into it, but they were busy touring the world, and it became clear it was more of a prestige acquisition rather than a strategic one. The remaining time was spent playing XCOM 2 while my wife was at work, on the fancy new computer I intended to use for work.

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.

[captmorrel]

Very interesting, winding road! Great anecdote laying out how things work out somewhat on their own (you did end up learning Node and JS somehow :) ). Thanks for writing it down, loved it!

[mikelevins]

After working full time for a few Silicon Valley companies for about fifteen years, I developed a chronic illness that forced me out of work for a couple of years.

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.

[kovacs_x]

As a person who's done that (3x ~1 year, 3x ~3-6 months "gaps" with total 20+ years experience as well), my simple answer is- yes, do it. Every other day you're only thinking on it is a loss for you!

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.

[captmorrel]

Thanks for the encouragement! I agree, its absolutely important to plan for it, not only for yourself, but for family and friends. This is one of the keys to it being a successful time off. I am of the slight suspicion that I might not want to get back to being permanent anymore like you. If you did move to freelance, may I ask how you handle health insurance for you and family? Or are you not in the US? :)

[kovacs_x]

nope, not in the US.

[ruben81adelaide]

I’ve pretty much been working non-stop since I was 18. I started self-learning when I was 14 and found a job as a programmer a few years after. I’ve only taken a long break when I decided to quit my full time job to create my own company. During that time I pushed my limits learning new technology and finding new ways to improve my code. After all, my business really depended on how good I developed the technology. So I think is worth taking a break to accomplish any objectives you have in mind: studying, travelling, experiencing new things, etc. It’s just one year of your entire life. You deserve breaks once in a while…

[louiswilbrink]

I'm a developer in my mid-30s, I've done this twice.

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.

[psyc]

I have taken several breaks lasting from 6 months to 2.5 years. They did not hurt my job prospects, but obviously I would likely be further in my career. I can live with that.

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.

[captmorrel]

Thanks for the input. I am a musical person myself, trained in percussion. I very well see myself picking it back up during the break. Tech + music + language learning + (racquet) sport would be how I structure most of my days, and that would be heaven to me! Same here about monetizing, always dreamed about it, but I guess I didn't want it bad enough since I havent done much about it!

[tachibana]

I took a break when I achieved my FIRE goals. I did all the usual stuff -- worked on personal projects, cleaned up the house, and played an insane amount of tennis and video games. After 6 months, I was so bored out of my mind that I started interviewing again. I discovered that I didn't hate the work, just idiot colleagues. Working as a software engineer in the Silicon Valley is a very cushy lifestyle, and I'm blessed to be able to do this type of work.

[ex3xu]

Sounds like you're looking to go on sabbatical? A lot of bigger companies have active sabbatical leave policies. If you're happy with your current company, you could talk to HR and see their position on it, as I think it's becoming a fairly common practice in tech and elsewhere.

https://blog.trello.com/sabbatical-leave

[captmorrel]

Yes, you can call it that but I haven't been in my current position long enough to qualify for a sabbatical. Also, the sabbatical is only like for a few weeks. I feel that doesnt fit with my notion of a longer-term break.

[rusticpenn]

Not sure how sabbatical works in your company. At least in mine we have possibility of 3 months to 6 months sabbatical where we get 75% paid during the sabbatical and 75% after until the 6 month gap fills itself in terms of pay.

[brutus1213]

Most companies also have unpaid LOA (leave of absence). Also, you might be able to talk to your boss (or bosses boss) to see if they can make it happen.

I know people who quit without having another gig lined up. Haven't done it myself.

[captmorrel]

Curious, what does an LOA give you? I dont suppose you get paid or still get health insurance. Is it just a stopping of payroll/benefits and resuming it once you are back?

[brutus1213]

Legally, I guess it depends on the state and country. If a company approves a LOA but changes its mind, perhaps that would be counted as a termination and make the person eligible for severance, unemployment, etc. I'm not a lawyer and this is tricky stuff. But from a human perspective, there is some expectation that HR or the manager would try to help the employee return back after the LOA.

[captmorrel]

That's a great benefit! We do get paid during the sabbatical but they are a growing company so I don't think they feel they can afford to make it that long, but they recognize the good that time off brings.

[gkfasdfasdf]

I took a 6 month leave of absence to go and study abroad. The subject of study was not technical at all, and I did zero programming while I was away. However, I didn't have any trouble getting back to work when it ended, and in some ways it helped as work felt fun and exciting again.