[gopalv]

> Part of me is tired of spending so much of my life in front of a computer.

I left my job 2022 February to not sit in meetings and mostly be a preventer of bad engineering rather than a builder of good stuff. On a good day, I told people how they were wrong - on a bad day, I told them how they were wrong, again.

If you have the option of taking a sabbatical, I would recommend taking one out of your own choice rather than being an unemployment statistic due to your own lack of motivation.

I quit rather than a sabbatical, because I could hand-pick my successors for the roles I occupied and it was better to kick about 3 people into core roles & get them promoted for it, than have them do the work only for me to show up 8 weeks later to hand it all back in for no benefit to their careers.

Took me 3 months before I didn't feel the need to "accomplish something today" to feel good about my day and mostly I went through my Netflix list, read through a ton of books that I've always meant to read and went for walks to the coffee shop instead of driving.

This isn't the first break of my life and it's technically possible to double your summer break in a year, because we've got options for winter.

The biggest thing that has always helped me in these situations is to head to the other side of the planet, because being in a cold place with short days feels bad when you wake up and there's nothing to do immediately on your mind.

I just got back from a trip to Patagonia and the only reason I haven't headed back to New Zealand again, is because I'm now interviewing again for jobs (also kids, kids need to be in school).

If you are talented, with a significant experience going back years, the fact that you took a break from your career to do something else for a bit isn't going to matter to a single employer. Oddly enough, I also spent enough time away to be out of the no-competes for a few work related systems, so my open areas expanded because of a break.

If you're tired of work, don't find another job - you probably need to remember who you are outside of work, before you can go back in to do something else.

[m00x]

> I left my job 2022 February to not sit in meetings and mostly be a preventer of bad engineering rather than a builder of good stuff. On a good day, I told people how they were wrong - on a bad day, I told them how they were wrong, again.

You sound like a great guy to work with with all this modesty and open mindedness.

[314]

You don't know what their job was, or what kind of engineering decisions they were having to work around. You don't know what kind of corporate hieracrchy they were stuck in, or what effect it had on what they were building. Without knowing any of those things it is a bit premature to be making character judgements.

[m00x]

If your job is to tell people they're wrong every day, you're working with the wrong attitude.

Your job isn't to say no, it's to say: "This doesn't work, but how about this?".

Engineering isn't about being a prick that shoots down ideas and be the "smartest person in the room", it's to make those ideas become reality as closely as possible while working within the constraints of what's feasible.

[314]

You seem to be making a lot of assumptions, and it's unclear how much direct experience you have of being in a bad situation where the day-to-day job does become saying no.

Some examples that you may be unfamiliar with:

* Working with a manager who is a former dev that likes to micromanage the decisions that their team makes.

* Working on a team that is driven / owned by a product owner who doesn't understand as much engineering as they think that they do.

Neither of these situations are examples of healthy functioning organisations, but they do occur. They are not an exclusive list either, just some random examples from personal experience.

Shooting down ideas may be a symptom of somebody being a prick, or it may indicate that they know why the idea will break the system (even if it closes a ticket or gets a particular feature finished). The ability to propose an alternative can be restricted by just how batshit insane the demand is.

It's not that you are wrong when you say that an engineer should respond "This doesn't work, but how about this?". But that characterization is incomplete - sure it works in theory, but there are many places where it does not work in practice.