12 ms·

The surprising benefits of a mid-career break

201 points by FuNe 10y ago

stephengillie 10y ago
> One of Smith’s clients pointed out to their manager how much money they could save in the budget for that year by not having to pay their salary, yet not sacrificing the investment they had made in training them over the years. When an organization can operate without your presence for over 300 days, your role may not be very necessary. The surprising costs of a mid-career break involve falling far enough behind industry trends and methods, that it would be faster to train a new person than retrain you. The article is very optimistic about the rate of change in any workplace, and also an employer's willingness to support this kind of extended vacation.
- fritzo 10y ago
  People skills have a much longer half-life than, say, proficiency in the latest javascript framework or machine learning trend.
- japhyr 10y ago
  What's the longest break you've taken from working? You might be surprised how little actually changes in the course of 6-12 months, once you get past the obvious surface changes. The perspective that can be gained from stepping away for more than two weeks can be invaluable.
  - lallysingh 10y ago
    Mostly it's projects that were "90%" done, expected to compete in a few weeks are now "had some unexpected complications, but we're past those now."
- cheriot 10y ago
  Well, I worked for 10 years and then took the last year off. I think you're full of shit, but I'll find out one way or another in the next few months.
  - shorttime 10y ago
    this isn't reddit...
- Spooky23 10y ago
  That's the absurdity of modern business in many places. Short term, stupid thinking. I'm glad to work for an employer with more enlightened work rules. When I had my back surgery, I was out for nearly 6 months. We had about a weeks notice, and my #2 person was able to take things on and I was able to transition most projects to her. Everything went fine. Actually it was a great thing because my fill-in's talents became apparent in my absence, and she got promoted later as a result. Any workplace that changes so quickly that an above average player is totally out of touch in <1 year, the place is a shitshow.
- jerf 10y ago
  If you work somewhere with such turnover that your knowledge is useless in 300 days... should you? I tend to believe the rate of change in programming is grossly overstated anyhow, but that takes it to truly absurd levels.
  - hiram112 10y ago
    True. I did a year of sys administration, and when I got back I realized I had missed that year's JS frameworks du jure. Panicked, I began learning everything I could about Bower, Grunt, Angular JS 1, and Mongo. I lucked out, though, because the team decided these technologies were woefully outdated, and we were to migrate to Gulp, React, and Postgres. Unfortunately, end of this year, and these have been eclipsed by Angular 2, JSPM, etc.
    - Fargren 10y ago
      I think you mixed up "du jour" and "de jure" there.
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        It does suggest, however, both "de jure du jour" and "du jour de jure".
        jerf 10y ago
        It may not come from an individual, but there is certainly an element of the JS community that seems to operate de jure. Frameworks are "the next hot thing" before they've hardly shipped a production site of any consequence, let alone shown the ability to improve things across a large array of sites, or had time for the negatives to be shaken out. Or a "next hot thing" ships one massive site like Facebook or something and it's the "next hot thing" before anybody can realize that they aren't Facebook and don't have three hundred dedicated front end developers themselves, and it's way less clear the NHT will work for two guys in a closet working on a startup.
- shorttime 10y ago
  > When an organization can operate without your presence for over 300 days, your role may not be very necessary. Which is a good thing. Everyone should be replaceable in corporate jobs, maybe not a startup, which makes sense. If you're not replaceable then your business is not doing the best it can to future proof itself. I try to find my replacement actually, I take the interns and coops in every meeting as well as CC them on all emails. I do not see myself in the same job for my entire career, what better bargaining tool to move up than say you have your replacement ready?
- notmything 10y ago
  RE: 300 days. Not always true, I took 6 month break from a large consulting firm - they have thousands of consultants so you can take a break without killing the company but obviously they want as many consultants billing hours as possible.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  In most companies nothing of substance changes over the course of a year. You won't fall behind trends and methods. It's like not reading the news for a year. You miss a lot of noise but the substance doesn't change.
- codingdave 10y ago
  If you are not replaceable, you are not promotable.
  - haalcion3 10y ago
    > If you are not replaceable, you are not promotable. Not accurate. You can be promoted and take on additional responsibilities and/or title.
    - hiram112 10y ago
      I've learned mostly the opposite. Those that become indispensable rarely get promoted because moving them would create a huge gap in a necessary role. At best, these engineers are rewarded with 'pseudo promotions' like team lead or lead of two projects - with no pay increase or perks, just more people to manage, PowerPoints to create, weekly status meetings to attend, etc. Playing politics, dressing better, getting in shape (opposite of the typical hoody-ed neck beard) and befriending those above you, while learning a little bit of lots of business facets, is the path to real promotions.
- HillRat 10y ago
  >The surprising costs of a mid-career break involve falling far enough behind industry trends and methods, that it would be faster to train a new person than retrain you. In programming -- and, I think, perhaps in most industries -- more people fall behind in learning because of their job than because they're out of the daily grind. Any large-scale enterprise is chock-full of devs who have plenty of experience developing inside Websphere, Liferay, Sitecore and so on, but who haven't had the time between work, family and sleep to gain knowledge and experience in SPA development, CI, CD, microservices, and so on, let alone more outre topics like ML or NLP. Giving knowledge workers the opportunity to sabbatical out and build new expertise would benefit both them and their employers.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    Except if their employers need people maintaining the legacy systems using the legacy technology. Then having people there who know nothing else is highly beneficial, since they're unlikely to quit.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  I'd be really interested to learn about companies that replace their entire codebase twice a year. That seems amazing.
  - avh02 10y ago
    while they may not be changing their codebase twice a year, code can evolve enough to be hard to recognize, especially in big, intermingled (i.e: poor) codebases which interact with other systems (can someone say microservices?) Small things change here and there and suddenly you don't understand the beast. Granted, this is not a general case, but do not underestimate several months work by a team of people.
    - jfoutz 10y ago
      Eh, there's so much thought built into getting code into production. Things like logging, monitoring, service discovery, orchestration, rollback, authentication, authorization. Couple that with all the other stuff for just coding, formatting style, testing standards, code reviews, version control patterns, allocation of tickets. Then sprinkle in some institutional awareness of who's responsible or who can answer questions about system interaction, connecting to databases, sending email, creating new users. I'm skeptical that all of that changes often enough to make a rehire less valuable than a new person. Sure, you may have switched to k8s from docker. In that kind of environment, can you really get a new person really productive in less than 6 months? And with the new person, you're never really sure they're actually capable of doing the work, until they do the work. Ok, sure, if the potential rehire wasn't all that great, it's probably worth rolling the dice. But if they can point to a few successful projects, why not rehire? You know they're a cultural fit. They accept however dysfunctional the organization is, and tolerated it well enough to want to come back. Plus they know a bunch about how to actually get things done in your particular structure.
- shermanyo 10y ago
  > When an organization can operate without your presence for over 300 days, your role may not be very necessary. For an alternative view: When an organization can't operate without your presence in that role, how can they consider promoting you out of that role? I've seen people stall their careers by becoming the only person able to cover a particular role. I personally fell into this trap for a couple of years. In hindsight, feeling like they couldn't do without me for a week or two for a holiday was a huge red flag. Since then, I've been conscious and cautious of this, and actively planned to avoid it. Anything I feel I'm the only one who can cover, I make a point to properly document the process, have someone shadow me the next time I need to do it, and eventually perform the process themselves while I supervise.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gh1 10y ago
While a sabbatical year might be very beneficial for the person taking it (for the multitude of reasons mentioned in the article), it can be detrimental for the organization. For example, if the person taking the sabbatical is in charge of (or playing a lead role in) a project that is time sensitive, then this is a big setback for the project. Similarly, if the person is mentoring someone else (who is dependent in some way on his presence), then taking a sabbatical is unfair to that mentee. This is why it is important to plan the sabbatical year so that it is personally beneficial and also not detrimental to the organization and its people.
- Frogolocalypse 10y ago
  I'd say that it is just as important to an organization to learn how to deal with people leaving. It's better to have someone leaving under good terms than bad, and if you're totally reliant upon a single person doing a single role, you're not displaying too much 'organizing' in your organization.
wallace_f 10y ago
I'm currently on a trip around the world, going over 1 year at the moment and loving life, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I've met countless 20-somethings doing the same, and a surprising number of mid-career professionals, and they're all European. I have yet to meet a single person in almost 2 years of international travel that is from the US and was willing to take a break in their career. I hope this American culture shifts towards Europe in the future. Americans are left out of this experience and cultural exchange, and seen as choosing to rather stay at home to toil over their bank accounts. The professional and personal benefits are more than adding 1 more year of your working life will ever get you, and besides, I want to see the change because I have a vested interest in finding a job when I come back.
- whenwillitstop 10y ago
  Can I ask what your career was before leaving? I've worked very hard to get to where I'm at, solving machine learning problems for a great company. But I really just want to quit and travel the world. Leaving behind all the effort I just put in seems like such a shame, I'm not sure if I could get back to where I am now. Where have you travelled? Are you going solo?
- mdorazio 10y ago
  The vast, vast majority of Americans simply cannot afford to take extended time off to travel internationally, and of those who can, the current job market is such that for those that return, the prospects outside of the tech industry are not good. Employers here generally do not look favorably on large employment gaps, and the social safety net is pretty sparse if you come back and need time to get situated again. Comparing European workers and American workers in this context is not very fair - the situations for each are quite different.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    I think your other points are good, but I disagree here: > The vast, vast majority of Americans simply cannot afford to take extended time off to travel internationally It can be done very economically; students with almost no money do it, staying in hostels, taking trains, etc. I know one guy who worked his way through, at least to some extent. If you have kids and a mortgage, that's a different story.
Noumenon72 10y ago
I never had a career, but I took a break anyway after 14 years as a plastics factory worker. Mine stretched to 2.5 years since I could afford it. I'm now in my second month as a junior Java developer. This makes more sense than the sabbatical, since I had no skills or connections to get stale. I have to say the benefits really did make me a better deal as an employee. I basically went from someone who did things because he had to, just fitting everything in around work, to someone who pursued his own goals. Now that I'm back at work, I don't constantly lose sleep till I have to rush to work at the last minute; I schedule things so I don't have to, and I got my sleep habits under control. I don't bike to work just because I need some way to keep from getting fat; I sought out active, fun hobbies I can still engage in, like ice skating. I don't beat myself up all the time for being lazy; I have my own strategies now for getting myself to put in time on the right projects and not let things slip away. I also used to have trouble just getting basic things done like phone calls and finding a tailor; with my time off, I got things done and gained confidence that I could get any errand done. I also feel so much more independent now. Google Maps plus free time to explore means I found so many wilderness sites and activities. Internet reading about joints plus time to work on the exercises mean any ache or pain that comes up is something I can solve. Compared to the time I tore a back muscle falling into a railcar, when all I could do is try to reduce the activities that caused me nerve damage and hope I got better, I'm so much better equipped to take care of my own health. tl;dr Having full responsibility for yourself is great. I did a lot of things it would have been too late for in retirement, and the best part is the habits I learned when I had time are now ingrained enough I can do them even while working full time.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  Are you also getting paid more in your new job? If so, how much of the change in your life is due to this. E.g. you might be able to buy time with money when previously you just had to rush.
  - valleyer 10y ago
    It's a shame that we have built a society where time is something you have to buy instead of a plentiful resource that everyone shares in. (I suppose you could say the same for food, shelter, and clean water.)
arvinsim 10y ago
As much as the break and benefits itself seem alluring, most of the world can't afford this kind of lull in their careers. This applies to both work-oriented countries like Japan and USA as well as third world countries.
neolefty 10y ago
I took 5 years off of programming, to go with my family to China, where my wife could pursue her ESL career. I taught high school part-time and was a house-husband. We came back this summer, about 3 months ago. I'm 45 and managed to find decent employment. I was pretty nervous about coming back to software development, but it turned out fine. I'm not very ambitious career-wise, but I can support my family. I'm doing web development (there was some catching up to do!) and servers & ops on AWS, which I was able to jump right back into. Linux hasn't changed much! I tried to find work in the US from China, but nobody took me very seriously, so I came back in late April, interviewed in a few places, partly while on a road trip, got 3 offers in 3 different cities, on a spectrum of interesting to well-paid, and all ethical, and accepted one in June (the middle one -- reasonably well-paid, reasonably interesting, in a low-cost-of-living location). It helped having support of people in the US (my parents, who gave me a home base, and friends in various cities who I could stay with) and being not-very-ambitious -- I'm happy to just be a software engineer / ops guy. I don't need to be very high up the food chain. Companies seem hungry for people who are professional and skilled and get along with people. I definitely sacrificed something professionally by spending those 5 years in China. It was an expensive sojourn. But I am happy we did it. We were very lucky to (1) all be healthy, (2) have enough money saved to make the leap, even though we knew it would be temporary, and (3) have at least one of us employable in the US (me, the programmer) and abroad (my wife, the ESL teacher). It was a monetary loss for sure! But I learned a lot about life and not worrying about every little detail, and it was an experience that strongly shaped our three children, both for better and for worse. And I think it helped bring the US and China together a little, on a personal level, in the friends that we made and the things we learned.
- foota 10y ago
  Can I ask how you feel it negatively impacted your children?
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    I'm not the OP but I'm guessing that being uprooted from one country to the other, and back, is somewhat challenging for a child's social development.
ryandrake 10y ago
Oh, another "Isn't it cool that people can quit their jobs to go do $EXPENSIVE_THING" humblebrag article! File this along with the "Exploring Africa in my custom jeep" and "Traveling the country in a solar powered van I built" pieces. Unfortunately, this option is not available to the 99.99% of readers who need to pay their mortgages, health insurance, child care expenses, student loan payments, and other realities of normal life. If you're one of those lucky enough to be able to just jaunt off to a faraway land for a "career break" then congratulations! But these articles claiming it's something that you, the reader, can do, are pretty silly.
- maxaf 10y ago
  Just for the hell of it I went over to my wife and proposed taking a sabbatical. She raised an eyebrow: "Are you high? Man up & do what needs to be done!" Seriously though, until universal basic income is a thing, those of us who must work for a living will continue to work for a living. This is capitalism in action.
  - hackits 10y ago
    Can only talk about my wife and our situation. We both work, but all ways make sure that either partner can hold a full time job and pay all our commitments. This goes for car loan, mortgage, shopping. It takes the stress of either partner that they can just take 6 to 12 months off when things get really tough.
  - shostack 10y ago
    Even with UBI my guess is you'd get the same response due to the likely standard of living hit you'd take.
- uhtred 10y ago
  Not being able to do this because you have kids, a mortgage or student loan repayments is down to choices you have made in life. Someone who doesn't have those commitments holding them back because they chose a different path shouldn't feel guilty.
hliyan 10y ago
In 2013, I quit a 10-year job in the HFT/trading systems industry and went to work for small non-profit that developed web/mobile systems for humanitarian and human rights agencies. One of the best the things I ever did. What came out of it: 1. Completely upgraded my outdated skill set - from C++/Oracle to ES6/React/Redux/Node.js etc. 2. Completed a life-long dream of writing a full length science fiction novel (not yet published, sadly) 3. Developed computational psychology model (pet interest) that might one day be the basis of a paper 4. Learned proper leadership skills, public speaking skills and people management skills 5. Much better health - exercised, got plenty of leisure time (worked only 30hrs/week) 6. Networked through pro-bono consulting It was financially punishing for me, but ultimately it was more than worth it. Last year I returned to the industry full time (a different industry this time). The additional skills/experience in the resume opened up a lot more higher level opportunities that I would never have been able to pursue 3 years ago. Right now I'm in a management level position doing exactly the kind of work I want to do, and I doubt if I'll ever have to worry about finding a job... By the way, for anyone who asks, those 2 years were easily the happiest in my life. Edit: cons: be ready to be poorer!
- mailshanx 10y ago
  That sounds amazing! I would love to know which industry you returned to, how the exactly the experiences you had in the break contributed to finding higher level opportunities, and the impact on personal finances...
  - hliyan 10y ago
    1. The food services industry 2. My previous job was 10 years of mostly proprietary tech. Had no time to pursue other things seriously. Dealing with the newer technologies in a production setting (in the non-profit) helped more than any other learning process would have. Also, going from a small fish in a very big corporate pond to a big fish in a very small pond meant having to take a lot more responsibilities for product, delivery, strategy and HR. It was like a mini skill incubator. I also had enough time to do some serious consulting work, which opened up a lot of opportunities. 3. Quite bad. Savings are quite low currently. My living standard is still somewhat lower than my peers. But opportunities within the next 2-5 years are huge. Had I remained in my old industry, I'd have been a technological fossil by the time I'm 40 (I'm 37 now).
whenwillitstop 10y ago
Can anyone in this thread speak to how it would impact a software engineers career in the USA? I've considered doing this for a while, just afraid to give up all I've worked for
pfarnsworth 10y ago
I did this a few years ago, taking 1 year off. I was a bit nervous being in my 40s, but it did such immense help for me, I recommend it for anyone who is willing to work hard during their time off. I pivoted from enterprise software to backend development for various online companies and I'm very, very happy.
andrewclunn 10y ago
Non-white people do this too. They just call it being laid off. The holistic, "I just feel so fulfilled!" crap just irks me at some visceral level that I can't fully explain. There's just something so entitled and lazy about this way of existing.
- terrywilcox 10y ago
  You sound like you need a sabbatical.
personjerry 10y ago
Did BBC just clickbait me?
eslaught 10y ago
It sounds like lots of people here have taken breaks, but have any of you taken actual sabbaticals (i.e. with explicit employer permission and with the intention of coming back afterwards)? How did you negotiate it and how did it go for you?
- sokoloff 10y ago
  We have a program that grants a short (4 week) sabbatical every 5 years. You can add an additional 2 weeks of PTO to get to a 6 week break. It's not an academic's typical sabbatical, but it's a nice perk to disconnect as well as force us to not be excessively dependent on a long-time veteran for daily ops. To your last question, it's a company perk, so wasn't negotiated; my first one went very well; I caught up on some hobbies that I'd let slide and did some fun travel and am looking forward to my second one.
  - nordify 10y ago
    > We have a program that grants a short (4 week) sabbatical every 5 years. You can add an additional 2 weeks of PTO to get to a 6 week break. That's not a sabbatical, that's a normal summer vacation in Europe :)
raleighm 10y ago
I’m a few months into a mid-career break. I’m exercising, playing with kids, writing, studying, and sleeping (8 hours/night!). I’m also depleting savings, but not as quickly as I projected. Now that I have time, I fix broken things rather than replace them. I take time to research things really well before purchasing, so make few mistakes and get good deals. Each dollar I spend is a few minutes sooner that I need to return to employment (if the projects I’m tinkering with aren’t yet revenue-generating), which motivates frugality. We lowered our costs significantly right before I left work. We moved to a small but adequate house in the far suburbs. My mortgage is about one-eight the mortgage of peers in my profession at my level, even when I include the rent I pay now for a tiny personal office nearby. Chen, featured in the article, was one inspiration to take the plunge. I found his LinkedIn CV, which describes that period: “Father and Husband, Sabbatical, September 2011 - August 2012. We took a year off from our life in Boston and lived on a remote island in Norway just north of the Arctic Circle.” I liked that. Ideally I emerge from this period with a sustainable business of my own, but even if I return to working for others, as long as I have an interesting, compelling story about what I was up to during my time off, and how it made me better - which I will - I doubt the period will cost me much (if anything) in interview terms, and it may benefit me. Glad to read the experiences of others here who did this and didn’t regret it. If there are people who took time off and did regret it or have advice about how (not) to spend the time, would love to read that too.
- varjag 10y ago
  > I found his LinkedIn CV, which describes that period: “Father and Husband, Sabbatical, September 2011 - August 2012. We took a year off from our life in Boston and lived on a remote island in Norway just north of the Arctic Circle.” Honestly it sounds more along the lines of a usual stay at home dad, the location notwithstanding. The only reason they moved there was wife's origin and offer of employment. If you reverse the genders it happens all the time, just that no one would call that 'sabbatical'.
  - wolfgke 10y ago
    > If you reverse the genders it happens all the time, just that no one would call that 'sabbatical'. Because a sabbatical means that for a limited time you will do something different that you always wanted to do and go back to the job afterwards. Not cultivating a new hobby which will distract you from your job for the next, say, 15 years.
siquick 10y ago
I took a 1 year career break in 2011, travelled around Asia, learnt some new life and professional skills and got an excellent new job in Australia (I'm British) via sponsorship. Im convinced that I got the job because my energy and enthusiasm levels were completely reset after my time away from working. In August this year I left that job and I've been living in Thailand for the last 2.5 months, and already I feel completely reset and ready for new challenges. The most important part of a career break is to use the time wiseley to either work on yourself, or work on your skills, or both. If you just sit around on your backside playing XBox and doing the same shit you did while you were working, then you're probably not going to benefit from it. Yes this path may not be available to friends who went down the family/mortgage path but they have benefits in their life which I don't have. Different people, different priorities I guess.
jczhang 10y ago
Question for all you guys who took a break (ie travel for 1 yr+) and came back to another job. How did you show in your resume?
- dagw 10y ago
  My resume just looks something like: Job A: 2007-2009 Job B: 2010-2014 ...etc No one ever asks.
- dejv 10y ago
  Well, I did few freelancing projects during my 2 years break, so I guess I could fill it with freelancing and list of projects to show for. On the other hand, I haven't try to get another job since. Mix of freelancing and working on my own projects is replacing my income.
k__ 10y ago
I worked 7 years for one company and had the feeling it wouldn't go anywhere. So I quit and went Funemployed for 1.5 years. Doing some game development etc. Went self-employed afterwards and got to work from home and make much more money. I learned much and even tried to finish my masters degree, but the new job prevented me from getting the thesis done, haha. But maybe next year.
davidhyde 10y ago
Get on the property ladder before you take your sabbatical. I recently took an 18 month sabbatical from my banking software development job and it was well worth the risk. I had been working for 11 years. I ended up getting my old job back when I returned because I did not leave on bad terms. I probably would not have if I had stayed there any longer as work and London life was turning me into an angry selfish person in general. My only regret is that I didn't buy a flat or house just before I took the break. Whilst employers are more than open to the idea of a long sabbatical in my industry, lenders are not. Right now I am earning just as much as I used to but I am struggling to get a home loan despite having an excellent credit rating. They see that hole in your work history and it gives them the jitters. I should have bought a place and rented it out before I went traveling.
- hliyan 10y ago
  Strange, this is one of my regrets as well -- not investing in real estate!
- ptero 10y ago
  In the US I often see well paid friends struggle financially after buying a house (I do live in a high cost area in the US). And most landlords (again, US) will accept a bank statement with 12-14 months rent in lieu of a salary check. You can prepay 12 months to avoid any questions whatsoever. I would personally avoid buying a house before jumping off as that would occupy my mind instead of freeing it. My 2c.
  - CalRobert 10y ago
    "..And most landlords (again, US) will accept a bank statement with 12-14 months rent.." When I was starting a company and without a salary it was really hard to find a landlord who was OK with this. Some seemed to be thinking "eh, this is different from the norm and I have plenty of applicants so it's not worth the mental trouble", and others "irregular income situation probably means they sell drugs".
  - davidhyde 10y ago
    Right now, in London and if you have a 15% deposit, its cheaper to buy a place than to rent from month to month so I guess it depends where you live. I always thought it was better to keep my savings liquid for startup capital but I found myself going back to work because I did not like spending it on rent. I figured that I would continue my project at a slower pace in the evenings and weekends and cover my expenses in the meantime. This is not a good recipe for swiftly setting up a startup.
oriel 10y ago
I did this last year by accident, after a layoff from a high intensity but failing startup. Easily one of the most productive, eye opening, bucket list kicking experiences of my life. I ended up doing 6 months, traveling, starting a company, got CELTA certified, met a woman who turned my perspective on dating upsidedown, and generally was much happier. Oddly though, all of my personal coding projects went almost immediately into the bin. I didn't have the motivation to push them when I was employed and lost all motivation when I didn't touch the field on a daily basis.
JamieAtBud 10y ago
A consultant that just started working for our company wrote this post a few days ago: "He who dares"... Why moving from a corporate to a start-up could be the best move you ever make… Might be of interest http://blog.thisisbud.com/he-who-dares-why-moving-from-a-corporate-to-a-start-up-could-be-the-best-move-you-ever-make/ http://blog.thisisbud.com/he-who-dares-why-moving-from-a-cor...

201 points by FuNe 10y ago

> One of Smith’s clients pointed out to their manager how much money they could save in the budget for that year by not having to pay their salary, yet not sacrificing the investment they had made in training them over the years. When an organization can operate without your presence for over 300 days, your role may not be very necessary. The surprising costs of a mid-career break involve falling far enough behind industry trends and methods, that it would be faster to train a new person than retrain you. The article is very optimistic about the rate of change in any workplace, and also an employer's willingness to support this kind of extended vacation.

fritzo 10y ago
People skills have a much longer half-life than, say, proficiency in the latest javascript framework or machine learning trend.
japhyr 10y ago
What's the longest break you've taken from working? You might be surprised how little actually changes in the course of 6-12 months, once you get past the obvious surface changes. The perspective that can be gained from stepping away for more than two weeks can be invaluable.
- lallysingh 10y ago
  Mostly it's projects that were "90%" done, expected to compete in a few weeks are now "had some unexpected complications, but we're past those now."
cheriot 10y ago
Well, I worked for 10 years and then took the last year off. I think you're full of shit, but I'll find out one way or another in the next few months.
- shorttime 10y ago
  this isn't reddit...
Spooky23 10y ago
That's the absurdity of modern business in many places. Short term, stupid thinking. I'm glad to work for an employer with more enlightened work rules. When I had my back surgery, I was out for nearly 6 months. We had about a weeks notice, and my #2 person was able to take things on and I was able to transition most projects to her. Everything went fine. Actually it was a great thing because my fill-in's talents became apparent in my absence, and she got promoted later as a result. Any workplace that changes so quickly that an above average player is totally out of touch in <1 year, the place is a shitshow.
jerf 10y ago
If you work somewhere with such turnover that your knowledge is useless in 300 days... should you? I tend to believe the rate of change in programming is grossly overstated anyhow, but that takes it to truly absurd levels.
- hiram112 10y ago
  True. I did a year of sys administration, and when I got back I realized I had missed that year's JS frameworks du jure. Panicked, I began learning everything I could about Bower, Grunt, Angular JS 1, and Mongo. I lucked out, though, because the team decided these technologies were woefully outdated, and we were to migrate to Gulp, React, and Postgres. Unfortunately, end of this year, and these have been eclipsed by Angular 2, JSPM, etc.
  - Fargren 10y ago
    I think you mixed up "du jour" and "de jure" there.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      It does suggest, however, both "de jure du jour" and "du jour de jure".
      - jerf 10y ago
        It may not come from an individual, but there is certainly an element of the JS community that seems to operate de jure. Frameworks are "the next hot thing" before they've hardly shipped a production site of any consequence, let alone shown the ability to improve things across a large array of sites, or had time for the negatives to be shaken out. Or a "next hot thing" ships one massive site like Facebook or something and it's the "next hot thing" before anybody can realize that they aren't Facebook and don't have three hundred dedicated front end developers themselves, and it's way less clear the NHT will work for two guys in a closet working on a startup.
shorttime 10y ago
> When an organization can operate without your presence for over 300 days, your role may not be very necessary. Which is a good thing. Everyone should be replaceable in corporate jobs, maybe not a startup, which makes sense. If you're not replaceable then your business is not doing the best it can to future proof itself. I try to find my replacement actually, I take the interns and coops in every meeting as well as CC them on all emails. I do not see myself in the same job for my entire career, what better bargaining tool to move up than say you have your replacement ready?
notmything 10y ago
RE: 300 days. Not always true, I took 6 month break from a large consulting firm - they have thousands of consultants so you can take a break without killing the company but obviously they want as many consultants billing hours as possible.
maxxxxx 10y ago
In most companies nothing of substance changes over the course of a year. You won't fall behind trends and methods. It's like not reading the news for a year. You miss a lot of noise but the substance doesn't change.
codingdave 10y ago
If you are not replaceable, you are not promotable.
- haalcion3 10y ago
  > If you are not replaceable, you are not promotable. Not accurate. You can be promoted and take on additional responsibilities and/or title.
  - hiram112 10y ago
    I've learned mostly the opposite. Those that become indispensable rarely get promoted because moving them would create a huge gap in a necessary role. At best, these engineers are rewarded with 'pseudo promotions' like team lead or lead of two projects - with no pay increase or perks, just more people to manage, PowerPoints to create, weekly status meetings to attend, etc. Playing politics, dressing better, getting in shape (opposite of the typical hoody-ed neck beard) and befriending those above you, while learning a little bit of lots of business facets, is the path to real promotions.
HillRat 10y ago
>The surprising costs of a mid-career break involve falling far enough behind industry trends and methods, that it would be faster to train a new person than retrain you. In programming -- and, I think, perhaps in most industries -- more people fall behind in learning because of their job than because they're out of the daily grind. Any large-scale enterprise is chock-full of devs who have plenty of experience developing inside Websphere, Liferay, Sitecore and so on, but who haven't had the time between work, family and sleep to gain knowledge and experience in SPA development, CI, CD, microservices, and so on, let alone more outre topics like ML or NLP. Giving knowledge workers the opportunity to sabbatical out and build new expertise would benefit both them and their employers.
- adrianN 10y ago
  Except if their employers need people maintaining the legacy systems using the legacy technology. Then having people there who know nothing else is highly beneficial, since they're unlikely to quit.
jfoutz 10y ago
I'd be really interested to learn about companies that replace their entire codebase twice a year. That seems amazing.
- avh02 10y ago
  while they may not be changing their codebase twice a year, code can evolve enough to be hard to recognize, especially in big, intermingled (i.e: poor) codebases which interact with other systems (can someone say microservices?) Small things change here and there and suddenly you don't understand the beast. Granted, this is not a general case, but do not underestimate several months work by a team of people.
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    Eh, there's so much thought built into getting code into production. Things like logging, monitoring, service discovery, orchestration, rollback, authentication, authorization. Couple that with all the other stuff for just coding, formatting style, testing standards, code reviews, version control patterns, allocation of tickets. Then sprinkle in some institutional awareness of who's responsible or who can answer questions about system interaction, connecting to databases, sending email, creating new users. I'm skeptical that all of that changes often enough to make a rehire less valuable than a new person. Sure, you may have switched to k8s from docker. In that kind of environment, can you really get a new person really productive in less than 6 months? And with the new person, you're never really sure they're actually capable of doing the work, until they do the work. Ok, sure, if the potential rehire wasn't all that great, it's probably worth rolling the dice. But if they can point to a few successful projects, why not rehire? You know they're a cultural fit. They accept however dysfunctional the organization is, and tolerated it well enough to want to come back. Plus they know a bunch about how to actually get things done in your particular structure.
shermanyo 10y ago
> When an organization can operate without your presence for over 300 days, your role may not be very necessary. For an alternative view: When an organization can't operate without your presence in that role, how can they consider promoting you out of that role? I've seen people stall their careers by becoming the only person able to cover a particular role. I personally fell into this trap for a couple of years. In hindsight, feeling like they couldn't do without me for a week or two for a holiday was a huge red flag. Since then, I've been conscious and cautious of this, and actively planned to avoid it. Anything I feel I'm the only one who can cover, I make a point to properly document the process, have someone shadow me the next time I need to do it, and eventually perform the process themselves while I supervise.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

gh1 10y ago

While a sabbatical year might be very beneficial for the person taking it (for the multitude of reasons mentioned in the article), it can be detrimental for the organization. For example, if the person taking the sabbatical is in charge of (or playing a lead role in) a project that is time sensitive, then this is a big setback for the project. Similarly, if the person is mentoring someone else (who is dependent in some way on his presence), then taking a sabbatical is unfair to that mentee. This is why it is important to plan the sabbatical year so that it is personally beneficial and also not detrimental to the organization and its people.

Frogolocalypse 10y ago
I'd say that it is just as important to an organization to learn how to deal with people leaving. It's better to have someone leaving under good terms than bad, and if you're totally reliant upon a single person doing a single role, you're not displaying too much 'organizing' in your organization.

wallace_f 10y ago

I'm currently on a trip around the world, going over 1 year at the moment and loving life, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I've met countless 20-somethings doing the same, and a surprising number of mid-career professionals, and they're all European. I have yet to meet a single person in almost 2 years of international travel that is from the US and was willing to take a break in their career. I hope this American culture shifts towards Europe in the future. Americans are left out of this experience and cultural exchange, and seen as choosing to rather stay at home to toil over their bank accounts. The professional and personal benefits are more than adding 1 more year of your working life will ever get you, and besides, I want to see the change because I have a vested interest in finding a job when I come back.

whenwillitstop 10y ago
Can I ask what your career was before leaving? I've worked very hard to get to where I'm at, solving machine learning problems for a great company. But I really just want to quit and travel the world. Leaving behind all the effort I just put in seems like such a shame, I'm not sure if I could get back to where I am now. Where have you travelled? Are you going solo?
mdorazio 10y ago
The vast, vast majority of Americans simply cannot afford to take extended time off to travel internationally, and of those who can, the current job market is such that for those that return, the prospects outside of the tech industry are not good. Employers here generally do not look favorably on large employment gaps, and the social safety net is pretty sparse if you come back and need time to get situated again. Comparing European workers and American workers in this context is not very fair - the situations for each are quite different.
- hackuser 10y ago
  I think your other points are good, but I disagree here: > The vast, vast majority of Americans simply cannot afford to take extended time off to travel internationally It can be done very economically; students with almost no money do it, staying in hostels, taking trains, etc. I know one guy who worked his way through, at least to some extent. If you have kids and a mortgage, that's a different story.

Noumenon72 10y ago

I never had a career, but I took a break anyway after 14 years as a plastics factory worker. Mine stretched to 2.5 years since I could afford it. I'm now in my second month as a junior Java developer. This makes more sense than the sabbatical, since I had no skills or connections to get stale. I have to say the benefits really did make me a better deal as an employee. I basically went from someone who did things because he had to, just fitting everything in around work, to someone who pursued his own goals. Now that I'm back at work, I don't constantly lose sleep till I have to rush to work at the last minute; I schedule things so I don't have to, and I got my sleep habits under control. I don't bike to work just because I need some way to keep from getting fat; I sought out active, fun hobbies I can still engage in, like ice skating. I don't beat myself up all the time for being lazy; I have my own strategies now for getting myself to put in time on the right projects and not let things slip away. I also used to have trouble just getting basic things done like phone calls and finding a tailor; with my time off, I got things done and gained confidence that I could get any errand done. I also feel so much more independent now. Google Maps plus free time to explore means I found so many wilderness sites and activities. Internet reading about joints plus time to work on the exercises mean any ache or pain that comes up is something I can solve. Compared to the time I tore a back muscle falling into a railcar, when all I could do is try to reduce the activities that caused me nerve damage and hope I got better, I'm so much better equipped to take care of my own health. tl;dr Having full responsibility for yourself is great. I did a lot of things it would have been too late for in retirement, and the best part is the habits I learned when I had time are now ingrained enough I can do them even while working full time.

adrianratnapala 10y ago
Are you also getting paid more in your new job? If so, how much of the change in your life is due to this. E.g. you might be able to buy time with money when previously you just had to rush.
- valleyer 10y ago
  It's a shame that we have built a society where time is something you have to buy instead of a plentiful resource that everyone shares in. (I suppose you could say the same for food, shelter, and clean water.)

arvinsim 10y ago

As much as the break and benefits itself seem alluring, most of the world can't afford this kind of lull in their careers. This applies to both work-oriented countries like Japan and USA as well as third world countries.

neolefty 10y ago

I took 5 years off of programming, to go with my family to China, where my wife could pursue her ESL career. I taught high school part-time and was a house-husband. We came back this summer, about 3 months ago. I'm 45 and managed to find decent employment. I was pretty nervous about coming back to software development, but it turned out fine. I'm not very ambitious career-wise, but I can support my family. I'm doing web development (there was some catching up to do!) and servers & ops on AWS, which I was able to jump right back into. Linux hasn't changed much! I tried to find work in the US from China, but nobody took me very seriously, so I came back in late April, interviewed in a few places, partly while on a road trip, got 3 offers in 3 different cities, on a spectrum of interesting to well-paid, and all ethical, and accepted one in June (the middle one -- reasonably well-paid, reasonably interesting, in a low-cost-of-living location). It helped having support of people in the US (my parents, who gave me a home base, and friends in various cities who I could stay with) and being not-very-ambitious -- I'm happy to just be a software engineer / ops guy. I don't need to be very high up the food chain. Companies seem hungry for people who are professional and skilled and get along with people. I definitely sacrificed something professionally by spending those 5 years in China. It was an expensive sojourn. But I am happy we did it. We were very lucky to (1) all be healthy, (2) have enough money saved to make the leap, even though we knew it would be temporary, and (3) have at least one of us employable in the US (me, the programmer) and abroad (my wife, the ESL teacher). It was a monetary loss for sure! But I learned a lot about life and not worrying about every little detail, and it was an experience that strongly shaped our three children, both for better and for worse. And I think it helped bring the US and China together a little, on a personal level, in the friends that we made and the things we learned.

foota 10y ago
Can I ask how you feel it negatively impacted your children?
- emodendroket 10y ago
  I'm not the OP but I'm guessing that being uprooted from one country to the other, and back, is somewhat challenging for a child's social development.

ryandrake 10y ago

Oh, another "Isn't it cool that people can quit their jobs to go do $EXPENSIVE_THING" humblebrag article! File this along with the "Exploring Africa in my custom jeep" and "Traveling the country in a solar powered van I built" pieces. Unfortunately, this option is not available to the 99.99% of readers who need to pay their mortgages, health insurance, child care expenses, student loan payments, and other realities of normal life. If you're one of those lucky enough to be able to just jaunt off to a faraway land for a "career break" then congratulations! But these articles claiming it's something that you, the reader, can do, are pretty silly.

maxaf 10y ago
Just for the hell of it I went over to my wife and proposed taking a sabbatical. She raised an eyebrow: "Are you high? Man up & do what needs to be done!" Seriously though, until universal basic income is a thing, those of us who must work for a living will continue to work for a living. This is capitalism in action.
- hackits 10y ago
  Can only talk about my wife and our situation. We both work, but all ways make sure that either partner can hold a full time job and pay all our commitments. This goes for car loan, mortgage, shopping. It takes the stress of either partner that they can just take 6 to 12 months off when things get really tough.
- shostack 10y ago
  Even with UBI my guess is you'd get the same response due to the likely standard of living hit you'd take.
uhtred 10y ago
Not being able to do this because you have kids, a mortgage or student loan repayments is down to choices you have made in life. Someone who doesn't have those commitments holding them back because they chose a different path shouldn't feel guilty.

hliyan 10y ago

In 2013, I quit a 10-year job in the HFT/trading systems industry and went to work for small non-profit that developed web/mobile systems for humanitarian and human rights agencies. One of the best the things I ever did. What came out of it: 1. Completely upgraded my outdated skill set - from C++/Oracle to ES6/React/Redux/Node.js etc. 2. Completed a life-long dream of writing a full length science fiction novel (not yet published, sadly) 3. Developed computational psychology model (pet interest) that might one day be the basis of a paper 4. Learned proper leadership skills, public speaking skills and people management skills 5. Much better health - exercised, got plenty of leisure time (worked only 30hrs/week) 6. Networked through pro-bono consulting It was financially punishing for me, but ultimately it was more than worth it. Last year I returned to the industry full time (a different industry this time). The additional skills/experience in the resume opened up a lot more higher level opportunities that I would never have been able to pursue 3 years ago. Right now I'm in a management level position doing exactly the kind of work I want to do, and I doubt if I'll ever have to worry about finding a job... By the way, for anyone who asks, those 2 years were easily the happiest in my life. Edit: cons: be ready to be poorer!

mailshanx 10y ago
That sounds amazing! I would love to know which industry you returned to, how the exactly the experiences you had in the break contributed to finding higher level opportunities, and the impact on personal finances...
- hliyan 10y ago
  1. The food services industry 2. My previous job was 10 years of mostly proprietary tech. Had no time to pursue other things seriously. Dealing with the newer technologies in a production setting (in the non-profit) helped more than any other learning process would have. Also, going from a small fish in a very big corporate pond to a big fish in a very small pond meant having to take a lot more responsibilities for product, delivery, strategy and HR. It was like a mini skill incubator. I also had enough time to do some serious consulting work, which opened up a lot of opportunities. 3. Quite bad. Savings are quite low currently. My living standard is still somewhat lower than my peers. But opportunities within the next 2-5 years are huge. Had I remained in my old industry, I'd have been a technological fossil by the time I'm 40 (I'm 37 now).

whenwillitstop 10y ago

Can anyone in this thread speak to how it would impact a software engineers career in the USA? I've considered doing this for a while, just afraid to give up all I've worked for

pfarnsworth 10y ago

I did this a few years ago, taking 1 year off. I was a bit nervous being in my 40s, but it did such immense help for me, I recommend it for anyone who is willing to work hard during their time off. I pivoted from enterprise software to backend development for various online companies and I'm very, very happy.

andrewclunn 10y ago

Non-white people do this too. They just call it being laid off. The holistic, "I just feel so fulfilled!" crap just irks me at some visceral level that I can't fully explain. There's just something so entitled and lazy about this way of existing.

terrywilcox 10y ago
You sound like you need a sabbatical.

personjerry 10y ago

Did BBC just clickbait me?

eslaught 10y ago

It sounds like lots of people here have taken breaks, but have any of you taken actual sabbaticals (i.e. with explicit employer permission and with the intention of coming back afterwards)? How did you negotiate it and how did it go for you?

sokoloff 10y ago
We have a program that grants a short (4 week) sabbatical every 5 years. You can add an additional 2 weeks of PTO to get to a 6 week break. It's not an academic's typical sabbatical, but it's a nice perk to disconnect as well as force us to not be excessively dependent on a long-time veteran for daily ops. To your last question, it's a company perk, so wasn't negotiated; my first one went very well; I caught up on some hobbies that I'd let slide and did some fun travel and am looking forward to my second one.
- nordify 10y ago
  > We have a program that grants a short (4 week) sabbatical every 5 years. You can add an additional 2 weeks of PTO to get to a 6 week break. That's not a sabbatical, that's a normal summer vacation in Europe :)

raleighm 10y ago

I’m a few months into a mid-career break. I’m exercising, playing with kids, writing, studying, and sleeping (8 hours/night!). I’m also depleting savings, but not as quickly as I projected. Now that I have time, I fix broken things rather than replace them. I take time to research things really well before purchasing, so make few mistakes and get good deals. Each dollar I spend is a few minutes sooner that I need to return to employment (if the projects I’m tinkering with aren’t yet revenue-generating), which motivates frugality. We lowered our costs significantly right before I left work. We moved to a small but adequate house in the far suburbs. My mortgage is about one-eight the mortgage of peers in my profession at my level, even when I include the rent I pay now for a tiny personal office nearby. Chen, featured in the article, was one inspiration to take the plunge. I found his LinkedIn CV, which describes that period: “Father and Husband, Sabbatical, September 2011 - August 2012. We took a year off from our life in Boston and lived on a remote island in Norway just north of the Arctic Circle.” I liked that. Ideally I emerge from this period with a sustainable business of my own, but even if I return to working for others, as long as I have an interesting, compelling story about what I was up to during my time off, and how it made me better - which I will - I doubt the period will cost me much (if anything) in interview terms, and it may benefit me. Glad to read the experiences of others here who did this and didn’t regret it. If there are people who took time off and did regret it or have advice about how (not) to spend the time, would love to read that too.

varjag 10y ago
> I found his LinkedIn CV, which describes that period: “Father and Husband, Sabbatical, September 2011 - August 2012. We took a year off from our life in Boston and lived on a remote island in Norway just north of the Arctic Circle.” Honestly it sounds more along the lines of a usual stay at home dad, the location notwithstanding. The only reason they moved there was wife's origin and offer of employment. If you reverse the genders it happens all the time, just that no one would call that 'sabbatical'.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > If you reverse the genders it happens all the time, just that no one would call that 'sabbatical'. Because a sabbatical means that for a limited time you will do something different that you always wanted to do and go back to the job afterwards. Not cultivating a new hobby which will distract you from your job for the next, say, 15 years.

siquick 10y ago

I took a 1 year career break in 2011, travelled around Asia, learnt some new life and professional skills and got an excellent new job in Australia (I'm British) via sponsorship. Im convinced that I got the job because my energy and enthusiasm levels were completely reset after my time away from working. In August this year I left that job and I've been living in Thailand for the last 2.5 months, and already I feel completely reset and ready for new challenges. The most important part of a career break is to use the time wiseley to either work on yourself, or work on your skills, or both. If you just sit around on your backside playing XBox and doing the same shit you did while you were working, then you're probably not going to benefit from it. Yes this path may not be available to friends who went down the family/mortgage path but they have benefits in their life which I don't have. Different people, different priorities I guess.

jczhang 10y ago

Question for all you guys who took a break (ie travel for 1 yr+) and came back to another job. How did you show in your resume?

dagw 10y ago
My resume just looks something like: Job A: 2007-2009 Job B: 2010-2014 ...etc No one ever asks.
dejv 10y ago
Well, I did few freelancing projects during my 2 years break, so I guess I could fill it with freelancing and list of projects to show for. On the other hand, I haven't try to get another job since. Mix of freelancing and working on my own projects is replacing my income.

k__ 10y ago

I worked 7 years for one company and had the feeling it wouldn't go anywhere. So I quit and went Funemployed for 1.5 years. Doing some game development etc. Went self-employed afterwards and got to work from home and make much more money. I learned much and even tried to finish my masters degree, but the new job prevented me from getting the thesis done, haha. But maybe next year.

davidhyde 10y ago

Get on the property ladder before you take your sabbatical. I recently took an 18 month sabbatical from my banking software development job and it was well worth the risk. I had been working for 11 years. I ended up getting my old job back when I returned because I did not leave on bad terms. I probably would not have if I had stayed there any longer as work and London life was turning me into an angry selfish person in general. My only regret is that I didn't buy a flat or house just before I took the break. Whilst employers are more than open to the idea of a long sabbatical in my industry, lenders are not. Right now I am earning just as much as I used to but I am struggling to get a home loan despite having an excellent credit rating. They see that hole in your work history and it gives them the jitters. I should have bought a place and rented it out before I went traveling.

hliyan 10y ago
Strange, this is one of my regrets as well -- not investing in real estate!
ptero 10y ago
In the US I often see well paid friends struggle financially after buying a house (I do live in a high cost area in the US). And most landlords (again, US) will accept a bank statement with 12-14 months rent in lieu of a salary check. You can prepay 12 months to avoid any questions whatsoever. I would personally avoid buying a house before jumping off as that would occupy my mind instead of freeing it. My 2c.
- CalRobert 10y ago
  "..And most landlords (again, US) will accept a bank statement with 12-14 months rent.." When I was starting a company and without a salary it was really hard to find a landlord who was OK with this. Some seemed to be thinking "eh, this is different from the norm and I have plenty of applicants so it's not worth the mental trouble", and others "irregular income situation probably means they sell drugs".
- davidhyde 10y ago
  Right now, in London and if you have a 15% deposit, its cheaper to buy a place than to rent from month to month so I guess it depends where you live. I always thought it was better to keep my savings liquid for startup capital but I found myself going back to work because I did not like spending it on rent. I figured that I would continue my project at a slower pace in the evenings and weekends and cover my expenses in the meantime. This is not a good recipe for swiftly setting up a startup.

oriel 10y ago

I did this last year by accident, after a layoff from a high intensity but failing startup. Easily one of the most productive, eye opening, bucket list kicking experiences of my life. I ended up doing 6 months, traveling, starting a company, got CELTA certified, met a woman who turned my perspective on dating upsidedown, and generally was much happier. Oddly though, all of my personal coding projects went almost immediately into the bin. I didn't have the motivation to push them when I was employed and lost all motivation when I didn't touch the field on a daily basis.

JamieAtBud 10y ago

A consultant that just started working for our company wrote this post a few days ago: "He who dares"... Why moving from a corporate to a start-up could be the best move you ever make… Might be of interest http://blog.thisisbud.com/he-who-dares-why-moving-from-a-corporate-to-a-start-up-could-be-the-best-move-you-ever-make/ http://blog.thisisbud.com/he-who-dares-why-moving-from-a-cor...