I would argue that there's no correlation. This exercise is pretty easy: If I gave you money for a year to keep you and your family alive, and gave you free ti

I would argue that there's no correlation. This exercise is pretty easy: If I gave you money for a year to keep you and your family alive, and gave you free time to do whatever you want, do you really think you'd come back as a worse expert after a year? Some people will take a year of and do nothing; some people will be bored to death after 3 months of doing nothing and for the next 9 months will learn tons of skills, new programming language etc. I'd not disqualify them because of that.