Ask HN: Have you ever taken a career break or gap year to hack?
I'm thinking about doing this for my own mental health, whether they be open source projects, fun projects, or projects that might be eventually monetizable and turn into a business (but without the pressure to necessarily do so). After burnout in the corporate world it would be nice to just do what I feel like doing for a while.
Financially, I'm good to do this for a certain amount of time, but at some point I'll need to work again -- my savings is fine for some years, but nowhere close to retirement.
Have any of you taken this kind of gap? Did you ever feel that your lack of a line on your resume caused the constant influx of recruiter emails to slowly start dwindling, and your "I can always get a job" lifeline started vanishing at some point?
Or did you feel it was a non-issue, and that recruiters continued to see your technical abilities without the job title?
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[ 0.63 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadIt's good to consider the financial impact seriously in balance with everything else - not only the income you won't earn, but also how that would have compounded across your lifetime.
To address your point about recruiter emails, I still get them. So long as you can provide value to a business at the end of your break it's not necessarily an issue, though you might have to work harder to demonstrate that - I think especially for the soft skills you'd otherwise be using day-to-day in a workplace as opposed to when you're just doing your own thing.
I took a three year break that combined freelancing, some personal projects and a good bit of everything but devwork. Coming back into a full-time dev role was challenging for a couple reasons, but most pointedly all the effort required to rebuild the emotional muscles to negotiate the political/social situations. Took a good 6 months before it felt effortless again.
I am thankful for the opportunities and growth that my break enabled. At the same time, it has felt that getting back into work routines has been just as awkward as getting out of them.
I don’t mourn money I misspent in my youth because experience was worth it but only now I see how much those would be worth in money terms. So I guess at least make adventure really worth it, because bumming on a couch watching streams for a year or even month is going to be a disaster.
In terms of “hacking on my own things”, I highly recommend it. Not needing to work allowed me to make a lot of progress in 6 months. I tried different businesses, and was able to focus way better than “hacking in the side / after my 9-5”.
In terms of physical and mental health, I also recommend it. Make sure to not work 16 hours a day and try to enjoy the free time as well. For me it meant going to the gym daily, doing more boxing sessions, and traveling a lot.
Lastly, in terms of healing burnout, I’m not sure yet. I’m learning now that burnout can be triggered by different reasons. So if you are tired from corporate, take a year off, and then come back to corporate, I doubt your previous issues with corporate will just vanish. But as always, YMMV.
Lastly lastly, didn’t have any issues with recruiters. On the contrary, it makes hell of a story.
Good luck. Feel free to reach out or check my blog, where I posted some notes form my sabbatical. Links/email/socials are in my profile.
It's coming up on a year for me out of a programming job. I'm looking forward to starting this fast food job so I can afford groceries again.
Either way, still writing code.
the food is shit but it's still better than 9 to 5.
on gaps on resume lol it never mattered. that "i can always get a job" lifeline is always there as long as i'm staying sharp on my technical skills.
on interviews though it's pointless to take it personally.
it's numbers game. sometimes they make you jump through hoops, sometimes you just dont pass the vibe check, sometimes they just cant afford a better offer.
for me it's less of how you can fit the requirements they are looking for, but more on what else you can bring on the table aside from fitting their criteria.
they should also be the one qualifying themselves to you as the right place for you to work at.
a lot of it is just a reframe on how you see things, and it reflects on your words and on your actions.
if you are feeling desperate and hopeless, it means you have a weak pipeline, a faucet not a firehose.
you need hundreds of brain dead applications and your phone ringing every hour or two. you have to play your cards like you're the blonde with the best tits in town.
you gotta be doing so much motion that your mind doesnt even have time to register any negative emotion.
Wondering how old you are. 6 months, to me, seems like nothing. I'm in my late 50s.
At 34, it still feels like a lot, but I also wouldn’t consider anything less than that a “break.”
I would say it was ultimately a mistake. While I stormed out of the gate I got way too comfortable after a few months and ultimately lazy. The mistake was in thinking this wasn't going to happen for me. I would also say the subjective feeling of time was much too fast.
The upside though was that was my retirement basically and the realization that is not what I want from life is quite valuable.
I'm also quite confident in my ability to find a regular job when needed even if I have a few years gap in my resume
I think because of the layoffs recruiters just stopped reaching out in general. Now that Im working at a household name company with linked in updated they still don't reach out.
The recruiters I talked to though were almost all on auto pilot. Theyd ask "why are you leaving your current job" and variations and I'd be like, well I haven't worked in a year. Or just ask me about my last job and I wouldn't bring it up that I wasn't working.
Not working felt amazing, the interview process made me hate working all over again and I didn't even have a job.
Having a gap is irrelevant if you can demonstrate skills.
Job-wise, I haven’t really stressed that much because I figured it wouldn’t too hard to get a software job as an experienced dev (and I was right)
During the break, I did try to build some for-profit projects so that I could prolong the break as much as I wanted. But in hindsight, it was a mistake if I were to do it again I would just focus on what makes me happy instead of trying to make something that can make money.
All in all, I’d recommend it. I’m in a better place mentally and I hope I can do it again in 5-7 years.
Had nerves interviewing at first but eventually settled into a groove. Will it be harder than interviewing when you're currently employed? Yes, but a lot of it will be in your head. One of the most rewarding experiences of my life and so happy I did it
I also wrote a more detailed blog about my experiences and advice for a break if it's useful! https://gunsch.cc/2024/04/06/sabbatical-review.html
Now that the health issues are behind me, I have the ability to move to SF and work with a team of robotic engineers on a new project they’re building. Only caveat is I’d be doing it purely for learning; I don’t have the skills necessary to provide value to the team yet.
Haven’t talked details all the way through with the founder I’m talking to, but I think it could be an incredible learning experience. We’re syncing up after Christmas, anyone have any suggestions on what to ask or input on the situation in general?
Of course. Having said that you have to take a look around and decide if the conditions are remotely in your favor, right now, and when/if things don't pane out in 6-12 months. The economy (not the stock market) isn't great, finding another job without much experience in the current state of the tech industry might look even more bleak. I graduated right after the dot com bubble burst. I took the calls from recruiters offering me sign-on bonuses and other crazy stuff during the bubble - I declined and chose to finish school instead. A year later after graduating I moved to Boston and heard first-hand accounts of developers driving cabs to make ends meet when things imploded.
It's one thing to take a high risk / high reward chance, but swapping a steady good-paying job for effectively an unspecified unpaid role doesn't seem like that. If he's willing to work unpaid, he's more likely to get a low-ball offer if/when the company decides to employ him.
* Be prepared for a potentially lengthy period of employment. The market is not what it once was, especially early in your career, and interview cycles are long.
* Consider that startup founders in SF have a high appetite for risk, may be very charismatic and persuasive, and ultimately will bear none of the consequences if this doesn't work out well for you. Sadly, founders can be exploitative too, and asking you to move to SF to work for free sounds exploitative.
* There are a lot of good options out there! Speaking as someone who broke into the SF tech scene after starting my career outside of it, the first few companies/job offers are going to sound unbelievably amazing. That's because they are sales pitches, sold to you by professional salespeople. Over time, once you have seen some of those promises fail to work out, you may view the sales pitches with skepticism. There are going to be more amazing opportunities, and some of them will pay.
Having said all that: I once quit my job and spent down my savings to work on a passion project. And I once left my hometown and set sail for SF, too (although I was paid for that.) Ultimately, if you have a good social safety net and good skills, you will probably be alright, even if you do something a little bit wild like this.
I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that there is a lot to learn still at your current job. Dive deep into Sales Engineering and learn as much as you can from the non-engineer salespeople at your job. Those skills are very valuable on their own, and you're already in a good place to learn them. You'll have time to dive deeper into engineering/development at your next job...
Note: I am not affiliated with the Recurse Center, just a big fan.
That worked, and I got my mojo back.
I also became a bit of an expert in the niche I was learning. That helped get me work that was unusually challenging and rewarding.
(I've since moved on to other areas, especially startup do-all-the-things roles.)
Just an anecdote, maybe an edge case. I don't think it's a reliably repeatable formula. There was a lot of good and bad luck involved. And, under the particular circumstances, I had to be willing to give up almost everything else, and ended up giving up things I didn't even know I was giving up.
Without financial security, to get by, you might have to suffer all sorts of things no one should have to put up with. The hardest parts are probably not what you would've guessed.
A penny-pinching lifestyle can also have effects on relationships. A "starving artist" or "poor student", who thinks differently, definitely has temporary appeal with many. But that's a lot less attractive to a partner's long-term thinking/feeling by late 20s, if they want to raise a middle class family, with good schools, safe housing, and comforts. My sense is that someone whose field seems to be "techbro", but who doesn't already show signs of financial comfort, is likely registering more as no-future, not like a "poor" med student (who will seem viable for raising a family, with just a well-defined period of hard work and non-affluence to get through first).
If at all possible, endeavor to have a FAANG war chest, or to be born to wealthy parents, and your gap becomes much better.
You might be able to get extended unpaid time off without leaving. My team has an unofficial policy that you can take up to about a month unpaid (not every year).