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My Year Plus Long Sabbatical

·2056 words·10 mins

I’m not unemployed I’m on sabbatical

I’ve been on what some might call a sabbatical, some might call funemployment, for almost a year and a half. In May 2023 I left GitHub to relax and spend time with family. My oldest kid is just starting high school, so I felt like now was the best chance to spend as much time as possible with both my kids before they’re too old and too busy to want that. Also, while not initially part of the plan, my wife decided to go to code school to switch careers after being the stay at home parent for over a decade. The flexibility and pay for software developers that allowed me to take this time off was appealing enough to her that she thought it might be worth her getting into. More on that later.

Financials #

First of all, let’s discuss the thing that seems to make a lot of people uncomfortable: money. I’m very lucky to be able to afford to take this much time off. I know by far the majority of people could not swing this financially, and I assume most people at least wonder about how this is possible. I know that’s what I always wondered about the very few people I’ve heard of who take sabbaticals of any length.

Simply put, software development has paid pretty well and I’ve invsted much of what I’ve earned. Honestly, I’m better off financially in terms of net worth than I was before I left my last job thanks to gains in my stock market investments. That’s not something I was counting on, but that is largely why my initial planned time off of 6 months has increased to the current time frame.

Health Insurance #

Another big financial factor was that I qualified for health insurance through the Oregon Health Plan, essentially medicaid. I wasn’t expecting this given my annual income by the time I left my job in 2023, but was pleasantly surprised to find the qualification was based on monthly income, which was near 0 since neither I nor my wife was working. Initially I signed up for a federal marketplace plan that cost $1000 a month with a $15,000 deductible. Insanity. Maybe one day our whole country will move to universal healthcare, and we won’t have to play ridiculous games with our jobs being linked to our health insurance, but for now this is the closest I’ve come to that dream. It was confusing at first because there were no copays, coinsurance, out-of-pocket maximums, or other confusing terminology to deal with. I didn’t believe it at first, but the few times we’ve needed to go to a doctor for something, it was just free and easy. It says something about how messed up our system is that having medical interactions be free and easy makes me super suspicious.

Fun #

Having fun with my time off really was the main goal, and one that was accomplished so well that it made it very hard to consider returning to work. I’ve heard of people who retire and are bored and don’t have enough to do. What?! I always had more to do than there was time for: bouldering, camping, backpacking, skiing, video games, books, movies, hanging out with friends, traveling with my family, playing music, and on and on.

My family at Yellowstone Falls

I’d say the highlight of my fun times were road trips with my family, mostly to visit friends and family or National Parks. Over the two summers I’ve been off we went to Crater Lake, Redwoods National Park, Oregon Caves National Monument, the Sawtooths, Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, Olympics National Park, and those are just the “national” areas and parks we had time for. My youngest daughter got a 4th grade parks pass, so we used it.

Most of the fun things I did are fun things I normally do while I’m working too, but somehow everything is more fun when you’re less stressed about other stuff. Normally time seems to go by faster every year I’ve been alive, but for the first time in a LONG time, time actually seemed to slow down a little. Besides having time to do more fun things, the chance to savor the fun times make them feel even more impactful.

I may have actually played enough video games that I need a break from them for a while, partly because the recent effort of beating Shadow of the Erdtree broken me a little. Of course the new AstroBot game is coming out tomorrow…

Health #

I’ve been meaning to write about this for over a year now, and may someday write about it in more detail, but in the fall of 2022 I had what might be best described as long COVID. Mainly because there’s really no consistent definition for long COVID, but I had what it typically sounds like: major fatigue. Oof. Long story short, I think it was probably exposure to COVID triggered a re-activation of the epstein barr virus, more commonly called mono (AKA the kissing disease). I had mono in 3rd grade, and at one point while talking to a doctor after a month of tests and frustration I said something like “I haven’t felt this tired since I had mono”, so he ran some tests and it showed I probably had it recently.

I’m super happy that after a couple months the fatigue did eventually pass and I returned to whatever normal was. However, that episode really made it clear the absolute essential priority of health, and that I can’t wait to focus on it. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to work again with how tired I was for that long. While going through that, I saw people who have been absolutely debilitated by long COVID like Dianna Cowern, and it really put in perspective that you can’t put off making health a priority. Time away from work has let me do that more.

That’s not to say the time off was all magical and I have some thirst trap pic of my new six pack abs to show off. There were actually ups and downs for my health even with the time off, mostly due to a couple injuries I won’t go into. But I did have a lot of time to climb at the bouldering gym, lift weights, go for long walks, meditate, sleep well, and realize how much better I could feel even as I age. It’s a never ending task though.

Learning #

I definitely had a chance to learn stuff during my time off, but even more so my wife decided to go back to school and learn a TON. Specifically a code school bootcamp at Epicodus. She was definitely spending over 40 hours a week on the program, probably closer to 60 or more. I was impressed with how much she learned, and I’d say she came out of the program far more ready to work as a software developer than a lot of people I’ve worked with. She even had a cool internship. Sadly, she was the last class to go through Epicodus since they shut down due to low enrollment. The junior dev market is ROUGH right now

This meant I became the full time stay at home parent responsible for all the cooking, cleaning, kid drop-offs, calendar scheduling, etc. I upped my cooking game quite a bit, making a lot of soups and spicy asian dishes. I never did make a Pad See Ew as good as my favorite Thai restaurants, but maybe one day. I enjoyed my stay at home parent role, but that may be in large part because it was surely a LOT easier to do that for teenage kids compared to when they were younger.

AI and code #

After maybe six months I actually missed coding again! The last few years of staff / principal level software jobs drained me a bit. Higher levels of software ironically involve a lot less writing code. There’s a LOT of reading, reviewing, planning and other activities related to code, but there really is something magic about being able to just write and create without a bunch of responsibility or deadlines. I wrote some toy stuff with AI large language models. It blows my mind how easy it is to just incorporate that stuff into everything these days. Using something like Ollama you can download models to your laptop and just start running them in minutes. I wrote a little app to read my journal and give me feedback and talk about it. We’ve come a long way since AI was something like Eliza trying to be a therapist. This was fun because I wouldn’t want to upload my journal to a public AI model, so it was cool to be able to duct tape together something locally that could read this data without ever putting it out in the cloud.

I’ve considered applying for jobs multiple times in the last year, usually if the stock market dipped, so have spent some time doing leetcode practice just to keep up my skills. While I think leetcode style interview questions are absolutely inane and not at all good predictors of good employees, they still persist in so many interview cycles. However, I don’t see how this can keep up with how good AI code agents like GitHub Copilot have become at this particular task. I can practically just put the url for a leetcode problem in my editor, and Copilot will generate a working answer instantly. I actually find it funny that some people were giving my wife advice to NOT use AI code assistants while she learns. That’s ridiculous, because they’re very useful and accelerate learning. I don’t think they’ll ever completely replace software developers, mainly because they’re much better at writing small snippets than modifying large, unwieldy, poorly factored codebases - which most codebases are. But they’re here to stay, so avoiding them at any level isn’t going to be an option for long. It’s already gotten a lot better than when I was using GitHub Copilot while working for GitHub.

Future #

I think my time away from work is coming to an end. There’s a couple motivating factors

I’ve heard from a bunch of people that the current software job market sucks. There’s signs it might be getting better, including that my wife has started to get some interviews after months of nothing. While that doesn’t exactly excite me for starting applying and interviewing, especially since even in good markets that’s never fun, I’ll probably have more luck than a junior dev as I’ve heard people still want to hire senior people. At the end of 2021 when I was job hunting I had 7 job offers in about a month after applying to I think 9 or 10 companies. I highly doubt that’s gonna be the case this time around.

The main thing I miss about work is consistently seeing people. One of the few downsides to being funemployed is that almost nobody else I know is in the same boat. So it’s not like summer vacation when you’re a kid and all your friends want to hang out too. I don’t expect my work colleagues to all become my new friends, although I have made good friends from past jobs, but that basic camaraderie you get when building things together can be very rewarding.

So I’ve begun my job search by just talking to people I’ve worked with in the past, but haven’t applied anywhere yet. Sadly, almost nobody I talk to is exactly happy with their job, which seems to correlate with data from surveys showing only about 20% of software developers are currently happy. Yuck. That’s way worse than 5 years ago when around 60% of those surveyed were at least slightly satisfied. I’ve got lots of thoughts why this might be, but that’s for another time. For now, I’ll continue the search at a leisurely pace and wait for something promising to come along. Or worst case, I extend my time off to 2 years and go for that six pack abs photo 💪😃