Today marks the first month anniversary of my gap year. A month ago today, I was out of energy and quit my job in the hope of resetting myself. I will spend this year resting, blogging and working on a few projects. This blog will be where I record my thoughts and feelings during my time off. To find out why I made this life changing decision, read more below.
A bit of history
The slow drip of my batteries started a long time ago, before I even realized that it was happening. Before becoming a software engineering manager, I was a software developer for about 15 years, and I remember being ever so curious about all sorts of things. Whether it was new operating systems (new to me, anyway,) new frameworks or new programming languages, I wanted to experiment with them and I would spend a lot of time at night and on weekends doing so. This strategy helped me build my career and kept my knowledge fresh.
Eventually, I started working for an AI startup in town. This was about five or six years before ChatGPT came along and I didn’t know much about the field, but I was eager to learn. And I learned a lot! At first, I had to get up to speed on Big Data, install Hadoop and Hive and perform queries on terabytes of data. Then I had to create machine learning pipelines to integrate AI models trained by the data science team, models that we used to do predictive maintenance on our customers’ industrial assets.
I believe that it was at this job that something changed for me. I started coasting and casually stopped learning on the side without really realizing that it had happened. Instead, I started playing more video games, watching more television or YouTube. I noticed the change eventually and wondered why my drive had seemingly disappeared. Today, I could argue that the job was stressful and that I was learning so much while at work that I didn’t really need to do so in my free time anymore, and I tend to believe that this was indeed the case, but I have never really gained back my momentum since then, despite not having been a software engineer in the last five years.
Management
Management was a slow drip of energy for me
I was eventually promoted into management, which is quite literally a career change that requires a completely different skill set. So once again, I could argue that I had to learn a lot on the job. But also, management demanded more from me than my software engineering job did before that. So many people have written about this on the Internet, that transitioning into management takes time, mentally. A software engineer is used to daily hits of dopamine when they make something work. A manager does not get any of that. Instead, managers may get a few wins every year, and even then, those wins might need to be credited to the team that they manage.
Managers also spend a lot more time in meetings, very often back-to-back meetings to discuss things that are completely unrelated to each other. For example, you might end one meeting on an important roadmap initiative promising to look into your team’s performance issues only to jump immediately to another meeting to discuss a new Jira workflow that the operations team wants to implement company wide. In a lot of cases, the frustrations incurred in one meeting had to be compartmentalized in the few seconds of free time that I had before jumping into another meeting.
Managers also have to be able to fight for their team, or sometimes even fight their teams when it comes to aligning with business objectives. This can cause the job to feel quite lonely sometimes. On top of that, I am not someone who enjoys saying no to people, or arguing about decisions, or fighting off insistent product managers that think the team can achieve more than it can. All of this took a toll on me.
Unhappiness
At some point I started feeling unhappy. I’m not sure when it happened exactly but I spent a few years on a roller coaster of feeling unhappy, trying to shake it off and motivate myself, only to feel happy for a few days before being unhappy once again.
Looking back, I can see that my unhappy days usually started on Sunday nights, after realizing that I had spent the weekend doing nothing. Because work wasn’t rewarding to me anymore, I started accumulating hobbies to compensate. But because I had no energy left at the end of the day, I never really spent time on my hobbies. I increasingly started feeling angry with myself for wasting my free time away, for remembering how I used to be energetic and always used to read or tinker. Instead, I had spent the night or weekend in the clutches of the YouTube algorithm, watching video after video, often of people who were successful at doing something with their own lives, while I sat here angry that it was almost Monday again.
This recurring unhappiness as a software engineering manager continued across three different companies that I worked for. I used to think that maybe things would be better at the next company but that was never the case past the first few honeymoon months at the new gig. I quickly found myself reacting to events at the compay instead of being proactive. I found it increasingly difficult to find the energy I needed to tackle my todo list. Thank goodness I was managing great engineers, because inside my head, it was not pretty. I was a mess earning an underserved paycheck. I knew what was going on. I had known for a while, in fact. It was time to take a break, recenter and rediscover myself.
The test
With the support of my family and with the knowledge that my savings could support me for a bit, I took the plunge and quit with the goal of taking a year off to rest, reflect and work on a few projects that interest me.
As for what I’ll do when I go back to work, it’s still unclear at the moment. I may decide to go back to work as a software developer after refreshing my skills. Or I may pursue something else if one of my projects takes off or if I suddenly discover a new passion for something else. We’ll see!
Will I ever cut my year short and go back to work early? I hope not, because I set out on this path to learn something. As I reach my year off anniversary, will I have regained the desire and curiosity that I once had? This is what I truly want to know. And to know the answer, I need to spend a year without working a regular 9 to 5 job.