The term has roots in "seven", just like Sabbath, so with 14 years in the industry, you've skipped one.
I think a solid half-year off every seven to ten years is an excellent practice for intellectually demanding labor.
What makes it a sabbatical is that it's a change of pace which furthers your career. I'd love to take a sabbatical and just work on building stuff, personally: from soldering, to designing boards, probing them, writing firmware, I'm a rank amateur, and I'd love to level up for awhile, while free of the burden of justifying my salary in the process.
It could be painting, there's a popular author who wrote a book about the connection between painting and hacking, can't remember his name but his stuff gets posted here all the time.
What it isn't, is a vacation, or a convalescence. It sounds like you haven't hit "can't work", just "sucks to work", which is a blessing.
If you can't afford it, that's understandable, there are ways to get some of the benefit from a new job, but "relieved of the burden of delivering value" is an important factor.
I've known people who pushed "sucks to work" until it became "can't work", and they don't all make it back to the profession, a bit less than half in fact. Whatever you do, I urge you to take burnout seriously, because at the limit it's a serious medical condition which can cripple or kill you.
Some context for the fun of it. Sabbath is the 7th day of rest that the God of Genesis took -- yes even God found rest to at least be good (if not needed). He also prescribed for the jewish people of the Old testament seven sacred feasts, which could be multiday if not weeklong festivities and breaks from work. Then there was the Sabbatical you mentioned -- One year off in 7 to rest the land and labor. Furthermore there was "Jubilee" -- a special sabbatical year every 7th sabbatical that went even further :)
Seems like ancient people (if not God) deeply understood the need for rest!
A sabbatical sounds outrageously stressful to me. I'd immediately have significantly worse health insurance, I wouldn't be contributing to retirement, all the while I'd be draining away my safety net.
Obvious for me to say: there's a point in time when you're going to stop working and you're going to be draining away your safety net regardless, because you're retired.
So with a sabbatical now, just think that you're making time now so that you can have a better retirement later because you'll be ready for an enjoyable retirement as opposed to needing to take two or three or five years of your retirement, just calming down from your crazy career.
It's definitely not an easy thing to consider. Do evaluate with an extended pros and cons list and weight each item in the list.
If you develop serious conditions during 30s, you're going to enjoy them longer. I think the aim overall should be balanced life oriented towards future. If whatever I am doing now seems unsustainable it's not gonna be sustainable in a year (I will just learn how to ignore it).
If you're a software engineer that has been working for 7+ years and don't have enough savings to survive 6 months off work or are so behind on retirement savings that this would seriously impact your future I think you should work seriously on getting your finances in order.
Well obviously if you are so sick that the only way for you to survive, financially and literally, is to have employer paid health insurance then ok don't take a sabbatical. This is of course a US-centric problem and would be absurd to basically anyone outside the US.
You don't even have to be "so sick"! for a family of 4 health insurance from a state exchange costs $1,000 a month and can come with a $7k per-person deductible. That's a minor car accident away from $26k in healthcare costs ($14k family deductible + $12k in annual premiums)...
It's less that and more that you're not maximizing retirement savings at that point, which is something that stresses a lot of folks out.
Also, even within software, I can't imagine trying to find a job with a 6-month gap on my resume. I'm not in the bay area, and even working remotely, competition is brutal. A gap on your resume is a great reason to get immediately rejected by wherever you're applying to.
Not all of us are in the niches of software where jobs are easy to come by. Not everything is web dev.
This is well worth replying to, it surfaces some culture/class things which are worth making explicit.
Being responsible about the future is important, but let's phrase the goal as "savings upon retirement", rather than "retirement savings".
A sabbatical can help with that in a few ways, but first let's talk about the gap.
A sabbatical is not a gap in one's resume, it's a sabbatical. What's done with that time is open-ended, but one of the things it does is provide a useful line item.
This is in fact a class thing. People of independent means will take time off to improve their careers. Real talk, I can't stress this enough: don't buy a sabbatical, or a Porche, if you can't afford it.
They don't put this on their resume, but rather, on their C.V.
I'm not from those people, but growing up in a university town, one gets to know them.
A sabbatical is good if: you can write an open-source library in your niches which solves a problem, if you expand the breadth of your expertise, if what you're doing has a significant philanthropic angle. All of these can set someone up for a higher tier of job, something with better prospects.
It's good to have a comfortable nest egg, and it's even better if when you do, you have the kind of respect and stake in your field where you don't actually retire. Emeritus is a wonderful Latin loanword. May we all merit emeritus.
> It's less that and more that you're not maximizing retirement savings at that point, which is something that stresses a lot of folks out.
I understand where this is coming from, but it can be a trap. Maximizing your retirement savings for the distant future at the cost of your current health is not a good tradeoff.
All things in balance. One's current needs are just as important as their future needs. "Future you" can figure it out when the time comes. They're pretty smart :p. "Future you" would want you to properly take care of "current you".
I say this as someone who has spent most of my net worth -- over $100k -- over the past 2 years of not working as I've taken time to heal and grow and learn how to live life better.
It's been a difficult journey for me but it is something I needed to do. I have more hope for the future than I have had in many, many years.
> Also, even within software, I can't imagine trying to find a job with a 6-month gap on my resume. I'm not in the bay area, and even working remotely, competition is brutal. A gap on your resume is a great reason to get immediately rejected by wherever you're applying to.
This may be a hurdle, but it's probably not as big as you think. You were taking care of your health -- no details required. The matter has since been resolved and you are excited and ready to make use of your skills again. Do they need someone with your skillset or not? Don't project your worry onto them :) They will sense that and that will be the actual issue.
> It's less that and more that you're not maximizing retirement savings at that point, which is something that stresses a lot of folks out.
What you contributed in years 1-3 are going to be worth far more than what you are contributing after year 7, see exponential returns.
>Also, even within software, I can't imagine trying to find a job with a 6-month gap on my resume.
Idk what field you are in but I get recruiter calls and emails daily, there is massive demand so I don't see this making much sense.
>A gap on your resume is a great reason to get immediately rejected by wherever you're applying to.
I don't think this actually bears out for people with in-demand skills that can interview well. Maybe you are overthinking how long people even look at a resume before interviews, hint: it's not long.
One could easily move past the gap by saying you took an extended break, were traveling, were working on a passion project, etc.
People in US seem so freaked about it. I don't think many people in EU would care that you have a gap. Great you will join in as fresh.
Further I think you can just write "working on personal endeavors"... which you will. Many people have gaps on startups that failed and now there is even no website to show, no?
You should think about retirement, but maybe that will never come. You can hit by a bus any day. You could be sick from the stress and won't able to enjoy the money you saved. You have to live a little right now.
You shouldn't have gap in your resume. I took more than one year off to travel around New Zealand. I put this in my resume and I think it made it more interesting. After that I migrated from Hungary to the UK during COVID and didn't had any problem finding a job.
Agreed. Currently I am on a 3-month sabbatical after being laid off from my previous position of 7 years. While I could have opted for a longer duration, I’ve been happy with the time off thus far, and my efforts of saving and investing over the years has made finances a non-issue during this time.
I also set up my next gig in the weeks immediately following layoffs, which I’ll be starting in November, so I’m excited to know that there’s financial security at the end of this experience.
That depends on what you do with that. You can also look at this as an investment in yourself that will substantially increase your income later. If you have something to show for it after you sabbatical, you can actually win long term.
It's entirely possible that you take a long break from work and find that you don't want to do anything. That means that you burned out completely. Just say that in an interview - that you needed to take a serious mental break, recharge, find your new orbit, and decide what you wanted to do next.
If you look for a job a bit later, it's actually easier than looking for it right after when you find yourself unemployed ;)
This. I'm on one now and it is incredible. I'm in my early forties and was a senior software dev manager at a big co. I've been doing stuff around the house like yard work, tinkering with a raspberry pi, metal and woodworking, etc. My general disposition is much sunnier. I'm sleeping and eating better. Making time for fitness without it feeling like a chore.
And importantly, I have space to think about work--what I like and don't--so that when I go back, I can be intentional about my next move. Rather than just climbing the ladder that's in front of me.
I would definitely not want to have no income for half a year (or more). Especially considering the current economic downturn. It would probably stress me out even more.
I don't know. I just lost my job and I have fewer savings than I wanted (six months just about), and I am feeling phenomenal. I started finally working on my own long-neglected passion projects, and I feel excited about coding again. Started drinking way less, stopped stress-eating, etc.
Granted I was planning on doing this anyway (just a bit ahead of schedule for me), I needed to be ejected from the hamster wheel by force to acknowledge that it was the job and not me.
Then next year I will start looking again, but I will be way more picky. A job that you hate can wreck you.
If you're anything like me, this will have enduring positive benefits on both your personal happiness and lifetime earnings.
A sabbatical is an investment in yourself, and by definition not a cheap one. Although depending on who you are and what you want to do with it, it doesn't have to come 100% out of one's own pocket.
A great sabbatical would be teaching children, or underrepresented adults. That will affray expenses, and gets you in on a group buy for health insurance, for those of us stuck with that problem.
Still, it's not available to everyone, I don't want to dismiss that. I'd like to see it possible for more of us. This is not an industry which is short of wealth, and a nonprofit which helps match mid-career software people with sabbatical opportunities, scholarships, and so on, would be a welcome addition to the landscape.
The term has roots in "seven", just like Sabbath, so with 14 years in the industry, you've skipped one.
I think a solid half-year off every seven to ten years is an excellent practice for intellectually demanding labor.
What makes it a sabbatical is that it's a change of pace which furthers your career. I'd love to take a sabbatical and just work on building stuff, personally: from soldering, to designing boards, probing them, writing firmware, I'm a rank amateur, and I'd love to level up for awhile, while free of the burden of justifying my salary in the process.
It could be painting, there's a popular author who wrote a book about the connection between painting and hacking, can't remember his name but his stuff gets posted here all the time.
What it isn't, is a vacation, or a convalescence. It sounds like you haven't hit "can't work", just "sucks to work", which is a blessing.
If you can't afford it, that's understandable, there are ways to get some of the benefit from a new job, but "relieved of the burden of delivering value" is an important factor.
I've known people who pushed "sucks to work" until it became "can't work", and they don't all make it back to the profession, a bit less than half in fact. Whatever you do, I urge you to take burnout seriously, because at the limit it's a serious medical condition which can cripple or kill you.