Ending sabbatrical

This upcoming Tuesday (4/19) I’m rejoining the world of the working, ending my 13 month sabbatical lasting from March 2021 to April 2022. I’m incredibly excited about the new role. I’ll share more about that in a separate post soon.

In this letter I’ll revisit some of my reasons for stepping away from work in the first place, share some of the goals I wanted to accomplish while on sabbatical, and then see how I tracked against those. I’ll also talk briefly about the process of finding a new job, but that also is probably best covered by a separate post. Let’s dig in.

Why I left?

As a hiring manager, when I’m evaluating a candidate, one of the things I’m looking for is whether you’ve had a variety of experiences with increasing levels of responsibility along the way. In my mind I’m thinking, “Does he have seven years of experience, or one year of experience seven times?”

I felt myself starting to loop in my role at LinkedIn. And while it was heartening to be recognized for my accomplishments by being promoted to Senior Engineering Manager at the tail end of my time there, I realized the promotion alone wouldn’t change the nature of the work I was doing. I was on a path toward doing the same work as before, only now for higher compensation, with little opportunity to move laterally within the organization. Higher comp is nice but wasn’t what I was trying to solve for. I needed to ensure I was growing as an engineer and manager over the longer term.

The other factors for a work break were a desire to de-stress and realign myself mentally, take a deep breath post-COVID craziness, and to refresh my tech skills and branch out into new areas.

Through a combination of skill and luck, we were in a position to be able to cover living expenses for awhile without setting our financial progress back significantly. So we did.

What did I do during sabbatical?

In no particular order:

Stopped drinking alcohol — July 20 was my last day. My sobriety has been tested by both the EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival and now a 7 night cruise. Still dry!
Learned some Javascript. I’ve been avoiding JS for years now on principle (I find it ugly) but I’ll grudgingly admit I’ve had my “ah ha!” moment with it and better understand its place in the world. It’s still ugly, but at least I can kind of read it and write it now.
Built habits around diet and exercise. Starting back in January, I decided to shed my excess pounds. The kids were back in school, I wasn’t working... I kept repeating “if not now, when?” to myself, and found that I was right. There were no excuses. I started religiously logging meals into MyFitnessPal, targeting a daily calorie count that should shed around 1.5-2 pounds a week. On top of that I added at least an hour of exercise a day through treadmill, Peloton, and neighborhood walks. It worked. From a high of 207 in mid-2021, I managed to get down to 178... though that was before the 7 day cruise I’m currently on!
Random online learning. With sites like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, EdX, and others, it’s now possible to learn almost anything you want from the comfort of your own home, without breaking the bank. I believe the blockchain specalization courses I took from SUNY Buffalo ended up costing me something like $60. Amazing.
Took a Product Management course from Stanford. This was a live course taking place over 10 weeks, with assignments, grades, and group work. Some of my work at LinkedIn dealt with product management, so I wanted to expand out in this area and learn more about what a product manager deals with.
Got out of the house. In February I joined a co-working space in my town of Holly Springs. It provides an environment with fewer distractions for doing focused work, allows for some socializing, and just generally gets me out of the house (I was finding myself cycling between the same three rooms).
Learned some Unreal Engine 5 (game engine). Check this out: Brian's UE5 environment from a course.
Tried to do some videogame streaming for fun. Being successful as a game streamer takes consistency, above all, and that ended up feeling like a job to me.
Earned a certification for Amazon Web Services (AWS). It’s something I’d worked with for a number of years so I did some refreshing and made it official. I figured it would help some when I went looking for my next job.

What’s next?

I’ll post about this in-depth some other time. but let’s just say: the hiring process is super not-fun. Some companies, like Coinbase, communicate well but have long times between interviews. At a few others, I chatted with the hiring manager and it was clear to me they didn’t really know what kind of person they were looking for (which is fine!) and didn’t feel like I was the right person to explore that with. Some were looking for unicorns: that person with the exact set of skills they felt like they needed, even if it takes half a year to find that person, instead of hiring for potential. Personal referrals into companies didn’t end up helping, even when I considered myself well-qualified for the role I was applying for. Some companies said they wanted a people manager but really they wanted an architect who would write annual reviews. And so on.

And then there was the company I accepted an offer from. I’d have to check my notes but I believe the timeline from initial recruiter call to receiving an offer was about a week and a half. Decisions to pass me to the next level happened within hours or a day at most. This company has the same time constraints around hiring that everyone else does, but they still delivered an excellent candidate experience — critically important when competing for talent.

Is there uncertainty around the role? Yes. But contrary to those other companies who pushed me away because I didn’t fit an exact mold, this one embraced me. There’s a lot of work to be done and I feel I have the ‘technical generalist’ skillset that will help me be successful here.

Well I’ve probably rambled long enough. As always, thanks for reading!