Time off

I’ve been thinking about taking some time off work.

Do I really want to do this?

Here I’m going to list out some pros and cons of taking time off. Try to avoid complaining about the current situation and imaging having this conversation with yourself when you decide the same thing, otherwise it’s just going to be influenced by the situation.

Pro

Growth

I don’t feel like I’ll continue to grow if I stay at Lyft. Since the re-org to the data infra team, I’ve felt like there is only so much I can learn. When I first started at Lyft, I felt like I was spending a lot of time learning about how to bootstrap a cloud. What technologies were needed, what the needs of the business usually are, how do we get promoted.

Since I got promoted and moved to the data team, I don’t feel like I’ve been growing at the same rate, and I don’t feel like I’m growing at all with the new projects coming up.

When I was working on my game, I spent a lot of time learning about new infrastructure pieces that I would use. I spent a lot of time looking at CNCF projects and imagining what I would do in my own cloud. No kube, a different logging solution, M3 for metrics, what to do for a schema registry. I learned about quic, even more about gRPC, and Rust.

These types of skills would be really nice to have going into an interview with a startup.

The opportunity cost here seems like taking time off is more cost effective.

The Game

My personal project, Gigaship, would get a lot of attention and help my technical growth. If I’m working on my own project like this, then I’ll actually get to write more code.

Online Classes

I could take some old CS and Math classes that I never got to take in school. I don’t want to spend money on a degree though. There is a whole class of distributed systems problems that I never got to intimately learn about. I could spend some time learning about computer vision.

Con

Social Pressure

There will be a ton of pressure from people to work. On my career and at parties, I’ll have to tell people that I’m just not working.

No Health Insurance or income

Not having health insurance or income could be tough. I’ll have to tighten my spending per month. I have enough cash reserved to last the time that I’ll be not working, but It’ll be difficult to weigh the risk of no health insurance while COVID is around.

How long do I need

I spent some time talking to a coworker about this and I decided that I won’t need a full year off. 6 to 8 months should be enough time for me to settle in and accomplish what I want to. With this time range, it may be possible for me to accept a job offer and push the start date really far back.

To do this, I’d need some kind of clever excuse…