Ask HN: Burnt out from big tech. What's next?
&gt; Part of me is tired of spending so much of my life in front of a computer.<p>I left my job 2022 February to not sit in meetings and mostly be a preventer of bad engineering rather than a builder of good stuff. On a good day, I told people how they were wrong - on a bad day, I told them how they were wrong, again.<p>If you have the option of taking a sabbatical, I would recommend taking one out of your own choice rather than being an unemployment statistic due to your own lack of motivation.<p>I quit rather than a sabbatical, because I could hand-pick my successors for the roles I occupied and it was better to kick about 3 people into core roles &amp; get them promoted for it, than have them do the work only for me to show up 8 weeks later to hand it all back in for no benefit to their careers.<p>Took me 3 months before I didn&#x27;t feel the need to &quot;accomplish something today&quot; to feel good about my day and mostly I went through my Netflix list, read through a ton of books that I&#x27;ve always meant to read and went for walks to the coffee shop instead of driving.<p>This isn&#x27;t the first break of my life and it&#x27;s technically possible to double your summer break in a year, because we&#x27;ve got options for winter.<p>The biggest thing that has always helped me in these situations is to head to the other side of the planet, because being in a cold place with short days feels bad when you wake up and there&#x27;s nothing to do immediately on your mind.<p>I just got back from a trip to Patagonia and the only reason I haven&#x27;t headed back to New Zealand again, is because I&#x27;m now interviewing again for jobs (also kids, kids need to be in school).<p>If you are talented, with a significant experience going back years, the fact that you took a break from your career to do something else for a bit isn&#x27;t going to matter to a single employer. Oddly enough, I also spent enough time away to be out of the no-competes for a few work related systems, so my open areas expanded because of a break.<p>If you&#x27;re tired of work, don&#x27;t find another job - you probably need to remember who you are outside of work, before you can go back in to do something else.