🤔 Setting up for a Mini Sabbatical

This is part of the mini-sabbatical series. Read more here.

Why? #

Why bother?

Meeting the girlfriend’s family #

By September 2023 it would have been ~2 years since I started dating my girlfriend, so I thought it was about time I said hi to her parents! To complicate matters, her family were still in Beijing, China.

I still wanted to meet them of course, and wanted to make this a priority for 2023 (along with learning a toddler’s level of Mandarin, which I unfortunately failed). So became the goal of “meet the family”!

Rebound from grief #

In December 2022, I was quite heavily affected by the passing of my Grandmother, after her long and exhausting battle with Bone Cancer. Those who knew us knew how close we were, and her passing seriously rocked my emotional foundations, in addition to that of my family.

I try to make sure I take away at least one maxim from each fundamental moment or figure in my life. From my Nan, these were innumerable, but to pick a few:

• If you think something is wrong, check it now
  • This goes without saying, if you suspect you have a health condition, act on it immediately. It may never just “go away”.
• Do what you have to do, then do what you want to do.
  • Something that was barked a lot at me as a kid, primarily about homework. I feel it has it’s own renewed value in an age of such easy distractions.
• “At least I had a go”
  • I’ll never forget this quote, it’s the kind of thing I wish we could all say when we look back on our lives.
• Stay independant.
  • My Nan’s husband passed away 30 years before she did, but she never let this slow her down and she continued travelling, making memories and friends well into her eighties.
• Be friendly, and keep your friends close.
  • I have never seen a funeral so full of friends, sharing such amazing memories. My Nan had this innate ability to form a bond with anyone, no matter how brief the first contact. Every Christmas her house would be decorated with a hundred cards, from friends all over the world. Almost every day up until she passed, she would be on the phone or having tea with another. I even remember being shocked at how she could stay in contact with a couple she had met whilst on a cruise, 20 years prior!

After her passing, I did feel a bit empty. The impact on me was nothing compared to my parents, and I’m aware my actions have been extremely selfish in contract, just another character flaw I’m working on.

Given this, I needed some time to reflect, and to make some more memories and friends of my own. So with me, I packed a diary, and I designated 2023 as a year of “learning”.

Depressurising from work #

From August 2022 to June 2023, work became insanely busy, with a sequence of “death march” mismanaged development cycles that sucked a lot of the spare energy out of me, as I tech-lead two large streams of work. We seemed to have this concept of the “hero developer” at the company I worked, who could/would work tirelessly to deliver an almost impossible feat of code-smashing. Each time we burn out a “hero” we say to ourselves woah that was crazy, we can't do that again!, but somehow we always repeat the same mistake.

I’m sure many other companies suffer the same delusions.

This isn’t necessarily an entirely bad thing, during these crunch time periods the rate of learning is dramatically increased (partially due to the rate of mistakes also increasing), and you have the ability to grow much stronger professionally, having survived these challenges.

The problems can come when you fail to sufficiently separate work and life, leading to work encroaching on the precious sanctuary of your personal life. I unfortunately saw this happening to me, so I put my foot down and started planning for a period of time where I deliberately remove myself from this style of work for a bit.

Having now come back from this trip, several people at my work have come up to me expressing how much they want to do the same - some have even put plans in motion to do so! So I feel this emotion is much more common than I had first thought, and we could all do with some extended time off from work every now and then.

Additionally, I had felt that I was starting to stagnate as an Engineer, and I wanted a new medium to challenge myself with. Thankfully my manager was very receptive to this, and whilst he took a 3 week break of his own, he allowed me to get a slight flavour of management in his place (see: Trialling out management).

How? #

In late 2022 / early 2023 (I can’t remember) I approached my manager requesting a 3 month sabbatical. Turns out this wasn’t quite as easy as I had hoped, and came with a fairly significant opportunity cost, so we “pivoted”. There was an opportunity within the company to take part in a secondment to Singapore to assist with the production support team, handling live client incidents within the APAC region.

This sounded somewhat daunting, but combined with a revised 6 week sabbatical (of which only 3 were unpaid), it came with a few key advantages over the original plan:

• Much lower opportunity cost (3 weeks unpaid vs 3 months)
• The company paid for the big flight tickets to/from Singapore (thanks!)
• Put up in a nice hotel for 3 months, get to hang out with some really cool people from Singapore and take part in all the “crazy Singapore office” stories I had heard so much about.
• My GF could only take 3 weeks holiday from work anyway, so this reduced the time I was travelling along

So, we agreed on the duration, and queued up my secondment, so the dates were set! 31st July -> 27th November.

Pre-departure #

Preparing for a sabbatical is half the battle. If you aren’t clear on what you want to do, and you haven’t prepared for it, you may end up just twiddling your thumbs for 3 months!

For my particular case, I had to get a few travel things organised before setting off, as I already had a fairly good idea of what I wanted to do, and how to do it (I just wanted to travel, experience new cultures, meet the girlfriend’s family, and journal). If you are planning your own sabbatical, I’d encourage you to think about what you want to focus on during this valuable time!

Visas and Vaccinations #

For a long time, I didn’t really know where I would end up going, so with the knowledge of “China at some point” I made a “Grand Asian Itinerary” and started listing places I wanted to visit. Once the dates were settled, I split this into 3 weeks of China, and 3 weeks of everywhere else, with the intention that China would be the first 3 weeks due to other scheduling constraints. For China we knew we wanted to spend around a week in Beijing, and travel to some other key places (Great Wall, Terracotta Army, Shanghai, Sichuan province for the food), so for the most part we just placed these on the map and connected the dots with what we could reasonably travel to by train.

For the remaining 3 weeks, I wanted to try to mimic Race Across the World as much as possible, so despite it being shockingly cheap, I tried to avoid planes as much as possible whilst around South East Asia. Once we had decided on Hong Kong being the last destination from the China portion, and knowing I had a return flight from Singapore to catch, it once again became a connect-the-dots exercise.

Chinese Visa #

Thanks to the UK passport, I only needed a tourist visa from China. Unfortunately, the plan was a bit in flux still, and I had some slight challenges since I was applying for the Visa more than 3 months in advance of my visit to China (not strictly allowed according to the rules).

The whole Visa process itself was quite daunting, and this was not helped by the fact that their online application system was in a half-half state of readiness. Since covid started, China had stopped issuing tourist visas, and only restarted applications in ~April 2023. I was applying in May/June so they were still ramping up and changing rules as I went through the application, which was fun.

The application website had a slightly different set of rules to the Chinese embassy site and I even contacted both the Singaporean embassy and the London embassy to see where would be best to apply from.

In the end, as with most bureaucratic issues, once you talk to a reasonable person, the issue becomes a non-issue, and they were mostly ok with me applying a few months in advance. They even granted me a 2 year Visa instead of my requested 3 month one!

The only hiccup I had while applying, was that during my visa appointment, sat in front of the application interviewer, they asked to see my flight tickets, which I hadn’t booked! The Visa rules had changed in between me booking the appointment, and it actually taking place, so I needed to hurriedly book return flights from London to Beijing (not cheap!) whilst sat in front of the interviewer. Let me just say, that was one of the most stressful and expensive mornings of my life!

Not least because the first set of tickets I hurriedly bought, were non-refundable, and I had spelt my own name wrong on the tickets! 🤦‍♂️

Vaccinations #

For the most part, I just took everything recommended from the Fit for Travel NHS website, under “East Asia”.

This required a few visits to the doctors/pharmacy to consult about vaccinations (ultimately deciding a couple were not worth the cost), and then ultimately have them administered over a few sessions.

Hilariously, the first vaccination session I had 5 vaccinations in one go, and ended up passing out (I’m not good with needles!), so that certainly felt like the weirdest ~£300 I ever spent.

Overall, vaccinations were the easiest part of this to organise.

Wrapping up work #

Since I had planned this so far in advance, myself and my manager had months to prepare for this time off from normal work duties. When this process started, I was tech-leading a relatively significant chunk of work for one of the company’s (notoriously large) major version releases, so at least half of the 6 months before setting off would be dedicated to completing this stream of work. Afterwards however, I had nothing concretely planned, so let’s skip forward to that bit.

Handing off responsibility #

Before you head off for an extended time from work (or quit!), it’s common courtesy to give plenty of heads-up to your team to make sure you aren’t going to place any undue stress on people.

For myself, aside from the above mentioned workstream, I only had a few low-importance things I was sole owner of, so I had kept a fairly good Bus Factor!

At the time, I had been running informal knowledge shares and discussion sessions for around 2 years within my team, partly to practise public speaking / whiteboard skills, but also to encourage healthy forms of debate and open conversations around tricky problems and upcoming feature ideas with the wider team. However, after 2 years it had started becoming a bit stale, and I felt it needed a change of leadership to reinvigorate the concept.

I was pleased to see that coming back these sessions were still happening, with a new runner, a little bit differently than I had thought, but that was the goal!

Trialling out management #

A weird section in my recent career, but one I found very insightful.

My manager went on a 3 week holiday, and given my apparently alright organisational skills during time as a tech lead, we thought it could be a fun challenge to try and have me fill his shoes for a few weeks.

Obviously, whilst I’m fine playing around with my own career, we didn’t want this impacting any of my teammates, so there were no significant challenges for myself (no upcoming reviews, no significant ongoing work, no resourcing constraints, no unresolved pay disputes, etc), and we (correctly) anticipated this would be plain sailing.

I had a few small challenges, around battling a bit for resources with the other managers, and attempting to have serious productive conversations with my peers and friends about their career, but it was fun!

Three things that really stuck out for me were:

• Transparency is key (even on the seemingly unimportant things).
  • I had some feedback from the director that I hadn’t been as transparent as I could have been regarding department level goings-on. His point being that as you learn more about department level changes, it begins to break down that barrier between management/non-management, and can employees engage with the company. Transparency is something I value so it shocked me to realise I was failing myself! From that point I started each standup with a quick recap of the managers meetings, obviously avoiding mentioning things that introduce too much uncertainty.
• 1:1’s are the best.
  • You have individual challenges with each person having their own motivations and personality types, but just having time to sit down and work out how each person can best work towards their own goals (or find them!) is both a fun challenge, and extremely rewarding in the long run (if it works!).
• I am currently terrible at politics.
  • I’m starting to believe that being an effective manager is 80% down to your skills in politics. Unfortunately I have much to learn here.

I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity, but I think I can currently deliver the most value as an Individual Contributor.

On-call lead #

For 3 months I acted as lead of a core on-call rota.

A quick win was in optimising the rotation schedule:

• For every week period, for the next 6 months we need 2 engineers available for on-call.
• We also need to know who else may be able to act as a replacement, in case of illness.
• We also need to space out shifts, to avoid burning out an engineer, but keep them frequent enough to grow skills.
• We have ~20 engineers in this rota…

This was previously a nightmare, but I introduced a google sheet with some fancy scheduling formulas, then gave everyone access at once to allocate their own desired/if-i-have-to/cannot-do periods. After a few days we had a rock solid rota for 6 months, with backups for each week, all requiring much less effort on the rota lead’s part than previous methods. Win-win!

We also had a sudden influx of new people who wanted to join the rota (we had a lot of engineers who joined, and were now becoming tenured enough to warrant addition to the rota), this was a good thing as we had slowly been losing people from the rota over the last year, and our production-running experience bus factor was dangerously low. My opinion was that the most effective way to upskill a team quickly, is to follow a see one, do one, teach one approach. So I accepted almost everybody who applied into the rota, with the provision that they should self-arrange a shadow on-call session with an experienced member in the months before their first week of oncall.

I also encouraged more senior members of the rota to slowly remove themselves, to make way for new talent, and to free up their own time for more valuable pursuits in technical design.

The issue was, that the new applicants had somewhat underestimated the challenges of on-call. Whilst our clients were not impacted, the first month of this new round of oncallers did feel quite chaotic at times, as people rapidly ramped up their understanding of and skills working with older versions of our product, in hostile situations.

Coming back to the situation now, 7 months later, turns out I was right. All of these new oncallers are performing well, and are now much better at handling support requests than when they started.

Again, I’m very grateful for the opportunity, and would like to try it again in the future. However at the current company it is an unfortunately thankless role, so there is little incentive to take part.

Working abroad #

A bit of fun, I decided to organise a 3 day remote-work holiday with some co-workers in Nice, France.

To make sure this wouldn’t be seen as a complete jolly by the rest of the company, we designated these days as “reset days” where we could finally work on some designs for long outstanding tech-debt / product improvement ideas that were not officially in the roadmap.

As a bit of a cathartic release, and a lot of fun with some good friends, it was a success!

This is something I want to do much more of, but the political capital I spent trying to get this approved was probably not worth it.

Preparing for the rest of the year #

Then, the rest of the year!

I spent a good deal of time planning for what kind of impact I wanted to have on my Singapore rotation, as well as discussing my career goals with my manager to make sure my upcoming work would allow me to progress on this front.

Unfortunately, the rotation to Singapore to assist with production support is not viewed as a valuable activity for an engineer in my company (despite the high price tag associated), so this 3 month block was assumed to delay my promotion goals.

Additionally, I would be missing out on a “design” phase in the company, where many of the “cool” upcoming projects are divided amongst hopeful tech-leads, like a sounder of pigs at a trough.

Losing this was a bit of a blow to me professionally, but if you are planning on going for a sabbatical, you will face similar challenges.

I knew personally that this 4 months chunk out of everyday work, achieving some of my own life goals was going to be far more valuable than the opportunity cost of a bit more time in employment.

Your mileage may vary, but I strongly encourage anyone to at least consider a sabbatical at some point in their career - ideally multiple!