(12 month update) Taking a gap year / sabbatical from Big Tech

I wanted to give the community a 12 month update on my sabbatical/career break. Lot of context is in my last four posts (original, first update, 3 month, 6 month), but here’s some TLDR; from earlier threads:

• Previously Engineering Manager in Big Tech, 40s, Bay Area, major breadwinner in a family of 4 with young kids.
• 15+ years working in Tech, burnt out, didn’t see much hope for progress, so quit to take a break instead of jumping to new job right away.
• Not fully retiring as we still rent, and prefer to buy a home somewhere to “settle down” and that somewhere cannot be bay area at this NW if I retire.

Finances:

Net worth jumped up to 6.1M in Feb/March 2026, but now back to 5.9M. Still up 350k YoY, basically since I left my net worth grew by 350k.

We are averaging 16k/month in expenses (including rent). Wife makes ~2k/month, so we are netting at 14k/month. The expenses included some crazy spending to stay at an all inclusive resort in Mexico during new years. Plus all the extra traveling due to my free time. Our travel expenses in 2025 ($25k) were double that of 2024 ($12k).

How I spent the 12 months?

• First month was very productive. Attended lot of events/meetups, took a course on AI etc
• Next 1.5 months were slow. Family got sick one by one.
• Next 2 months were summer break. Spent the whole time with kids. We did a lot more local trips this year than in any past summer + one short fly-out trip. I also cooked a lot and did some major home organization. 
• Last 1.5 months were not so great as I felt a bit lost once kids when to school and I had nothing to do. 
• Next 3 months were eventful. I decided to participate in a few AI related regular meetups. That kept me intellectually engaged. And all the other free time was taken up by festivals (Diwali, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, NYE) and travel.
• Last 3 months were terrible. I will talk about it next

I can’t believe it's been a year. The last 3 months went by too fast. But in some ways they were excruciatingly slow too. I started interviewing, so that’s what took over all of my time. The interview process sucks – the preparation, the practice and the trying-to-impress-people part sucks the most. And right now the job market sucks too. I got rejected from positions I was a perfect fit for, I got rejected from places I got accepted a few years earlier and I got rejected from my backup options too. 

It was not all terrible though. I started playing around with coding agents and had a lot of fun building things with Claude and Codex on the side. And I have almost fully stopped preparing for interviews. 3 months of preparation is enough. Now I just practice before upcoming interviews. 

So here I am. No job. Still on a career break, this time not of my own volition. And with worse health.

Why am I looking to work again? Great question readers. It is a question I have not fully internalized myself. I do have an outline of the plan reasoning.

I decided to look for jobs back in December 2025, when coding agents were not this powerful. At that time I was missing a purpose in life. Don’t misunderstand me, the break so far had been great. I would recommend everyone to take career breaks / sabbaticals in between jobs. I traveled, I meditated, I slacked off as much as I wanted, attended concerts, went to the beach a ton, rewatched Star Trek TNG and Game of Thrones end to end, cooked, cleaned, played with kids, read some, wrote some, met friends, lost weight and got healthier. The only thing I missed was something external driving my life. It sounds terrible when I say it like that. But it is true. These things can fill up your time, but your mind is still unoccupied. Actually my mind was occupied, but it was with things I didn’t want it to: politics, world affairs etc. Overall it felt like I didn’t have a strong internal purpose directing my time, energy and headspace, so I started missing that external drive. A job would give me that. I just need to make sure I like the work, people etc.

I also missed the camaraderie that a job provides. I realized this more when I ended up meeting my old team for dinner and realized that I actually missed them. I looked elsewhere, but most of my friends are still working and are busier than ever. I couldn’t find a tribe to give me company. To be honest, I might have not tried too hard either given that it was a temporary break. Maybe full retirement won’t be that bad?

On the monetary side, I needed to go back to work to add some more cushion to my net worth. We want to “settle down”, which means buying a house. All for good reasons: having a consistent set of neighbors, having kids attend the same neighborhood schools, and getting involved in the community around us, instead of living like a temporary resident. 

This meant that if we stayed in the Bay Area, I would need more money to be able to afford a decent house here (in the kinds of neighborhoods we want to live in). The other option was to move to an MCOL location. I could theoretically retire there, but I wasn’t fully happy with the high 90% chances of success based on my FIRE scenario calculations. I prefer 100%.

And more importantly I wanted to retire with a good quality of life (QoL). 

What exactly is QoL? For FIRE purposes, I decided it meant how much of my preferred discretionary spending I am able to accommodate during retirement (assuming essentials are always funded). 

Based on that definition, I realized that I can retire, but not with the best quality of life. So, again, the conclusion was to make some more money. 

So here I am. Looking for a remote job, preferably, so that I can move MCOL and retire sooner. But in the worst case, I will take an in-person job, buy a < $2M townhome in the bay area and retire here after a few years. 

In the meantime, I will enjoy my daytime movie theatre visits (AMC A-list is great value!) and the free time to build things. Hopefully I will start to focus on my health again.