Right now I’m taking a sabbatical for two main reasons:

1. My parents are reaching EoL, and as the executor of their estate I’m getting involved in them handing everything off to the rest of us. So this pause in my career couldn’t have come at a better time – how many kids have the opportunity to spend the last year or two of their parent’s lives with them to help them wrap stuff up? Not many.
2. My entire industry has gone koo-koo for AI. They are quite literally eliminating entire development divisions in favour of badly hallucinating LLM’s that create some of the shittiest code I have ever seen – it’s worse than having only juniors on staff with no-one else more experienced. So I am waiting out until the inevitable “ZOMG we need to hire everyone back” stage, just like Klarna is doing right now. Because as it is, 60+% of all job postings are ghost ads, with no intent to hire anyone, and the other 40% require applicants to go through 4+ interviews and have ridiculous requirements. Like, no. if the pope was appointed with only two rounds of discussions, your company doesn’t need to rope in 20+ people over multiple interviews and weeks of deliberations to hire my sorry ass.