Starting June 15th, I will be taking a one year unpaid leave of absence from EMC Isilon.
The reason for the leave of absence is that I’m burned out. Crispy critter burned out. Although I’m not going to go into detail on exactly why, the 30k-foot version is that I held myself to too-high a standard on some projects that drastically, and negatively, impacted my work-life balance to the point where I was mentally and physically exhausted when I came home from work. Every day. For months.
I’m looking forward to mentally rebooting myself and hopefully learn some skills on how to help prevent this in the future.
That said, it’s incredibly difficult to leave EMC Isilon right now. It’s hard to leave just before the next version of OneFS1 ships. I’m super excited about the work that the entire engineering team has done for this release and would love to see it complete. It’s also hard to leave right when DuctTape is releasing some cool new functionality and significantly increased capacity.
Still, taking some time off is most certainly the right decision for my mental and physical health and I leave the projects I was working on in very capable hands.
1 According to the interwebs, the code-name of the next release is not yet public, and I’m not about to be the one to make it so!
Digital Ramblings 