It's been roughly 23 years since I took a break longer than six weeks. Finally, today (June 29, 2024), I am starting my six-week sabbatical.

I delayed taking my sabbatical for an entire year because I wanted to ensure I had plans to make the most of it.

To generate ideas, I talked to folks who have recently returned from their sabbaticals or have taken one in the past. I also talked to my friends in academia about what they do during their sabbaticals. Academia wasn’t that helpful, as their sabbaticals are often opportunities to do industry work, so I skipped that advice.

Common suggestions I received included:

• Traveling to a new destination

• Relaxing and recovering

• Regular hiking

• Solo trips

• Trying new cuisines

• Starting writing projects

• Searching for a new job

• Catching up on overdue house chores

While these activities are great, personally, I did not resonate with many.

Further searching did not result in any new activities. So I decided that I would go on sabbatical when I could answer the questions:

“What is the goal of my sabbatical? What state do I want to be in when my sabbatical is over?”

It may seem that I am overthinking a six-week break. Well, I am, and here’s why:

This is my first true six-week break in 23 years. If this sabbatical is successful (as per my goal below), I plan to reduce the time between my sabbaticals and increase their length.

This is my pilot sabbatical.

Considering that I am on sabbatical now, I have answered the question:

What is my goal with the sabbatical?

Coming up with an answer took a while. It actually happened by talking to the same folks again and asking two additional follow-up questions:

1. Why did they decide to do the activity they did during their sabbatical?

2. How did they feel about the activity once they completed it?

To the first question, people’s answers were:

• Always wanted to

• Wanted to try something new

• It was on my bucket list

• Saw someone else do it, so decided to try

And then to the second question, this is where things got interesting, the answers fell into two categories:

• They felt energized, wanting to do more of it

• Meh, they were not likely to do it again or it wasn’t for them

This is what I was looking for.

You could see the twinkle in people’s eyes who felt energized by the activity and couldn’t wait for another sabbatical. They were actively trying to integrate their new experiences into their current lives. The others went back to normal.

I want to be in the first category, and as a result, this became my goal:

Coincidently, this is a state of happiness for me (and many others). And this state is what I plan to achieve by the end of my sabbatical.

Next, I came up with a list of things that energize me. Here are the top ones:

• Writing this blog: I have 300+ posts sitting in my draft folder. I plan to publish many of them. They cover topics like software engineering, people management, and leadership in tech. If you like those topics, subscribe. It’s free.

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• Building software: I have a few side projects that I want to finish. I may not publish them as they are only for me, but we’ll see.

• Working on a business idea: People who know me, know something is coming :)

• Spending time with friends and family: Especially this.

• Doing creative work: I haven’t figured out exactly what yet. Suggestion welcomed.

• Playing: Tennis, cricket, other sports, and instruments.

That seems like a lot for a six-week break, but I am going to try it anyway. There are things that de-energize me, which I will keep private :)

In six weeks, I will make another post summarizing my sabbatical experience.

Till then, the latest updates will be from this blog, my twitter (@mayankv_tweets), and my LinkedIn (@vermayank).

Looking forward to the journey.

There are only 300 or so katana sword-smith left in the world, and only 30 of them make their living forging katana. Making katanas is a highly specialized skill. One that we can't learn from reading books. It has to be taught and passed down from master to pupil over a decade of training before the pupils can become master swords-smith.

Among many skills passed on from the master to the pupil, IMO, there are two skills that translate well from learning to make katanas to engineering.

The ability to find impurities and work patiently to remove them.

It's what makes the katana a precision instrument that is durable, strong, and deadly.

To me, this sounds similar to engineering.

While both skills are essential, the order matters in which they have been acquired matters. Many spend decades of their time fixing impurities, but that alone won't make you a master. The ability to find impurities independently is what separates a master from an amateur.

The same is valid for engineering. Finding problems and solving them is what excellent engineering is all about.

So while everyone cannot be a master katana sword-smith (literally), we can all be katana sword-smith (i.e., engineers) figuratively. Happy katana forging ⚔️

April 28, 2022: Airbnb announced its new work policy. Work from anywhere in the world.

I highly encourage you to read the official announcement and the following Twitter thread from Brian Chesky.

We'll only know whether this decision is good or bad for the company in 1-2 years. I hope this turns out to be good 🤞

With the new policy, we know one thing for sure. Airbnb is going to become the biggest digital nomad workplace in the short term.

Why does that matter? Because hiring talent in the great recession market is hard. And IMO becoming a talent magnet in this market may be the highest leverage for Airbnb.

Here's how I am thinking about it.

Let's look at the following two points from the memo.

2. You can move anywhere in the country you work in and your compensation won’t change

3. You have the flexibility to travel and work around the world (you can live and work in over 170 countries for up to 90 days a year)

These two points will create a Tsunami of engineers who would want to join Airbnb. Competition to get into Airbnb is going to rise. That means a higher bar for clearing the interviews, leading to top candidates.

Now the question is, will other tech giants follow?

They may, and they may not. Each organization is different. Many organizations can't adopt the same model as Airbnb. Not because they are old and have an old-fashioned mentality, but because their business model is not similar to Airbnb. So I wouldn't be surprised if they don't follow Airbnb's remote work policy.

But more I think about it; many tech companies are not far behind. They may not have a single salary tier yet, but even without that most companies don't mind 90 days of work from anywhere as long as they have a non-mandatory back to office policy.

Jumping off to another topic that caught my interest is

5. We'll continue to work in a highly coordinated way (The backbone of how we operate will continue to be our single company calendar with our multi-year roadmap. It's centered around two major product releases each year—a May release and a November release.)

And what those product releases would be, you may ask? Here is another tweet from Brian highlighting what they could be.

As I put all this together, I am becoming bullish on Airbnb. Airbnb is doing great work for its employees, users, customers, and refugees from Ukraine.

I am delighted and excited to see Airbnb's new policy take shape. I wish Airbnb the best of luck in its pursuit.

Thanks for reading my miscellaneous commentary on Airbnb's stay anywhere and work anywhere policy. Honestly, I like my headline better than Airbnb's design to live and work anywhere. And happy for them to have it in case they want to reword 😜

If you would like to share your views on Airbnb policy, please leave them in the comments for discussion.

Snap announced pixy, a drone camera. AFAIK, it's Snap's 2nd hardware product. The first is spectacles. I am not on Snapchat and don't use it often, but I am somewhat confused about who the users are for pixy.

I somewhat understand the users of spectacles. Influencers or celebrities want to create content without holding a camera in hand. That makes sense.

But pixy has me confused.

It seems like pixy is a selfie camera that's on a drone. And apart from directly uploading images to the Snap app, I am not sure what market segment Pixy is trying to address?

Even the product information on the pixy website is non-descriptive. Nothing on the website highlights the use case except to take a picture of your crew and add filters.

Is that it? And, I am not even sure I understand the price of $250. There are other higher-quality drone cameras out there for the same price range, and I don't think Snap is planning to compete in the drone market. Because that will be a bad idea for snap shareholders.

If you think of a better use case for pixy that I may have missed, share that in the comment section.

Thanks for checking out my miscellaneous commentary on pixy.

Miscellaneous Commentary is a category where I comment on topics of tech-related news (mostly) and other areas that interest me. These views and opinions are mine and do not reflect the organization I work for or have been part of.

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