In late July, I resigned from my corporate job working in technology as a project manager. I had been at the same company on-and-off since 2011, and had worked in a range of roles covering data analytics, data engineering, information security and finally project management.

I had it pretty good. I had over a decade of organisational experience, a solid rapport with all of the senior decision makers in the business, a good sense of what was happening 'on the ground', a comfortable salary, and the opportunity to work on a fairly diverse set of technical projects. Our company was leveraging current AI models to speed up their work (and dealing with the governance, security & quality issues that come with it, just like any other business), so I got good exposure to cutting-edge tools, even if I wasn't a super-user of AI tools directly.

But I had a growing feeling that I needed a break from the corporate world, and I was worried about being in a stale environment for too long. So I gave my two months notice and got out.

What I told people when I quit

Once my resignation was made public, I inevitably got asked 'why?' – it was a sudden shock to everyone I spoke to, particularly those that I'd known for over a decade. Most asked whether I was leaving for another company (I wasn't); the answer I gave was that 'I had run out of energy' to keep working as I had been for years, and that 'I just needed a break from work'. Both of these statements were true – but wasn't the full story.

I hadn't had a proper hiatus from a job since graduating from university, so I felt that taking a bit of time off to think about my next career choice was socially acceptable. Fortunately, this didn't invite too many follow-up questions. I really didn't want to get sucked in to long conversations about my departure; I had mentally checked out of my role and just needed to cut the cord for my own sanity. In hindsight, I didn't want to be the centre of attention as there was a weird sense of resigning being a 'selfish' decision. So weird to think of it that way, but I guess that's what long-term company loyalty drilled into me.

The other part of the story

Of course, there were a few other reasons that made me resign. I mentally bundled them up into three topics:

1. Feeling like I had lost psychological safety & autonomy in my role
2. Mandated usage of AI tools making technical work unenjoyable and unfulfilling
3. Symptoms of burnout, both emotionally & physically, making it difficult to work

Psychological safety

Over the last few years, any concerns or problems I raised were taken less & less seriously, and senior management were making unilateral decisions without any compromise or incorporating feedback from experienced middle managers like myself.

Previously I had enjoyed being a part of a more collaborative working environment, but that was a distant memory.

AI usage causing problems

In my previous role, the mandated usage of AI tools for technical purposes circumvented any need for quality or care that software development and other technical teams used to have.

When I left, the process of developing software features was diluted into a mundane process that most of the Tech industry globally seems to have adopted:

• feed a 2-3 sentence prompt into an AI tool such as Claude Codex or Github Copilot to spit out a product requirements document (PRD) or similar
• after a brief review, feeding that PRD back into the AI coding tool to develop the feature
• perform some cursory testing of the feature within the application, then push the changes to other developers who would approve the work

My issue with this is that development was so highly automated without any real oversight or input from the end users who were going to deal with the AI-generated code slop – there wasn't any critical discussion of 'hey do the developers really understand what we need here?' – if it wasn't captured in that 2-3 sentence prompt, it didn't matter.

Deep knowledge of the codebase by developers dropped off quickly once this approach started, because there's no time to think through the problems and develop elegant or performant solutions.

I felt for the end users who ultimately paid the biggest price here, because they'd be expected to perform their user acceptance testing on AI slop, and have to provide a bunch of feedback to get the software into a sensible state. My take on the whole development lifecycle is that the time saved on developing code was pushed onto end users who needed to test more – and high-quality output didn't really happen any faster overall.

And as a result, the company now had a sizeable AI token bill to pay every month, and a codebase that was bloated and barely understood by anyone in the development team. I felt like it was hard to stay a part of that kind of environment.

Burnout symptoms

This last point was probably the biggest factor in me needing to stop working. I wasn't specifically diagnosed with burnout but I definitely felt like I had most of the common symptoms. There was a general apathy and lack of enthusiasm with my work, and I often operated with a heavy brain fog around me that made high-quality work difficult to maintain.

Most work days I felt drained of energy by mid-afternoon, regardless of the volume of work I had on my plate. I was able to easily keep up with my day-to-day admin and I often completed any crucial tasks within a few hours each day, but the lack of satisfaction & fulfillment was so debilitating that it bled into my personal life and started to stop me feeling joy in non-work activities.

The combination of all three of these issues led to me feeling unfulfilled and demotivated in the workplace, and these physically manifested for months before I properly pulled the resignation trigger in July. I had felt physically tense & drained within an hour of clocking in every day – my body's way of telling me that I was in the wrong environment.

And so I started my career break, without any real direction of what I would do next or how long I'd have a break for.

The plan

My plan during my career break was to attempt to not have a plan – or at least avoid structuring my life too much. I was acutely aware that if I overloaded my time during my break that my feelings of burnout wouldn't get better, so I had to minimise and simplify.

But I did have some vague guidelines of how I imagined my career break would unfold:

1. Not spend any effort in finding a new job or a new career for at least a few weeks
2. Give myself a few vague goals or tasks for each day, to avoid overloading myself but still get some small feelings of satisfaction
3. Work towards having a new job/career in early 2027 (i.e. have no expectation of returning to work before Christmas 2026).

To avoid needing to rush back into work, I set myself a fairly strict budget to live on and calculated that I had 6 months of money to live off. So far I've mostly kept to the budget, with the odd unforeseen expense coming up.

How it's actually worked out

After one month of not having a job to go to, I have no idea how to reflect back on this time and assess if I've 'done it right' or not. When I've been asked by friends & family “how is the break going?” the word I have settled on is volatile – it's definitely been hard to adapt to as it's a completely new experience.

I have had some good weeks and some bad weeks, when thinking about my physical and emotional state. I've had some inspiring days full of coffee catchups and chats with my career network, and some dreary days where I distract myself with every possible household chore to stop myself being bored.

At least my dog Charlie is enjoying the extra attention that comes with being at home a bit more than before:

As someone who used to be very routine and schedule-driven, the lack of structure to my day has been confronting and revealing. My daily habits that I used to squeeze in around my work day have completely dropped off, as every day has a different cadence depending on where I'm going and who I'm seeing.

However I can't ignore the positives. I still feel burned out (I expect to feel like this for the foreseeable future – how can you possibly unlearn 15 years of corporate life in a month or two?) but I very quickly stopped feeling the frustration of being in a corporate environment, apart from hearing about my wife's job at the end of every weekday.

I've found a little bit of joy & satisfaction with doing things cheap or being thrifty. Cooking vegan or vegetarian dishes is often much tastier than meat-based meals (because the sauces/flavours are more interesting) and are at a fraction of the cost. The best recipes get saved to my recipe management app. On the home front, taking the time to properly research, plan and complete home improvement projects is far more satisfying than hiring a handyman. I learned how to install my first ever toilet seat earlier this month!

While I've become a bit tighter with spending, on the whole our usual lifestyle continues on as normal. Last weekend we did a multi-day hike in the Alpine National Park in Victoria with friends, and with more hikes being planned for regional Victoria I'm now thinking about planning some day trips to country towns (getting there via the V/Line train) to do some light tourism in this great state.

What's next

I've read other stories about career breaks, with some anecdotes mentioning that they are only truly relaxing after a year or more of not working. This makes sense, if you're trying to unlearn the emotional patterns of being in corporate or bureaucratic environments which have built up over decades.

I worry that I don't have the patience to be unemployed for such a long period of time, and that I'll feel forced to get back into the workforce before I'm ready. I currently have an idealistic view that I'll find my dream career which ticks all of my boxes and if I have to compromise on that, then the break may end up being a failure. I've started to adopt the process that the Careershifters.org website describes to identify a new career path, and I'm aware that'll take several months of ongoing effort to get there.

I am also simultaneously excited and scared for how my identity will unfold or appear as I grapple with a life that isn't based around a job. Every day during this break I'm starting to learn a bit more about myself, but naturally there's always more questions than answers.

From time to time, I'm reminded about the phrase “you can just do things” which gives me the confidence to be courageous, try something new or “just go do some cool shit” as a friend instructed me. But telling yourself YCJDT and actually living it in practice are totally different things; I feel like I need to get properly comfortable with this new rhythm before giving myself a novel experience. The two shadows of burnout symptoms and the need to find a new career in some timeframe really complicate the situation.

#CareerBreak #CareerChange #lifestyle