I Quit

I have left my job at Amazon, and I don’t have another one lined up. It’s time for a career break, my first time spending more than about a month between commitments in at least 25 years.

I’ve had a great experience for 3 years developing open source software for Project Jupyter. The work is very much unlike anything I had done at Amazon before, and I’ve been privileged to have a job where all my work is available to the public for free, without any advertising or surveillance required. My job was so unusual at Amazon that I gave a talk entitled “Yes, I Really Work Here” about open source development at an internal conference in 2023. I shared the internally available recording with colleagues who, a year later, still doubted whether I really worked at the same company as they did.

My decision to take a break has been in the works for most of this year; it isn’t a reaction to a corporate decision. In my personal life, this has been a trying decade so far. I need some time to relax, to recover, and to heal. I want to take time to read the books I’ve been putting off, to spend time with friends and family I care about, to support causes I like, and to see more amazing places near and far from me. Now, I can. Kudos to Katrina McGhee, whose book Taking a Career Break for Dummies provided a lot of useful advice and inspiration.

In addition, I want to take this time off to examine my approach to work and to engage with my local community. I’ve had a fixation on work for most of my life; even when I didn’t need to have a job, I had one, because I felt like I should. When I started working full-time in 2003, each of my parents lost their jobs in quick succession. Even though they had savings and other work opportunities, their experience scared me into saving a lot of the money I’d made. Now, I’m ready to use some of that savings for my own improvement. I still plan to use my donor-advised fund, the Amalgamated Compassion Fund, to make regular grants to nonprofit organizations that are doing great work at local and national levels. Being independent will let me associate more publicly with political campaigns that matter to me, without involving any employer.

I’m not using the “R word.” I know people my age who have, in their words, retired, but who seem busier now than they had been as a working professional. I’m stepping back for the time being, and I’m open to take on new work that inspires me. For the time being, I’m looking forward to a healthy and happy new year.