gemini://ur.gs/blog/garden-leave/

I put my notice in at GitLab towards the end of March. There's always a mix of pull and push factors with these things, but the main one was the salary - although it's a lot in absolute terms, it's low relative to comparable jobs, especially now the shares are done with.

So, I join the ranks of Geminaunts currently between jobs; I've been interested to read ew0k's and left_adjoint's experiences on the same topic, and it gave me some things to reflect on.

I've also been reading Reddit's r/antiwork (through the remini frontend) for a while now, and it's heartening to see all that talk about the great resignation show up in my personal life.

Although pay was the decisive factor for me, you can't look at it in a vacuum - at a minimum, it's pay per unit work, and I might not have gone looking at other jobs if that had stayed the same. Of course, it didn't - for a start, they wanted to put me onto two overlapping on-call rotas for nothing extra - so I had a peek.

I learned that I was getting underpaid by about 50% for my *current* workload, never mind adding things on top. So I put in my notice in and started applying! There's been some success on this front, but I do plan to try to keep my new employer private. We'll see how that goes; it's not the end of the world if it doesn't work out.

For whatever reason, GitLab decided that garden leave was their best option, so I've got another seven weeks on full pay before my relationship with them ends. My laptop got wiped today though, and there's no expectation that I *do* anything in those weeks. It feels like a weird power flex - trying to take control of the situation or something - but I don't mind. It's basically another 2 months of paternity leave, taking it from an acceptable 4 to a good 6.

GitLab was a pretty revolutionary employer when I joined in 2016, and I don't intend to malign them here - they're still doing a lot of very good things, and it remains an objectively good place to work, especially at the intermediate-senior level. Since pay is location-based, even that's unlikely to be an issue if you happen to live in one of the well-paid regions. I might even continue to contribute code from time to time. I will keep self-hosting my personal projects with Gitea, though; make of that what you will.

After nearly 6 years, I'm definitely ready for a change. In particular, I'm avoiding Ruby in future roles. It's just too much effort at scale, and ridiculously wasteful. You can always throw more money and coal and rare earths at the problem, but I'd rather not. Rust and Go are much more efficient, but even Python would be a massive improvement on that score. A non-monolithic codebase would also be welcome, and Ruby doesn't do well at encouraging that. Not to mention the deployment issues - saints preserve us.

Garden-wise, it's already looking quite nice, but I do have a shed to knock down... and my astrobotany plant can always get a bit more attention, of course.

Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Contact the author by email: gemini@ur.gs

Garden leave