It’s been over 6 years since I started working at Meta (then known as Facebook). Not going to comment here about all the controversies surrounding our products, but as an employee, I have been lucky enough to work on interesting teams that, yes, don’t do anything that give me cause to be sleepless at night.

One perk we have (that is no big deal to friends in Europe, but is a big deal in the US) is being able to take 30 calendar days of recharge leave (think of it as a short sabbatical) after each 5 years of employment (together with the 21 work days of PTO a year, this roughly brings us in line with what Europeans get courtesy of employment laws. Lucky y’all!)

Why did I not take it in 2021-2, you might ask? Well.. between the pandemic and having a toddler at home (who finally got fully vaccinated including the bivalent booster a few months ago), there does not seem to be much point. My wife and I were actually thinking of delaying it until next year, when we’ll have a wedding to travel to and Mr. 2 will be Mr. 3 and might travel better!

… and then the layoffs began. After the first round I rushed to apply for my recharge, since… unlike more established benefits like parental leave, this likely won’t be cashed out in case the employee gets laid off. I’ll be back just in time to see if my position gets eliminated in the second round! (That is looking very unlikely, but you never know).

Anyway… that said, even if I get laid off the severance package is decent and would allow me time to find another job. But I’ll be mostly taking a break from computers, and spending more time with my better half and our toddler.

The computer time I have, I will be focusing on a couple of long-delayed projects:

  • writing lua-rock2rpm for converting lua rocks to RPM specs
  • porting choosier (my browser picker) to Android so I can use it on my phones

I’ll be dealing with major Fedora and Debian bugs affecting my packages, but for less severe issues expect a delay until I get back the week of April 17.

This post is day 23 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.

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