News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The surprising benefits of a mid-career break by HillRat on Sunday October 16, 2016 @10:01PM (#12722237)
>The surprising costs of a mid-career break involve falling far enough behind industry trends and methods, that it would be faster to train a new person than retrain you.

In programming -- and, I think, perhaps in most industries -- more people fall behind in learning because of their job than because they're out of the daily grind. Any large-scale enterprise is chock-full of devs who have plenty of experience developing inside Websphere, Liferay, Sitecore and so on, but who haven't had the time between work, family and sleep to gain knowledge and experience in SPA development, CI, CD, microservices, and so on, let alone more outre topics like ML or NLP. Giving knowledge workers the opportunity to sabbatical out and build new expertise would benefit both them and their employers.

Re:The surprising benefits of a mid-career break by adrianN on Monday October 17, 2016 @02:25AM (#12723016)
Except if their employers need people maintaining the legacy systems using the legacy technology. Then having people there who know nothing else is highly beneficial, since they're unlikely to quit.