Trust me they don't.

I've had all sorts of gaps in my career. 6 months, 1 year and more, to explore different domains. I'm in computer graphics/front end, pretty fast paced.

Nobody ever asked.

Please, never feel guilty about taking a single month off. If your body needs rest, you need to listen to it.

Yeah, all you have to do is say "I took a year off to tend to personal family matters," and they should hear "none of your damn business" loud and clear or they don't understand boundaries, in which case they're disqualified from employing you.

You have to be careful with this one. "Family matters" can raise a flag if it's an ongoing issue. You're trying not to look like you're going to be a problem employee, as much as that should or shouldn't be a thing.

I think the proper answer is "I just took some time off between jobs." Sounds fine, sounds like you took advantage of an opportunity, and doesn't sound like you're somebody that had a hard time finding a job.

To be frank, if they infer "ongoing problem" out of a single data point like that, they fall into the "not qualified to employ me" bucket. One instance of "tending to family matters" doesn't really say anything beyond, "I have a family."

Yup, I second this. I took almost a year off to work on a personal project and drive GrubHub to make rent. Had no problem getting interviews and hired after a few weeks of looking.

Not every industry is like this, but tech has little reason to care. If anything, employees with more life experience are a benefit to the employer.

for a position that is well paid there is competition. it is a risk to take someone who took a year off. any kind of manager will think that way. obviously if the pay is low and the tech is not changing every month then it is not a problem

>especially in a fast moving technology space like cloud, k8s, ML

You are kidding yourself.

Indeed. Here's why we know this isn't true: everyone has areas they focus on, and they aren't defined as "everything fast-paced that exists." You can spend literal years working on problems in the security space, or on web front end crap, or in audio processing, or object storage, learning absolutely jack squat about cloud, ML or k8s, and you don't shrivel up and die. I basically completely switch disciplines every time I job hop, and nobody's ever questioned me about keeping up with whatever fast-paced stuff I was doing two jobs ago.

Problem solving requirements don't just disappear once you fire up jupyter notebook or set up minikube.

>trust me they care.

The Boomers might.

Thankfully, one of the best things to come out of the recent progressive movements is that work is the be all, end all. There's more to life. More and more companies are being run and staffed by people who understand this.