David Heinemeier HanssonModify

The only way many tech workers in the US can get a long break is by quitting their job. So lots of them do that every few years, which is partly why the average tenure in our industry is at an atrocious 18 months. But this terrible rate of churn is often avoidable by one simple benefit trick: Sabbaticals.

We've been giving everyone at 37signals a six-week sabbatical every three years for the last fifteen years or so. It's been magical for retention because a break like that allows the mind to reset in a way a two-week vacation never could. And when employees yearn for such a reset, the typical option is usually just to quit.

I know the idea of a six-week sabbatical might sound strange to many Europeans who'd be forgiven for thinking "isn't that just August"? And they're not exactly wrong. Europeans usually do enjoy more vacation time, but in the tech industry, that also comes with much lower pay. Easily half to two-thirds less.

I think it's entirely possible to have it both ways: Work for an American tech company with American pay levels, but also enjoy a regular full reset, without having to quit to get it. 

And the argument for the boss doesn't even have to be some humanistic plea about long-term happiness. It can simply be about retention: it's very expensive to see smart, trained people walk out the door.

I'd even argue that bosses — be they founders or professional executives — benefit just as much from a regular sabbatical like anyone else. Whenever Jason or I have taken one, we've always come back with fresh ideas and perspectives that invariably lead to positive changes or new ambitions that wouldn't have come otherwise.

Six weeks is also just long enough to remind tired founders that selling their company isn't likely to be the bliss they imagine. That mojito island gets boring quickly. That by week five, they're probably already antsy to get back to the action. There are endless stories of founders who regret selling their business when all they needed was a six-week break from the startup sprint.

Bottom line is that we all need a long break every now and then. Not just two weeks on Mallorca, but time enough to get bored. To get hungry for the intellectual stimulation of work and the social connection of colleagues. The sabbatical is a great way to deliver that and keep founders from wanting to sell and employees from wanting to quit.

As Omarchy was taking off this summer, and thousands of happy users started expressing their delight with the system, I kept waiting for the universe to balance the scales of passion. Nothing of note in this world is allowed to succeed without spawning a counteracting force of haters. And now they're finally here.

The same happened twenty years ago with Ruby on Rails, but back then I still thought you could argue your way to understanding. That if you just made a logical case to counter whatever objections were raised, you'd be able to persuade most haters to change their perspective. How naive.

It was Kathy Sierra who changed my perspective on this. From being annoyed by straw men and non sequiturs to accepting them and the haters as a natural consequence of success. That if you want people to love your creation, you have to accept the opposing force. Yin and yang.

Here's how Kathy presented the choice:

It's safe there in the gray middle. Nobody is mad at you, nobody is making any bad-faith arguments, but also, nobody cares. Lots of work exists in this zone. And that's fine. We don't need every project to reach the moon! But when escape velocity is achieved, you can't avoid drawing energy from both sides.

All this isn't to say that all objections, skepticism, or criticisms come from haters. Far from it. But once sufficient success is secured, a large portion will. It's just that kind of planet, as Jim Rohn would say.

The trick is to see this in aggregate as a necessary milestone. One that's even worth celebrating! Have you even made something worth cheering for, if there isn't a contingent there to boo at it too? Probably not.

So embrace the boos as you embrace the cheers. They come as a pair.

Omarchy didn't even exist before this summer. I did much of the pre-release work during the downtime between sessions at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June. And now, just a few months later, we've delivered a petabyte of ISOs in the past thirty days alone. That's about 150,000 installs of the Omarchy Linux distribution!

I've been involved with a lot of successful open-source projects in the past quarter of a century or so. Ruby on Rails, first and foremost. But nothing, not even Rails, grew as quickly as Omarchy has been growing in the first few months of its life. It's rather remarkable.

This is what product-market fit looks like. Doesn't matter if the product is free or not. The fit is obvious. The stream of people who don't just enjoy Omarchy but love it is seemingly endless. The passion is palpable.

But why? And why now?

As per usual, there are a lot of contributing factors, but key is how Apple and Microsoft have been fumbling their relationship with people who love computers in general and developers in particular.

Microsoft is killing off Windows 10, which in turn cuts off a whole slew of perfectly fine computers made prior to around 2017–2018. They also seem intent on shoving AI into everything, and wavering on whether that might be optional or not. Oh, and Windows is still Windows: decades of patching cracks in a foundation that just never was all that solid to begin with.

Apple too has turned a ton of people off with macOS 26 Tahoe, liquid glass, and faltering software quality. They're also cutting off all Intel-based Macs from future updates. A Mac Mini sold as recently as 2023 is now end-of-life! This is before we even talk about how poorly the company has been treating developers depending on the App Store bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, Linux has never looked better. Hyprland, the tiling window manager at the heart of Omarchy, is a sensation. It's brought an incredible level of finesse, detail, and style to the tiling window management space: superb animations, lightning-fast execution, and super-light resource consumption.

The historic gap in native GUI apps has never mattered less either. The web has conquered all as the dominant computing platform. In the past, missing, say, Photoshop was a big deal. Now it's Figma — a web app! — that's driving designers. Same too with tools like Microsoft Office or Outlook, which are all available on the web.

I'm not saying there aren't specialized apps that some people simply can't do without, that keep them trapped on Windows or Mac. But I am saying that they've never been fewer. Almost everything has a great web alternative.

And for developers, the fact is that Linux was always a superior platform in terms of performance and tooling for most programming environments. With 95% of the web running on Linux servers, all optimization and tuning needed to get the most out of the hardware was done with Linux in mind.

This is why even a $500 Beelink Mini PC is competitive with an M4 Max machine costing thousands of dollars for things like our HEY test suite, which runs on Ruby and MySQL. Linux is just really efficient and really fast.

Finally, I think the argument that owning your computer, fully and deeply, is starting to resonate. The Free Software crowd has been making the argument since the 90s, if not before, but it's taken Apple's and Microsoft's recent tightening of the reins on our everyday operating systems to make it relevant for most.

Omarchy is a beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux distribution, but it's also yours. Everything is preconfigured, sure, but every configuration is also changeable. Don't like how something works? Change it. Don't like the apps I use? Change them. Don't like how something looks? Redesign it. The level of agency is off the charts.

Turns out that plenty of people were starved for just this. All it took was someone to actually put all the pieces together, ignore the Linux neckbeards who insist you aren't worthy to run Arch or Hyprland without spending a hundred hours setting it up from scratch, and invite everyone to the party!

We're fed an endless stream of consternation over AI slop these days. The content apocalypse is nigh! It'll rot your brain! Okay, sure, maybe, but have you seen the kind of content sludge that perfectly ordinary humans are capable of producing? It's thrice as tragic.

The web is full of it. Garbage writing and brain-dead shorts. Content mills pumping out nonsense pages and gagging videos to appease whatever the high priests of SEO now think they've divined will please Lord Google or Master TikTok. 

It's been infecting websites everywhere with "calls to action", "white paper available upon sign up", and "10 ways to supercharge your productivity". Links stuffed into every crevice to juice rankings, capture "most searched for" keywords, and convert, convert, convert.

It's an affront to humanity to make sentient beings do this work. Turning human potential, creativity, and ingenuity into content sludge is a process no more dignified than turning pink slime into chicken nuggets.

I'll take AI slop over human sludge any day. Let the little robots barf up tokens to unlock the next basis point of incremental conversion. Better them than us, I say. This is exactly the soul-crushing, creative drudgery that machines were made to munch through without complaint.

But couldn't we do without sludge or slop, you say? Sure, right after we reach a shared state of nirvana. As soon as the average 4.5 hours of screen-on time is turned into real reading, real making, real pursuits. So that'll happen exactly never.

Case in point: the most important attribute of a phone for most people is still the battery life. These little content slop and sludge faucets can already spew out nearly an entire day's worth of nonstop eyeball junk, and yet you crave more. More! MORE!

So stop whining about the AI slop. You're already steeped in human sludge. And the door to exit both was always there. But you're not going to open it, are you?

There'll always be more emails in need of reply, more meetings to attend, and more updates to read. A person can fill the entire workweek with these tasks over and over again. But to stay sane and sharp, you must pay yourself first by doing the work that actually means something to you.

I feel this acutely as someone responsible to employees, customers, followers, and readers. I could do nothing all day but check up on projects, people, and posts, but my brain would quickly check out if it was just doing that.

So quite frequently, I just don't. Don't check in, don't check up, and instead dive into the work that checks my own intellectual boxes. Programming for the love of it. Experimenting for the hell of it. Researching for the fun of it.

In another age, I might have been tempted to apologize for such privilege, but screw that. Privilege is wonderful. You should do your best to earn more of it. Even if you have to carve it out of the bare rocks around you.

Ironically, the best way to do that is also to choose to always pay yourself first, however little at first. By solving your own problems, tickling your own interests, chasing your own curiosity. That's where you'll find the motivation to elevate your talent. To turn interest into competency. 

And once you've developed some competency, you'll be rewarded with more privilege to build it further. This is the virtuous circle of merit.

There'll always be an endless list of work that could be done. You'll never get through it all and onto your own priorities, if you continue to put them at the bottom.

Every few years, the same sad contingent of Ruby malcontents tries to cancel me from Rails. At the peak of the woke era, back in 2022, they were actually successful in getting Ruby Central to uninvite me from doing the yearly keynote at RailsConf. But now RailsConf is dead, Rails World is thriving, and the cancellation nonsense is over.

Only I guess nobody told that same sad contingent! Because three days ago, they tried yet again, with the same trite grab bag of accusations: "he holds racist and transphobic views, as well as a number of other traits undesirable". And to add to the outrage theater, they named their little letter after a French resistance action fighting the Nazis during WWII. Subtle!

Except this time, nobody cared. In fact, quite the opposite. Thousands of people have taken to X and elsewhere to reject this nonsense, and that's apparently making one of the organizers very sad:

I guess I would be sad too if I had named my group after THE GOOD GUYS and then it turned out that everyone thought I was THE BAD GUYS. But that's exactly what happened. The outpouring of support from all sides has been overwhelming.

This is what it looks like when preference falsification finally falls. When normal people are no longer afraid to say no to these people. Then it's revealed just how small and isolated these aggrieved individuals actually are.

Tobi from Shopify said it best:

That's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to reject and ignore these nut jobs. Then we're going to keep building.