Am I being smart or reckless by taking a sabbatical with no job waiting for me in a weak job market?

Hi everyone.

I am a developer turned SRE with around 9 years of experience. For the past 5+ years, I’ve been with this startup where I’ve worked in almost every area of the stack: frontend, backend, video engineering, and recently DevOps and SRE. Heck, I’ve even handled client communication and acted as customer support during the early stages of this company.

It’s been close to 5.5 years now, and I know the product and engineering stack really well — to the point that I’m the go-to guy for a majority of the discussions. The curse is that a lot of my time goes into unofficially training or enabling folks from other teams.

Recently, I was promoted to lead the SRE/DevOps team after my manager was let go due to poor performance. Our team was already small — 3 people including my manager — and an additional team member joined right around the time my manager was let go. That increased the stress on me tenfold. I’m handling my team and still have to remain an individual contributor because the team is still learning. I onboarded another engineer after that, but they’re still new and need to be taught things before they fully grow into the team and start taking responsibilities.

While all of this has been a learning opportunity, I feel tired. I start my day around 9 AM; half my day goes into discussions and meetings, the other half into helping or guiding people from other teams or my own team. Whatever time is left, I work as an individual contributor. After all this, my day ends at around 8–9 PM, and when I finally close my laptop, I have zero energy to study. I just eat, watch videos, and sleep.

Even when I take vacations now, I still have things to tend to or some item pending. I don’t feel fresh even after coming back from a vacation. At this point, the only things keeping me here are the pay, the promotions, and the opportunity to work remotely.

But now I’m tired and unmotivated. The company isn’t looking to sell or make an exit anytime soon. They’re looking for further investments, so I don’t think I’ll be able to cash out big either.

I’m thinking of taking a break for 4–6 months. My goal is to upskill, get certified, and try my hand at providing consulting services to startups during this period. I’ve picked up good FinOps and security audit/compliance skills, and I actually like the work that comes with it.

If I’m not able to break into consulting, I want to hedge by continuing to interview for relevant roles. In terms of financial runway, I have a sabbatical fund saved that will last me 22 months even if I spend generously. Apart from that liquid fund, I also have around 6 months of emergency money. All in all, I can last 28 months without a job and still won’t have to touch my long-term savings.

What I’m fearing is: what happens if I don’t get a job after my sabbatical ends, or if I don’t get consulting clients? My wife and I are planning to have a kid next year. I need to be back in the workforce by then to secure the future for my kid.

TL;DR: Tired at current job of 5+ years. Want to take a sabbatical. But looking at the market, I’m having second thoughts.