People leave the work for all sorts of reasons. Illness. Caring for someone. A redundancy that took eight months to recover from. Burnout you did not have a word for at the time. A baby. A degree. A move to another country and the paperwork that came with it.
Then you come back, and the first week is genuinely disorienting. The build system is different. The chat has four hundred unread messages and a running joke you do not understand. There is a new deployment tool with a name you have never heard. Everyone seems to be moving quickly, and you are reading a README.
Here is what is actually true. The tools drifted. Your judgement did not. Knowing when a design is going to hurt you later, how to talk to an angry stakeholder, what a rushed estimate feels like, how to break a vague problem into pieces, none of that expired while you were gone. Those are the parts that took years. The parts that changed are the parts that were always going to change, and the people who never left had to learn them too, just gradually enough that it did not feel like anything.
So plan the return rather than white knuckling it. In the first week, take one small task that goes all the way from ticket to production. Not the hardest thing available, and definitely not something chosen to prove a point. You are rebuilding the loop, not auditing yourself.
Ask one person for thirty minutes of what changed while I was out, and take notes, because you will be given four months of context in one sitting. Read the decision records or the last quarter of design docs if they exist. Tell your manager plainly that you expect to be slower for two or three weeks. Almost every manager hears that as professionalism.
And say the gap once, simply, without a defence attached. I took a year out for family, and I am glad to be back. Then move on to the work. The people worth working with will already have moved on with you.
Time away sharpens one thing in particular. You come back with a very clear sense of what is actually worth worrying about.
– Asael Shinder
