Career Sabbaticals, Identity Crisis, and AI-Powered Self-Discovery

Career Sabbaticals and Self Discovery — with Thiago Ghisi

TLDR: Former Nubank director of engineering Thiago Ghisi discusses his six-month sabbatical journey, exploring how engineering leaders can navigate identity outside their job titles, use AI tools like Claude Code as a second brain, and even pursue psychology studies to better understand themselves.

Summary:

There's a conversation happening in tech circles that most people avoid — what happens when you step away from the title that defines you? Thiago Ghisi, with an impressive resume spanning ThoughtWorks, Apple, and most recently Nubank where he served as director of engineering, decided to find out. He's been on sabbatical for over six months, and what he's discovered goes far deeper than just "taking a break."

The discussion hits on something many senior engineers and engineering leaders struggle to articulate: the uncomfortable entanglement between who we are and what we do. When you spend years climbing the technical ladder, building teams, and solving complex problems, your professional identity becomes deeply woven into your sense of self. Remove the job title, and suddenly you're forced to answer much harder questions. Who are you without the meetings, the decisions, the team looking to you for direction?

What makes this conversation particularly relevant is how Ghisi has approached his sabbatical with an engineer's mindset while exploring deeply human territory. He's been using Claude Code to build what he calls a "second brain" — using AI not just for coding tasks but for organizing thoughts, processing reflections, and engaging in a form of AI-powered self-discovery through personal data analysis. This is a fascinating application of tools we typically associate with productivity hacks being applied to existential exploration.

The path from engineering leadership to potentially pursuing a psychology PhD might seem like a sharp turn, but it actually makes perfect sense. The best engineering leaders have always understood that the job is fundamentally about people — understanding motivations, managing stress, building environments where humans can do their best work. Psychology is just making that implicit knowledge explicit and rigorous.

For architects and senior technical leaders, this conversation is a valuable reminder that career planning shouldn't just be about the next role or the next company. Sometimes the most important technical skill you can develop is the self-awareness to know when you need to step back, and the courage to actually do it. The fact that Ghisi can leverage AI tools to facilitate this journey shows how these technologies can serve purposes far beyond their intended design.

Key takeaways:

• Taking a sabbatical as a senior engineering leader requires confronting deep questions about identity separate from professional accomplishments
• AI tools like Claude Code can be repurposed for personal development and self-discovery, not just technical productivity
• The skills that make someone a good engineering leader — understanding people, systems thinking, pattern recognition — translate surprisingly well to psychology and self-analysis
• Six months is not too long to spend figuring out what you actually want from your career

Tradeoffs:

• Gain deep self-understanding but sacrifice career momentum and potentially income
• Pursue psychology studies for rigorous people knowledge but sacrifice time that could go into technical skill development

Link: Career Sabbaticals and Self Discovery — with Thiago Ghisi