Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go?

Since most of these answers are tech-related, here's my financial services perspective.

I spent two years working as an auditor for a large public accounting firm. This was my first post-college job. I disliked the job from the beginning, but was not confident I would find another good entry level job, so I stuck with it until I burnt myself out. Covid resulted in more work hours than usual. Compensation per hour was terrible for the number of hours worked, and I felt like I was wasting my life.

Near the end (August 2020), I struggled to do anything. Since I didn't have strong relationships with coworkers, I quit without much discussion or a plan. It was easy because: the parents paid for college, I don't spend much, I have minimal monthly expenses, and I have no major commitments.

After quitting, I drove around the US for two months seeing cool places and old friends. Eventually I was offered a short-term contract as an auditor again, and I took it. I really didn't want to be an auditor, but the hourly pay was great, and it was a promotion. Turns out, higher compensation made me a happier auditor.

Bonus points, after that contract I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, which I just finished. The 6 month gap from the hike did not cause any issues when finding a new job, and actually made interview conversations fun and easy.

I've done it a few times, and am doing it now. Just make sure you have a plan and a realistic idea about what getting that next job would look like. The plan doesn't need to be very detailed but should include a realistic idea of when you would NEED to become employed again, and what you want to accomplish in the time off. That could be "I want to play video games for 3 months straight". It doesn't really matter as long as you don't finish your sabbatical wishing you would have done something else. The entire point is to reset your mental health, or to simply live life as though you didn't HAVE to work for a living. Generally speaking people work because they have to, there's nothing wrong with simply not wanting to do it for a while.

I think if you don't know what you'd do, there's a chance you'll end up regretting it. But there's also a chance you realize there's a ton of life you aren't living, and find ways to reconnect with it.

Same here. Too bad it only lasts 6 months.

Good perspective, thank you. I am starting an indefinite sabbatical here in 2 weeks, single and no kids. I don't know what I want or need, but I know it's not 50-60 hrs/week. I also will go nuts if I don't have objectives that I work towards. Having a team of coworkers are very motivational.

No worries, it's a fun topic!

For any given position on the board, there are only 9 possible moves that can be made (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9). One could try each possible move without regard to the rules of Sudoku, then evaluate whether the new state is correct - and this is what I understand you mean by brute force.

My implementation goes to the next step and only considers valid moves for a given position by looking within the current 3x3 square, and also by looking along the row+column to eliminate numbers that have already been used. This is slightly better than brute force and reduces the search space quite a bit.

At a high level, my sudoku solver does a guided DFS by generating the full list of moves that can be made from the current board state, then sorts them according to heuristics that match how I play sudoku (first try to fill in positions with less options, first try to use numbers that have been used more), then starts trying values and backtracking once it reaches a point where there are no more remaining valid moves.

The problem with heuristics like those is that sudoku puzzles can be created that exploit the heuristics and make the search take forever. My implementation solves easy and medium sudokus very quickly. My implementation can't solve most hard sudokus even after letting it run for hours.