291–300 of 320 posts
In both cases, I spent tens of thousands of dollars during the interim lull.
Had I invested that money in our crazy stock market... more money.
It's fine, I'm a spoiled brat in a bubble.
Quit your fucking job. The worst that can happen is a very expensive lesson in humility.
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> a sudoku solver Sorry to hear about all the stresses you were dealing with but if it's okay, i'd like to follow up on your sudoku solver. Are you doing the brute force/general way or are you implementing sudoku specific logic? Here's my understanding of the general way: it tries to insert different values in different squares until it finds a conflict. A sudoku specific way, in my mind, would implement the algorith…
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 with…
I got pretty high up on the traditional engineering corporate ladder (junior to senior to lead to managing managers at a startup) and realized, even though I was pretty good at it, it just wasn't where I wanted my life to go.
I enrolled in a part time language learning school for Chinese and spend the other half trying to get a engineer training business off the ground. I figure the worst case scenario was I'd learn Chinese and have plenty content in my portfolio to become a Developer Advocate for The Man later. Worst worst case scenario I'd already developed a great reputation with previous colleagues in the past I could send a text message to and get work fixing broken websites again.
I further hedged my risk by giving a 1 month notice at my last job to ensure no bridges were burned. Also relocated from California to Taiwan which halved my living expenses and doubled my quality of life.
Even though I had a multi year run way of savings, an impending IPO that would give me even more cash, and the bonkers bull market of 2021, I _still_ got a bit anxious about not making an income right away at first.
Instead of planning on doing nothing I'd recommend finding a 10-20 hour a week contract gig, or interviewing at somewhere like karat.com to give freelance interviews. At the very least, have a plan of WHAT you'll be doing if you're not working, maybe it's signing up for a foreign language course, or grad school, or flamenco dancing, whatever. Just make sure you have some sort of routine planned. You can start your own thing while taking a part time class, and it'll make it much easier to make friends and not accidentally waste your time on social media by accident.
That being said, if you have a plan of what you'll do, have a specific place in mind, and have the cash saved up, go for it.
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Don't feel bad, or ashamed, this is perfectly normal. I find renting a desk in a co-working space has helped me stay a little more motivated and positive over the last several months (home office gets too monotone). Just do your best and make a genuine effort, if you do and you still want to go back to a classic job, then do it. As long as you know you gave it a genuine effort, you have nothing to feel bad about.
Thank you for the kind words. I more and more think that renting a desk was something I should have done long ago. I didn't realize working from home would be this bad (without people around or external pressure).
Good luck!
Note: I am not an engineer. I’m mostly skilled in telling stories. I got fired from every job I ever had before I started working for myself. Each time I left I ended up in a better job until the last time when I got laid off from a telecom PM role. I went to look for another job and never found one. At the time I was living paycheck to paycheck (barely) so this was quite scary. I did have a small severance but that…
What do you define as living 'paycheck to paycheck'? What kind of friends do you have that have loanable startup money? I think you and I come from totally different classes in life.
I grew up very poor, like don’t know where your next meal is gonna come from poor. I networked into the tech community by working day in and day out to be something the tech community wanted. That meant changing who I was in deep and fundamental ways.
I grew up in the Bay Area but all of my friends were in the hood when I was a kid. I also dropped out of college. At a certain point I just started paying more attention to who had money and power.
Your mileage may vary. As I said I got very lucky.
I quit a normal job in 2015 to do freelance consulting. I had no plan, luckily I found two clients for part time work and for the rest of my hours I created a e-commerce site that I operated for myself. That quickly escalated and made more money than in a normal job, but running an e-commerce site isn't much fun. 1.5 years later I joined a startup, with 3 other ambitious guys which was super successful. The first yea…
Just out of curiosity, what about running the e-commerce site was a drag?
I had a very good margins, so overall it wasn't a bad business with long hours. For many this would have been fine. But for me it got boring really quick, shut down after about 18 months.
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How much saved up do you think is a lot? Just wondering
~50k dollars. It's obviously not nearly enough to retire on but I can sustain my current lifestyle for at least 3 years without issues, even if my income would be 0
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>Quitting to do your own thing, as long as you show employers why you did it in a year or two, shouldn’t be a detriment for getting rehired. That said, hiring managers may question if you’d quit again in a year (depending on your past employment tenure)… It shouldn't be a detriment for getting rehired, period. If you are qualified for a role and pass an interview bar, there is no reason a potential employer should ca…
Hiring manager here. Knowledge has a half life. If you have taken 6 months off, and have an interesting story, this is not a big deal. (For example, I took 8 months off to live in Istanbul. I had two interviews and two offers when coming back, one of which was completely outside my network.) However, I had also just taken a month to do a functional course, and had worked half-heartedly on a startup that went nowhere.…