Ask HN: Should I cash out my 401K and try to get my dream job?

I don't see why you would need a github profile, etc., for those things, and if you think that improving your public image as a developer will land you a job with such a company, you may be right, but I think you are looking at the problem the wrong way. Many jobs offer the last two things in your dream job. A few jobs offer one of the first two, often at the expense of the latter. A very few jobs offer all four. How do you expect to tell that a company has all of these attributes? Unless they are a very high-profile company, you have very few data points to go on. Just like you talk yourself up during an interview, the company will talk themselves up, and often misrepresent and overstate what they have to offer.

Case in point, I'm actually in a somewhat similar situation, and am aggressively looking for an out. After returning to school to finish a degree I was hoping to take a different tack in my career. I really wanted to work on scientific applications with something more in mind than just the bottom line. I accepted a position that offered mostly remote work. They already have an established remote workforce, and it appeared to be a true meritocracy, with little management overhead or fixed structure, and lots of very bright talented people working on interesting projects. I had several interviews, including a day long in-person interview. I turned down three other very solid offers to take this job.

Fast forward a few months and the picture they painted could not be further from reality. The people in the office don't have phones, so talking to them directly always involves jumping through hoops and can take a long time to set up. People are often unwilling to talk at all and prefer to hold terse conversations over IM. Lack of management structure translates to lack of communication and support from above. Some things about the job were grossly misrepresented and there was one major outright lie that would have been a deal-breaker from the start if I'd known about it.

But the job looked perfect! I looked like a great fit to them! This is a career, don't count on a quick fix or finding nirvana in a day, or six months. A friend of mine used to say, life is the process of finding the things that don't work. If you put yourself 100% on the line hoping for a big payoff, you are more than likely not going to be happy with the result. Just look at how many startup founders on here have failed over and over before making it, and many never do. I see no reason to over-extend yourself like that for the sake of a salaried position, at least not without some really clear goal at the outset.

The other comments in this thread explain it much better than I could, but I will also throw in my 2 cents and add that you should absolutely not cash out your 401K. You're better off finding a better job. Once you do, you won't have to think about dipping into retirement savings for this.

You are working as a full-time software engineer and you think 6 months of answering StackOverflow questions and working on your GitHub profile are going to be better for your resume than continuing in your job?

Get a new job. If not your dream job (yet), some job that is incrementally better. Apply for jobs. Interview for jobs. That will teach you a lot more than hanging out on SO.

1) I don't have a GitHub (or Bitbucket, or other "profile" on similar repository hosts), or anything else in your list--at least not that I advertise or share with people. Yet I'm in SV earning in the mid $100k. The kinds of companies who put a lot of weight on the things you list are disproportionately likely to be social media sweatshops with a dogmatic view of development (if it's not +RoR+Cloud developed on a Macbook Pro, it's not "development"). If you want to work for them, you need those things; otherwise you don't.

I have a full-time job, as I noted, and a toddler at home. Over the last six months I've found a half-hour here, an hour there to do side-projects. One of which (and my only, to-date) I just released to the Google Play store. There is absolutely no reason you can't do this.

What does "I'm not allowed" mean? I can't think of any employment contract that would restrict you from doing any other development work on your own time. Just pick projects that a "reasonable observer" would not think overlap with your "day job" work.

2) You should not cash out your 401k to live on. It is not that kind of savings account (i.e. an "emergency" fund). However, if you have a solid investment opportunity in something (relatively) stable for the long-term, such as real estate, it may be worth it. I've cashed out my 401k three times, two for the wrong reasons (to fund relocations), and one to purchase a home that I now rent out and derive significantly more income (net of taxes and other payments) from than had that money been in my 401k fund.

The "not allowed" refers to sharing some of the best code I've written. I find it hard to reproduce that quality of code in a 45 minute code puzzle, like the time I interview for Twitter.