Ask HN: If you had two months off between jobs what would you be doing?

Relaxing. Siestas. Spending time with my kid, taking her to parks, playing with her. Taking wife to movies, dinner and reading books.

Well, the main thing I want to do at the moment is build an external tracking sensor for Windows Mixed Reality. That'd be a pretty huge product if done right since the one weakness of WMR is the inside-out controller tracking. To do it right, though, it would need to do on-board video processing so it doesn't add any load on the host computer, which would involve implementing SoftPOSIT in an FPGA. That's as far as I've got on that one.

Then there's a ruggedized telepresence robot with enough flexibility that it can be used for inspection and troubleshooting on remote sites, so you don't need a person physically present. It would also let systems maintainers 'teleport' to a remote site for troubleshooting without having to lose a day to plane flights and paperwork. This might even be my next commercial project.

No-one's done a self contained drone 'airport' yet which can hold a few small drones and launch / retrieve / recharge them. It'd be useful for a whole bunch of remote observation and monitoring applications, eg. early bushfire detection. This will be tougher to commercialize due to large incumbent drone operators trying to increase red tape to prevent new players entering the market.

Another idea is a lawn weeding robot, using computer vision to detect weeds and some kind of claw to physically rip them out of the lawn. A few people have done hobby style builds but I don't think one's been commercialized yet.

And then there's a few fun non-commercial project ideas like a license-plate reader based automatic opener for our front gate, facial recognition doorbell / automatic lock for the front door, and a couple of game ideas.

I'd argue that it still might not fit you. If I'm hearing you correctly, you are in a software engineering position. That job unfortunately requires human interaction, as the problem of correctly designing and deploying software is HARD. It sounds like that isn't lost on you, though, and I can imagine having autism would make this job exceedingly difficult. It sounds like a pure programming job would be ideal for you, but I've never seen one personally. I honestly hope you find one. I just got out of a bad job and I know how taxing it can be.

I disagree that every job is soul crushing, though. At least not intrinsically so. Different jobs are good or bad based on the situation of the one performing it. We do have a choice in that we can choose not to perform that job (although for many that isn't really a true choice).

In any case, I hope your current and future employers recognize your needs. There are too many hard-ass managers with a "business mindset" that would rather avoid working with perfectly productive individuals such as yourself.