Ask HN: How did you escape your safe 9-5 job?

I really need advice, I'm in this exact situation and I'm feeling lost.

I'm gonna go throwaway since I really need to spill the beans here:

My story is full of 'pendulum swings' and 'comparisons' and I can't really make up my mind. I need help.

- I am married with children.

- I live in Brazil, which is shitty right now, as most of you know (far-right trigger-happy president just got elected). Lots of unemployment going down here, people are genuinely struggling. Basically everyone knows someone unemployed or in bad shape financially.

- I managed to somehow escape all the suffering from the last 3-5 years by landing a .gov job several years ago. That means I currently have a good stable income, I am able to afford a mortgage and a comfy home, I have a car and health insurance. Not much money left at the end of the month but everything is properly paid and managed. And I basically cannot be laid off unless I do something really bad.

(Lots of people here would kill to have this job -- in our culture landing a .gov job is synonymous of "having made it", because the majority of Brazilians don't really enjoy hard work -- they measure success by your amount of free time).

- Problem is, my current 8-5 job is as meaningless as one can imagine. I siphon data thru python scripts and write excel spreadsheets, deal with lots of useless crap, data that is not going to be used for anything, and that's it. It's a .gov job after all, filled with bureaucracy and useless stuff to do just to fill time. It makes me feel really empty and after all these years I have ended up developing Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Panic Attacks ;(

- Otoh, before working here I worked on places in which I've consistently put 70h+ work weeks, I was really fat and my overall health (blood pressure, sugar, cholesterol levels) was poor. After joining this boring dayjob I managed to have more time for exercising and hobbies and I ended up losing an excess of 50kg, which was really good to me. My health is mostly in check, besides my anxiety which fucks me on a weekday basis (I almost don't have it on weekends).

- After I arrive home from my dayjob I'm usually so stressed out for not really doing anything meaningful (which worsens my anxiety) that I have several freelance gigs lined up so I can 'feel alive' for a bit. I am a systems developer and I have almost 20 years of UN*X experience, which lends well to these kinds of custom workloads where they need specialized solutions and whatnot. When I'm in the zone doing this kind of work at my home office, I have no anxiety whatsoever.

- I know I need more free time for my family and the kid. I don't think I should be living two work lives for that much time or I'll end up not seeing my kid grow up or something. As much as the freelance gigs make me feel really accomplished, I realize I also need time for "real" hobbies (music making, woodworking), exercise, etc.

- All these freelance gigs helped me shape my career outside of my day job and build a good network and portfolio of solutions and cases. I currently have some interviews lined up with recruiters from Europe, and some are going pretty well. I think I might score a job there soon-ish and if that happens I'll be offered to move. That means abandoning my "dream job" here.

- Thing is, I don't know how it can turn up there, it could be good, it could be bad and if I come back I'll not have my safe job anymore, and I'll end up being thrown into genpop without any kind of safe net which is much needed in this extremely volatile environment that is Brazil right now. And now I'm older and I have a mortgage and a kid.

- I am currently "taking a hit for the team". Not happy at my dayjob, but I do it anyway and I "like it" because I am thinking about how I am able to keep my family together and well-fed, while several people are losing their houses etc and suffering a lot. It really is a 'lesser evil' situation.

My doubts are:

- Am I complaining on an full stomach? Should I stick to my safe job and not go into unsafe adventures?

- What if I end up hating there as well and regretting not having valued my current safety as much as I should?

- Otoh, what if I am losing myself into this hole of a job and living a lesser life, for me and for my family? Emigrating to a better place could mean more work and less slack but also living in a better place, with less crime and with a better overall quality of life.

Doubts doubts doubts.

I'd appreciate your sincere opinions! I'm gonna come back in a few hours to read the replies.

Thanks in advance and have a good day, y'all! o/

It sounds like you overthink uncertainty, which is something I was stuck in for years. If I just reason it out enough, and have a good idea, and think it all through, maybe I can solve the problem before I quit that cushy job, or so the thinking goes.

It turns out that as long as I'm employed as a factory worker cranking out pointless Jira tickets all day to integrate another A/B testing framework, I don't have any good ideas. Boring works makes people dull.

How to escape: have f-you money. Pay off debts, save ruthlessly. See e.g. Mr Money Mustache [0] or The Simple Path to Wealth [1] for more. Bonus: you'll end up making better decisions at your 9-5 job because _you just don't have to put up with all that_, if the need arises.

My strategy: realizing that having a boring 9-5 job I found unfulfilling would make me insanely unhappy in the long term. You can always get another job if you decide you'd rather do that again.

Did I regret it? Am I happy? N/A. I know for sure I'll regret wasting another day arguing with a project manager that putting a ticket in the "in progress" column isn't actually the same as progress. In any case, others' experience doesn't have any bearing on yours (fortunately!). However, I strongly recommend against discussing this with your coworkers. They've chosen the same path you have, and will demotivate you despite having best intentions for you. If you go on an antarctic expedition, you'll run into a lot of people interested in the South Pole, and may begin to think it's common to spend lots of time thinking about penguins or the aurora australis. Well-intentioned but bad advice is pernicious.

You can't go wrong spending your days doing something that matters to you.

If you haven't read it, I recommend Post Office by Charles Bukowski.

[0] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com [1] JL Collins: The Simple Path to Wealth

> P.S. The "safe" job might not be as safe as it seems.

It's been my experience that if you can get one 9–5 job, you can get another as long as you have a nontrivial amount of experience.

For example, I last got laid off in March of 2016. In May of that year, I applied for a job that I ended up starting in June (and I'm still here two and a half years later).

I escaped the 9-to-5 with freelance web development. I never actually had a full time job because I decided I never wanted one when I was doing a summer job in college that required me to sit in one place programming for 6-8 hours a day. I discovered Hacker News around that time and the idea that I could make money on my own and was hooked.

I started out doing what basically amounts to working in an agency. A business guy I graduated with wanted to start a marketing company and he got the jobs and I built the websites. It was still a contract setup and I made $50 an hour because Hacker News told me that $50 was a good starting rate so I asked for it and he gave it to me.

Then I got into doing Django web development and charged around $90/hr because I got a lead and I didn't really want the work so I said, "My rate is $90/hr" and he said "okay" and from then on my rate was $90/hr. (Ha!) I just recently got $125/hr in a recent project.

Starting when I was still sort of in college helped a lot. Living in small town Indiana where the college was and this company started out helped a lot lot. Rent at the time was $150/month with a roommate. Having very low expenses meant I could experiment more and not have to worry as much about paying rent. Not having any dependents helped too.

The biggest advice I have to anyone who wants to go out on their own: learn business skills. If you already know how to develop, you may think that's all you need. It's a meme at this point that "If you build (a SaaS) they will come." No, they really wont. You need marketing, marketing, marketing, and coding to build a webapp.

This is why I recommend people start out freelancing first. Then go into building consulting services. And _then_ build products. Freelancing is so much easier to make money with. Any competent developer can get $100/hr+ with some networking. That will teach you how to talk to clients and how to sell yourself. All things you need if you are going to sell products, but it's way easier and you don't also have the burden of designing a good product.

Consulting services are very lucrative, but require even more business sense. If you can business and code at the same time, you are in a verrrrry small percentage of people, and have superpowers.

Build your audience somehow. You'll need one if you are going to sell a product. Make the product first as a service that "doesn't scale". That is, manually implement the business outcome your software would give your customer manually yourself.

Then if you feel the need build a product based on your consulting business. Create rungs on a "product ladder" - free content you put out, paid info products, higher price consulting services, and then at the very top automate all of it in software. It's a model I've seen a number of people do that will be a lot "less risky" than quitting your job and building a webapp blind without anyone watching.

I tried this once. I quit all my freelance work for a year and lived off of savings. I then proceeded to not make anything anyone wanted and just ended up spending all of my money. Then I got back into freelancing and have money again.

In general, this strategy is: "Have safe money and risky money". Your employment is safe money. It's boring, but safe. If you want to get out on your own with less risk, figure out a way to get more time but keep that safe money (maybe try to reduce hours, maybe try to reduce your commute, maybe try to work 4 days a week), then pick up freelancing part part time. Then once freelancing becomes "safe money", quit your job. Work on freelancing part time and build a business that is "risky money".

This is what I'm now doing and I have managed to make a reasonable living while having a lot more time to pursue ventures I'm passionate about. I still spend about 20 hours of my day doing "boring" web development work, but it pays for the rest of my life. I'll probably always keep at least a little of that work because it pays so well for the time put in.

Happy to talk about this more, this subject is of great interest to me and is something I've thought about a lot. My email's in my profile if you want. I think your mindset is more reasonable than many people seem to think, and I wish you the best in your quest to find work you love. It's a long term process but in 10 years of doing this I wouldn't have it any other way.

Thank you. I'm also disappointed how people(millennials specially) find this days 9-5 jobs "outdated" or mark them as "meaningless" without even taking the chance to get one, or taste the struggle to make it's path to a decent job.