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Ask HN: Should I quit my job?

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Re: Ask HN: Should I quit my job?

#51

Post by edw519 »

My gut is telling me to quit my job and work for my products.

The best advice I ever got from my mentor: "Listen to your gut!" Passing it on...

I have enough savings to survive for five years.

What?!? Are you fucking crazy?!? What are you waiting for?!?

My biggest fears are: - To not stick to a schedule/routine once I am solo.

How will you know until you try? More to the point: how will you know how important "sticking to a schedule/routine" is until you try? (Probably not nearly as much as you think.)

- People's and family opinion.

Fuck. That. Shit. The first thing anyone must do when embarking on a new journey is to focus on the issues and ignore the pointless details. I can't imagine anything more pointless than "people's and family opinion".

- Failing and losing motivation. Why lump these 2 together? In my experience, failing is the best way to learn and learning is the best way to get more motivation.

Should I quit my job and work on my stuff or search for another position that would give more motivation?

YES! YES! YES! Do something, anything different! The worst thing you can do at this point in you life is stay the course. You'll just get older and more bitter. And posting the same thing on hacker news 2 years from now.

You can recapture money. You can recapture relationships. You can recapture your health. You can recapture almost anything, except for time.

Please don't make the same mistake I made by getting started in your 40's. Because you were too timid and pissed away too much of your life on what you know is the wrong thing.

I've responded to many similar questions over the years here on hn, but yours may be the clearest of them all: You already know what you must do but came here for confirmation. Now you have it. Take the next right step for yourself and please, keep us posted.

Best wishes and respect!

Re: Ask HN: Should I quit my job?

#53

Post by ratsimihah »

If you're already making revenue, it will be easier to scale up than if you had no revenue at all. So quitting your day job doesn't sound too bad, in the short-term. If your project fails, you'll have gained experience and live a few exhilarating years working for yourself, but your savings will be gone.

Taking a perspective that stretches further in time, it sounds like you're on your way to reach financial independence fairly soon, assuming you don't quit your job just yet. tldr: if you save enough money and invest it intelligently (basically in the s&p 500 or a total stock market), you should be able to live off the compounding interests of your investments. If you have 5 years of expenses already saved up, you might be a quarter/third of the way to reach your number (the amount invested for which you don't need to work anymore). Finally, having a goal laid as such might make it easier to bear your day job until you can retire in a few years.

For more info, check out the book Financial Freedom. I didn't write it but I'm in the same boat as you, so my goal is now to make and invest as much money as possible through day job and side hustles, to then be able to retire and work because I want to, rather than because I need to.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Should I quit my job?

#54

Post by bmat »

Similar story here. 29, had been working at a big tech company for almost 4 years. Didn’t really enjoy the work, definitely didn’t enjoy the 1 hour commute. Tried to convince my manager to let me work remotely but was rejected, so I decided to take the leap and quit* . I didn’t have a specific plan for what I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to do some traveling, work on passion projects, and cultivate some new hobbies.

It’s been 2 months and I have zero regrets. In that time I started and finished a video project I had put off for 8 months, started playing drums, and just finished a month of traveling the US and Europe. I still don’t know what I want to do long term, but I’ve never felt more empowered to figure it out. Do it!

* Disclaimer: I have an open offer from my old company to come back any time (same role same compensation), so that took a lot of the pressure off of the decision. You should see if you can negotiate something similar with your job.

Re: Ask HN: Should I quit my job?

#55

Post by neilv »

Your situation sounds above-average, by US American standards.

If you're unhappy with your situation, you should try to improve it.

Feeling depressed can tell you that it's time to improve your situation, but it can also be a barrier to improving the situation. Immediately, make sure your nutrition, exercise, and sleep are good. If you can get a doctor checkup and blood tests, that can also rule out some possible contributing factors. Also consider talking with a counselor (if that is a thing in your country). In addition to all those, you can experiment with things like getting more daylight, standing and moving more than sitting, etc.

If your situation isn't unbearable, don't quit before you have a plausible plan for what to do instead. Such as a signed offer for a job that you want to do instead. Or a plan for exploring a startup, with conditional plan branches for what to do if it doesn't hit certain milestones within certain timeframes.

If age discrimination is a thing in your field and country, don't predicate your plan on assumptions of how easy it was to get a job 5 years ago. If you do a startup for a few years, then decide to go back, consider how different you might be perceived, trying to go back in your mid-30s. (Many companies like to hire impressionable young employees without much family commitments, and focus their hiring on those. And there's a good chance you'll be interviewed by some 20yos who have interesting theories about already knowing everything of value themselves, and about the sudden onset of severe cognitive decline afflicting anyone on their 30th birthday.) So, if your conditional plan includes possibly going back to this, try to plan for how that can work despite any age discrimination.

Re: Ask HN: Should I quit my job?

#56

Post by apl002 »

I quit my job to work on my side project. I have a years worth of savings to get the project in a place where i can either successfully monetize it or raise VC money. I am in month 3 and will be ready for launch in month 5. Here is my routine M-F:

wake up at 730-8 and gym. start work by 930-10. pause work at ~5pm to take dog for walk & cook dinner with gf start work again around 8pm to 11-12.

Its been pretty sustainable for me and my gf isnt unhappy. Quit your job and go figure out if this things works or not. Worse case scenario you fail and then you go back to a corporate gig.

Re: Ask HN: Should I quit my job?

#57

Post by gomox »

Do it. You will never know until you try.

With 5 years to figure it out, at 29, with no kids, with a career in a profitable industry/segment that will employ you again quickly, and in a country with a solid social safety net, you're not really risking anything other than your ego getting bruised.

Source: I did it, in a situation not that different to yours.

Re: Ask HN: Should I quit my job?

#58

Post by rossdavidh »

marktani wrote: post #34
rossdavidh wrote: post #23

This will sound odd, but hear me out: assuming that whichever way you choose, it will be wrong, which would you choose? If you quit this job to pursue your side project, and that doesn't pan out, will you forever regret having given up this job? Or, if you don't quit this job, will you forever hate your career because part of you is wondering what would have happened if you just "went for it"? Figure out which mistak…

That's a very interesting approach. Do you have more data/anectodes etc. on your point: > By the way, for reasons I won't speculate on, this method (assume failure, which would you pick) turns out to be a pretty good way of picking the option more likely to succeed, actually. I'm going to try to keep this one in mind for big decisions.

Anecdata: quit my job at age 29 to go back to get a Master's in EE, studying neural networks, in 1996. Quit my job in the semiconductor industry in 2004 to become a programmer at a university. Quit my job at the university in 2010 to go into the private sector. All three turned out to be the right decision, as far as I can tell, but in all three cases I was mostly motivated by knowing that if I did not, I would regret that more than I would regret quitting a position I was no longer interested in.

But, I wonder if it would still work well if, in the back of your mind, you were thinking "but it won't really fail, it always succeeds". You really do need to take seriously the idea that it will not work out, and only do it when you would still rather try it.

Re: Ask HN: Should I quit my job?

#59

Post by rossdavidh »

mdolon wrote: post #47
rossdavidh wrote: post #23

This will sound odd, but hear me out: assuming that whichever way you choose, it will be wrong, which would you choose? If you quit this job to pursue your side project, and that doesn't pan out, will you forever regret having given up this job? Or, if you don't quit this job, will you forever hate your career because part of you is wondering what would have happened if you just "went for it"? Figure out which mistak…

Jeff Bezos frames this concept fairly well too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ

Interesting! I will never make 1% of the money that man made. But, I don't regret that either. :)

Re: Ask HN: Should I quit my job?

#60

Post by brailsafe »

Yes quit. But life is not binary. I personally slip into a schedule of 4am sleep and noon wakes when I'm not obligated to be anywhere. I'm 27 and it's a struggle to find my place in the world. However, I tried to ride out a similar situation until I found a different job, only to be fired when things went too downhill for a variety of reasons. Your situation sounds like my nightmare, but many peoples dream, what you decide can't be wrong, and if you have any resilience in this world then you'll figure it out. I highly recommend fucking around a bit—perhaps as the Nomad you decry. It's fun, and when you haven't had fun in a while, it's awakening. It's a bigger and more damning risk imo—if you have savings—to stay put and not change things up. I think it's better to work hard and suffer in a positive way to find something that brings you and others value—and you positive mental health state—than to suffer in a negative way for no discernible positive outcome other than money. My overall recommendation: Don't trade your life for money and perceived safety. Try something else and let your damn hair down. True hippies btw are awful, nomads just like to explore and basically just tend to get out of stagnant corporate grinds.
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