Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go?

#301

Post by georgeburdell » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

jnguyen64 wrote: post #273

georgeburdell wrote: post #102

I'm going to caution that I have NOT quit my job, but I did take a ~3mo leave of absence from work to study full-time for getting a job as a senior software engineer. This thread seems to take a very optimistic view of quitting, and that getting another job was easy as a fallback option. I can say as an average dev in the Bay Area, I've failed the vast majority of first round technical screens I've encountered. Conse…

interesting perspective - was it mainly leetcode questions that you ended up getting asked for first round technical screens?

About 60/40 LeetCode vs. straightforward problem

Re: Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go?

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Post by 6510 » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 3:37 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #252

mlac wrote: post #87

After skimming half the thread and only seeing one view (DO IT! It’s GREAT!), I’m going to throw this out there: - You will have heavy selection bias here (people who did not succeed might be working at a crappier job and unable to comment at this moment) - You will also have confirmation bias among those who willingly quit (“of course it was the right move”) - You are asking a very unique set of people with very val…

Both times I have quit my job with nothing else lined up have been stress-filled disasters with a dreadful financial countdown timer. I would never do it again. The second time, our savings left us about 1 month away from my wife and I living in our car. This thread has been unreal! I don't know who these people are who can just leave their jobs and go off to windsurf in Ibiza, but congratulations on how fortunate yo…

A friend of mine went to live on a beach on the other side of the world for 2 years. He would just follow the tourist party every day. I don't have what it takes to do that. It's really all about the mind set. He did have an exit strategy: Ask his mum for a ticket. Which he eventually did. Hearing about it afterwards I was somewhat angry with him that he never called to ask for money. A few hundred euro goes a long way compared to nothing?

When it was my time to leave I didn't even have a car to live in. I maintain a complex agenda where I would invite myself a week in advance to sleep on vaguely familiar peoples sofa for 1 night never more than 1x every 14 days per household. The bargain was this: I clean your kitchen, I cook an elaborate meal, I clean the kitchen again, I sleep on your sofa and leave after coffee in the morning. If I had money I would spend it on the meal but usually I had the host pay for it. Some people I barely knew would compensate for it by turning their kitchen into something like a war zone. I joked how welcoming it looked. Others never bothered to cook anything elaborate and welcomed the formula. It was a surprisingly interesting period that lasted something like 8 months. I think I've actually helped a good number of burned out people who just gave up cleaning the house and/or cooking and badly needed a break from it.

Re: Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go?

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Post by nanidin » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

nanidin wrote: post #290

saimiam wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

On re-examination, the search is BFS by the way.

Re: Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go?

#304

Post by Rury » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

I quit my former employer earlier this year (largely due to management). They tried retaining me, however I simply think the company was a poor fit for the remainder of my career. I had worked there almost 10 years out of college.

Afterwards, I spent a month seeing members of my family. Unfortunately, while I was away on my travels, my car happened to be damaged. Had to spend several days fixing that amongst other things. Then I just spent about another month of just relaxing, before even looking for a new job.

From there I took about 3 months of 8 hour days looking for, applying and interviewing for jobs in two metros I wanted to live in. I think I had applied to ~80 jobs, had ~20 interviews, and received 3 job offers. Accepted an offer in late June, approximately 5 months after leaving my last employer.

Was it worth it? Yes in some aspects. I now make 25% more, have an easier work-life balance, and was able to resolve some things I was putting off for years. The process wasn't easy though, and even though I make more now, it'll take ~18 months for me to recoup the money I missed from being unemployed for 5 months. I also learned a lot I otherwise wouldn't have. Only downside I'd say, is that I feel this may just be a temporary stepping stone in my career...

Re: Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go?

#305

Post by growthfunda » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

I quitted high paying job as a Software Engineer to peruse my dream of FREEDOM lifestyle.

For me it went very well in terms of overall exposure, experience but in terms of finance it was not that good.

But I never regretted it.

During, journey I failed in 4 business attempts, but I never stop learning and exploring new opportunities.

Fast forward, after 9 months of break, I again joined full time and I have been running a digital side hustle along with the job.

During those 9 months of break I learned so many things and developed new high income Digital skills like Blogging, Content Writing, SEO, Marketing, Web Development, Graphics design, etc.

I have noted my entire journey of side hustle here in this job free life post: https://www.growthfunda.com/job-free-life/

Feel free to read and share you thoughts. And Here are my closing thoughts: If anyone of you planning to quit job then don't quit it without any backup (backup as in backup plan, finances) I would rather recommend one should parallely start side hustle.

Re: Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go?

#306

Post by rgrmrts » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

Not during the last two years but ~2017 I quit and moved to a new city. It was a great experience, I eventually got a new job after 3 months that paid double what I was making before. Those 3 months off were such a breath of fresh air, and undid my burnout.

I kind of just explored the city every day, tried new food, got myself in slightly better shape, and formed some new habits.

Obvious caveat here is I was fairly young (mid 20s) with no responsibilities.

Re: Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go?

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Post by josh2600 » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 7:00 PM UTC

canaus wrote: post #198

josh2600 wrote: post #89

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…

This entire comment reads odd. The begging. The purchasing ETH with severance. The multiple advertisements. I'm glad it worked out for you, but this is a 1% of 1% tier of luck (especially situationally).

I 100% agree. My point was that often in life a lot of success that we attribute to skill is luck. I got insanely lucky more times than I can count. A few coin flips in the other direction and I’d be homeless.

Re: Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go?

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Post by jnguyen64 » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 7:43 PM UTC

cushychicken wrote: post #55

So far, so good. I quit in July with nothing else lined up. I took about two months off where I was just reading and taking care of our new puppy. I've started a job board for FPGA/RTL engineers at www.rtljobs.com. The mailing list is growing at an appreciable clip and paid postings should be live early in the new year. I've also been doing some electronics consulting work. Not much. Only about 2-3 hours a day. I'm m…

Pretty cool website!! I'm working on a job board as well (completely un-related field) and would love any early insights you got as far as gaining traction and building up a mailing list.

Also, for the filters, could you make it so that when a user clicks outside of the filter choices, it closes the menu that pops up?

Re: Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go?

#309

Post by swimorsinka » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 8:44 PM UTC

gaws wrote: post #262

swimorsinka wrote: post #208

I'll add another cautionary tale.... At the start of my career, I worked as a SWE at one of the FAANGs. After 3 years, I couldn't take it anymore. I hated everything I worked on, nothing was meeting my lofty expectations, and I thought about quitting constantly. Eventually I pulled the trigger to go and "do my own thing." I didn't have a backup job - instead I worked on my own projects with a cofounder and tried to t…

> This continued for 2.5 years. Eventually, I had had enough, and I knew something had to change. I went and tried to get my old FAANG job back, but couldn't - probably due to my entitled attitude when I was there. lol @ thinking this was a viable option. Who returns to a company nearly three years later thinking he or she will get their old job back? By that point, they've likely filled the position several times ov…

Lol, not on the same team, just the same company.

Re: Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go?

#310

Post by magicroot75 » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 12:44 PM UTC

patchorang wrote: post #58

I've done this 3 times in my 8 year career so far. I pretty much leave every job this way. I like to take a few months between jobs to do my own thing and take a break. If you are financially stable enough and are in a spot in your career where you don't think you'll need to worry about getting another job too much. DO IT. Looking back at the last 8 years, those periods off are the periods I remember the most. One ti…

I told my new company I wasn't available for 90 days. And then went and traveled eastern Europe, formally accepted the job after about 87 days, and started about a week into returning home. I highly recommend.