Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

joshuahu.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 233 posts

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#181

Post by csomar »

mettamage wrote: post #176
csomar wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that most HN'ers are 1%'ers. Those who are not are on the way to get there. The 1% is not really special and doesn't take much money/effort to get there. The 0.1% would be more interesting.

You mean in income? I would love to get there. I am based near Amsterdam and willing to relocate. Specialties: web dev, ios, coding bootcamps

You might not in the top 1% of devs but probably in the top 1% of your country. Also by being near Amsterdam you are already in the top 1% of the world.

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#182

Post by Regardsyjc »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #126
keeptrying wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people confuse the pursuit of entrepreneurship woth just wanting a break. They are two different things. Entrepreneurship means killing yousrefl with more work than in a day job. If you’re looking to take a break, then just do that like the OP. Take a break and do some light coding only if you want to. If you want to do entrepreneurship Then you need to cut down the risk when you are going full time. So have…

"Entrepreneurship means killing yousrefl with more work than in a day job." It doesn't have to, a lot of the people I know started their business because they wanted to get away from that culture.

In my experience as someone who started and ran a small business for a few years now- entrepreneurship carries a lot of risks. Financial, social, and emotional. If you have a business background or previous professional experience with a valid business model - in that you can just execute building a profitable business from the get go and delegate the parts needed - you're set. But if you don't have capital or experience delegating, it can be a very painful process because you are now responsible for everything from hiring/management, operations, finance, product, etc.

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#183

Post by michaelchisari »

csomar wrote: post #164
sizzle wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1%'er you say? You've piqued my interest, mind sharing what your family did to get there? Can anyone guess how many 1%'ers are on HN?

My guess is that most HN'ers are 1%'ers. Those who are not are on the way to get there. The 1% is not really special and doesn't take much money/effort to get there. The 0.1% would be more interesting.

The minimum income to be in the 1% in the United States is $421,926. That seems highly optimistic to say that most HN'ers are in that category or ever will be.

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#184

Post by trycrmr »

Does anyone else see articles like this and think about how much money in retirement they're foregoing? By not maxing out 401k & IRA deposits each year in your 20s you're missing out on significant gains from compound interest later in life. A sabbatical like this makes sense to me when you're comfortable with the trajectory of your retirement. The other situation is where significant mental health issues that can't be sorted out by adjusting schedule & lifestyle around work are going to negatively impact your career anyways. It could be worth it to take the loss on retirement account deposits to sort things out.

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#185

Post by nonamenojob »

meuk wrote: post #168
biscottigelato wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have trouble leveraging my portfolio for much to be honest. And they are fully functioning published app. Graphic design, marketing material, front-end back-end all that jazz... Studying 'Cracking the Coding Interview' like everyone else. Nobody cares about specific technology either it seems like these days... Including Triplebyte. Sick of it.

Thanks for sharing. Are you from the US? It is not in line with my experience. Employers here (in the Netherlands) care very much about experience with specific technologies. It is common that job offers demand a couple of years experience with very specific frameworks, libraries or programming languages, even for entry-level jobs. Anything having to do with data science is also out of question (even though I have a…

I would like to share my thoughts on this, as I consider that my experience is comparable with meuk's. I've graduated this summer with a master's degree in security in an Eastern European country and I am currently looking for a job.

Before master's, I worked as a full stack developer (1 year) and for a data science startup (8 months) which did not get off the ground. It seems that managers ask about short stints even for junior positions and one manager asked me "so you weren't working for the past 2 years?". On sites like https://www.honeypot.io/, a platform representative told me that I should write in my profile why I left the jobs after such a short time.

Regarding job ads, most of them are for specific languages and frameworks (Java developer, Python developer, Spring Developer, Django Developer) and very few have a generic title such as Software Engineer. Companies like to cram both language nuts and bolts questions and CTCI questions in 1 hour.

During recent interviews, I have received questions such as: "In Java you have this try-catch-finally code, in what scenarios the finally block does not get executed?". "How do Python generators work under the hood?" "You have a Python class, when the __init__ method is called, does the object already exists?" "In Python, what is with statement and why it is used?"

Btw, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lmCu8wz8ro is a great presentation about Python features.

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#186

Post by coaxial »

biscottigelato wrote: post #160
bradneuberg wrote: post #83

I've been in the industry nearly 20 years and I always take breaks between jobs. I've worked for startups, Google, Dropbox, non-profits, etc. Between jobs I've pursued personal growth, traveled extensively, re-tooled my CS skill sets in new directions, gotten healthy, done extensive open source work, and more. I highly recommend it to others in the industry if you have the ability to do so; it's only helped my person…

Any tips for companies to take your open sourced work as experience? I've mostly just been thrown the book at doing algorithm puzzles and such... Got rejected for not 'technically competent' despite polished complex app on both the App Store and on Github. It's insulting to the point I want to start cancelling processes with all Unicorns...

> Got rejected for not 'technically competent' despite polished complex app on both the App Store and on Github. It's insulting to the point I want to start cancelling processes with all Unicorns...

Because "how do we know you didn't copy paste it from a tutorial and claim it as yours?"

It is insulting, and frankly discouraging. As if the only one true way to tell whether you know your stuff or not is to check if you can solve some silly riddle/puzzle under the gun.

One solution is to only apply to companies without a broken hiring process, but sadly they're very rare.

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#187

Post by paranoidrobot »

biscottigelato wrote: post #160
bradneuberg wrote: post #83

I've been in the industry nearly 20 years and I always take breaks between jobs. I've worked for startups, Google, Dropbox, non-profits, etc. Between jobs I've pursued personal growth, traveled extensively, re-tooled my CS skill sets in new directions, gotten healthy, done extensive open source work, and more. I highly recommend it to others in the industry if you have the ability to do so; it's only helped my person…

Any tips for companies to take your open sourced work as experience? I've mostly just been thrown the book at doing algorithm puzzles and such... Got rejected for not 'technically competent' despite polished complex app on both the App Store and on Github. It's insulting to the point I want to start cancelling processes with all Unicorns...

> Got rejected for not 'technically competent'

That sounds a bit harsh.

Unless you're going for a role that requires some kind of explicit/specific knowledge - and you're clearly not able to demonstrate any skill in that area - I wouldn't put too much stock in the interview processes of Unicorns actually being indicative of your true skill.

I've been told, during an interview, that I was clearly incompetent and the interviewer terminated the interview. This was because I stumbled on doing a series of whiteboard exercises to solve some obscure brain-teasers.

I ended up getting the job anyway (I had worked with people there, and they vouched for me) and learned that to many of the interviewers, they found great delight in finding the most obscure and weird problems, trick questions and coding challenges.

It didn't help with selecting for competency, and the product the company was shipping wasn't exactly ground breaking or needing of someone who could on the spot solve arcane bullshit.

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#188

Post by coaxial »

r00fus wrote: post #112
CydeWeys wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily eliminate every gap up to 12 months and some gaps up to 23 months simply by omitting months on your resume. Quit job A in January and joined job B in December of the next year? 2011-2013 at Job A, 2014-Present at Job B! Solved!

Exactly. If pressured on interview to detail months then have a good fractal story. People love stories. First mention is one sentence; if listener is interested then you go into more detail.

I don't think I get your point, could you elaborate on what you mean?

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#189

Post by wool_gather »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #55
stephengillie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because these are all the excuses people give when they were fired and couldn't find another job. Especially after 2 years, when the unemployed person has likely given up on the search. But seriously, if you enjoyed the job so much, why leave? Why not just take a quick vacation and keep enjoying the job?

>Because these are all the excuses people give when they were fired and couldn't find another job. Especially after 2 years, when the unemployed person has likely given up on the search. Yea, I'm aware of that, and I don't necessarily blame the recruiters for that, but it does suck for me. >But seriously, if you enjoyed the job so much, why leave? Why not just take a quick vacation and keep enjoying the job? I didn't…

> I knew that sticking it out would get me early promotions and bonuses, which is what gave me the financial security to take time off

Nice; good on you for playing the game and walking away with the prize you wanted.

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#190

Post by bob_roboto »

bradneuberg wrote: post #83

I've been in the industry nearly 20 years and I always take breaks between jobs. I've worked for startups, Google, Dropbox, non-profits, etc. Between jobs I've pursued personal growth, traveled extensively, re-tooled my CS skill sets in new directions, gotten healthy, done extensive open source work, and more. I highly recommend it to others in the industry if you have the ability to do so; it's only helped my person…

I can second this. I always take 3-6 months off between jobs for travel and personal development (given I stayed there ~2 years). I'd say I technically progressed about the same during these periods as I did during the preceding employment (minus the real world experience) because I actually really enjoy it. I have never once gotten a negative response in an interview because of it.
Post reply on HN