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

joshuahu.io

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

#191

Post by CydeWeys »

coaxial wrote: post #188
r00fus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

First sentence: "I took some time off to travel."

If they ask for details, then list all the places you went, and then if they're curious about any individual one give them more details about what you did there. If they don't ask for any details about travel, then they don't care, and you're not wasting time with irrelevant information by going into detail on travel from the beginning.

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

#192

Post by tartoran »

coaxial wrote: post #188
r00fus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's a risk. If a hiring company searches in your butthole for gaps in employment you're likely better off not working there anyway. There are plenty of other companies who won't do that...

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

#193

Post by sticazzi »

bitexploder wrote: post #109
humbleMouse wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6 weeks isnt a sabbatical. Thats a normal vacation in europe.

Interesting. I guess most Americans would call a sabbatical longer than that too, but it is a decent, hard disconnect from work well beyond a typical vacation. I don’t think I have taken that long off in 20 years.

Sabbatical is 1 year or more. 6 weeks is a vacation. You should also look up an article about bragging that was on HN few days ago.

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

#194

Post by ffanon »

I've managed to get myself into what some might consider an ideal situation: a half-time job at BigCo. It means my work at BigCo is more interesting and condensed, and of course it means I have all the time in the world for side projects. BigCo total comp is so incredible that half of it still pays the bills in ExpensiveCity.

Except all the challenges echoed by others in the comments are real: overcoming procrastination and doing focused work. Actually the former I can manage, the latter is harder. All I have to show for side project time is a long list of smaller projects, I can't manage to take one of them and build/polish it into something significant. Somehow having the choice 100 fun project makes devoting time to just 1 super hard.

Maybe half-time off to some extend is worse for procrastination than full-time, since I can always fall back on my work at BigCo as a sign of progress in my life.

This situation should be ideal, I know the path I should take, the opportunity is there for the taking, but so far have not managed.

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

#195

Post by abakker »

ffanon wrote: post #194

I've managed to get myself into what some might consider an ideal situation: a half-time job at BigCo. It means my work at BigCo is more interesting and condensed, and of course it means I have all the time in the world for side projects. BigCo total comp is so incredible that half of it still pays the bills in ExpensiveCity. Except all the challenges echoed by others in the comments are real: overcoming procrastinat…

Do your side projects have customers? I’ve found that there is no motivator like someone else’s support tickets or deadlines. Put another way, it is easier to find motivation when the needs of your project are immediately helpful to someone else, rather than theoretically helpful. Just a thought.

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

#196

Post by ffanon »

abakker wrote: post #195
ffanon wrote: post #194

I've managed to get myself into what some might consider an ideal situation: a half-time job at BigCo. It means my work at BigCo is more interesting and condensed, and of course it means I have all the time in the world for side projects. BigCo total comp is so incredible that half of it still pays the bills in ExpensiveCity. Except all the challenges echoed by others in the comments are real: overcoming procrastinat…

Do your side projects have customers? I’ve found that there is no motivator like someone else’s support tickets or deadlines. Put another way, it is easier to find motivation when the needs of your project are immediately helpful to someone else, rather than theoretically helpful. Just a thought.

I can imagine that would motivate, yes, but for me the point of side projects is to explore things that are less commercial, more researchy.. things BigCo wouldn't pay me to do. And to do something commercial while at BigCo would require quite some paperwork for BigCo to agree. And it is not like I need to be doing commercial work on the side for financial reasons.

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

#197

Post by barrkel »

humbleMouse wrote: post #99
bitexploder wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We give our employees time to take sabbaticals. One person took 6 weeks and hiked the El Camino trail in Spain. We actually have to encourage people to take time off :)

6 weeks isnt a sabbatical. Thats a normal vacation in europe.

6 weeks isn't a normal vacation. 20 to 30 days vacation allowance (excluding public holidays) is the norm in the private sector and while in theory you could use 30 days to take 6 weeks off, you'd have nothing for the rest of the year. 2 weeks is a normal big vacation, over summer, often in August.

Overlap it with public holidays, and you can get 17 or 18 days off in a row for 10 vacation days - 10 weekdays, three weekends and a public holiday or two. But it's usually better to plan a public holiday somewhere in the middle because of the extra traffic.

As terminology though it's not a sabbatical either. 6 weeks off sounds more like a gap between jobs with gardening leave or travel or some other project that wouldn't fit in a work vacation.

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

#199

Post by stephengillie »

Ancalagon wrote: post #198
badpun wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon does not have a great reputation.

Well it did at one point, and still does in the eyes of software development employers

"If you can survive there, you can survive anywhere."

Hopefully other employers believe they can provide better work balance.

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

#200

Post by bitexploder »

sticazzi wrote: post #193
bitexploder wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I guess most Americans would call a sabbatical longer than that too, but it is a decent, hard disconnect from work well beyond a typical vacation. I don’t think I have taken that long off in 20 years.

Sabbatical is 1 year or more. 6 weeks is a vacation. You should also look up an article about bragging that was on HN few days ago.

Good article on bragging. I do it some of the time and without any shame. Part of being a business owner is promoting it with honesty. It blurs the line with bragging IMO. I do try to avoid it on HN, but pride, etc. I almost never share IRL, most people will not understand the context or effort or sacrifices required, and, a lot of it is luck too, so bragging obviously is self servicing to some extent. Thanks for pointing it out though, genuinely, it is good to think about. I think this fell under item (6) of the article.
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