Join the Engineering Leisure Class

Few things:

- Depending on what kind of problems you enjoy solving, you're going to be miserable even if you are able to do this.

I love working on my own at times (exploring new concepts and ideas, new languages, or even "toy projects" with no real-world applications), but in the end, I find working on bigger problems, with a team of great people to be a lot more fulfilling.

- Constraints are useful in that they force you to rely on something other than pure will power. This can go both ways: _if_ you are going without a regular source of income (as opposed to retiring after winning the [startup] lottery), you'll need to sacrifice time for money. On the other hand, a full time job provides a good deal of constraints as well (both for what you do _at_ work and what you do outside of work hours).

Gene Wolfe[2] kept a full time job and wrote an hour each day. That had two constraints: he didn't need to rush or alter his work in order to sell (his books are fulfilling and rewarding but not a "easy, fun read" that brings in great royalties right away) and since he only had an hour each day to write, he knew he had to make the best of it (one thing said about him, is that he doesn't waste words: he's got a whole CNC machine milling Chekhov's guns...)

- Burnout is an entirely different matter, one shouldn't generalize from "this helps deal with being burnt out" to "drop everything, do this, and you'll never be burnt out."

- Finally, it isn't a feasible option for most:

First, one can't insure against economic catastrophe, savings and a low burn rate are great, but ultimately the _only_ financial insurance one is there ability to earn an income[1].

That ability is predicated on ability to contribute and the amount of people willing to pay for your contributions. In other words, if you're a great developer and you live (or can relocate to) a fluid job market, your risks are lower than those of an average developer (note: assuming a normal probability distribution, 50% of developers are _below_ average, and most fall within a standard deviation of average...) in a less fluid job market.

Areas with fluid job markets tend to have higher costs of living. Unless one is extremely talented (and in many cases, even if that is the case), one doesn't become a great cut above average overnight. One generally starts off with a job in an area with a fluid job market (hence greater expenses!) and over the time develops ties to the area (friends, family, pets, etc...) and can't easily drop everything to move to a cheaper area for their "leisure time" and then -- if something goes wrong -- easily return to the area to take advantage of the fluid job market.

All else being equal, a developer of equal skill, in an equally fluid area, that did not "take a year off" will hired over one that has, _unless_ they've done something extra-ordinary with this time. Best prediction of being able to do something extra-ordinary is... having done something extra-ordinary. So at the least, do something extra-ordinary on a smaller scale first before going full-time on it. Zuck and billg didn't drop out of Harvard with a blank emacs window (in billg's case, perhaps it was a TECO window, not sure if TECO EMACS was around in his days...).

- In a capitalist system, money does one thing well: if you have more money than you have a use for, you can give it to someone who has the time to make the most of it. Marginally, a dollar spent donating to someone _very good_ working on a project I care about (a programming language, infrastructure for open source projects, a social cause, etc...) goes _much further_ than a dollar "spent" by foregoing income to work on most of those projects full-time. As for the exceptions to this, I can usually incorporate them into full-time jobs.

Conversely, I'd suggest this heuristic:

1) Can you afford it without putting people who rely on you into jeopardy? (Are you going to demand that your wife end a rewarding career to move to a cheaper area with you? Are you going to make your kids move to an area in inferior schools? If either is true, stop right there and then...)

2) Marginal value of dollar spent metric above: if someone can do a better job with the same resources, help provide the resources for them. Concrete example: since my username doesn't begin with a 'p' and end with a 'g', money I contributed to Clojure project (when it was in dire financial straits) probably had more impact in creating a Lisp-1 with a good macro-system than if I were to quit my job and work full-time on a Lisp-1 (likewise, while pg can afford to literally work on anything he wants to, he chooses to invest[3] in teams capable of building things he careers deeply about, but isn't quite good at building himself).

Otherwise, try to make the "leisure" activity part of your day-to-day job as well.

3) Otherwise, if you can do something awesome with your time -- you probably don't need someone named after a function that may never return in a memory-unsafe language's standard library to tell you that :-)

[1] Investments under-writing "early retirement" may collapse. "Social insurance" such as universal healthcare, pensions, unemployment benefits, etc... can be voted or sued out of existence.

[2] If you're an SFF fan, pick up Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy sometime, but be warned that once you start, your dreams of doing anything else with your time will be over.

[3] Investing is not the same thing as donations, but I don't believe any angel/seed investor invests purely for the money.

If you are considering the in-between with kids and work, remember that managing the in-between has it's own logistical overhead (== costs).

For example, if you have a nanny part-time, you will have to figure out nanny taxes - assuming you're doing it the legal way - or pay an outside party to manage the nanny's payroll.

That overhead may be easier to justify when the nanny is allowing you to work a full time high paying job, less so if the nanny is only coming a couple days a week. In this case, you might consider a part-time day care center instead.

And unless you have a lot of energy or hired/family help, you will be so tired in the first few years of your child's life that you likely won't have the energy to do anything beyond growing a few token tomatoes and potatoes, certainly nothing at the scale needed to make a dent in a family's food costs.

For clothing, tap your friends-with-kids network to get into the hand-me-down stream. Babies and toddlers grow out of clothes faster than they can wear them out, and new clothes are $$$.

Yes, a similarly high cost difference is what drove my acquaintance to have orthopedic surgery in India, which was far cheaper, even when including the cost of several weeks of recovery at a resort in Kerala. The US has uniquely high costs for specialty medical procedures and devices.

A friend who runs a biotech startup told me that most European companies developing medical devices and pharmaceuticals justify the high R&D costs and regulatory risks by targeting the high profit potential of the US market. In most non-US developed countries, they aren't allowed sell their product for as high a cost by law.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to try and help me out! It does seem like it's a buyer's market right now for pianos, but a decent piano still costs a considerable amount of money. Of course, I think this is partly because I'm very serious about it so I don't want just anything.

If you get a poorly maintained piano, it could cost several thousand dollars to restore it. Just replacing the actions of a grand costs something like $4k-$5k from what a technician told me.

> Full time childcare is about $24,000 a year.

You don't pay this on "a median developer's salary". Most children have two parents.