i worked at the Open Source Development Lab 2001-2002, and left for the same reasons everyone else who had been there left - after walking out of that job, i spent 1 year unemployed in portland until taking a high level software engineering job for much less money.
would i have made the same decision? no, i wouldn't have worked at the OSDL and would have preferred to burn out at another dotcom, but it did teach me how to live very frugally, and how to set money aside for rainy days.
now i try to keep at least a year's worth of living expenses, preferably 2-3, just to make sure i can survive the next one.
I never wrote a follow up to it, I guess in part because I'm still not sure exactly what I got out of it. I certainly improved a lot as a programmer - I'd say I worked harder on programming than at any time in my life, and doing almost all of my work in public held me to a higher standard than what I was used to. I spoke at several conferences and managed to get over my fear of public speaking, which was another goal of mine.
Most importantly, I also got to be a lot more present in my 1-year old son's life for that time, which I will never regret.
It did however take a big toll on my family financially, and I can't help coming away with the feeling that there are ways I may have accomplished those same goals without having gone to the extreme of sacrificing almost all income. I'm almost 40 now and given the historic ageism in our profession I worry a little about the kinds of jobs that will remain open to me over the next 20 years.
Anyway I think that if you're at the point in your life where you have enough money to satisfy the kind of lifestyle you want to live, but don't have the responsibility of a spouse and children, then absolutely go for it.
I stayed at my second job for nine years from 1999-2008. By 2008, I became an expert beginner. I asked myself for years why I stayed there so long. The current me, would have left April 2003 when I closed on the house I was having built.
If I do a retrospective, it is kind of clear:
I worked with most of the same people all nine years. My coworkers became my friends and they were the only constant in my life.
My managers were shady as hell though.
I was going through a horrible marriage (2002-2006) a horrible financial mess because by 2006 I had $500K worth of mortgages making $70K a year (because you could back then).
My skillset was outdated. I was maintaining VB6 code in 2008 - 7 years after it had been discontinued (and some old school C++/MFC/COM).
As bonuses got cut and raises were meager, I only made $8K more in 2008 than I did in 2001.
My head wouldn’t have been in the game enough for another job.
I learned my lesson with my next six jobs. I do resume driven development. I only worked at companies that were using in demand technologies. I jumped ship after two meager raises or when the bullshit/pay ratio got too high.
I kept my network strong.
But on the other hand, I’m going to “stay put” at my current job at $BigTech until at least my initial 4 year initial vest (and an interim refresher) is done and see what else is out there.
I was trying/planning to get out right before the market nosedived. I was planning on my previous job being the last job I ever worked in software, at least for the time being.
Of course when I lost my job that all went out the window. Now it just seems infeasible to leave. I’d be fine paycut, hell I already had to take one, but the cost both in time and money to retrain to something else (that I think I wouldn’t enjoy at least) are too high.
I didn’t really want to go into software in the first place, but I was in a position in early adulthood where it looked best option available to me. In retrospect I wish I had done something else, and possibly later moved to into software development, because it seems a hell of a lot easier going that direction.
I got kind of burned out after I got laid off at the tail end of the first dotcom implosion—I'd stayed in a really toxic environment for a couple of years too long because things were rough for a junior/early-mid-level developer back then, at least in my market. So I spent several months depressed and unemployed before deciding to go back to school which ultimately led me to preparations to go to med school.
Ironically, I took a semester off and took a contract gig for a few months to pay off some bills and save up some cash, and that turned into a full time job writing software in the public health sector. I never did return to finish the undergrad, and have doubts I ever will, as my career in software has been about as good as medicine would have been when you balance the ten extra years of earnings against a slightly higher salary. The only reason I'd do it now would be to pursue a masters in something interesting.
I think if I had it to do over again I'd have probably just stayed in the market a little longer and skipped out on the student loans. I loved biology and medicine but i'd love to not be paying off the student loans too.
I gave up my job as software "architect" (really I was tech lead and in charge of production) for an education company and decided to spend some time "not working". The goal was to see how I could get by in life while just doing a bit of work building sites here and there for contacts but generally falling out of the job market.
My goal was just to be able to cool off for a few months having worked too hard imo for 8 years or so, and spending the time researching and building my own prospects. I left my job with £5k in the bank and a few people who respected my dev skills.
In the end I went with it for 3 years. Each year, all in, I probably worked (don't have my old time records to hand) 4 months out of the year total never working more than 4 days in a week and never working for more than 2 weeks in a row.
Only once did I need help covering my rent (even then that was only to stop me dropping into my overdraft and not actually to stop me being completely broke).
The structure of how I lived killed my motivation to work on anything to benefit myself, and any project I started always ended up being canned 50% through when I lost the starting up movitation. Lack of other people to bounce off and perpetuate the interest and excitement with really showed after the first few months.
In the end the total killer to the scheme was the isolation from people every day. Starting with £5k in the bank I came out with £10k in the bank. I would say the only real casualty of all of it was my career path, I've basically been forced back down to developer, but perhaps that in itself isn't such a bad thing for now.
The lessons I took out of it were that I'm the kind of person that needs people to bounce ideas and enthusiasm off, so next time I go out to start something up I know I need to find a suitable partner to team with. I also found that I felt a lot less inclined to spend money when I knew how it was earned. In realised that I was spending my salary money basically to prove to myself that it was worth sitting in an office every day; when it was my money I earned it felt good just to know it was there and not turned into an LCD TV or PS3.
You sound like me a year ago. I quit a toxic job without anything else lined up (though I had a couple years of savings to live off). I worked on open-source stuff and little side projects for about six months, but I began floundering.
I wound up at https://www.hackerschool.com/ in February, and it was exactly what I needed. Most other students were in weird transitional phases of life as well. Check it out if you start struggling by yourself. I got a new job through them, so everything fell into place in the end.
I never really took my hand off the programming wheel, while being a manager. I just wasn't being paid for it (bonus was that I have a big open-source portfolio). I just did open-source work in nights and weekends.
When I left my last company, I just made it my full-time vocation, and that went quite smoothly.
I do this for the love of the craft; not the money.
Having a choice (in this case a job) is sometimes bad. If your back is against the wall, you'll be more driven to go after what you want.
I was working for a bank in the early part of my career. I was doing mainframe applications and I have always wanted to do web apps. So I quit my job and learned a web programming language (.Net). I learned it pretty fast and I built a small site to showcase my work. In two months since quitting, I found a consulting job that does web apps.
A few years ago, I was working for a big company in San Diego. I wanted to be in a startup environment. I tried my best to create one in my company but I failed.
So I quit my job and moved to the Bay Area. When I moved here, I realized that most startups use open source and I cannot find startups that use .Net. Actually I found a startup that uses .Net but they rescinded their offer when their investor told them to freeze hiring.
I was unemployed for months in the Bay Area so I said to myself I need to learn an open-source language. I ended up learning Python/Django.
I accepted a short-term web development using .Net and when that ended I continued learning Python/Django. Via networking, I ended up working for a YC startup and eventually moved to another startup in SF.
I'm really happy (but not satisfied) with where I am right now. If I didn't quit my job, I don't think I would have had the motivation to go after what I really wanted.
Both myself and my co-founder left well paying (not as well as yours though! :)) jobs to create our startup. It was definitely worth it and we plan on doing this as long as possible.
I love programming and always have. I realised I needed to leave my job after I started considering changing careers. The place was completely soul crushing. I've been doing it for almost 6 months now and the funny thing is I could go back to my old job any time if I wanted to. I have no intention of doing that though.
- I'd quit my first job earlier. I stayed there for 10 years - should have left at 5. Things went gradually downhill after that.
- Spend more time building longer-lasting projects. I kept doing freelance work on the side for quick and small amount of money instead of using my free time to develop something that would benefit me in the long-term. I can't even remember those freelance projects.
I'm leaving IT after 5 years to start a real estate company and work with my hands. I feel exactly the same way as the OP. Sitting on my butt for 6 years is wrecking my health and I hate the work.
I've saved lots of money and as long as I don't screw up my investments, I'll never have to work for anyone else again.
I love open source software and will continue to build and contribute to projects. I hate enterprise software and development culture and will never do it again. To each his own.
Because the job came easy and I liked it initially. With money inflow temporarily secured I focused on dealing with other areas of my life. I didn't notice how much I'm burning out at first. By the time I did, I started having financial difficulties, because my salary started following my work performance, which was decreasing because of the progressing burnout, which... well, I managed to escape that feedback loop after spending over an year in it, but not unscratched. So basically at first I didn't leave because I liked the stability, and later I couldn't because of a sense of duty.
I was originally in a team of 4-5 programmers, but the company slowly got rid of everyone except me. At that point I tried to leverage the situation and institute some changes in the programming languages, web stack and workflow automation; most of them were rejected by the boss on the grounds like "sure, we could switch to something better - like say, Ruby - but Ruby programmers are much more expensive than PHP."
It took me a lot of work and pain to eventually leave. My two biggest mistakes:
1) Not noticing when was the best time to go. There was a moment when the old project ended and they wanted to get me into a next one. Building it solo. From scrapped bis of metal. I should have left right there.
2) Being too afraid of changing jobs. I know that with my skills I can land a new programming job very quickly, but the process of job interviews scares me.
Oh, and 3) Singing that exit-level contract that ended up with me working my ass off in the evenings to finalize some contracted components.
It's hard for me to say what would've happened as we drift further and further off into a pretty different hypothetical life but for reference it took me quite a long time post-grad to find a software job. It certainly wasn't due to a lack of looking, but rather that I lived in an area without many opportunities which meant that I would need to be relocated in order to kickstart my career.
Eventually I landed on a great company that was willing to do that, but it was a difficult search as an entry-level developer. Would I have been able to pay off my debt? In 5-10 years maybe. That's still a large burden for people to bear, and we're in one of the better paying careers.
6 - I quit my $80K job over a year ago, haven't been looking since. I enjoy web dev, but I can't find a good company to work for. Mostly due to unqualified mgmt and avg. devs who think they are rockstars.
I'll start. I found myself directing a company against my better judgement because of extraordinary reasons. It has cost my mental and physical health and I found myself surrounded by incompetence.
During a critical time and a low point for me, I resigned and I'm taking a year long sabbatical. I honestly don't care about writing code for other people anymore. And I'm done being paid to write yet another CRUD application.
My goal for the next 10 years is to work on my mental health, my well-being and on open source code, trying to improve the state of the Linux desktop. But first, I'll just do nothing for a long while.
I gave up my more or less very highly paid software development career and moved to Utah to eat ramen noodles every day and ski 120 days a year.
All things considered I now wish I'd done that immediately as soon as I was old enough, and never got into programming as a career. I'd almost say I wish I'd never learned to program, except being able to write your own programs for your own use (or fix/improve existing free software that you use heavily) is pretty nice.
The money I've made in those ~15 years sure is nice, but it doesn't really come close to making up for wasting the best years of my life.
would i have made the same decision? no, i wouldn't have worked at the OSDL and would have preferred to burn out at another dotcom, but it did teach me how to live very frugally, and how to set money aside for rainy days.
now i try to keep at least a year's worth of living expenses, preferably 2-3, just to make sure i can survive the next one.
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