Ask HN: Should I quit my job?
However, my day job is draining all my energy in a way that I am grumpy from Sunday night to Saturday morning. I wake up at 6:20, commute 45 minutes, work 8h, commute 45 minutes, arrive home at 18:00 and then I try to squeeze time for my side project, going to the gym, making groceries, hang out with my gf, etc. I probably push around 10h/week to the project. The worst part of it is getting home exhausted in a way that it's impossible for me to do any work done. It makes me feel miserable, depressed, and tied. I could create more value just by myself. During my office hours, my energy levels are, and the atmosphere at work is pleasant. Also, my salary is above the Spanish average, but nothing special, my uni friends are also making similar numbers.
My gut is telling me to quit my job and work for my products. I have enough savings to survive for five years. I don't think about going nomad or any of these hippie trends. I'm focused on building a business and feel accomplished by something I've done with my hands.
My biggest fears are: - To not stick to a schedule/routine once I am solo. - People's and family opinion. - Failing and losing motivation.
Should I quit my job and work on my stuff or search for another position that would give more motivation?
129 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadYou could instead try and move to a consulting role with the company where you can control your hours and do more off-site. Seeing as you said a German auto, that may not be so easy to do. The other option is stay in your day job temporarily while you find a couple of consulting gigs (even PM type work or whatever you can) where you can basically have part time work and you know you'll have money coming through the door, but that will enforce some discipline on your days. Then use the time you have to build out your own products and get it moving. Also, the part time work lets you interact with other professionals and keeps you a little more engaged then you might otherwise get if you just solo out immediately, which is helpful.
My 2 cents, if you have any concerns about whether you can stay disciplined to make it work, don't just jump and start living off savings. Do one step towards being 100% on your own, but do it with some part time work which forces some structure. This will help you transition and let you figure out how you work best, and how to motivate yourself. I have seen this is where a lot of super capable people make their mistake initially. Having a little extra structure at first where you must deliver something for someone every week etc will help you. Also, the income you are taking in is a way to help offset just living off your savings since that can also be a scary thing to do, even if you have many years saved up already. When you only see your account getting smaller it is hard not to panic a little.
My life is different now. There is much less stability, constant fear of not making enough money to pay for my expenses, my retirement, etc... also, I’ve never been so tired in my whole life.
Having said that, I feel _happier_ than when I had stability in my previous draining day job. I also don’t have a single drop of regret.
If you have something work wise that you love, just make the jump. You’ll survive and learn a lot.
That's textbook survivorship bias right there.
If you find paid work on your own, you learn different skills that could prove to be better for survival, since you're less dependent on an external entity.
>It makes me feel miserable, depressed, and tied.
And this;
>I have enough savings to survive for five years.
I'd say leave immediately.
In my opinion, if you are losing your motivation, maybe your guts are not the best advice you should follow. I always try to take risky decisions when I feel comfortable with the current situation.
In the mean time, I believe you need to revamp your diet and keep up with your gym activities. If you eat well and keep working out, you may become strong enough to handle this current workload and still be able to work on your project.
I wish you the best.
I’ve done it before and it’s a great experience. 100% worth it. Follow your dreams.
Just don’t delude yourself into thinking you will grow your side project into a full time income. You may. But don’t count on it.
Working with a therapist or a coach might help you unblock whatever is holding you back and identify how to increase your energy and reduce frustration. That would be a better use of your savings - right now - than quitting your job.
You also don’t say whether you have any experience on the business side of things. A side project supported by a stable job is very different to something being your primary source of income.
I’m not saying don’t take the jump - but get everything lined up and address the disorder first.
Quitting my job to pursue my own project, with a few years of runway, massively accelerated the development of my project, accelerated my rate of learning - ideal for staying employable, while basically subconsciously removing "lifestyle" distractions that come with making > 200k/year.
So yeah, chalk it up to personality type, but if you're serious about building your own business, the best advice, since you have the runway, might be to quit your job as soon as you can.
Interesting. Why kind of personality type do you have?
As long as you are strict with yourself in only giving it 6 months, it should be fine. Tell everyone you know that this is your plan. If you don't get any traction within six months it's very unlikely that it makes sense to drag it out longer. Just cut your losses and move on.
If your current work is, as they say, "soul crushing"... you should invest some of your personal time to leaving that job. This is an independent decision of what you want to do/should do afterward: yes, you can quit/work on your own stuff.... but there are other possibly good outcomes that include the "quit" part, but something other than bootstrapping a business.
As for starting your own business, I found it hard to bootstrap something meaningful without being full time on it... so that part of what you're talking about does make sense. But you need to be ready to burn cash for an extended period, consider: 1) how long it will take to get your product/service into something making reliable income (meaning enough to cover business expenses, your expenses, as well as enough to bank some cash so that you can ride out the hard times); 2) if things don't work out, you still will need cash to burn while you look for new employment... or more seriously risk having to take the first thing that comes along and being, perhaps, in a worse position than you are now. Not having dependents is helpful, but you have your own needs that, no matter how meager, must be accounted for.
I did the bootstrapping thing myself, but I was lucky in a sense. I had run out of runway cash and had to take a job quick: the job I took saw my bootstrapping effort as a plus, and after I was there for a few years, I was allowed to moonlight on my original business to get it stable... and later when I left that firm, they were a client for while. (my business has been self-sustaining for about 7 years now) Don't count on that kind of luck, though, and to that point. If you don't have the cash (or access to it)... get out of your current job, but almost certainly get another.
As for people's / family's opinion: meh... you need to have sufficient confidence and independence to pull off a bootstrapping project. If you second-hand your self-worth to the opinions of others: then you need to question how successful you are likely to be. Much of being an entrepreneur of any type is being able to see opportunities that others don't. If you rely on the opinion of others... well, you may see a contradiction in goals. None of this isn't to say that well qualified or well reasoned opinions shouldn't be listened to or taken seriously: they can give valuable perspective... but fearing those opinions in determining if your vision is legitimately right or wrong is probably going to put you on the wrong path. The only valid fear that comes to mind is if you intend to use those people/family as a safety net if you fail.... I would suggest planning and preparing so that you don't need to call in help should you fall.
Also, be aware that your business will take a life of its own. I was able to bootstrap and get stable because I did smaller consulting gigs across a lot of long term clients, but ultimately I wanted to build products. Well, great... now I have a good cash flow as my client base come to me with new projects and I have "hard times" buffer, but I have so many client obligations that I have trouble getting to product building part... which really needs to be full time. There are solutions to this, but they are not easy to pull off at my scale... I do well, but not so well as to staff up, for example.
However, beyond information people can give you, it still sounds like a very personal decision. For what it's worth, I'd recommend writing about it in a journal/diary. You really have to figure out what you feel about it, and I've found that writing really helps solidify muddled thoughts and feelings. Just get a blank page and write about it for half an hour. Do it on several different days across time and find out how you really feel about it.
Also, in case you're not familiar already, I'd recommend spending some time reading a few posts at https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ - the aesthetic might seem a bit weird, and it's not a "one size fits all" topic, but there's some good food for thought. Maybe read it at work ;).
Figure out which mistake would be less crushing, and do that one. If it happens to actually work out, great. If not, at least you won't be spending the rest of your life regretting.
By the way, for reasons I won't speculate on, this method (assume failure, which would you pick) turns out to be a pretty good way of picking the option more likely to succeed, actually. But assume you won't succeed no matter what, and use that scenario to decide which way to go.
> By the way, for reasons I won't speculate on, this method (assume failure, which would you pick) turns out to be a pretty good way of picking the option more likely to succeed, actually.
I'm going to try to keep this one in mind for big decisions.
But, I wonder if it would still work well if, in the back of your mind, you were thinking "but it won't really fail, it always succeeds". You really do need to take seriously the idea that it will not work out, and only do it when you would still rather try it.
This question seems to be the right question to ask, but whether it is or isn't, thanks for reminding me.
Realise that 100$ / month of nothing. It's the income of a small blog and even my small side project earns me 500-600€/month consistently.
Then again, do what you will regret the least.
That kind of thinking has kind of put a very big truck into my thought train in a lot of situations. Not doing things suddenly seems a lot more appealing.
And don't get me wrong. I'm an operator with legal and other non-functional requirements at heart. But there's still many things to ignore as much as possible.
It's more closely related to Being Unto Death (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/philosophy-of-heidegger...).
There's no way you can imagine yourself in an unknown future. You can not estimate how much you will regret one thing or the other, because you don't know the situation you will be in. All the variables affecting you (economy, health, family situation) are constantly changing. You're not going to picture yourself as a homeless alcoholic who somehow is still really glad he built that app once and would do all it all over again.
The first bad thing that'll probably happen after he quits his job is that his girlfriend will leave him. Not necessarily immediately, but it'll be a strain on the relationship. Even though she will not admit it (perhaps because she isn't even aware of it), she is probably dating him because he is a guy that has a decent job, not some dreamer with a wacky business idea (unless maybe that's how she got to know him). Breakups can be really tough on men, why can negatively affect work and motivation. Not being the guy with the decent job, it will be tougher to find a new partner as well.
The second bad thing that will happen is the realization that "being your own boss" and "working on the stuff that is important to you" versus "showing up" and "collecting a paycheck" always sounds better when you're doing the latter. Doing the former is actually a lot of stressful work and you can not tell how it works on you until you have done it.
Lastly, living with regrets is not such a big deal. Who doesn't live with regrets? Whatever you do, you can rely on your brain coming up with rationalizations on why this-and-that just wasn't meant to be.
Having said all that, with "five years of savings" (more like two years, am I right?), doing a sabbatical just to try it out should be in the cards. There may not be a need to quit the job, many companies offer this. If after six months to a year you aren't on the right track, it probably isn't working out, but you will have learned a lot about yourself.
Breakups suck, but sometimes it is a way to find out if you are with the right person (not that this is why you should do it of course).
Also, what are the odds that a modern educated self-respecting independent woman would admit (even to herself) that she quit the relationship over that bit of money? If money really was the problem, she'd still have to come up with another reason to break up. Plus, it's not clear if you were already married, that's another threshold of course. Divorces are usually many years in the making.
Of course I'm not saying this is 100% exactly what will happen all of the time (though I've seen it happen shockingly often) and you will certainly find people whose dysfunctional relationships lasted a lifetime. That's called "survivorship bias".
Think through the choices in front of you, which of them do you think you would regret more when you are on your death bed.
I will note, there is a risk to this approach I didn’t fully appreciate while younger: you don’t always know what in the future you will regret.
However, at least in my life, I have very few genuine regrets by following this advice.
But it completely sidesteps your inbuilt missile guidance system. A human being with a goal is a powerful thing. Just seeking to avoid the worst of 2 scenarios is a little sad.
Unless your goal is just to seek comfort, which is fine, but then be up front about that choice.
Quitting and subsequently going on a 4 month motorcycle trip through Central Asia now feels like one of the best decisions of my life.
You are young, well educated, unhappy and working at the same company since you are 24. If your endeavor does not work out, you have will probably have a good chance of finding a decent new job. I believe that subjecting yourself to a new environment and new challenges from time to time reinvigorates your life and make you a happier person.