HN Explorer

I Quit My Job (normalkid.com)

32 points by arn ↗ HN
thought people would be interested in hearing of a "success" story so to speak. If I had had a traditional 9-5 job, I probably would have quit in 2003-2004. but for various reasons it dragged out to 2008. I never really considered myself a "blogger", though it seems that's what I've become. My other projects will not necessarily be blogs in the traditional sense.

21 comments

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arn
thought people would be interested in hearing of a "success" story so to speak. If I had had a traditional 9-5 job, I probably would have quit in 2003-2004. but for various reasons it dragged out to 2008. I never really considered myself a "blogger", though it seems that's what I've become. My other projects will not necessarily be blogs in the traditional sense.
babul
I have just been reading your blog and macrumors (which I had never heard of). It is actually good to see you have done well especially as your success is based on the model I like best - organic growth based on delivering value to people.
wallflower
I love MacRumors because even though they are huge they are still are in some arenas an underdog (e.g. full-time staff of Gizmodo)... Like other blogs I am addicted to, I manually type in the site address at least once, if not twice a day.

> My other projects will not necessarily be blogs in the traditional sense.

Maybe we can look forward to some custom iPhone/iPod Touch apps that are a different way to read/change the way we read our news?

petercooper
That's interesting. MacRumors.com is the only blog I manually visit every few days too. Almost everything else is in my RSS reader but for some reason I still visit MacRumors "by hand."
tptacek
He's licensed to practice medicine. He doesn't need much luck. If everything fails, he has an enviable fallback.
icey
True, but it's also informative that he's not replacing a career of telephone tech support with blogging.
ojbyrne
How long can you not practice medicine before your skills deteriorate and your knowledge become obsolete? Probably just as fast as it happens to programmers.
Deadsunrise
Yes, because humans change as fast a computer technologies , right? I think that next week they will be putting out Lungs 2.0

Come on, if you are a doctor you can always be a doctor, in a couple weeks you can get up-to-date with the discoveries made in your field in the last 10 years.

arn
actually, the body doesn't change much, but medical practice changes a lot over a few years. Treatments and standards of care change pretty frequently, so you do need to keep up (if you are practicing)

There are required continuing medical education credits to maintain your licensure. And board certification expires in 10 years, so you need to re-take the licesnsing tests every 10 years besides doing regular education every 2 years.

dcurtis
So after all that work and school, you're giving it up for MacRumors? What led to your decision? Did you have a passion for medicine?
arn
I probably don't have a "passion" for medicine, but few people do. I personally don't know any doctors that truly have a passion for it. (I doubt, for example, that many would continue to do it if they won the lotto.)

I felt like I was good at medicine and enjoyed it day to day, but given the choice of doing it vs being able to just do something I was doing for fun anyway and spending more time with my family, I think the choice became easy.

The flip side to that, is I do have a passion for what I'm doing now. If I won the lotto, I think I would continue to run MacRumors, and still try to launch some other web projects I've had in my mind.

dcurtis
Really? You think passion for medicine is that rare? I sit in biology classes with my mouth wide open, in absolute awe at the principles that guide the human body. Then, when I think about applications of that knowledge in clinical settings (especially relating to the brain, in the same way that V.S. Ramachandran practices and researches), it excites me.

When I think about practicing medicine and helping people by embarking on a journey of diagnosis every day, I get the same burning sensation of excitement in my chest that I get when I think about starting a company.

I don't know how someone can endure the torture of medical school, residency, and then a practice without being passionate and absolutely in love with what they do.

Most of the "I quit my job!" posts I read here are about people who code in a dead-end corporate job who are escaping for entrepreneurship (still coding). You had a completely different, successful career that you gave up. I find that interesting.

(Also, I read MacRumors every day. Thanks for that.)

arn
"When I think about practicing medicine and helping people by embarking on a journey of diagnosis every day, I get the same burning sensation of excitement in my chest that I get when I think about starting a company."

I'd love to hear your thoughts about it when you are done with it all.

I think people's beliefs and passion about it change significantly over the course of their training. And again, I am setting a high bar in defining passion. If you could do whatever you wanted, what would you choose to do with your time?

brent
> Really? You think passion for medicine is that rare? I sit in biology classes with my mouth wide open, in absolute awe at the principles that guide the human body. Then, when I think about applications of that knowledge in clinical settings (especially relating to the brain, in the same way that V.S. Ramachandran practices and researches), it excites me.

You would probably be more interested in learning/research, not practicing.

> I don't know how someone can endure the torture of medical school, residency, and then a practice without being passionate and absolutely in love with what they do.

$

dcurtis
"You would probably be more interested in learning/research, not practicing."

If the research/learning and the practicing of anything were mutually exclusive, we'd be in really big trouble.

menloparkbum
Most practicing doctors don't do research... and most medical researchers don't "practice" in the typical sense of the word.
iamelgringo
I've made a habit out of asking the doctors that I work with "Would you do it over again, if you had to?" I have about a 60% "Hell no" response rate. And, only about a 5-10%, "Yeah, I love what I do" response rate.

Especially nephrology. That's a brutal specialty. You watch most of your patients slowly die over 5 or 10 years while they are linked to a dialysis machine 3 times a week. The happy stories in nephrology are the people who get kidney transplants, but then you're only trading one disease for another: kidney failure for chronic immuno-suppression.

Congrats, on making it out! And, here's wishing the best for ya.

dcurtis
That's an extremely scary statistic. 60% an enthusiastic "no"?
rob
"So after all that work and school, you're giving it up for MacRumors? What led to your decision?"

The insane amount of money that MacRumors makes?

wallflower
Based on CPM/monthly uniques, I'd hazard to say it might be a bit more than his physician salary. We might have to add Arn to that News.YC thread about notable people here. I'm still amazed he ran the site on auto-pilot part-time while holding down rotations/practicing. And he reads HackerNews!
noor420
Yeah man, as long as you have fun doing this Mac blogging, its worth it.

I hate Mac personally, but am happy to see you are willing to give the community the fullest. Love what you do!