Ask HN: Should I cash out my 401K and try to get my dream job?
* I don't have a GitHub profile, * have not contributed to any OSS projects, * don't answer a ton of question on StackOverflow, * cannot share any of the code I've worked on * and so forth,
...are not helping in the search for my dream job. These are the things that seem to get people to show interest in a developer these days.
I have no time, (or I'm not allowed), to do any of these things while working full-time for an old-school software company. I'm considering cashing out my 401K to live on for the next 6 months and spending all of my time working on these types of things to make myself a more attractive candidate. This would really make me happy, but is quite a gamble given that I have a family.
Thoughts? Has anyone here done something like this?
61 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadGood luck to you, and I hope that you will reach a resolution soon.
I can't really give more specific advice with the information you've provided, but spending your retirement savings and risking your family's financial safety in order to get a nicer job seems unnecessary. You can probably engineer a solution without those risks.
I'm sure you are aware of this, but "not having time" is a relative notion.
There is no objective measure of great culture or interesting work. I mean, what is "great culture" to you may not be the same to me. For me, I would rather work in an environment where there is a good measure of self-motivated individuals (who get shit done) with a good balance of thinking towards the future (don't experiment too much with a bunch of hipster frameworks that generate a lot of technical debt). And. I like a place that has a great work life balance. On the other hand, there are people who think that great culture means being able to write code in any language, like to work 100 hours a week and who think free food = great culture. Now, I have no problem with that attitude. It is just not my thing.
> , interesting work,
Interesting work: This is a hard problem. Again, this is dependent on you. If you are fresh out of school, everything may seem interesting to you. On the other hand, maybe you have worked on specific frameworks for a while (say building CRUD apps for a BigCo) and now feel like interesting is working on iOS stuff. Maybe you want to be a full stack engineer. Maybe you want to specialize?
> is making money
Be wary, if you are at all looking at a startup. Very few of them are profitable. Most will quote numbers about funding, IPOs etc. It makes it hard to understand what 40 million in funding actually means. Does it mean that the startup is going to succeed? What does a 100 billion valuation mean? Does it mean the company is making money?
> remote friendly.
I think every place in theory is remote friendly for the right candidates. As to whether their culture has ways of workings that make it productive for remote candidates, that is a different issue. If you are a person who is so amazing that you can do your own stuff without face time, almost every tech company will be okay with you being remote. On the other hand, if you are a person who needs to work in a team and work collaboratively, there has to be a culture where the idea that the other person may not be geographically in the same place as you is firmly fixed. E.g. there are small startups in SF where people all come into work at 11 AM and leave at 11 PM. It is a system that works well for them because they all work in sync, talk to each other in person if something needs to be resolved. I like to come to work insanely early, get stuff done, go out and switch off. Some times, I like to get quite time and work from home because I can get a tremendous amount of work done without having to deal with meetings. Again, I wouldn't fit well in the environment that I just listed.
Case in point, I'm actually in a somewhat similar situation, and am aggressively looking for an out. After returning to school to finish a degree I was hoping to take a different tack in my career. I really wanted to work on scientific applications with something more in mind than just the bottom line. I accepted a position that offered mostly remote work. They already have an established remote workforce, and it appeared to be a true meritocracy, with little management overhead or fixed structure, and lots of very bright talented people working on interesting projects. I had several interviews, including a day long in-person interview. I turned down three other very solid offers to take this job.
Fast forward a few months and the picture they painted could not be further from reality. The people in the office don't have phones, so talking to them directly always involves jumping through hoops and can take a long time to set up. People are often unwilling to talk at all and prefer to hold terse conversations over IM. Lack of management structure translates to lack of communication and support from above. Some things about the job were grossly misrepresented and there was one major outright lie that would have been a deal-breaker from the start if I'd known about it.
But the job looked perfect! I looked like a great fit to them! This is a career, don't count on a quick fix or finding nirvana in a day, or six months. A friend of mine used to say, life is the process of finding the things that don't work. If you put yourself 100% on the line hoping for a big payoff, you are more than likely not going to be happy with the result. Just look at how many startup founders on here have failed over and over before making it, and many never do. I see no reason to over-extend yourself like that for the sake of a salaried position, at least not without some really clear goal at the outset.
I think we hit all of your points (although "great culture" is very subjective), and our application process does not hinge on OSS/SO profile/GitHub or anything of the sort.
Do not cash out your retirement account. [Edit: Generic personal finance advice for everyone: Unless your children will starve in the snow otherwise, it is never a good time to cash out your retirement account. It will be very tempting to tap it to pay for your wedding, your first home, a medical emergency, your kids' college, etc etc, but if you do this, you will not have it at retirement. This is far and away the largest risk associated with self-directed retirement accounts.] It is not required to buy coffee for people with the ability to hire engineers. Coffee is cheap and jobs are plentiful in the current environment.
The long is answer, is that there is probably another way. Make it a goal and put savings away for specifically that purpose. Find another job that may not be your dream job is friendlier to out of the office work. Maybe consulting?
Then, if you lose your job or need to take time off, you aren't totally screwed.
Also, after-tax investments lets you fund personal projects without taking the huge penalty for raiding retirement savings.
There are many other options: moonlighting, going part-time, reducing your responsibilities at work, taking an unpaid sabbatical, etc.
Make sure to include basic compound inflation because the figures given here seem to be hyperbolic.
100k principal, add 1k every month for 30 years. Compound at 7% --> 2M
50k principal, add 1k every month for 30 years. Compound at 7% --> 1.6M
Withdrawing 50k today costs you 400k in retirement
400k = 20% of 2M = 8 years of your 40 year career
50k today is worth more than 50k in the future.
(Consistent compounding at 7% is extremely optimistic, even before considering inflation at 3%+).
http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc424.html
Distributions received before age 59½ are subject to an early distribution penalty of 10% additional tax unless an exception applies.
--A) makes the unlikely discovery that you are putting non work related projects on GitHub
--B) cares that you are coding and posting online in your spare time
--C) decides to terminate you for this.
--If your IP is questionable, you may not want to contribute to large open source projects - or you could ask your HR for an exemption for specific projects.
3) If you don't have time (and especially if you are in a job that you want to quit), make the time. Segment your life as much as possible while your work / hourly expectations are met to a reasonable standard to which you want to work (at any company)
4) This is additional, but if you want to work at a company with a great culture, remote work, and reasonable expectations, it's important that you understand how to do the numbers above in a forward and friendly way.
--A) If you are familiar with working too long, you especially need to learn to segment yourself when working remotely.
--B) If you are familiar with working too long, you especially need to ensure that you don't try to encourage others to not segment their lives. (There are always things to be done, but everybody should be able to go home and spend the evening / weekend with their family)
--C) You will be much happier in your life / job if you have the ability to not have to use your 401k to work a few months.
The reason I ask is because if you already have a decent skillset, you may be able to get a new job at a startup and learn new skills at the same time (and thus not need to cash out your retirement fund). Simply contributing to open source projects IMO is not that valuable unless you want to prove experience in a languages you've never used professionally.
Can you dedicate an hour a day to OSS? Or perhaps spearhead an project at work to be open sourced?
Have you tried applying for positions that qualify as your dream job? If you haven't, you may want to start and see if those open source contributions are as key as you think.
He mentioned that he is not allowed to do these types of things while employed at his current employer. I always find that kind of clause crazy. If I want to spend my evenings playing video games the company would be fine with that, if I want to spend it creating video games no dice?
I imagine it is going to be harder and harder for companies to create anti-moonlighting clauses as time progresses.
I think you would be better off finding a sub-par non-dream job that lets you work on things that bring you closer to achieving your real dream job. For instance, if you are interested in javascript technologies you could try to find a contract involving node or angular and become more active in the online communities around those tools. After 3-6 months scope out the market with your new skills/network and see what else is available.
1.) Sign up for GitHub, fork a project, and improve it
3.) Answer 2-5 hard questions on StackOverflow
4.) Profit
They just want to see your skill. You shouldn't answer "a ton of questions" on StackOverflow. Just answer a couple hard ones. Somehow prove that you've actually got stuff done over the last 13 years. There are programmers that just started to learned the skill a few weeks ago, with tiny, but active projects in their GitHub.
ps. I hate when people say that they don't have something (GitHub account) that takes 30 seconds to signup for, is free, and is very important to solving their current issue. There's usually a deeper issue at that point.
a) Do not use company time or equipment. Pretty obvious that one.
b) No doing something that competes directly with IBM. This has to be more specific than "working with computers". It means I can still get beer money for helping friends/family fix their computers/servers, but I can't start a small consultancy that aims to take possible business away from IBM. I can start a social sports related side project website because IBM aren't in that space. But if I worked on Websphere Application Server (I don't!) I couldn't contribute to, for example, Apache Tomcat/Geronimo or JBoss AS. I could write my own game Apps and sell them through the App Store. Etc.
c) Contributing to OSS in your spare time needs to be cleared with IBM, just in case. The main reason is that everyone loves to sue IBM and OSS is fertile ground given the various OSS licenses and implications. If I do some work on some OSS package in my spare time it means I'm tainted in that area. If I then do any work on a commercial application in the same area then it opens the door for people to claim that the commercial work I've done has some work that could have been influenced by the OSS code and part of the commercial application is therefore derivative of the OSS work. With some OSS licenses this could mean that the entire commercial application is considered a derivative work and, depending on the license, the source code would need to be released or IBM could not charge for the software, etc.
It's not all doom and gloom. I work with some people that have got clearance to work on OSS software, they just have to make sure they avoid working with anything related to it on the commercial side (to the point of not having access to the source code to provide plausible deniability). You also need to think in advance and not work on anything that we could reasonably be working on in the future.
We are also regularly warned to avoid even looking at any OSS related to the commercial code we work on, for fear of tainting. Same for Googling for answers to technical questions and copy-and-pasting code from SO or elsewhere. You've generally got no idea of the copyright/licensing aspects of any code you see in the results.
IBM does use OSS in some of its commercial applications. Its use is always cleared with the lawyers first though. Certain licenses must be avoided simply because they are incompatible with selling commercial software. Where the license is permissive we always make sure we follow the rules and I've personally contributed many bug fixes in the OSS code back to the community as required (or even if not required!); these have often been found as the result of formal code inspections (which IBM is effectively funding by paying employees to perform it), peer review, static analysis tools, or general SQA testing.
Start with the end in mind. "I want to have X job" is a decent start but you should narrow that down to "I want to have X job, in Y industry and here are N example companies I would love to work for."
Investigate these companies and look at the developers they hire. Do they all have github accounts? Chances are you'll see a lot of blank profiles and the occasional blog last updated in 2008.
If you do see many people with very impressive online personas then start working with these people. Start working on the same OSS projects they are working on. You might find you don't like these people as much as you think you do. On the other hand after a few months they might say "Hey this notarockstar guy is pretty good, maybe we should hire him".
Oh and don't cash out your 401k
Source: I worked for two years in SF. I am currently working in NYC. A bunch of my co-workers are incredibly smart ex-finance folks who are good at Math and C.S. I am willing to bet that most of them didn't start a github profile until they joined us.
To get to where you want, live way under your means and save up your fuck-you fund. When that can last for 12 months, then you can spend 4 to 5 months to do whatever you want.
If you live in an area outside of SV where programming jobs aren't as prevalent, I would be a bit more careful.
Instead of using your 401k which is a terrible idea, you really should have a savings account that you should dip into. Therefore I would continue working for the next year or 2, keep working but save every dime you can so that in 2 years you can take 3-6 months off. In the meanwhile, apply to every single job you can.
You are going to fail.
You'll end up broke, pissed off, and unemployable (because you tasted freedom, and you don't want back in).
Sorry, statistics, history, and personal empirical evidence is on my side.
Wait...what? You want to cash out so you can create a GitHub profile and answer SO questions? Just no.
On first pass I thought you were going to take the money and time to build something. But not this. Here's my advice: don't get a dream job, get one that makes you happier. Not "happy," not "happiest," not "dream job," just a bit better, so you can have a little more time to put stuff on GitHub and answer questions on SO and spend time with your family. It's not just "dream job" and "old-school software company."
The reason for this is that you're not going to get that pension anyway, because the Western world's economies are barely holding together even as we speak. No one knows what will happen, but some of us know that something bad is going to happen.
It's fundamentally quite simple. Dozens of trillions of unpaid liabilities are just not going to get paid, and most Western governments are getting even more indebted each year. Using money you don't actually have will have consequences even for governments.
Whether your current plan is a wise investment for that 401k is another matter. I'd consider other plans too.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7532138
I started right away with putting money into retirement accounts(partly due to this book: http://www.amazon.com/Automatic-Wealth-Grads-Anyone-Starting...).
While it hurts a bit each month to put money away, in the end I know it'll be good for "Future Me". I currently have 3 different ones: a Roth IRA (I used to put in $400/mo, but now only do $200/mo if I can...the next accounts are all automatic though and I don't skip those), the 2nd is a 403b (similar to a 401k, but available for people in the public sector) which I put $1000 into pre-tax, and the 3rd is my life insurance/savings account which I put $400 into each month (this is a bit extra on top of the regular premium so it'll build value as an additional income source I can tap into down the road). Both 1 and 3 are after taxes and #2 is my only pre-tax one. My savings account right now isn't too great partly because so much goes into the future retirement accounts, but I try and put another $300/mo into that if I can, but some months I end up tapping into that due to extra expenses that come up. (Sounds like maybe we should have a separate thread on how much people put away each month and their reasons for doing so :-).
I think some of the others are correct though, you can definitely start now in your free time with at least creating some accounts and started to do a little bit (the key thing would be being consistent with those actions...as an example, I've always been an HN consumer, but I hardly ever commented...now I'm making an effort to add my own thoughts to posts and share what I have to say because I'd like to build up my karma :-).
I agree with your comments though that it's hard to demonstrate your skills and capabilities to employers when all you have is your resume and not these ancillary profiles and public information spots that seem to be used a lot in determining whether someone's skills are adequate.
Since I work in a college IT department I feel like I'm automatically ruled out because of my background even though I always include a list of the various projects I've worked on over the past 6 years and the increasing levels of responsibility I've acquired.
The other negative I have is I'm probably my own worst critic and don't always see my own accomplishments in their best light (I'll think to myself, "Self, well you don't really have any Ruby on Rails experience so that automatically disqualifies you from all of these jobs, let's see what else is available...". That's kind of a self-imposed problem where I need to do a better job of selling myself.
Actually right now, even though I enjoy my job quite a bit, all I'd really want is the ability to tap into some of the knowledge of Silicon Valley to learn new things (by working part-time remotely and maybe sometimes in person with a company) that I just can't learn here so I can bring those into my current job and apply them, but there don't seem to be too many employers looking for that (though if you know of any, please point me too them :-).
Since I'm way out in stix of SoCal, next to the border, in the desert, in the middle of a mainly agricultural community to have access to all of the good employers/jobs I'd have to move up to the Bay, which isn't too bad (but it's SOOO expensive). I don't mind where I live so much...I just mind that the learning opportunities I have are so limited (so I end up having to find my own ways to teach myself, but that process is a lot slower than having a teacher, aka a willing co-worker, help guide you).
Key takeway though from this thread so far: Don't cash out your 401K and possibly put you...
I'm interested in learning more about life insurance. Did the book you recommend advise storing value in life insurance? Most resources I've studied suggest that any life insurance product other than "term" is not worthwhile, and that it's not worth getting until some stakeholder in your life depends on your lifetime earning potential.
And how can you "not be allowed"? Just ignore that and do it anyway. Worse case, you are fired and have to live off your 401k, right? Best case, nobody notices.
The probable case is somewhere in the middle. You get a warning: a talking to by an "authority figure." Just tell them you "forgot" you were "not allowed."
Seems perfect for your situation.