12 ms·
One year later
- repomies691 10y agoNot really "quitting tech" as in working on some different industry, but more like story about how the guy stopped working as an employee/in a traditional job. He cashed his stock options from Yelp and lives on that, but still is working on many projects that I would call tech (games etc).
- debt 10y ago"quitting tech" usually means severing ties with the valley. working in tech anywhere else in the world is nowhere near what it's like working in tech in the valley.
- repomies691 10y agoI have visited valley, have friends working there and work from other country, and I disagree. Working life is not that different. I think in valley you also have variety of companies of all kinds.
- diggan 10y agoNever having worked "in tech" (as in the valley) but in tech outside, I feel like it's not very interesting reading about someone who working in the valley not working in the valley anymore. It would be many times more interesting reading about someone actually quitting tech as in moving away from the technology sector (not the silicon valley one, the anywhere else one)
- madgar 10y agoIt's true, no other tech hub can hold a candle to the traffic in Silicon Valley - let alone the cost of housing!
- andrewchambers 10y agoIt might seem highly critical, but the things he worked on seemed rather dull to me. I suppose if i did the same what i would choose to do may be dull to others too.
- mercer 10y agoThat's what I liked best about the post. I've noticed that often the stuff I enjoy most is stuff where I'm free from thinking what the 'use' is or what other people would think of the end result. Usually this would happen by accident. I'd feel 'inspired' to make a quick photoshop joke only to end up spending hours making it convincing, or I'd write a quick little script to alert me of bitcoin rate changes and end up doing much more than that. Something similar is the case with articles or books. Some of the most enjoyable reading I've done was the result of 'stumbling' across something that captured my interest, whereas I often feel a strong barrier to get to reading stuff I feel I should read. This all seems, to some degree, independent of the actual content. I've been trying to allow more of that playfulness in my life and cultivate it, but I still find that 'tricking' myself into it is usually the best way to get started because if I don't, the 'what is the use?' and 'will other people like/care for/admire this?' questions shut me down. Brett Victor and the XKCD dude are big inspirations for me in this regard. And Richard Feynman.
- draw_down 10y agoIf I were to quit my job, the things I would turn my attention to would be insufferably, oppressively boring to almost everyone.
- andrewchambers 10y agoI would probably try to do a startup. I guess that isn't quite the same as quitting though, just replacing.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- crayon765 10y agoWhat is this blog about exactly? I don't wanna read his whole life's story. I do like the name of the website though.
- Manishearth 10y agoIt's a personal blog, with posts on tech and other things.
- gfaure 10y agoAlso, it's her life story.
- peteretep 10y agoReally? The only gendered reference I can find on the site is from 2012 and self-describes as a dude.
- bshimmin 10y agoOn Twitter it says "she/etc" (but perhaps it really doesn't matter): https://twitter.com/eevee https://twitter.com/eevee
- peteretep 10y agoI'm sure it doesn't matter, I just had a mental-model that eevee was a he, and hadn't seen anything to counter that!
- avinassh 10y agoeven I vaguely remember reading something eevee being a dude
- Jaruzel 10y agoThis one I guess: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/12/10/dimorphism/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/12/10/dimorphism/ Dude (or 'bloke' in UK English). However, it's clear that in Eevee's mind gender is irrelevant. I totally agree with this. Gender isn't a black and white painting, it's a rainbowed coloured explosion on a digital canvas and we're all individual pixels within it.
- NegatioN 10y agoReally enjoyed the article. It touches on some key points for me, like not having enough time (oh what a special snowflake I am). I enjoy life the most when I am not beholden to anyone else's schedule, and can take the time to notice the small good/bad things happening to me every day without getting stressed (this is after all what fills most of my life, and forcibly suppressing it, saying only productive time counts, adds a lot of tension) . I feel like this is very taxing and difficult to do after a long day at the office, but I know my quality of life would greatly increase if I could either see life in this way, or have more time available to fall into this rhythm.
- arkadiyt 10y agoFun read - after finishing that I went back and read the post from a year ago ("I quit the tech industry") that the author is now providing an update on. In it they wrote the following: "I spent much of April and May increasingly grumpy and withdrawn and on edge. Weekends and evenings have become even less useful, instead being clogged by a sense of paralyzing dread that I’m wasting fleeting time if I’m not doing ten amazing things at once. I’ve foregone trivial maintenance like cleaning junk off my desk because I don’t feel like I have 20 minutes to spare. I stay up hours later than I mean to, not even doing anything, just trying to put off sleeping — because the next thing I experience will be waking up and going back to work. (I hate dread. What a completely useless emotion. Let’s just stop doing anything, and feel bad about something that hasn’t happened yet, and also feel bad about not doing anything because we’re too busy feeling bad. This will definitely improve anything in any way.)" I suppose I always knew in the abstract that others felt this way, but reading it from someone else like this was comforting.
- somestag 10y agoI wonder if dread is the right word for it. I've always associated feelings of dread with knowing (or fearing) something is going to happen that will be terrible. You can certainly dread going to your job, but that weird state of limbo--where you do absolutely nothing because you simultaneously are avoiding something but also are feeling guilty for avoiding it--always felt like a different animal to me. Then again, I've never had a good word to describe it, so who knows.
- dino-neil 10y agoThat describes it quite well. That empty feeling where you have so much to do, but you end up just ticking over without any ambition or drive. How do I fix?
- 72deluxe 10y agoI normally make a prioritised list and work through the items on the list. If I do not, I cannot fathom which item to do first and there is so much to keep track of that I forget to do some of the items. So a list forces me to document what I need to do, and work through it methodically.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- brian-armstrong 10y agoThis was a really cool read. I had seen some eev.ee tweets before but I didn't know that they had a year away from a desk job. I did something similar. I left my job last year and built https://github.com/quiet https://github.com/quiet which was an incredibly fun project (end plug). I can empathize with eev.ee's fear of building something nobody uses :) I'd love to see more stories about people quitting and doing something somewhat unconventional.
- rpazyaquian 10y agoI remember Quiet! It's really cool, +1 to that :)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- porker 10y agoI feel the way she does. My highlight from this post: "At worst, no one ever uses it, and I have nothing to show for the time. Even at best, well… let’s just say the way programmers react to technical work is very different from the way everyone else reacts to creative work."
- greenshackle2 10y ago>the way programmers react to technical work is very different from the way everyone else reacts to creative work. That's not specific to programmers. I bet technical experts in other fields react similarly to works in their fields. I mean, ask any science PhD if they feel their work is appreciated. It's not a programming thing, it's a laymen vs experts thing. Laymen are easy to impress. I can practice juggling for an afternoon and impress my friends. Circus professionals will be less impressed. If you want to optimize for recognition from your laymen friends, there's a sweet spot where your work is both legible to laymen and advanced enough that it looks like magic. Games fall in that category. (Consumer software generally does.) But if you go too far past that, or pick an arcane sub-field, your work is only legible at all to other experts, who understand how magic works, and who think they could have done it twice better in half the time. tl;dr if you want to impress people, build really nice bikesheds, not highly optimized, cost efficient electric turbines.
- escherize 10y agoI persuaded Eevee to live stream while making some DOOM maps. It was very fun to watch. Thanks Eevee! :)
- barbs 10y agoThat sounds interesting. Are the recorded videos up anywhere?
- fiatjaf 10y agoBasically the author didn't earn any money aside from the money from Patreon? Earning money on Patreon doesn't mean you're doing good things, but only that you know how to sell your own image as a brand. Am I correct?
- brazzledazzle 10y agoI don't know if those two things are mutually exclusive.
- Thimothy 10y agoThe Dwarf Fortress authors set up their Patreon[1] a while ago, haven't updated it much since, and is giving them 4K per month, so... I guess that if you want to throw some money regularly at some project it's one of your best options, regardless of the author's ability to sell the brand. [1]: https://www.patreon.com/bay12games https://www.patreon.com/bay12games
- pherq 10y agoThat's well within what they were making in donations per month prior to using Patreon, though. They already had the support, they just added another interface.
- Thimothy 10y agoYeah, and they were doing that well before automatic online monthly payments were a thing!! People actually took some minutes every month to send them money. But, to the point, it's not like you could accuse the Zach bros of "selling their own image as a brand". They just have this thing they are making, a healthy relationship with the community (but nothing histrionic like your average youtuber), and people just gives them money because they want them to continue making that thing.
- dwaltrip 10y agoIt also doesn't mean you aren't doing good things. A statement like that would require additional evidence.
- lewisjoe 10y ago>I spent much of April and May increasingly grumpy and withdrawn and on edge. Weekends and evenings have become even less useful, instead being clogged by a sense of paralyzing dread that I’m wasting fleeting time if I’m not doing ten amazing things at once. I’ve foregone trivial maintenance like cleaning junk off my desk because I don’t feel like I have 20 minutes to spare. I stay up hours later than I mean to, not even doing anything, just trying to put off sleeping — because the next thing I experience will be waking up and going back to work. I'm sorry the author wasn't able to get things done while in the `dread`. I've got an alternative perspective. I like working on multiple stuff. I see the day job as one of the several projects I work on. I've worked on projects, squeezing my brain through the longest span it can, on one single project and also the exact opposite - juggling focus spans between a few projects, when one gets too vague. I'd say the latter worked best for me in terms of #1. Getting stuff done. #2. The satisfaction of being productive. Time management is the key. #1. Wake up early and start the day early. This would make your daytime extensive enough to accommodate several slots. #2. Remember Parkinson's law. Put extra concentration while on the day job, so that you can wrap up early. Don't do this with dread. Consider the job as working on one of several projects, with a larger team, than those of your other projects. This has helped me overcome the feeling of helplessness. #3. Side projects need not be hackathons. One meaningful commit, made everyday will take it a long way. Read http://ejohn.org/blog/write-code-every-day/ http://ejohn.org/blog/write-code-every-day/. So stop worrying about not doing much on a specific day. On the contrast, worry if you haven't been consistent in committing code everyday.
- nathan_f77 10y ago> Wake up early and start the day early This isn't important if you're a night person. We all sleep roughly 8 hours, it doesn't matter what time you wake up or what time you go to sleep. I find the night to be very peaceful, and I get a lot done.
- ensiferum 10y agoI've come already a long time ago to the conclusion that writing libraries (as opposed to writing applications) is a task best reserved for those who are: a) too stupid to understand how crap their library interface/implementations are b) super smart and can get it right the first time c) people with endless time to work on their libs (and then recode their apps that dependend on their libs) These days I'm trying very hard to avoid the compulsive disorder of library writing and just write applications.
- lisper 10y agoI nominate this for the most useless headline ever to make the HN front page. Should have been: "One-year followup after quitting my job" or something like that.
- maxt 10y agoClassic case of Career FOMO https://rachsmith.com/2016/career-fomo https://rachsmith.com/2016/career-fomo
- bovermyer 10y agoMaybe, but I feel like that's abstracting it a little too far. There's nuance in both articles that a simple grass-is-greener mentality evaluation misses. For example, the author states feeling a prolonged sense of dread/exhaustion with regards to work. That's not a fear of missing out. That's an error state. Something is wrong, and needs to be addressed.
- sigi45 10y agoCan't identify with that person at all. Some adult guy preferring to draw pokemon avatars and doing some small things without value over more or less challenging things. I prefer working on stuff which make sense in some way and i don't get much enjoyment out of little strange things i do/did. I deleted also a lot of stuff because they were bad/worthless. Blog articles, images, 2 small games, small code repositories. But at the end everyone decides for themselves what meaning they give there lives. A normal/good paying job is a least for me quite relevant: Family, nice house and having enough money when i retire. Sounds boring, probably is but i gave up my illusion of becoming a great indie game developer or <other dream>. I'm good in my job after all.
- techxit 10y agoI understand his desire to leave tech (my name is "techxit"). Most people want out by the time they're 30. They realize that the job isn't about advancing the state of computer science or building useful things. It's about micro-optimizations of business processes that don't matter and that won't be rewarded. I've actually considered an exit consultancy as a side project: helping techxiters find jobs in government, research, and business when they're 30-40 and the traditional career switches (e.g. MBA school, which only provides elite connections at the top-5 level) aren't available. There are a lot of highly talented people who have no idea how they're going to get out of the mess they started making at 22 when they thought this career (which pays very well in the early years but fails most people in mid-career) would do more for their careers than it did.
- grosbisou 10y ago> Some adult guy preferring to draw pokemon avatars and doing some small things without value over more or less challenging things. That is a bit disdainful. It has at the very least value for him. Isn't it the most important?
- sigi45 10y agoYes of course. He postet his opinion online and i did the same. That's the only reason why i postet how i see it.
- hnnsj 10y agoI don't want to sound like a douchebag, but isn't the post basically saying that short-term gratification and procrastination feels nicer, so that's what he focused on? Not that I am any better, but that's not something I'm proud of.