7 ms·

A young person's guide to quitting your day job

103 points by zmitri 14y ago

jcottrell 14y ago
sounds a bit like my own story (though you're a bit farther along!)
Gobitron 14y ago
I'm at step 1-5
- xspectre 14y ago
  Me too. To the author: thanks for writing this blog post. It's always interesting to hear someone's perspective on the topic. I've been mulling over this for a while...
  - zmitri 14y ago
    Not a problem. Looking back, I admit it was nice to be able to get "instant" credibility, but if you know you are going to eventually pull the trigger, the sooner the better.
    - vubuntu 14y ago
      How much of your decision was influenced by the constraints of the H1B worker visa and the disillusionment with the whole green card process?
      - zmitri 14y ago
        If I were American and didn't need an H1B, It would have happened a year earlier.
ry0ohki 14y ago
As someone on a work visa, how did you quit your job exactly? What's the grace period before you need to find someone else to sponsor your visa? (I'm assuming your startup can't afford to do so, but I may be wrong)
- zmitri 14y ago
  Well, I thought about it for a while, and realized it wasn't worth it waiting N years to get a green card. I filed a petition to go from H1B status to B2 tourist and asked for 3 months to stay in the country to finish up my affairs. After that I left. As a Canadian, I may enter the US for up to 6 months at a time without requiring a visa, but am I not allowed to work. So when I do visit, I make sure to only visit friends and I make sure not to do any work. I am currently in Toronto, but next month will be taking a vacation to the USA.
  - byoung2 14y ago
    As a Canadian, I may enter the US for up to 6 months at a time without requiring a visa, but am I not allowed to work. So when I do visit, I make sure to only visit friends and I make sure not to do any work. I wonder what is considered "work" and how could it be tracked. Whenever I travel abroad, I bring my laptop, and I always end up answering a few emails and writing code (which is what I do when I go to the office here in the US). If you have a company registered in Canada and you come to the US for 6 months, who is to stop you from sitting at a computer and typing away, as long as no money changes hands in the US?
    - zmitri 14y ago
      Exactly.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      Well, by the same token there isn't much stopping a Canadian from coming into the US and working as a fry chef. Laws are for honest people, and people who attract attention.
iyulaev 14y ago
Between working at a huge company with rigid structure and payscales (what the author seems to be describing) and being a founder, there is a spectrum of jobs, with different risk/responsibility tradeoffs. When companies go public, it's not just the 2-3 founders that make out well.
- zmitri 14y ago
  I totally agree with you, which is why I tried to list out a bunch of things I noticed. There are lots of different approaches when your job starts to sour, but for me, it wasn't just about finding a new job. By the way, I was actually describing an extremely successful 20-25 person company.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    I worked for 2.5 years at a startup that failed. The technical work that I did was excellent, but it didn't do much for my career in the end. In fact, in my job after that, I was treated as a junior developer even though I was substantially ahead of the level, in terms of capability, at which I was placed. In retrospect, I should have jumped back into the mainstream a year before. As you get older and better, junior-level positions become non-options, but you may not get the "right" experience for senior ones. Working for yourself can work out very well, or it can leave you re-applying for your old job, 3 years older and 10 years smarter, and you know as well as I do that being 10 years smarter just makes institutionalized life harder. You can stay corporate and not lose your edge entirely. Obviously, it'd be better to work for yourself and not have to serve 2 masters, but few people have the resources for that. To do it, you have to learn how to be insubordinate enough to keep your creativity, without getting fired. That's not actually hard, if you stay out of the politics. Old Me would react to a pernicious inefficiency by speaking up and loudly, unwittingly walking into a political minefield. ("This is damaging my productivity, you idiots!") New Me says, "This is mildly annoying and reducing my productivity, but that gives me time for Coursera."
    - nodemaker 14y ago
      Wow this really resonates with me. But one may also accept that institutionalized corporate life is not for him and move on, even if that means less money and less stability throughout his life. To quote the asian guy from Tokyo Drift "Life is simple - you make choices and never look back"
MikeKusold 14y ago
I stopped reading when you gave an example of moving somewhere better. Google is not inherently better than Yahoo. Both companies have very interesting projects going on. What makes one company better than another is the chance to work on projects that YOU find interesting.
- zmitri 14y ago
  That's fair, but unfortunately that's probably the least important detail of the article. I'm still learning how to write blog posts so I'll take that into consideration in the future. I changed it to reflect the fact that many people, whether right or wrong, would currently assume it's a step up.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  He said that most people would perceive Google as a step up, and he's right, but his point is that the incessant climbing is pretty stupid, and I agree. Adam Smith called early industrial Britain "a nation of shopkeepers". Corporate America (and VC-istan is just as bad) is "a nation of social climbers."
  - mogrim 14y ago
    > Corporate America (and VC-istan is just as bad) is "a nation of social climbers." But (from what I see at least) it's still better than a lot of other countries. At least in the larger areas you can earn a decent wage, with a decent amount of seniority, while still being in a technical role. This just doesn't happen here in Spain - after 7 or 8 years you've hit the ceiling, you're an architect or analyst or whatever you want to call it, but to get further (earn more, have more responsibility in your company...) you need to move into non-technical management.
blendergasket 14y ago
This was awesome. Thank you for writing this. I'm saving money to have a year's cash to live on while fleshing out my idea(s) and heading down the runway of making my way on my own. I'll be making the transition ("falling out of the bottom of the world" I lovingly call it) on June 1st. My favorite line was this one: "...life isn't a competition to see how upper middle class you can get." This is so true. It blows my mind how much people internalize these milestones of success and how little questioning goes into them. It seems that basically the whole culture's on autopilot, and I guess the point of a culture is basically to build a structure for most people to sail through on auto-pilot but I am really starting to see a life of questioned assumptions as the only life not lived in slavery.
- pnathan 14y ago
  "...life isn't a competition to see how upper middle class you can get." That's been on my mind a lot for the last few years. While I'd like to put my (future) kids in a good starting point, there's more to life than rolling around in cash.
  - koko775 14y ago
    Not until you have enough that you're not clawing just to stay afloat. Until that point, stress and paranoia about job security are a pretty big deal.
    - pnathan 14y ago
      I've been broke before. Not to toot my own horn, but I know what it's like. There's a long way between "barely not broke" and "upper middle class". I am not particularly interested in struggling my whole life on the way up to wealth, but I am also not interested in living broke and trying to keep myself and my family fed.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Counterpoint: It's really hard to appreciate a day job for what it is until you're filling out HR forms to ensure your new baby has health insurance coverage from birth, and you let yourself appreciate the terror of not having that in a system that will do it's damndest to screw you over for any lapses. I have a friend who had a baby and had a gap between the 30 days during which the baby was covered by her health insurance, and the time he was covered by her husband's health insurance from his new job. The gap was the result, if I recall correctly, of her forgetting to timely fill out some paperwork. In that gap, the baby rolled off the changing table and hit his head. The baby seemed fine, but she faced the sickening choice between racking up a multi-thousand dollar hospital bill or just hoping the baby didn't have any internal injuries. Ultimately, they took the chance and luckily it worked out for them because the baby was fine. These weren't poor people, by the way. They were students at an Ivy-league school who were in the transition period between graduation and six-figure jobs.
shortlived 14y ago
Can someone please point me to "A married-with-family person's guide to quitting your day job"?
- zmitri 14y ago
  I am definitely not qualified to write that one!
- ktsmith 14y ago
  Have plenty of savings and the full support of your spouse. Don't let your new venture consume time to the detriment of your family life. Everything else can be pretty similar.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > Can someone please point me to "A married-with-family person's guide to quitting your day job"? Sure - here it is, short and to the point: "Don't even think about it."
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    I was going to say: "move to a country where child labor is legal".
- hkmurakami 14y ago
  I think having a strong personal and professional network of friends and colleagues in "bigco" type places will help getting back into such an environment if/when the entrepreneurial venture unfortunately fails. I think that kind of peace of mind would be invaluable in really giving it a go.
- mogrim 14y ago
  Depending where you live it can go by many names: lottery, powerball, loteria, etc. A rich, childless uncle dying may also work.
- nathanbarry 14y ago
  I did that a year ago. My last day at work was 2 weeks after my son was born. You can read about it here: http://nathanbarry.com/i-quit-my-job/ http://nathanbarry.com/i-quit-my-job/ What made it possible was that I spent an entire year before hand designing and developing apps on the side. I got to the point where I was averaging at least $2,500 a month from the App Store, which was half of what I made at my design job. I knew with that as a base I could make up the difference with consulting. The other really important thing I did was save a lot of money. I took all the profits from an entire year of selling apps, plus my regular savings, and had just over $30,000 in savings. Those two things gave me the confidence to leave, even with a newborn baby. Now, 1 year later, I've written two books (one comes out next week), released more apps, and make more money than I did at the day job. All while having more flexibility. If you want to talk further, my email address is in my profile. Good luck!
d0m 14y ago
Can't stress the "start small" part. I.e. not a marketplace or a social network to start with. (If you learn a new language, would your first project be a StarCraft2 clone or hello world?)
ataleb52 14y ago
That was seriously some awesome motivation. I've only been out working for a few months after graduation but I can already related to almost everything on his list. Thank you for sharing!
- mindcruzer 14y ago
  As can I. I think I have some natural aversion to having a boss.
vlokshin 14y ago
You offer some really good advice, and I'm in a REALLY similar boat / life. I wrote up something like this about 1.5 years ago. I started my company on the side, while still working a similar (top-tier consulting) gig. I hedged my bets a bit more by running the shop while I still had a full-time [salary] and built out my dev team as full-timers first. As of 1.5 months ago, 3 more of us are full-time and in beautiful San Francisco trying to grow the collective into something real. 7 full time, and 10+ in the collective. The problem with both of our writings to the world about doing this, is that it's not actionable. It's motivational and awesome, but there's not much of an action item. If you can't do it in a single pomodoro, most people won't do it :) We're both young, without a family tie-down, and ironically both Russian-born? men. @OP: Team up for a blog post next week so that we can put together some actionable steps towards giving up the life of a cog and working for yourself on actually building something awesome? vlad (at) DarwinApps.com if you're interested.
blhack 14y ago
First: this is hardly a "guide" to quitting your day job. The only advice OP gives on actually quitting your day job is: "Find a good partner!". --- Does there exist freelance agents? Like somebody that helps you track down freelance contracts? (I may be mincing words here) If there isn't, will some of you bizdev people pretty please make something like this? I'm a hacker, I've been coding for a long time, and I fit exactly the descriptions that this person laid out in part 1, but I would have absolutely no idea how to find work even if it came banging down my door.
- SandersAK 14y ago
  I think, like most things, most of this stuff is case-sensitive. If the situation resonates with you, then the experience of what happened is valuable. It sounds like you already have your mind made up and you've committed yourself to making the leap. Lots of people aren't there yet. As for freelancing - your best bet is hitting the pavement and meeting people. People tend to kick jobs to friends or people they personally have connected with. First step might be to, instead of waiting for work to bang on the door, open the door and go out and get it :)
- fizx 14y ago
  In my experience, most boutique development shops and agencies would love to put about 80% of their work through employees, and 20% through trusted contractors. Typically you need to be a product engineer--web, ios, etc. Expect to get paid about half of what you would for contracting work you source yourself. To get this work, go to conferences and be friendly with people in this group. If you can't meet these people, build some open source thing they want (when I did this five years ago it was imagemagick integration for RoR). They'll contact you and pay you to customize it. I have friends who've used https://grouptalent.com/main/talent/ https://grouptalent.com/main/talent/. They had a pretty good experience. Good luck!
  - tcdent 14y ago
    > Expect to get paid about half of what you would for contracting work you source yourself. Being in a position that hires said contractors, I have to say this is false. Rates are competitive; we're not the one's setting them, the market is. Recruiter's commission may play a factor where it's involved, but it certainly doesn't halve the rate. I'd also say "good luck" to acquiring contracts in your area of expertise directly from the companies that are buying them. They're looking for complete packages and the effort involved in acquiring and maintaing those relationships is quite often beyond the abilities of a single person.
tdyrsmid 14y ago
Having quit my day job back in 2000 to go into business for myself, I think I can give you a quick summary on the process to use: Step 1: ensure you have at least 12 months of living expenses in cash. If you don't, then sell everything and move in with your parents or friends so that your expenses go down a LOT. If you don't want to do this, you might ask yourself how bad you want to create your own business. Step 2. Spend all day talking to potential customers. Skip online research. Go talk to people. If you don't have something to sell (yet), tell them you are building it and you'd like to show them screenshots. You will suck at this conversation at first, but you will get better. Step 3. Sell, sell, and sell some more. If you have a product, sell to customers. If you don't, sell to investors. Either way, you have to persuade somebody to give you their money. Step 4. Pat yourself on the back because you just did something that most people only talk about. Step 5. Network your ass off and only hang around other entrepreneurs who will support you. JOBers will most likely only knock you down because they envy what you have done (and they dont' have the stones to do). Trent Dyrsmid
GICodeWarrior 14y ago
Depending on the interest rate of your educational loans, it can be better to keep them around. Save your money in the bank and budget for loan payments. Sometimes it is useful to have that extra cushion in the bank instead of saving a small percentage in interest.
- Crake 14y ago
  Most federal loans these days are at 6.8%, and max out at around $5,000/year for undergrads (which is only half the cost of tuition at a state uni here). Private loans tend to lean more towards 8-12%. Also, good luck even qualifying for the latter if you don't have a rich parent with collateral to cosign for you. It's a good thought, but I think it's much less useful today than it was in the era of 2-3% interest student loans. My teachers always use amazingly low interest rates in math problems and then get all shocked when I mention how much even the government charges these days.
moocow01 14y ago
Quitting your job is the easy part. Legitimately replacing it is the hard part. There are some nice thoughts here but I'd like to know what the plan is to survive. Its certainly possible to make it but I feel like this is glorifying a situation that most people once on the other side of the fence are going to be under stress and realize things are not necessarily so rosy. You have savings - great step. You have some things your working on - great step. Now how do you start making just enough money before your runway ends and you have to either go back to a job or start eating into your own time to do consulting (which is basically employment from my perspective). Ill admit Im a relatively risk averse person but Id say the best plan is the 1 step plan where the time you are spending on your own business becomes more profitable than going to work - easier said than done but thats my 2 cents.
- zmitri 14y ago
  I'm on the other side of the fence now. Yes, it's much harder, and much more stressful, but it's on my terms. There's a lot more to this story, but I've decided to draw this out over a couple posts. Funny you mention being risk averse. I've talked about this with my cofounder, and we don't see doing this as being risky. We see taking jobs as being risky, because we feel like we are losing out on doing something we like more and wasting our lives.
CommitPull 14y ago
Dude, I loved your article, very inspiring. Glad you managed to make the jump. Good luck!

103 points by zmitri 14y ago

jcottrell 14y ago

sounds a bit like my own story (though you're a bit farther along!)

Gobitron 14y ago

I'm at step 1-5

xspectre 14y ago
Me too. To the author: thanks for writing this blog post. It's always interesting to hear someone's perspective on the topic. I've been mulling over this for a while...
- zmitri 14y ago
  Not a problem. Looking back, I admit it was nice to be able to get "instant" credibility, but if you know you are going to eventually pull the trigger, the sooner the better.
  - vubuntu 14y ago
    How much of your decision was influenced by the constraints of the H1B worker visa and the disillusionment with the whole green card process?
    - zmitri 14y ago
      If I were American and didn't need an H1B, It would have happened a year earlier.

ry0ohki 14y ago

As someone on a work visa, how did you quit your job exactly? What's the grace period before you need to find someone else to sponsor your visa? (I'm assuming your startup can't afford to do so, but I may be wrong)

zmitri 14y ago
Well, I thought about it for a while, and realized it wasn't worth it waiting N years to get a green card. I filed a petition to go from H1B status to B2 tourist and asked for 3 months to stay in the country to finish up my affairs. After that I left. As a Canadian, I may enter the US for up to 6 months at a time without requiring a visa, but am I not allowed to work. So when I do visit, I make sure to only visit friends and I make sure not to do any work. I am currently in Toronto, but next month will be taking a vacation to the USA.
- byoung2 14y ago
  As a Canadian, I may enter the US for up to 6 months at a time without requiring a visa, but am I not allowed to work. So when I do visit, I make sure to only visit friends and I make sure not to do any work. I wonder what is considered "work" and how could it be tracked. Whenever I travel abroad, I bring my laptop, and I always end up answering a few emails and writing code (which is what I do when I go to the office here in the US). If you have a company registered in Canada and you come to the US for 6 months, who is to stop you from sitting at a computer and typing away, as long as no money changes hands in the US?
  - zmitri 14y ago
    Exactly.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Well, by the same token there isn't much stopping a Canadian from coming into the US and working as a fry chef. Laws are for honest people, and people who attract attention.

iyulaev 14y ago

Between working at a huge company with rigid structure and payscales (what the author seems to be describing) and being a founder, there is a spectrum of jobs, with different risk/responsibility tradeoffs. When companies go public, it's not just the 2-3 founders that make out well.

zmitri 14y ago
I totally agree with you, which is why I tried to list out a bunch of things I noticed. There are lots of different approaches when your job starts to sour, but for me, it wasn't just about finding a new job. By the way, I was actually describing an extremely successful 20-25 person company.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I worked for 2.5 years at a startup that failed. The technical work that I did was excellent, but it didn't do much for my career in the end. In fact, in my job after that, I was treated as a junior developer even though I was substantially ahead of the level, in terms of capability, at which I was placed. In retrospect, I should have jumped back into the mainstream a year before. As you get older and better, junior-level positions become non-options, but you may not get the "right" experience for senior ones. Working for yourself can work out very well, or it can leave you re-applying for your old job, 3 years older and 10 years smarter, and you know as well as I do that being 10 years smarter just makes institutionalized life harder. You can stay corporate and not lose your edge entirely. Obviously, it'd be better to work for yourself and not have to serve 2 masters, but few people have the resources for that. To do it, you have to learn how to be insubordinate enough to keep your creativity, without getting fired. That's not actually hard, if you stay out of the politics. Old Me would react to a pernicious inefficiency by speaking up and loudly, unwittingly walking into a political minefield. ("This is damaging my productivity, you idiots!") New Me says, "This is mildly annoying and reducing my productivity, but that gives me time for Coursera."
  - nodemaker 14y ago
    Wow this really resonates with me. But one may also accept that institutionalized corporate life is not for him and move on, even if that means less money and less stability throughout his life. To quote the asian guy from Tokyo Drift "Life is simple - you make choices and never look back"

MikeKusold 14y ago

I stopped reading when you gave an example of moving somewhere better. Google is not inherently better than Yahoo. Both companies have very interesting projects going on. What makes one company better than another is the chance to work on projects that YOU find interesting.

zmitri 14y ago
That's fair, but unfortunately that's probably the least important detail of the article. I'm still learning how to write blog posts so I'll take that into consideration in the future. I changed it to reflect the fact that many people, whether right or wrong, would currently assume it's a step up.
michaelochurch 14y ago
He said that most people would perceive Google as a step up, and he's right, but his point is that the incessant climbing is pretty stupid, and I agree. Adam Smith called early industrial Britain "a nation of shopkeepers". Corporate America (and VC-istan is just as bad) is "a nation of social climbers."
- mogrim 14y ago
  > Corporate America (and VC-istan is just as bad) is "a nation of social climbers." But (from what I see at least) it's still better than a lot of other countries. At least in the larger areas you can earn a decent wage, with a decent amount of seniority, while still being in a technical role. This just doesn't happen here in Spain - after 7 or 8 years you've hit the ceiling, you're an architect or analyst or whatever you want to call it, but to get further (earn more, have more responsibility in your company...) you need to move into non-technical management.

blendergasket 14y ago

This was awesome. Thank you for writing this. I'm saving money to have a year's cash to live on while fleshing out my idea(s) and heading down the runway of making my way on my own. I'll be making the transition ("falling out of the bottom of the world" I lovingly call it) on June 1st. My favorite line was this one: "...life isn't a competition to see how upper middle class you can get." This is so true. It blows my mind how much people internalize these milestones of success and how little questioning goes into them. It seems that basically the whole culture's on autopilot, and I guess the point of a culture is basically to build a structure for most people to sail through on auto-pilot but I am really starting to see a life of questioned assumptions as the only life not lived in slavery.

pnathan 14y ago
"...life isn't a competition to see how upper middle class you can get." That's been on my mind a lot for the last few years. While I'd like to put my (future) kids in a good starting point, there's more to life than rolling around in cash.
- koko775 14y ago
  Not until you have enough that you're not clawing just to stay afloat. Until that point, stress and paranoia about job security are a pretty big deal.
  - pnathan 14y ago
    I've been broke before. Not to toot my own horn, but I know what it's like. There's a long way between "barely not broke" and "upper middle class". I am not particularly interested in struggling my whole life on the way up to wealth, but I am also not interested in living broke and trying to keep myself and my family fed.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Counterpoint: It's really hard to appreciate a day job for what it is until you're filling out HR forms to ensure your new baby has health insurance coverage from birth, and you let yourself appreciate the terror of not having that in a system that will do it's damndest to screw you over for any lapses. I have a friend who had a baby and had a gap between the 30 days during which the baby was covered by her health insurance, and the time he was covered by her husband's health insurance from his new job. The gap was the result, if I recall correctly, of her forgetting to timely fill out some paperwork. In that gap, the baby rolled off the changing table and hit his head. The baby seemed fine, but she faced the sickening choice between racking up a multi-thousand dollar hospital bill or just hoping the baby didn't have any internal injuries. Ultimately, they took the chance and luckily it worked out for them because the baby was fine. These weren't poor people, by the way. They were students at an Ivy-league school who were in the transition period between graduation and six-figure jobs.

shortlived 14y ago

Can someone please point me to "A married-with-family person's guide to quitting your day job"?

zmitri 14y ago
I am definitely not qualified to write that one!
ktsmith 14y ago
Have plenty of savings and the full support of your spouse. Don't let your new venture consume time to the detriment of your family life. Everything else can be pretty similar.
lutusp 14y ago
> Can someone please point me to "A married-with-family person's guide to quitting your day job"? Sure - here it is, short and to the point: "Don't even think about it."
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I was going to say: "move to a country where child labor is legal".
hkmurakami 14y ago
I think having a strong personal and professional network of friends and colleagues in "bigco" type places will help getting back into such an environment if/when the entrepreneurial venture unfortunately fails. I think that kind of peace of mind would be invaluable in really giving it a go.
mogrim 14y ago
Depending where you live it can go by many names: lottery, powerball, loteria, etc. A rich, childless uncle dying may also work.
nathanbarry 14y ago
I did that a year ago. My last day at work was 2 weeks after my son was born. You can read about it here: http://nathanbarry.com/i-quit-my-job/ http://nathanbarry.com/i-quit-my-job/ What made it possible was that I spent an entire year before hand designing and developing apps on the side. I got to the point where I was averaging at least $2,500 a month from the App Store, which was half of what I made at my design job. I knew with that as a base I could make up the difference with consulting. The other really important thing I did was save a lot of money. I took all the profits from an entire year of selling apps, plus my regular savings, and had just over $30,000 in savings. Those two things gave me the confidence to leave, even with a newborn baby. Now, 1 year later, I've written two books (one comes out next week), released more apps, and make more money than I did at the day job. All while having more flexibility. If you want to talk further, my email address is in my profile. Good luck!

d0m 14y ago

Can't stress the "start small" part. I.e. not a marketplace or a social network to start with. (If you learn a new language, would your first project be a StarCraft2 clone or hello world?)

ataleb52 14y ago

That was seriously some awesome motivation. I've only been out working for a few months after graduation but I can already related to almost everything on his list. Thank you for sharing!

mindcruzer 14y ago
As can I. I think I have some natural aversion to having a boss.

vlokshin 14y ago

You offer some really good advice, and I'm in a REALLY similar boat / life. I wrote up something like this about 1.5 years ago. I started my company on the side, while still working a similar (top-tier consulting) gig. I hedged my bets a bit more by running the shop while I still had a full-time [salary] and built out my dev team as full-timers first. As of 1.5 months ago, 3 more of us are full-time and in beautiful San Francisco trying to grow the collective into something real. 7 full time, and 10+ in the collective. The problem with both of our writings to the world about doing this, is that it's not actionable. It's motivational and awesome, but there's not much of an action item. If you can't do it in a single pomodoro, most people won't do it :) We're both young, without a family tie-down, and ironically both Russian-born? men. @OP: Team up for a blog post next week so that we can put together some actionable steps towards giving up the life of a cog and working for yourself on actually building something awesome? vlad (at) DarwinApps.com if you're interested.

blhack 14y ago

First: this is hardly a "guide" to quitting your day job. The only advice OP gives on actually quitting your day job is: "Find a good partner!". --- Does there exist freelance agents? Like somebody that helps you track down freelance contracts? (I may be mincing words here) If there isn't, will some of you bizdev people pretty please make something like this? I'm a hacker, I've been coding for a long time, and I fit exactly the descriptions that this person laid out in part 1, but I would have absolutely no idea how to find work even if it came banging down my door.

SandersAK 14y ago
I think, like most things, most of this stuff is case-sensitive. If the situation resonates with you, then the experience of what happened is valuable. It sounds like you already have your mind made up and you've committed yourself to making the leap. Lots of people aren't there yet. As for freelancing - your best bet is hitting the pavement and meeting people. People tend to kick jobs to friends or people they personally have connected with. First step might be to, instead of waiting for work to bang on the door, open the door and go out and get it :)
fizx 14y ago
In my experience, most boutique development shops and agencies would love to put about 80% of their work through employees, and 20% through trusted contractors. Typically you need to be a product engineer--web, ios, etc. Expect to get paid about half of what you would for contracting work you source yourself. To get this work, go to conferences and be friendly with people in this group. If you can't meet these people, build some open source thing they want (when I did this five years ago it was imagemagick integration for RoR). They'll contact you and pay you to customize it. I have friends who've used https://grouptalent.com/main/talent/ https://grouptalent.com/main/talent/. They had a pretty good experience. Good luck!
- tcdent 14y ago
  > Expect to get paid about half of what you would for contracting work you source yourself. Being in a position that hires said contractors, I have to say this is false. Rates are competitive; we're not the one's setting them, the market is. Recruiter's commission may play a factor where it's involved, but it certainly doesn't halve the rate. I'd also say "good luck" to acquiring contracts in your area of expertise directly from the companies that are buying them. They're looking for complete packages and the effort involved in acquiring and maintaing those relationships is quite often beyond the abilities of a single person.

tdyrsmid 14y ago

Having quit my day job back in 2000 to go into business for myself, I think I can give you a quick summary on the process to use: Step 1: ensure you have at least 12 months of living expenses in cash. If you don't, then sell everything and move in with your parents or friends so that your expenses go down a LOT. If you don't want to do this, you might ask yourself how bad you want to create your own business. Step 2. Spend all day talking to potential customers. Skip online research. Go talk to people. If you don't have something to sell (yet), tell them you are building it and you'd like to show them screenshots. You will suck at this conversation at first, but you will get better. Step 3. Sell, sell, and sell some more. If you have a product, sell to customers. If you don't, sell to investors. Either way, you have to persuade somebody to give you their money. Step 4. Pat yourself on the back because you just did something that most people only talk about. Step 5. Network your ass off and only hang around other entrepreneurs who will support you. JOBers will most likely only knock you down because they envy what you have done (and they dont' have the stones to do). Trent Dyrsmid

GICodeWarrior 14y ago

Depending on the interest rate of your educational loans, it can be better to keep them around. Save your money in the bank and budget for loan payments. Sometimes it is useful to have that extra cushion in the bank instead of saving a small percentage in interest.

Crake 14y ago
Most federal loans these days are at 6.8%, and max out at around $5,000/year for undergrads (which is only half the cost of tuition at a state uni here). Private loans tend to lean more towards 8-12%. Also, good luck even qualifying for the latter if you don't have a rich parent with collateral to cosign for you. It's a good thought, but I think it's much less useful today than it was in the era of 2-3% interest student loans. My teachers always use amazingly low interest rates in math problems and then get all shocked when I mention how much even the government charges these days.

moocow01 14y ago

Quitting your job is the easy part. Legitimately replacing it is the hard part. There are some nice thoughts here but I'd like to know what the plan is to survive. Its certainly possible to make it but I feel like this is glorifying a situation that most people once on the other side of the fence are going to be under stress and realize things are not necessarily so rosy. You have savings - great step. You have some things your working on - great step. Now how do you start making just enough money before your runway ends and you have to either go back to a job or start eating into your own time to do consulting (which is basically employment from my perspective). Ill admit Im a relatively risk averse person but Id say the best plan is the 1 step plan where the time you are spending on your own business becomes more profitable than going to work - easier said than done but thats my 2 cents.

zmitri 14y ago
I'm on the other side of the fence now. Yes, it's much harder, and much more stressful, but it's on my terms. There's a lot more to this story, but I've decided to draw this out over a couple posts. Funny you mention being risk averse. I've talked about this with my cofounder, and we don't see doing this as being risky. We see taking jobs as being risky, because we feel like we are losing out on doing something we like more and wasting our lives.

CommitPull 14y ago

Dude, I loved your article, very inspiring. Glad you managed to make the jump. Good luck!