
Join the Engineering Leisure Class - ChrisLoer
https://medium.com/@chrisloer/join-the-engineering-leisure-class-b3083c09a78e
======
vinceguidry
> Luckily, there’s a corner of the Internet dedicated to breaking the link
> between “comfort” and money.

The problem with this is that it moves in the wrong direction. You spent all
this time learning how to earn more money for your time. Then what do you do
after you earn a bunch of money? Figure out how to trade your time for money
again, just in different arenas? Why, so you can avoid having to spend more
time doing what you specialized in? This isn't the direction of leisure.

The MMM types always are quick to say that they actually enjoy all these
little things they do to avoid having to put out more money for daily
essentials. Cloth diapering and seems the be the poster-child for these sorts
of things. Also using single-blade razors. Working on your own car.

Doing these things properly requires learning more skills. But time spent
learning these skills is time not spent engineering. It almost seems more of a
irrational reaction against modernity than it does an actual path towards
greater impact.

You need to be trading the money you're making through specialization for time
not spent learning more skills to be going in the direction of more actual
leisure. (what I call "fuck you time". Much better IMO than fuck you money.)
You use some of the freed-up time to make more money, and the rest of it
towards leisure activities. It's possible for your skill-set to be so valuable
that you can maintain ridiculous incomes on, as Tim Ferriss puts it, four
hours a week.

Every dollar I can spend on not learning a new skill is a minute I can put
towards pushing my flywheel.

~~~
jnem
Sorry, but i cant find a reference to what MMM means anywhere. Im guessing you
guys aren't talking about the Moon Miners Manifesto.. or talking about
enjoying something "mmm.mmm.mmm"

~~~
lemdj
[http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/)

~~~
jnem
Ahh, there we go, context. Thanks!

------
mndrix
I've been doing this for 8 years and love it.

I'm married with 5 kids. We live in rural Wyoming (no income tax, bought a
comfortable house for $86k). We've always lived well below our income so we
have no debt and sufficient savings.

I mostly choose to work on "products". That helps me focus on problems that
people actually care about without any of the startup pressures. Although,
I've also written several open source libraries that I thought the community
might like.

I started by telling my employer that I would only work 4 days each week. I
spent Fridays working on a cool idea my brother and I had. That idea proved
useful enough to pay the bills so I quit my job.

I'm much more relaxed now and spend better quality time with my kids. In
hindsight, it would be worth almost any sacrifice to get to this point again.

~~~
BSousa
Quick question since you have a few kids. Is real Wyoming a good place for
them in terms of school and future? (really asking, no idea as I live on the
other side of the pond).

I work from home so I can move anywhere, and a more rural/calm place, earning
less and having more time does appeal to me, but all the good schools here are
in the city and I'm not brave enough to risk my kids future on my dreams of
today.

~~~
mndrix
I think that our local schools are about as good as government education can
get. My kids' classes range from 11 to 14 students so they get lots of 1-on-1
time with a teacher. The teachers provide extra challenges for exceptional
students. The teachers and school administration are very responsive to
feedback from parents. Students graduating from high school with good grades
get a full scholarship to the University of Wyoming, if they want it.

Having said that, my wife and I place much more emphasis on independent
learning and life experiences than on formal schooling. Because my wife and I
have plenty of time, we are able to encourage their education in ways we
couldn't if we lived in an expensive city. Our lower living expenses also
allow us to take trips and have experiences that we feel are more valuable
than book learning.

------
neilk
I did this. I advise against this.

I had money saved up, and for visa reasons had to spend a year outside the
USA. Seemed like a perfect time to indulge in some risky ideas, especially
those which were a little idealistic.

It ended up being incredibly depressing and I got very little done.

It's hard enough to build a product when you're in a startup or a smart team.
In my opinion it's nearly impossible if you're going it alone. And unless some
of your friends have an exactly coincidental amount of leisure time or extra
energy, you probably won't make progress.

It's especially bad if you're taking on something that you think is good for
the world, because now you have extra pressure, but no extra motivation.

Plus, things that are good for the world tend to be _products_ , and not just
tools. Those are harder.

I know _you_ , the reader reading this, are exempt from this, and you're an
island of personal productivity that needs no human inputs. That's how I used
to think, too. Or at least, I told myself that I was more capable than others
who said the same thing and who similarly failed.

The main problem is that you think you're freeing yourself from distraction
and you're just going to have 100% of time to work on something. But in the
process you might also free yourself from people to tell you you are
overbuilding, from customers to tell you you're doing it wrong, from the
social interactions that make the day brighter. And you might feel the urge to
keep it all behind the curtain until The Great Unveiling. This has the effect
of making all your small progresses, in the meantime, feel useless. Success
recedes further and further away, and human emotional feedback loops don't
usually work in those situations.

So I suggest if you're going to use your money and time this way:

\- Take on something small. REALLY small. Then cut it to 10% of that size.
Then release it. Iterate if it seems to be working out and building a
community.

or:

\- Be very young and with enough privilege to not have to worry about debt.
You have leisure time, few expenses or commitments, and extra energy, and so
does almost everyone you know.

or:

\- Make sure others are invested in your success and have a commitment to it
that's at least in the same order of magnitude as your own. A funded startup
is a wonderful way of focusing commitment like this, and ensuring that you
have to talk to people all the time. But there are other models.

~~~
marktangotango
I did this too, and I agree. IMO anything worth doing is non trivial. The
project I took on had some really hard parts. Example: something akin to
defining a relational schema for maintaining a model of c/c++ source code,
before and after preprocessing (not exactly, but same idea minus the
difficulty of parsing c++). This was one of about 5 'hard' problems. I got
bogged down, and with no one to bounce ideas off, I became trapped in
'analysis paralysis'.

I gave up after 8 months and got a job. Now all I have to show for it is some
source code, and a gap on my resume to explain.

~~~
rifung
I'll have to respectfully disagree with the idea that "anything worth doing is
nontrivial." This might certainly be the case for you, but I would love to
just spend some time learning Haskell, writing an OS for fun, reading papers
on Theoretical Computer Science, or trying to find security exploits.

I don't think these things are hard, at least they certainly aren't things I
would doubt myself to be able to do. These are just things I'm sure I could do
today if only I had more time, and at least to me these are definitely worth
thing for one reason: they make me happy

~~~
smikhanov

        > I would love to just spend some time learning Haskell,
        > writing an OS for fun, reading papers on Theoretical
        > Computer Science, or trying to find security exploits.
    

What you describe sounds like what students do in a university. Maybe you
should consider another degree in CS?

~~~
rifung
Indeed I didn't finish my degree and would love to go back and even get a PhD!
But.. it doesn't make much financial sense right now, especially when you
consider that the earlier you save and invest the better the outcome, so I'm
waiting till the time is right.

------
geebee
"An engineer earning an amazingly-not-uncommon salary of $100k/year ends up
living in an expensive place like San Francisco, starts spending money on some
admittedly lovely luxuries, and quickly becomes convinced that her spending is
just about right for a comfortable life."

Certainly, one way to manage all this is to not live in a place like San
Francisco. But I think it is important to make sure people know that lovely
luxuries aren't really what forces people with families to focus on money, and
that if you do try to raise a family in SF on the median developer's pay
(about $114k a year in SF), you'll find engineers don't really have "more
money than <we> need", though of course there's always a version of poverty or
struggling that would make raising a family on $114k in any expensive city a
cakewalk.

Just keep in mind, the median price for a house here is over 1 mil, and that 1
mil will get you a 2br, maybe 3, south of 280 or maybe the outer sunset. OK
areas. Full time childcare is about $24,000 a year. Those are really the
whopper expenses (that and health care).

Are those "lovely luxuries"? Well, maybe living in SF is a lovely luxury. I
like it here, though I'm really here because I grew up here, have two kids in
school, and have so much family around that I'm sort of superglued at this
point. But yeah, I could leave. All in all, I think there are better places
(no, I'm not like some pac northwester trying to get you scared of the rain,
if it's your choice to live here you should be welcome in SF, but I really do
mean this, I'm really not sure SF is worth it if you have the option of living
somewhere else).

I'm not trying to be hard on the author of this piece, but I do think it's
important for people to know that engineers in SF even in dual income families
struggle with housing and child care payments, not with luxury cars, expensive
vacation, lovely luxuries.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> I'm not trying to be hard on the author of this piece, but I do think it's
> important for people to know that engineers in SF even in dual income
> families struggle with housing and child care payments, not with luxury
> cars, expensive vacation, lovely luxuries.

Choosing to work in a locale where a median home price is a million dollars is
a luxury. Engineers could pick from other metro areas, and get fairly close to
$100K/year with much lower costs of living (Austin, Dallas, Durham come to
mind, there are many more).

~~~
dilap
Most of my family is here in SF. Since when is "living near your family" a
"luxury"? Fuck that.

~~~
scott_s
When it is a _choice_ , and other people do not have that choice because of
their ability to pay for it.

------
analog31
Something to consider is risk. Here's what goes through my head: I can plan
for how much I need to earn throughout my life if everything is "normal" and
predictable. But what if one of my kids is born in need of some monumental
amount of care? What if something happens to my own physical / mental health,
or that of my spouse? What if the economy goes into a long term downturn and
we have to live on savings indefinitely? What if we have to leave the country
due to political turmoil? (One of my parents is a refugee).

Thinking about these things made me kinda appreciate why the rich want to get
richer. Even if I'm earning more than strictly necessary for subsistence under
normal conditions, our economy / society is set up so that the only source of
a safety net for my family is my own productivity right now. I wouldn't mind
growing that safety net to infinity, so long as it imposes no externality on
my own family. This is what keeps me in the rat race.

A better safety net would make people think less about going to such extremes.

I'm lucky to have a mentally rewarding job with minimal "price" in terms of
things like office politics and bullshit. My opinion might change if this
situation changes.

------
solveforall
I am currently doing this. I am much more productive compared to having a
corporate job, but it is really hard on your family. There seems to be an arms
race on doing everything for your kids these days. That means moving to a good
school district (usually in very expensive places), paying for and driving to
tons of activities, organic food, nice stuff. I have realized none of these
things are possible while we are living off savings.

That said I feel much happier now being able to focus on a project that is my
own creation. I was frequently angry everyday I had to split my time between
paid work and my own project, leaving even less time for my family. (To be
honest, in terms of total work, I got more done, but was miserable.) I
frequently think about the consequences if my project ends up being a failure,
but if I never tried to create something on my own, I'm pretty sure I would
regret it on my deathbed.

My advice is to do this engineering leisure time before you have a family to
support.

<shamelessplug> If anyone wants a preview of what I'm building, please check
out [https://solveforall.com/](https://solveforall.com/). It's a hackable
search engine that can be enhanced with user-provided data, programs, and
third party APIs. I'm currently working on making it much more customizable
and private, so hopefully I'll be able to publicly announce it in a 2-3 more
months. </shamelessplug>

One problem as mentioned in another thread is that it is very hard to get
feedback while working alone. Everyone is so busy these days caught up in the
rat race and their families, and I don't blame them. It would be nice to have
some tech friends at work to bounce ideas off of. If anyone has any feedback
for me, I'd greatly appreciate it!

~~~
tomjacobs
Try telling us about your projects and updates on Glitch Club, this is exactly
what it's for: [http://glitchclub.com](http://glitchclub.com)

~~~
solveforall
Sorry, I'm a bit old school in that I prefer text over videos, and desktop
apps over mobile. Text on desktop can more easily be edited and perfected
before being sent out. I like the idea of a community feedback platform though
-- would definitely use it if it were multiplatform.

~~~
tomjacobs
Yeah it's for desktop and mobile. Desktop for browsing and watching and
listening, and take your phone out of you want to add your voice.

------
rifung
This is actually exactly what I want to do, although I just started working so
for obvious reasons it isn't a reality yet. How long does it take to save up
enough money that you wouldn't need to work though?

Also, it seems like eventually you'd run out of money unless you can just
retire early, in which case, you have the issue of explaining why you've been
out of work for so long and proving you still are up to the task.

The last issue I have is that things I want to enjoy in my leisure time are
costly. For example, I'd love to finish my degree and study music, but these
things cost money. I want to continue studying piano, but pianos cost money,
getting a house costs money, and lessons cost money. I'm sure I would still
program and do projects, but it's not the only thing I happen to enjoy. Maybe
not everyone has expensive hobbies like I do but I bet a lot of people, for
whatever reason, want kids. Those things are expensive!

Also, I take issue with the author assuming that we spend money on luxuries
just because we make more. At least for myself, this is not true at all. I've
had jobs that were very stressful, and getting things I liked was my means of
destressing and justifying staying at my job instead of just becoming a
teacher or something (Not that teachers don't have stressful jobs, I just
wonder if I'd enjoy it more). I think I'd have trouble keeping some jobs if I
couldn't enjoy spending some of what I made.

~~~
ChrisLoer
\- On how long it takes to save up enough money that you don't need to work:
depends on your assumptions, but yes it takes some years of work. There are
lots of people who write on this, I especially like:
[http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/)

\- I don't personally have enough money to pay for my current living expenses
for the 70-odd years I hope to remain alive. It was an important shift for me
when I stopped thinking this was necessary. I have enough money to glide for
several years, and I'm confident that either some money will come my way
during those years (and I believe it's a little easier to make money when
you're not worried so much about it), or I will at least have enough time to
notice I'm running out and adjust course. I'm not too worried about the "hole
in my resume". If you do interesting stuff with your life, you'll always have
a good story to tell. Maybe your story isn't optimized for going up a certain
career ladder, but who cares?

\- I don't think luxuries are bad, and I think you spending money on a piano
could be an awesome use of your time on earth. I just think we don't realize
quite how many choices we have. I know lots of poor musicians find ways to get
access to pianos, and owning a house out here in 29 Palms is certainly not too
costly. But that doesn't mean you have to do it that way!

\- I also spent more money while I was working long hours in part to "de-
stress". While I don't think it was strictly necessary, I don't think it's
crazy. It's just useful to remember that those "de-stressing" costs disappear
when you leave the stressful situation.

~~~
HaloZero
Wow, you live out in 29 Palms? I grew up in Yucca Valley.

You can live pretty cheaply out there but you also have to deal with all dumb
crap out there. It wasn't very pleasant growing up in the schools there.

~~~
ChrisLoer
We're still a few years off from worrying about schools, but it is the sort of
thing that makes us _toy_ with the idea of some variety of home-schooling. I'm
sure there other nuisances around, but I'm a desert rat and I think this place
is absolutely beautiful (although my opinion of the desert usually dips a
little in July and August).

------
x3n0ph3n3
Why should we assign "meaning" to leisure? Why does everything you do have to
be meaningful? Reminds me of a lyric from Cat Power - Metal Heart: "How
selfish of you to believe in the meaning of all the things you do."

~~~
gluggymug
I think we assign "meaning" to leisure so we give it as much value as our
work. Gaming ourselves to respect leisure more.

I.e. The itch we instinctively don't bother scratching when we are too busy
working. We need to value that itch so we take the time to scratch.

------
dreamdu5t
Engineers don't make _that_ much money. Yes, I live a middle-class lifestyle.
But even without owning a car, not having a child, etc. After saving for
retirement and eating healthy food, I simply don't have that much savings to
start any business that requires a decent amount of capital to get going - at
least not without burning through everything fairly quickly. At most I could
take a couple of months off and destroy that savings the buffer against job
loss and other emergencies.

I don't get why the world thinks software engineers are so rich...

~~~
Avshalom
>>But even without owning a car, not having a child, etc.

>>I don't get why the world thinks software engineers are so rich...

Last year I lived in Austin TX, owned a car, ate healthy, lived 15 minutes
from the city center and made 29000 before taxes. Of which I managed to save
15000.

The world doesn't think software engineers are so rich, we think anyone above
50K is rich, because for a lot of us thats double what we make a year, and
many of us are supporting families on that. The idea that some one making
75-100k could be living paycheck to paycheck is fucking baffling to the half
the population making less than 42k per household.

~~~
dionidium
What's happening is that upper-middle class families _really do_ run out of
money after saving for college, sending the kids to private school, both
driving two new cars, and so on. They think of those things as _basics_ and
forget that those _basics_ are unattainable to most.

~~~
gohrt
Note that "saving for college" means "saving to pay for their kid's tuition
AND ALSO pay for the financial that goes to a family earning $50k/yr".

And two cars (not necessarily new) because both parents are driving to work.

And property tax that pays for public school for kids of less real-estate-
wealthy folks

Also marginal tax rate (Federal, state, social security) of ~30-40% on the
difference in income.

~~~
dionidium
You can't list those first three things and then _also_ -in the last one. The
last one encompasses the first three.

~~~
sukilot
That is incorrect. Tuition and property tax is not the same as income tax.

------
MisterWalter
It always drives me crazy when people that make 50k+ a year complain about not
having money. I live on about $500-$600 a month and I'm fine. Granted, not
everyone is ablebodied and living within biking distance of their school/work,
but most certainly could be, especially with a little effort.

Not needing money is incredibly liberating, I advise everyone to just try it
for a year.

~~~
greenjellybean
I agree with you. My current life style ends up around $7,000 a year. I live
in a very affluent mid-east city. I don't own a car (15 minute walk to
downtown), I don't eat out constantly (I prefer healthy meals), and I don't
buy a bunch of luxury junk. I can honestly say that I do not feel like I'm
struggling at all.

Having the 'standard' car, house, and family are unnecessary luxuries. It's
fine if you choose to do these things but it's silly to me that people feel
poor making 50k+. I would argue that if you are struggling with those types of
income, your lifestyle is severely out of whack. You don't have to keep up the
Jonses to lead a very happy, healthy life.

The benefits of living cheaply are pretty obvious and already pretty well
covered. The ability to work on whatever I want, whenever I want all without
ever having to think about the personal finance side of it, is just incredibly
freeing.

------
desbo
The author obviously doesn't live in London. I could never afford to pay rent
without a job.

The article is idealistic bullshit.

~~~
angrybits
So relocate to bumfuck, england and do your work there. I don't think the idea
is to ditch your job and still pay $3000 a month for an apartment.

~~~
twic
What work? There are no jobs in Bumfuck, and not enough companies that hire
remote workers for this to scale.

As i understand it, the situation in the US is that there is Silicon Valley,
where the salaries are high and the rents higher, and then half a dozen other
places where there are significant concentrations of software jobs, and more
reasonable living costs.

This is not really the case in the UK. There's London, there's a ring of big
corporate offices just outside London (Guildford, Cheshunt, places like that),
and that's more or less it. You pretty much need to live in London or its
commuter belt to work non-remotely in software.

~~~
jasonkester
You're mistaken about how easy it is to find remote developer work. Upon
moving to bf Lake District, I had no trouble picking up a gig for an American
company at my Bay Area rate.

There are enough companies hiring remote workers these days that I can't
understand why _anybody_ in England continues to put up with comically low and
out of touch with reality London rates.

~~~
twic
Are you seriously trying to generalise from your experience as one person to
an entire city?

There's certainly enough remote work going for you to find a job. Or for
everyone reading this page to do so. But there are over 100 000 people working
in IT in London. Are there 100 000 remote jobs available?

~~~
jasonkester
Remember, we're not trying to find remote jobs for everybody in London. Only
enough for the ones smart enough to move someplace nicer and take a job with
an American company.

Also keep in mind that _every_ developer job is a remote one. It may not be
advertised that way, but if you've proven that you're good at what you do and
you decide to move out of your felt cube and claim back your quality of life,
your company will find a way to accommodate that (if they're smart enough to
do the simple arithmetic to calculate what it would cost to replace you in
this market).

~~~
AwesomeGorilla
There is going to be a tipping point if London property prices continue to
rise. There's no point in having a start up in, say, Shoreditch if you can't
afford to pay living salaries to people to work there, so either you a) move
somewhere the salaries and office space is cheaper or b) you go remote and
increase your talent pool. There's quite a few startups that have to be in
London (e.g. they work in the finance industry) but there's likely more than a
few that really don't need to be.

------
chrisBob
Its nice to see a name for this. I am considering joining the Engineering
Leisure Class this winter. My wife got a new job which will comfortably
support our family, so I will have some flexibility. My plan is to look for
jobs also, but only apply for ones I would love.

If that doesn't work out then I will find something fun to do that may not
pay. This will be some combination of taking Tactition Programming seriously,
and working on open source lab specific software that my wife uses for
crystallography.

------
scribu
> You’re not limited to small ideas, either: part-time volunteers in the open
> source community have built huge parts of the modern world.

Am I wrong in thinking that, in fact, all major open-source projects continue
to thrive because there are big established companies supporting them? Where
corporate support is lacking, the project doesn't do too well in the long term
(I'm mainly thinking of the OpenSSL case from a few months back).

------
gaius
The RMS lifestyle - get a $1m grant or two, then work for free!

~~~
ChrisLoer
Haha, he's a pretty impressive example of independence, although I don't think
either the million dollars or the parrots are truly necessary!

~~~
gohrt
RMS is not independent. He is interdependent. He relies heavily on the
community for housing when he travels.

~~~
smikhanov
Who is RMS? First results on Google are "root main square" and "Risk
Management Solutions".

~~~
dagw
Fourth result and first person (at least for me) on Google is Richard M
Stallman.

------
velocitypsycho
Two words make this difficult. Health Insurance.

~~~
stevenmays
Not with the ACA... now if you retire and only have income you draw from your
investments, you pay a low income based rate even though you may have
significant assets.

~~~
ChrisLoer
Yeah, I think ACA is a huge supporter of this kind of move... although I
planned to get an exchange plan, I ended up marrying a member of the US Navy,
so I get covered by Tricare. I know, not everyone has that luck (or lots of
other luck I enjoyed)...

------
yellowapple
While I'm sure this sounds great in theory, I can't help but interpret this as
coming from someone who is lucky enough to have the privilege of not being
broke.

If you're part of the lucky privileged elite that actually _has_ money to
burn, then yeah, go for it. For the rest of us, though, saying "you should
stop working for a paycheck so you have more time to do other things"
basically translates to "you should stop eating, drinking water, and breathing
oxygen so you have more time to do other things", which is plain nonsensical
unless one happens to be a robot (which, while I'd love to be a robot, isn't
really in the cards right now).

------
swagmeister
We aren't rich by any means... Don't start thinking about dropping off the
face of the earth or going into philanthropy if you still only have a 6 figure
bank account, like many of us do... Also don't forget about what happened in
2000. Engineers should probably work more but spend less money because things
aren't so easy in less favorable conditions

------
hyperbovine
How many kids do you have, Chris? :-)

~~~
ChrisLoer
One kid is on the way -- and yes, I have no idea how children are going to
affect our lives! I've considered going in two totally different directions: I
might go for a high-paying full-time job so that my wife and I can pay for a
nanny and all those other modern affluent child-raising tools, or I might try
to go full-bore stay-at-home Dad changing diapers and raising the kids to grow
their own food in the backyard and make their own clothes. More likely I'll
muddle somewhere in between, but I want to go into it with as many options as
possible, and a clear idea of what we want for ourselves and our kids.

~~~
danans
If you are considering the in-between with kids and work, remember that
managing the in-between has it's own logistical overhead (== costs).

For example, if you have a nanny part-time, you will have to figure out nanny
taxes - assuming you're doing it the legal way - or pay an outside party to
manage the nanny's payroll.

That overhead may be easier to justify when the nanny is allowing you to work
a full time high paying job, less so if the nanny is only coming a couple days
a week. In this case, you might consider a part-time day care center instead.

And unless you have a lot of energy or hired/family help, you will be so tired
in the first few years of your child's life that you likely won't have the
energy to do anything beyond growing a few token tomatoes and potatoes,
certainly nothing at the scale needed to make a dent in a family's food costs.

For clothing, tap your friends-with-kids network to get into the hand-me-down
stream. Babies and toddlers grow out of clothes faster than they can wear them
out, and new clothes are $$$.

------
tomjacobs
This is exactly what I'm building with Glitch Club. It's a community of
talented engineers who could be creating great things if they had the support
of others and the community feedback on their work daily. Check it out:

[http://glitchclub.com](http://glitchclub.com)

At the moment I'm exploring other directions with it, such as having it as a
story telling platform, but the original idea was a startup/engineering
sounding board. With reply videos able to be added to the existing videos
there, and smart conversations happening through video replying to video.

------
nick_urban
Living comfortably on little money is a skill. MMM calls it the "frugality
muscle". If you don't understand how to do it, it's not because it's
impossible. It's just that you haven't learned how.

In parallel to the skill acquisition there is a change in mindset, replacing
the ideal of comfort with the ideals of strength and self-sufficiency.

------
ZeroFries
I would much prefer working part-time in traditional money earning avenues,
and spending my other 20-30 hours of energetic time on the projects/activities
I personally want to work/play on. I just wish there were more opportunities
for high value part-time work.

------
Bostonian
If you are an engineer working at a company, I'd expect that the resources
provided by the company and the access to coworkers make you more productive.
If you think you would be more productive on your own, this may be a sign to
change employers.

------
strlen
Few things:

\- Depending on what kind of problems you enjoy solving, you're going to be
miserable even if you are able to do this.

I love working on my own at times (exploring new concepts and ideas, new
languages, or even "toy projects" with no real-world applications), but in the
end, I find working on bigger problems, with a team of great people to be a
lot more fulfilling.

\- Constraints are useful in that they force you to rely on something other
than pure will power. This can go both ways: _if_ you are going without a
regular source of income (as opposed to retiring after winning the [startup]
lottery), you'll need to sacrifice time for money. On the other hand, a full
time job provides a good deal of constraints as well (both for what you do
_at_ work and what you do outside of work hours).

Gene Wolfe[2] kept a full time job and wrote an hour each day. That had two
constraints: he didn't need to rush or alter his work in order to sell (his
books are fulfilling and rewarding but not a "easy, fun read" that brings in
great royalties right away) and since he only had an hour each day to write,
he knew he had to make the best of it (one thing said about him, is that he
doesn't waste words: he's got a whole CNC machine milling Chekhov's guns...)

\- Burnout is an entirely different matter, one shouldn't generalize from
"this helps deal with being burnt out" to "drop everything, do this, and
you'll never be burnt out."

\- Finally, it isn't a feasible option for most:

First, one can't insure against economic catastrophe, savings and a low burn
rate are great, but ultimately the _only_ financial insurance one is there
ability to earn an income[1].

That ability is predicated on ability to contribute and the amount of people
willing to pay for your contributions. In other words, if you're a great
developer and you live (or can relocate to) a fluid job market, your risks are
lower than those of an average developer (note: assuming a normal probability
distribution, 50% of developers are _below_ average, and most fall within a
standard deviation of average...) in a less fluid job market.

Areas with fluid job markets tend to have higher costs of living. Unless one
is extremely talented (and in many cases, even if that is the case), one
doesn't become a great cut above average overnight. One generally starts off
with a job in an area with a fluid job market (hence greater expenses!) and
over the time develops ties to the area (friends, family, pets, etc...) and
can't easily drop everything to move to a cheaper area for their "leisure
time" and then -- if something goes wrong -- easily return to the area to take
advantage of the fluid job market.

All else being equal, a developer of equal skill, in an equally fluid area,
that did not "take a year off" will hired over one that has, _unless_ they've
done something extra-ordinary with this time. Best prediction of being able to
do something extra-ordinary is... having done something extra-ordinary. So at
the least, do something extra-ordinary on a smaller scale _first_ before going
full-time on it. Zuck and billg didn't drop out of Harvard with a blank emacs
window (in billg's case, perhaps it was a TECO window, not sure if TECO EMACS
was around in his days...).

\- In a capitalist system, money does one thing well: if you have more money
than you have a use for, you can give it to someone who has the time to make
the most of it. Marginally, a dollar spent donating to someone _very good_
working on a project I care about (a programming language, infrastructure for
open source projects, a social cause, etc...) goes _much further_ than a
dollar "spent" by foregoing income to work on most of those projects full-
time. As for the exceptions to this, I can usually incorporate them into full-
time jobs.

Conversely, I'd suggest this heuristic:

1) Can you afford it without putting people who rely on you into jeopardy?
(Are you going to demand that your wife end a rewarding career to move to a
cheaper area with you? Are you going to make your kids move to an area in
inferior schools? If either is true, stop right there and then...)

2) Marginal value of dollar spent metric above: if someone can do a better job
with the same resources, help provide the resources for them. Concrete
example: since my username doesn't begin with a 'p' and end with a 'g', money
I contributed to Clojure project (when it was in dire financial straits)
probably had more impact in creating a Lisp-1 with a good macro-system than if
I were to quit my job and work full-time on a Lisp-1 (likewise, while pg can
afford to literally work on anything he wants to, he chooses to invest[3] in
teams capable of building things he careers deeply about, but isn't quite good
at building himself).

Otherwise, try to make the "leisure" activity part of your day-to-day job as
well.

3) Otherwise, if you can do something awesome with your time -- you probably
don't need someone named after a function that may never return in a memory-
unsafe language's standard library to tell you that :-)

[1] Investments under-writing "early retirement" may collapse. "Social
insurance" such as universal healthcare, pensions, unemployment benefits,
etc... can be voted or sued out of existence.

[2] If you're an SFF fan, pick up Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy
sometime, but be warned that once you start, your dreams of doing anything
else with your time will be over.

[3] Investing is not the same thing as donations, but I don't believe any
angel/seed investor invests purely for the money.

------
aswanson
i have been pondering getting a high salaried job in sv for 1-2 years living
out of my car and office and saving 90 percent of my salary to live nicely
anywhere else in the country.

~~~
campers
Reminds me of this article :)
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2750652/Former-
Googl...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2750652/Former-Google-
employees-brag-long-lived-work-rent-free-thanks-tech-giant-s-awesome-
perks.html)

------
Dewie3
> We’re used to thinking of leisure in the narrow sense of “use of free time
> for enjoyment,” but leisure can be more meaningful if we focus instead on
> its broader definition as “opportunity afforded by free time to do
> something.”

Stop coupling "enjoyment" with "non-productive".

~~~
rifung
How did the author couple enjoyment with nonproductive?

It seems like the opposite considering he's advocating working on an idea for
no pay, which is something you'd only do because you enjoy it and can easily
be seen as being productive.

~~~
Dewie3
> How did the author couple enjoyment with nonproductive?

By considering "use of free time for enjoyment" too narrow. Supposedly because
he thinks that "meaningful" is distinct from "enjoyable".

~~~
ChrisLoer
I'm sorry if I phrased that sentence wrong. I certainly don't think
"enjoyable" things are "non-productive". In fact I think that the things we
truly enjoy are likely to be some of the most productive things we do.

