
A young person's guide to quitting your day job - zmitri
http://arbor.posterous.com/i-quit-my-high-paying-job-what-now
======
blhack
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.

~~~
fizx
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/>. They had a
pretty good experience.

Good luck!

~~~
tcdent
> 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.

------
moocow01
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
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.

------
tdyrsmid
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

------
blendergasket
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
"...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
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
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.

------
iyulaev
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
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
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
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"

~~~
michaelochurch
I would advise taking acting classes. No, I'm not trolling. It can teach
social skills and also make corporate life a lot more bearable. Public
speaking is good, too.

Sometimes you have to _act_ subordinate, while keeping your poise. Play the
character, do the role well, but never actually _be_ subordinate. Always keep
your own career goals (knowledge, contacts, credibility) in mind and protect
them, because corporate incoherence will assault your goals from all sides.
It's rare that anyone will look out for you, and usually managers can't
(that's called "playing favorites") so you have to do that for yourself. Your
real boss is someone you can't get away from but who can't fire you: it's you.

~~~
pathy
This is very good advice. One tangent on this is the High/Low status games we
did during the few acting classes I took in high school.

It truly helps you read some situations as one does act differently when a
high or low status is assigned to you, it is striking how it affects
behaviour, both in the game and when applied to real life.

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

~~~
nathanbarry
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/>

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!

~~~
zmitri
Surprisingly similar to my situation when I quit (except I didn't have a baby,
and I'm not American). So nice to hear things turned out.

------
vlokshin
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.

------
d0m
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?)

------
MikeKusold
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.

~~~
michaelochurch
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
> 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.

------
ataleb52
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
As can I. I think I have some natural aversion to having a boss.

------
GICodeWarrior
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
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.

------
ry0ohki
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
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
_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?

~~~
jlgreco
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.

~~~
byoung2
That's different, as the restaurant is a US business employing a foreign
national without a visa. In my example, the business was outside the US, and
no money changed hands here.

~~~
jlgreco
Ah, I took your hypothetical as a proposal for an enforcement loophole, not a
legal loophole.

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

------
Gobitron
I'm at step 1-5

~~~
xspectre
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
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
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
If I were American and didn't need an H1B, It would have happened a year
earlier.

