[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.

[dasmoth]

If you'd enjoy the structure of university life, that's certainly worth considering.

But if you're happy doing it independently, why pay $lots (and add at least some extra bureaucracy) to "make it official"?

[marktangotango]

But is learning haskell worth the risk of quitting full time employment and living off of savings for x number of months or years? That is the context of this thread, and my statement.

[dasmoth]

How much trouble does the resume gap cause you?

The idea that everyone should want to have a job all the time seems like a strange distortion in the labour market.

[Kaizyn]

I bet you now know a lot about parsing and the relational schemas and managing models now. You'll hit a problem again where this turns out to be valuable knowledge. Even a failed experiment if the problem is interesting enough is fruitful for improving your thinking about hard problems. Once you get past being disappointed over the experience, you'll probably find that a second attenpt at cracking the problem gets you further.

[DennisP]

I'm doing this right now. I sometimes feel that I'm not being very productive and should just get a job. Then I look over my daily journal and discover I'm getting quite a lot done.

This week I started using Trello with a basic kanban arrangement. When I'm ready for a break from one task, instead of goofing off I just switch to a different one. Eg., if I need a break from coding, I'll read my current book for a while; at the moment I'm going through a stack of books on UI design.

I've built one proof of concept, made a lot of progress on another, did each in a language I didn't know before, and I'm working now on another idea using Meteor, which I also didn't know before. Several projects are from ideas I had after starting all this, and I think they could become marketable products.

I guess you could say I'm not exactly doing the "leisure" thing since I'm working towards real products, but it's not a definite startup yet either. But now I'm focusing more on the easier projects so I can get something into production. It's been nice working in an ivory tower for a little while, but I'm getting an itch to show people results.

And I'm having a great time doing it all. I'm pretty introverted so I don't need that much social interaction, but I have a girlfriend I see every day, do lunch with my old coworkers every week or two, and make sure I get good food and exercise. Several times a week I wake up early enough and watch the sunrise.

All of which is just to say: YMMV.

[D_Alex]

Moreover.... if you are not in software, but say mechanical engineering (like myself), doing anything new and interesting usually costs a lot of money. And if you do not have that money - because you have quit your paying job - your ideas will never be built. And if you try to get funding from others... well that can be really disheartening, the VC scene in mechanical engineering is much much worse that in software.

[tomblomfield]

Totally agree. I get my energy and focus from working with a (small) team of people, usually under time-pressure.

Working by myself, without any deadlines or goals, I become unmotivated and pretty depressed.

[jsprogrammer]

Sounds like it would help you to set your own deadlines and goals if you want to successfully work by yourself.

[clarebear]

The author is just asking his friends to do what he is doing to provide the social context he is lacking. He is right that naming it attractively is motivating. But an attractive name is usually not enough to an engineer to make up for not getting to touch the gears of how the world actually works.

[ChrisLoer]

Yeah, the lack of feedback (and not being embedded in a motivated team) is a very big downside. In my case, I responded by distancing myself a little bit from focusing so much on success at the one "big" thing I was working on, and focusing more on enjoying curiosity, exploration, etc. The app I've created probably falls in the "tool" category more than "product", and I spend (waste?) a fair amount of time psychologically prepping myself for marking it as a failure. On balance, I still feel like it's been a good move for my life, but of course the experiment is ongoing...

[neilk]

Oh yeah, let me say, my year+ of trying this wasn't a waste either.

I updated my skills, learned new tech, and tried stuff I never would have got to try in a normal work situation. I got to dick around with pretty UI on Monday and backend performance on Tuesday.

So a sabbatical of sorts wasn't a terrible idea -- I'd just do it differently. Ensuring a good iterative environment (social context, regular advisor meetings, customer contact) would be my #1 priority.

[mavdi]

It pretty much depends on your personality too I guess. I myself can go years without the need to interact with any other soul.

[intrasight]

Really excellent suggestions in my opinion