DreamThrall
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- Oct 14, 2003
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Hello, everyone. I don't generally talk much around here, so you may or may not know me well, but I wanted to get this off my chest in a pseudo-anonymous fashion, so here it goes.
Those of you that know me know that I'm a software engineer, and for better or worse, I absolutely love my job. I've got great benefits, I can work from home, and I get to solve some pretty interesting problems with software. On top of that, my career progression has been fairly quick - I went from junior engineer, to senior engineer, to manager in a little over 3 years, and I'm also making 1.5x the salary I originally started at. I don't say all this to gloat; rather, I just want you to understand the incredibly comfortable position I've enjoyed for the last 3.5 years.
Several months ago, my manager/mentor - more or less the guy responsible for most of the previous paragraph - announced he was going on an indefinite leave of absence. What followed was quite a bit of turmoil and pseudo-related internal drama I don't really care to get into. Our other senior engineer left, leaving me as the most senior tech at the company, which had its mixed blessings. In my manager's absence, things slowly began to fall apart, culminating in a meeting I had 2 weeks ago with the company's president in which he more or less told me that I was basically being pushed out of the company. They weren't firing me, but "it would be in my best interests to find another job".
I had mixed feelings about this - I'd been considering finding another job since my manager left, but the problem was, the circumstances had changed since the last time I'd been on a job hunt. I've got a child now, so I need to maintain health insurance. My wife has been diagnosed with MS, which means that said health insurance plan needs to be fairly kickass. We're used to making much more money now, so I need to be able find a job that will allow us to maintain our lifestyle. With a family, making a career change of any significance is ****ing terrifying.
So hold on to all that for a moment.
I've also been working on a side project of my own lately. It's a Facebook application that hooks into Amazon and lets people make wishlists so that their friends can do holiday shopping for them. I'm fairly confident that it can be a pretty decent success - the problem is just that I don't have the time to put into it in order to get it up and running as quickly as I would need it to. While I believe that I have the ability to make it a success, I just don't know how fast I'd be able to make it a stable, sustainable income.
So, I've been applying to all sorts of local positions and telecommuting positions, and some of them seem pretty interesting. I'm just worried that after 3.5 years of putting my heart into a company with the result it got me I'm just not going to be able to be passionate about whatever company I work for next. I'm also worried that when I do take a new job, it'll be so time and energy consuming that I'll have even less time for my side project, which is what I *really* want to do... and between both of those things happening I'll end up miserable.
So, I've been turning several options over in my head...
a) We have enough in savings to pay bills for a couple months, which should be more than enough time to finish and launch the personal project. The problem with this is that money supposed to be getting saved to put a downpayment on a house, and if it does flop, I'm leaving my family without any financial safety net.
b) Try and get someone to invest or fund me, even a friend or family member. Viable, I suppose, but it would probably take more time than I've got, and it seems silly to take on a business partner when I *can* do it all on my own.
c) Suck it up and get a new job, finish in my free time. Duh.
I suppose this isn't really a dilemma, because C is really the only option... but it really isn't what I want to do.
Being an adult sucks.
*sigh*
tl;dr: don't bother.
Those of you that know me know that I'm a software engineer, and for better or worse, I absolutely love my job. I've got great benefits, I can work from home, and I get to solve some pretty interesting problems with software. On top of that, my career progression has been fairly quick - I went from junior engineer, to senior engineer, to manager in a little over 3 years, and I'm also making 1.5x the salary I originally started at. I don't say all this to gloat; rather, I just want you to understand the incredibly comfortable position I've enjoyed for the last 3.5 years.
Several months ago, my manager/mentor - more or less the guy responsible for most of the previous paragraph - announced he was going on an indefinite leave of absence. What followed was quite a bit of turmoil and pseudo-related internal drama I don't really care to get into. Our other senior engineer left, leaving me as the most senior tech at the company, which had its mixed blessings. In my manager's absence, things slowly began to fall apart, culminating in a meeting I had 2 weeks ago with the company's president in which he more or less told me that I was basically being pushed out of the company. They weren't firing me, but "it would be in my best interests to find another job".
I had mixed feelings about this - I'd been considering finding another job since my manager left, but the problem was, the circumstances had changed since the last time I'd been on a job hunt. I've got a child now, so I need to maintain health insurance. My wife has been diagnosed with MS, which means that said health insurance plan needs to be fairly kickass. We're used to making much more money now, so I need to be able find a job that will allow us to maintain our lifestyle. With a family, making a career change of any significance is ****ing terrifying.
So hold on to all that for a moment.
I've also been working on a side project of my own lately. It's a Facebook application that hooks into Amazon and lets people make wishlists so that their friends can do holiday shopping for them. I'm fairly confident that it can be a pretty decent success - the problem is just that I don't have the time to put into it in order to get it up and running as quickly as I would need it to. While I believe that I have the ability to make it a success, I just don't know how fast I'd be able to make it a stable, sustainable income.
So, I've been applying to all sorts of local positions and telecommuting positions, and some of them seem pretty interesting. I'm just worried that after 3.5 years of putting my heart into a company with the result it got me I'm just not going to be able to be passionate about whatever company I work for next. I'm also worried that when I do take a new job, it'll be so time and energy consuming that I'll have even less time for my side project, which is what I *really* want to do... and between both of those things happening I'll end up miserable.
So, I've been turning several options over in my head...
a) We have enough in savings to pay bills for a couple months, which should be more than enough time to finish and launch the personal project. The problem with this is that money supposed to be getting saved to put a downpayment on a house, and if it does flop, I'm leaving my family without any financial safety net.
b) Try and get someone to invest or fund me, even a friend or family member. Viable, I suppose, but it would probably take more time than I've got, and it seems silly to take on a business partner when I *can* do it all on my own.
c) Suck it up and get a new job, finish in my free time. Duh.
I suppose this isn't really a dilemma, because C is really the only option... but it really isn't what I want to do.
Being an adult sucks.
*sigh*
tl;dr: don't bother.
