Summer Vacation
xichekolas.blogspot.com
xichekolas.blogspot.com
In reality you get up, spend 30 minutes getting ready, another hour eating and commuting, more like 9-10 hours a work, another 30min or an hour getting home. After this whole ordeal you don't have any desire to even THINK about anything except relaxing.
On the weekends you're trying hard to find something to do that gives your life some kind of meaning besides the job you have.. something that doesn't include sitting in front of a computer.
The only way you can really work on something of your own is to quit your job and live off your savings. And still it's up for debate how much one person, without any investment can achieve working by themselves. You might be able to make a simple website.. But you won't be able to pay to promote it.
I suppose it's jealousy and greed. And this exists in almost every culture (from what I know) -- I hope things eventually change. Even Google is guilty of this form of "Evil".
I think the solution may be to think of your job as buying you time. Set a baseline salary that'll let you live a simple life with adequate health & safety. For a single guy, that's about $20K/year (= grad student wages); for a married guy with a couple kids, about $40K. If that seems low, remember that 50% of America lives on that.
Then take the difference between your actual salary and your cost of living, and think of it as time. For example, if you graduate with a $60K/year job, set aside 2/3 of your salary as savings, and every hour you work is buying you 2 hours of freedom. When you have enough time saved up to accomplish what you want, quit and "spend" it.
For example, I'm currently saving about 2 hours of time for every hour I work. I'm looking to quit after slightly more than 2 years at my job (that'll be another 6 months or so), at which point I'll have 4-5 years saved up.
I met an innkeeper in Alaska who followed this strategy. He and his wife decided when they got out of college that they'd live like grad students. They worked in the computer field. After 15 years, they each quit their jobs, bought a sailboat, and sailed around the world with their son, stopping at every port they came into. They finally settled in Seward, Alaska (pop. 3000), bought an old building, and fixed it up as an inn.
Where's your Buying Your Freedom As a Modern Day Wage Slave essay? ;-)
1999: Did a website for a local town newspaper
2000: Worked for an all-teenage venture funded dot-com (yeah, it was that easy to come by funding during the bubble).
2001: InstallShield scripting for said dot-com's parent company. (2000/2001 bookended a "gap year" between high school and college, so I was working there all year, with various projects.)
2002: Worked for a contract programming shop.
2003: Summer off - spent it learning Lisp and Dylan, attempting the ICFP programming contest (didn't finish), starting an Eclipse plugin for Dylan (didn't finish), and designing the database schema for FictionAlley.org (eventually did finish, but it wasn't till 2005).
2004: Worked for a financial software startup that eventually became my full-time employer.
2005: Summer off. Spent it finishing up FictionAlley.org. Well, that and going on a cruise.
If I had to rank the years from best to worst, it would probably be 2000, 2001, 1999, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2005. Two of the three worst were the years that I had no job, while all of the best involved a job of some sorts.
I suspect it's because when I had an internship, I spent the summer learning new technologies, which is exactly the same thing I would've been doing without an internship. However, with the internship, I a.) got paid b.) usually completed a project or 3, and c.) had people around me. When I was working on my own stuff, none of those were a given.
This is a great topic for people who are still working for someone else. One issue I've had is that I'm basically incapable of treating anything like a "day job". I want work really hard and pour passion into anything I do. When I have a day job I tend to give my best energy to it, draining me from my own projects.
I'd recommend internships, if you can get one, even if it means spending a lot of time working. But grunt jobs suck and part of me really regrets the amount of time and energy it wasted during my college summers.
I spent my teens and college years thinking the kids who traveled all summer were idiots. That they weren't contributing to society. Now I'm 27 and wishing I had taken a break.. Done something because I wanted to, not because it was "what you did". I thought that being a "year behind" would be disastrous for my career. Well guess what.. 1 year is nothing when you have to work for 50 more.
If you are young and able to just LIVE... do it. If living is working on your own startup, do it. If it's building a working replica of a PDP machine out of legos, do it. Just get out there. There's plenty of time for work.
However I had no idea what else I could be doing. I didn't realize that you could make a decent web application and attract users, for instance. The problem was that I didn't have any friends or mentors to guide me in the right direction.
To the people who are working on their startups full time now - how much money are you spending in living expenses per month?
summer jobs are a place where you get paid to learn. not only do you pick up technical skills, but you learn an assortment of soft skills (e.g. managing people, communicating, success metrics, company culture, etc). if working on your own projects will yield more relevant experience than at any summer job, then go out on your own.
in the end, summer vacation is long enough to learn a ridiculous amount, but short enough so that if you don't like it, you can grind through it.
A huge regret of mine.