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Comment by logicslave | Hacker News Reader

I took 18 months off, built a machine learning product and then sold it for a modest amount of money. It was very exciting for me. Then I joined a FAANG company, and I'll be honest, I am completely miserable. I feel like I am in a cage, and the time off only convinced me that I am happier in other modes of being. The unhappiness of working that I attributed to burn out was really because I actually just hated having a job, any job. But theres no easy answer, starting a company is financially very risky.

"They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box."

-Nassim Taleb

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A lot of people who say they enjoy their job at a big company only work 10-20 hours a week. They may be at the office or on their computer 40 hours a week but most of that time is spent doing things they enjoy ( chatting with friends, gossiping, spending time with people they find attractive, learning new technologies, browsing the internet, travel planning) They don't spend much time worrying about bonuses, promotions or what is best for the company.

I’ve been doing practically nothing since February, plenty of time to work on my hobbies. This is about the third time in my overall career that this has happened, and all at giant companies. At Oracle I had a 4 month period where I did absolutely nothing and didn’t even have a manager lol.

That happened to me and I couldn't handle it. Then when I started getting work I resented the time away from my side projects. Handling time off is a skill itself.

Is that a common thing to do…?

I haven't seen that. On the teams I've been on, you would quickly get put on a PIP if you don't work extra overtime (unless you are politically connected, then you get away with doing nothing).

Look how fun NBC’s “the office” looks. It sounds like a terrible and boring job but they have so much fun.

To say that starting a company is too risky, but then inject that quote afterwards that summarizes being in the rat race... is silly. If you want to live outside the box, find a way to be financially independent. Living outside the box is the definition of risk. You’re missing the entire purpose of life. To live without risk, is to live in a box of comfort.

Take calculated risk.

I think there's always a time and place to do something risky. For example when boredom sets in, financial freedom is present to some degree and an idea fun and worth pursing is there. For me that's definitely not right now, but at some point in the future I'll give this a shot again.

That quote was not quite the positive way I wanted to start my week, but wow. Very accurate.

Also curious about your experience building/selling an ML product. Because that's the dream :-)

It was a bit of luck and timing. A model and system for real time classification of twitch gaming streams. Easily trainable by someone who doesn't know ml, with small amounts of data. Some very complex data augmentation and ml modelling went in to make the computation and system fast. Could be run on a cpu, as running on gpus is just too expensive. Found an esports company who was hiring for a role to built what I had, and they outright bought it

@logicslave username and quote update in the comment, describe your's constant state of prolonged anguish.

What did you build? And did it help you get into FANG?

FANG you just need to be good at algorithms with a good study plan, getting the interview isnt so hard

I remember hearing a similar line about boxes from Kanye West's Yeezy Campus GQ interview.

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