Comment by nanidin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nanidin | Hacker News Reader

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I left my job in February 2021 due to being overstressed and eventually burning out. I was in a role where I was essentially on call 24/7, with the only calls actually coming in at early AM hours on holidays. This made it impossible for me to relax during time off, which contributed to the burnout. Around the same time, my SO was finishing cancer treatment, so work stress was not the only stress I was dealing with.

I left with the stated goals of working on personal projects and of going on a road trip to national parks. I have now been on two significant road trips - one about 10 days, and the next about 35 days.

As far as projects go, I have created a few toys that scratched itches - a pi calculator, a sudoku solver, and a market data collector/analyzer. I also worked on establishing some passive income during this time.

I'm now working as a consultant in the same industry I was working in previously. I'm not sure yet when I will return to full time employment. My plan is to definitely find a job before the COBRA insurance coverage expires (October 2022 I believe.)

My advice to anyone planning to take time off is to have some idea of what you want to do. Don't end up quitting your job thinking all of the free time off will be great, then sit around and do nothing for months on end - at the time it may feel great, but after those months go by it's nice to be able to look back and see that you did something. You don't have to be productive, but at least get out of bed, have a routine, and do something besides sit around. To that end, I recommend journaling.

I also recommend that if you're going to quit and you like your job but just need some extended time off - talk with your manager! Mine wasn't very agreeable to a sabbatical on the timeframe I wanted, but my SO was able to secure 6 months of PAID time off just by talking to her manager about what was going on with her and her plans to leave (keep in mind her case may be unique due to cancer and working for the company for 8+ years).

> a sudoku solver

Sorry to hear about all the stresses you were dealing with but if it's okay, i'd like to follow up on your sudoku solver.

Are you doing the brute force/general way or are you implementing sudoku specific logic?

Here's my understanding of the general way: it tries to insert different values in different squares until it finds a conflict.

A sudoku specific way, in my mind, would implement the algorithms we humans use to solve a sudoku. E.g., look at a block, see which numbers are missing, see if open squares in that block can be filled with numbers by eliminating options along the vertical or horizontal of that square.

Hope this isn't too callous given everything else you wrote. Also, big fan of journaling which you too have called out.

No worries, it's a fun topic!

For any given position on the board, there are only 9 possible moves that can be made (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9). One could try each possible move without regard to the rules of Sudoku, then evaluate whether the new state is correct - and this is what I understand you mean by brute force.

My implementation goes to the next step and only considers valid moves for a given position by looking within the current 3x3 square, and also by looking along the row+column to eliminate numbers that have already been used. This is slightly better than brute force and reduces the search space quite a bit.

At a high level, my sudoku solver does a guided DFS by generating the full list of moves that can be made from the current board state, then sorts them according to heuristics that match how I play sudoku (first try to fill in positions with less options, first try to use numbers that have been used more), then starts trying values and backtracking once it reaches a point where there are no more remaining valid moves.

The problem with heuristics like those is that sudoku puzzles can be created that exploit the heuristics and make the search take forever. My implementation solves easy and medium sudokus very quickly. My implementation can't solve most hard sudokus even after letting it run for hours.

Thank you! I'm starting to work on a sudoku solver. Let's see how far I can get.

On re-examination, the search is BFS by the way.

> I also recommend that if you're going to quit and you like your job but just need some extended time off - talk with your manager! Mine wasn't very agreeable to a sabbatical on the timeframe I wanted, but

Securing that much time off is nearly impossible at many places.

> my SO was able to secure 6 months of PAID time off just by talking to her manager about what was going on with her and her plans to leave (keep in mind her case may be unique due to cancer and working for the company for 8+ years).

Don't be fooled by management's "kind" gesture. Your SO's cancer, while horrible, got her the six-month paid leave, not the eight years at the company.

In my case the duration was acceptable (I asked for 6 months of unpaid leave), but burnout was telling me I needed out in two weeks. Management wanted me to stick around for two months before taking extended leave. At the time it wasn't an option I was willing to consider.

As for SO, I suppose you could be right about the cancer (they also gave her 3 weeks of time off earlier this year that didn't impact her PTO bank), but even before cancer her job was super accommodating.

I also want to add that I took some time off earlier in my career as well. During that time off I spent a year traveling around Asia, then I tried to create a startup. I was hungrier at the time due to being a lot less established and due to having a clear runway that defined when I would need to have a job in order to be self sustaining. I returned to work with a 50% increase in compensation after that break.

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