Explaining to my Dad why I quit my job | Hacker News Reader

Explaining to my Dad why I quit my job

joshaust.in

72 pointsntrepid835 comments

Cherish your dad, seriously.

I'm about to take a year off medical school to explore the startup/design world. I'm doing it to finally pursue my real passion and interest, to take some time to contemplate about whether being a doctor is something I want to commit to (probably not), to get into shape, etc. Seems like a reasonable decision, but to my dad and family, I will be considered an immense failure. Being a Doctor is a disgustingly inflated status symbol in my community, and deciding not to be one is about the worst thing you can do other than murdering someone.

I won't be getting any support, emotional or financial, and worse is that I'll be consistently criticized and told that I'm making a stupid, selfish decision. It may very well be stupid, but I won't find out if I don't actually do it. It'll be tough, but more than worth it.

You're incredibly, incredibly lucky, OP, to have an understanding and supportive parent. There are many out there who'll never get to make the leap that you've made because of familial pressures and criticisms. Best of luck!

Edit: If any of you have an interesting startup opportunity (particularly in health), email is in my profile!

Cherish your dad and try to emulate him. I'm lucky to have parents just as supportive, but a lot of my family and friends don't. So when they tell me about their grand plans, I don't second guess their decisions. I might push back a little, just to see if they're serious, but I'm not here to plant seeds of doubt in their mind. If they want it, then I want it to happen for them.

I've been through the exact same thing - med school dropout (1 year from graduation) who got into tech, got zero support from family. It's tough but, hang in there - things will get better.

Can I ask what led you to dropping out? The parent commenter is not so irrational - he can always go back. But you, if you actually dropped out (and not simply taken a "leave of absence") and if it was actually your choice (not expulsion) seem to have made quite an odd choice - after bearing through premed classes and 3 years of MD classes.

An MD has lifelong financial stability and the chance to do residency and earn even more. You completely burned the bridge when, after just a year, you could've done tech and preserved the bridge, no?

Mike L, founder of Research In Motion (now BlackBerry) dropper out with two months left in graduation (from a world-renowned electrical engineering degree). So did, I think, Robert Downy Jr.

"preserving the bridge" only makes sense to an outside observer. It may never be a practical option for the OP. In fact, it may be something that may taint OP's identity for the future in that he/she may always be stereotyped as a doctor. It'll be contested every time he meets someone new. It's nothing short of an identity crisis. It's the loss of freedom to do what he wants.

People like this usually try to live life in accordance with self-defined principles rather than those defined by the social structure. They think different.

Ask yourself 2 questions: 1) How much money will you have to take out to finish med school? 2) Is putting doctor on your resume a distinguishing enough factor to pursue it?

Most people on HN will say, nah, don't do it! I disagree, if you can finish, it is unique and will pay dividends later. If you don't finish, you are starting from zero. If you can finish, you should.

My dad keeps saying things like "there's nothing better than being employed" when I hint about my plans. I think his reaction would be very negative if I took the leap.

I once had a fairly successful side-project and when I showed him our first big customer invoice (~$20,000) he got terrified and thought it was something I had to pay. When I told him it was actually money people had to pay us he still didn't get it. It was like he refused to accept the fact that you could make money without having a "real" job.

I like this dad.

I think the OP is right. His dad was a surrogate for his own fears. It's easy to put parents up on a pedestal and see them as the voice from above, but in reality the only difference between parents and children is age. A different life stage might bring a different attitude about security and such, but that doesn't mean forgetting about what it means to be young. The OP's dad himself had the pioneering urge and acted on it. He understands.

I'm in my fifties and recently back to the security of regular employment after quitting my good job 12 years ago to start my own business. It was a long, hard time, without much to show for it, but I don't regret any of it, and my three kids turned out fine.

As another dad to the OP: I wish you the best of luck. I'm sure you'll do great.

My dad is the complete opposite. He is of the group that believes you can only get your true worth by owning your own business. He preached this my whole life growing up.

And it is kind of funny -- as he worked his whole life for the government (military and civilian) -- but after he retired he started investing in real estate (great timing -- around 2008). He's making more money now than ever in his life (he doesn't flip, just rents), is enjoying life more, and it's nice to see one of his lifetime philosophies validated (at least for him).

Something for everyone out there to keep in mind. Reactions are always negative when you talk about doing something risky in the future and are much more likely to be positive when you decided to actually do it.

I dropped out of college a few months ago. Through the different talks I've had with family and friends about it in the past year, you would have guessed that everyone would have criticized the decision tremendously. But the day that I went from "dad, I want to drop out" to "dad, I signed a full time offer and I'm dropping out", I received staggering amounts of support.

Suddenly people knew I was serious about what I had been saying for a while. At least that's what I think the difference was caused by.

While my parents were generally supportive, my dad did tell me "That's fine, but one day you'll have to settle down and get a real job." It's taken a while but he's finally coming around that what I'm doing now is, in fact, a real job.

I have been in this position quite a few times. I think my family, as a whole, comprises some of the most risk-averse and fearful people I have ever met. Especially on my dad's side of the family.

Whenever a contract would end, or I would leave a job because I wasn't satisfied, my family would automatically view me as less-than-successful. To them, success is being at the same job J for X years and then retiring, where the job is generally a government job.

When I was with my last girlfriend, I had just come off of a contract job and I decided to build small business websites as a freelancer. She was of the opinion that "I couldn't make much money that way." She also thought I should get a job at a restaurant cleaning instead, to her at least it was stable. Never mind I was working my ass off and feeding myself as a freelancer once got going.

I think when it comes to these matters, the people close to you will always have an opinion. I tell myself that they won't always be in my life, and if I let them make my decisions for me then I will just grow to resent them and myself. At least if I take a different path, I can be confident in the fact that it was my own choice and I will live with the consequences of it.

My mother is the same way. I hold off on telling my parents when I switch jobs until I know things are going well, because if there is anything negative about it at all my mother will have a panic attack (figuratively, of course) and think I made a huge mistake. She'll think that anyways, like your parents her measure of success in work is stability.

Nice post, as a dad I try to be supportive of the choices my kids make. My philosophy has always been that everyone is the director in the movie that is their own life (sadly they are not the screen writer and must work with the material they are given :-).

I would have thought my dad would have had a negative response too. But instead he shared that he felt like decades of being a VP at a big company earned him little, and he should have started something when he was 30 too.

Dads are unpredictable.

The coffee shop isn't really comparable business-to-business because that's a whole different thing altogether.

There's a lot of effort and a bit of luck going into running a coffee shop (which can still succeed), but you have to still treat it as a business which sadly, a lot of people don't do because... well, it's a coffee shop they run for love.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitt...

I think dad was wise enough to see the difference.

I noticed, on the following page (shortlistedjobs, one of the sites listed in your portfolio), that the "Distiller" takes the employee data and computes a list of factors that are then categorized into success and failure buckets. I see that being an introvert is considered a failure with a significance of -5. How do you quantify introversion? What method do you use? Something similar to sentiment analysis? I'm just curious. http://www.shortlistedjobs.com/how-it-works/

Ha, this was one of my prior "failures" but being an introvert is not a "failure" per se. Shortlisted was designed to consume any information an organization had about an employee plus a 1 to 10 rating about the value of each employee to the organization.

The algorithm would then perform a step-wise regression on all the data and "distil" it down to a model of attributes that correlate with performance to that specific business, not in general. So being an introvert might be great for some business cases but may not correlate well with success in every case.

After the model was built, the second step in Shortlisted is to take another huge chunk of data and look for new employees that had attributes that correlate well with success for the business.

So a typical use case might be your company hires 10 engineers out of college per year. Out of those ten you can rank them in approximately highest to lowest in terms of value to the company. Shortlisted takes everything you know about those 10 (plus any from previous years, it really takes about 30 data points to produce meaningful results) and searches the University for more people like the most valuable employees and tries to avoid people like the least valuable.

Our goal was to help job seekers avoid situations that not going to be a good fit, and help employers find new hires that had a high likely hood of success.

Hahaha, this is great! 3 weeks ago, I turned down some fairly decent jobs for my startup and let my parents know the fact. They were very supportive, pointing out only that I be doing it for the right reasons.

One point of contention may be that we, or at least I, have much much more in the way of opportunities in that I can realistically dream of an ambition that my parents did not have access to. It's deceptively understanding of them to be able to not only comprehend this but also support me in it and for this I am thankful.

I quit my job in October. I made the mistake of telling my parents too soon. I told them I was planning to quit on Halloween and I'm sure their parental instincts kicked in trying to convince me not to quit.

I would recommend not telling your parents at least till the week of. Then there isn't much for them to do but to wish you the best of luck because you've already made up your mind.

My parents now support me a lot and I definitely dont think i disappointed them.

Failure builds character and determination to succeed! I like how the OP acknowledges that he's tried before and failed. I believe that is more motivation to stay up at night, drink coffee and red bull, and type away furiously. You WILL succeed as long as you stick with it... YOU are your greatest investment!

Thomas Edison quote: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

"(not risky) choices about my career."

The difference between salaried and self employment is the self employed guy know his own burn rate and knows when he goes out of business if he just coasts, perhaps to the very day well in advance and truthfully, but the salaried guy just shows up to work one day and the security guard hands him a cardboard box and see ya.

I think its also a cultural drag thing. The WWII generation would think you're crazy, you work for the same bigcorp for 40 years and get a gold watch and great pension, right? LOL that died before my dad's generation. I'm not even sure if that cultural mythology was even true, most of those people are all dead now. Certainly not like that now.

One of the advantages of being young is that you are unencumbered enough to nurse a dream castle. If you put foundations under it, it might come down to Earth. If not, you can always let someone else underpay you to help them with their dream castle.

Fantastic story. I really do hope that my parents are as excited for me if and when I try to strike out on my own.

Tiny nitpick, the font is a bit hard to read, the letters seem a bit bunched together.

Thanks for the feedback. The site was designed using a high dpi display and sometimes I am surprised at how different a font can look on another display. If you don't mind me asking what sort of device are you reading it on? I'd like to see if I can make it look good on everything.

Firefox 21, running on Ubuntu 12.04! Nothing fancy for hardware, just the built-in panel for the Dell Latitude series.

thanks!

Reminds me of an old joke:

You know the easiest way to make a small fortune doing a startup?

Start with a large fortune, then create a startup.

i used to work at Creative Artist Agency and agents there used to say that about making movies.

That is an old stock market adage. I wonder how many would translate well:

"Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered"

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

"End trades that show a loss as soon as possible"

"Markets are NEVER wrong-- opinions often are."

"It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked."

"A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought."

"Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken."

"Operations for profit should be based not on optimism but on arithmetic"

"Nobody ever went broke taking profits."

etc.

The businesses are not comparable per se, but the emotions that the operators feel might be.

Multifamily listings is an area that could use another competitor. What is the site?

https://www.rescour.com

email me, HN name @gmail I sold multifamily property for 5 years.

It's hard explaining your rationale to risk-averse people but ultimately each person lives their own life. I just quit a great job to do my own thing but I have no regrets. This will be my third time trying to strike out on my own and I hope this one is successful. But if it's not I will just get back up, dust myself off, and try again. Because it's what I love to do. No one likes to fail, but to me, the risk taking is addictive. What greater way to achieve something in life then through creation?

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