If you're good at what you do, you'll find a job you love immediately (if that's what you're looking for). As developers, we're fortunate to be in extremely high demand. Life is too short to be bored. Work on interesting things.
If I've learned anything about working, it's that you never quit without another job lined up. Employment seems to be a prerequisite for finding employment.
Unless you manages to get on the gravy train, in which case, congrats!
I think that what hiring managers want to see is that you fully exploit the opportunities available to you. That means that if you're in a good employer and given a lot of responsibility, you stay. If you're in a dead-end job where you're not learning anything, you leave. If it's a good company going through a rough patch, you stay. If it's just a bad company, you leave.
Oftentimes that means you'll have stints of varying lengths on your resume: you may have a few of 1-2 years when starting out to find your footing, then a longer stint of 4-5 years at an industry-leader, then a shorter stint at a smaller company where you're given more responsibility, then a startup, and so on.
I ask in part because I've been at my current employer for 9 years -- should someone in my spot be looking for a new job?
Try interviewing and seeing what you get offered.
Wow, really? Many (not all, though) of the people I know who are really good at some things also don't like the politics of working in companies/jobs at all, so finding a job they 'love' is near impossible. If you're leaving one job because of your own issues, you'll be taking those wherever you go.
If you want to keep it up you should overlay something that says "I used to want to work at airbnb" but leave the rest. (Doesn't matter if you still want to work there or not saying "used to" doesn't mean "I won't still").
Leaving this up makes you seem like the jilted guy with high school puppy love. Not very attractive to other "women" who want to possibly date you.
It is a job of the employee to be creative (talking about design, of course). But it is the job of employer and investors to make an environment that challenges the employer. If they are unable to do that then any really creative employer will (or at least should) leave.
@OP: good luck!!! I wish you well on your path, wherever it takes you.
Well, that sort of goes back to a common theme in software companies: Are the people being hired as creatives or are they being hired to implement someone else's vision?
My experience is that in most roles you're likely to be being hired for the latter - and having intelligence outside of the ability to do your assigned task efficiently is strongly discouraged in them.
Especially since you profile reads:
I'm on sabbatical.
I've been bored before, so I hear you. But, I guess I'm kind of surprised that you chose to jump into nothing rather than parlay your way to something else. Seems a little impulsive. Impulsive is a red flag, despite what many on HN think (you can be impulsive, but you better be brilliant too).
Now you've got to explain a gap in your res to a potential employer (should you choose to go that route). The employer is going to hear "I got bored" and think "maybe he'll get bored here, too."
As for my sabbatical, it is true. I'm on one after spending my 20s earning enough to justify it. I'm not saying it was time well spent, but I got a lot out of it (dealing with corporate BS and powering through boredom to produce value teaches you a lot). It is also an easy narrative to tell.
Best of luck. I know you're a clever fella (maybe brilliant, too --- time will tell) and I'm sure you'll figure it out. But, this might end up being a very different lesson than you originally anticipated.
Is the OP an experienced developer?
(How many years does he have in a production setting? Would it be worth getting those critical 5 years of experience, despite bouts of boredom?)
I won't suggest that I know whether or not the original poster made a good decision, but assuming that an experienced developer will have job opportunities on tap is naively short-sighted.
The current market in the Bay Area won't last forever. A lot of people today either weren't around in the late 90s or have chosen to forget what happened. In a matter of months, lots of developers went from having a seemingly unlimited number of high-paying jobs to choose from to collecting unemployment.
Even if the next down cycle isn't the same as Bust 1.0, a lot of the angel and VC-backed startups in the Bay Area currently eager to pay six figures for even mediocre talent aren't going to survive, and when they're replaced by fewer and fewer startups, many developers will be ill-prepared.
I'll tell them how I don't think sticking to what is easy is the best approach to building a successful business, even though it feels safe. I'll tell them how I think it's important to always be moving, and take calculated risks to push forward. I'll tell them how I learned (from mistakes) that it's okay to release an impefect product - because trying to get it perfect on the first time around will kill you.
I told my past employer all of this. They disagreed. And that's fine. They were smart guys, and they worked hard. Everyone has their own methods and ideas. We just weren't the right fit. But I'll try hard to make sure the next employer is.
Good. Me too. Gets me in trouble all the time; I'll never change.
And I agree with you motivation for leaving... I just would have rather read "I quit X to start Y." I don't care what "Y" is. Might not have made front page. Hmm, karma or cash... which is better?
Generalizing is usually pretty pointless but if I were banking on getting a programming job, were debt free, and okay with not being especially picky about what company I work for after the experiment should it come to that, I wouldn't worry too much about possible red flags.
In life you have to prioritize things. If your highest priority is running your own business or taking time off from work to try something new, then your next job after that really has to fall down the priority list. You can't have everything assured and hope to be successful. Edit: MOST PEOPLE can't have everything assured and hope to be successful. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but most of the time you do have to experience trade-offs to be successful. I'm not advocating taking huge risks, and most of the time there are smart ways to mitigate risk, but in the end I think a lot of people are arguing you should mind your red flags and try to stay focused on getting your dream job after the hiatus. I'm simply saying that isn't realistic if you want to focus on being successful in a different line of work. I've always believed you can really only be truly committed to one career at a time.
Everybody gets bored and frustrated with work. Up & quit after a year and sell it as wisdom on HN? Fuck that.
Sounds impulsive, but doesn't have to be. It's possible to make that jump after long and thorough consideration. It took me years and a couple of jobs before I finally dared to quit and start my own thing. Not everything I did with my own thing worked out well; spent a lot of time finding my own way, wasted a lot of time, made almost no money in my first year. I did some freelance work, now working on a bigger freelance gig, but I'm really hitting my stride now, and can't wait to go back to my own projects.
I'm not a natural entrepreneur. It took me ages to make this step. Nobody in my extended family has their own company; they all work for a salary. Nobody likes this kind of risk, but I love it. I love the freedom and the uncertainty. I love the risk.
It was a tough decision, and it still seems impulsive compared to a steady salary, but it was the second best decision of my life. (The best was marrying my wife, but that one was surprisingly easy.)
If you're in your 20s (early 20s?) maybe not so much, but for me (early 30s) it's not so easy.
I really want to work on my own company (and I have just started a new side project which I hope to bootstrap, the last 2 washed out early), but I have to pay the bills in the meantime.
There has been one programming position advertised in the city I live in in the last 3 years. That company has since closed - as I suspected it would (the entire team of 10 was Polish guys and gals and as it turns out they just wanted a presence in the country and farm out all the work back to Poland). Programmers in the US are totally spoiled right now, as there is a huge demand for them, but its not the same elsewhere. A number of other software businesses have also shut down or retreated back to their base.
Life may be too short to be bored, but its also too short to become penniless and homeless in a few months after quitting because you couldn't hack it anymore in a dead end job.
I think there are a lot of unsolved ideas - like zero-friction data upload from instrumentation - possibly running on different platforms, wiki-like annotation and record keeping, setting up protocols with timers, and a uniform notification scheme that can be pushed out to a mobile device, etc....
If you plan on working for someone else, that employment gap would be a red flag.
(I'm trying real hard to find a spin but can't..)
Otoh, I sold a business and everyone criticized me that I had nothing else lined up to do but I realized that I wouldn't be able to line something up to do while involved day to day in legacy enterprise. (Of course that was not the same as I wasn't looking for employment.)
You solve that by not explaining why you left :) but instead focusing on where you want to go, and how the prospective company is the ideal place to achieve that.
This had the added benefit of likely being true, and it complements the company without being sycophantic.
When someone says 'job security', the profession I immediately jump to is a tenured professorship. And those don't exactly come by frequently.
I don't have a ton of money, but I have some. I have enough to survive for several months (or longer, if needed). LA is expensive, but I'm relatively frugal.
If you make the decision in your head that you are going to quit then it's quite possible your work and your attitude will decline and either co workers or management will have a negative view of you by the time you do quit. In a sense this is similar to why many performers go out while on top (thinking of Seinfeld as one example) instead of waiting for ratings decline. You don't want to just be going through the motions.
In other words if the person reading the resume is going to read (incorrectly) into the situation and penalize you for leaving it's ok to fib a bit in order to prevent them from having that wrong impression (which you can't correct if you don't get the interview).. A case of who draws first blood.
Corp X: 1999-2004 Corp Y: 2005-2009 Corp Z: 2009-2013
Last day at X could have been 12/31/2004, last day at Y could have been 1/1/2009, first day at Z could have been 12/31/2009, but no 'suddenly suspicious gap' shows?
There's no reason for hyper-precision on a resume when it comes to dates.
That said, I'll never just up and quit a job now. Did it once, and those were some of the most stressful months of my life. No matter how crappy a job is, it doesn't compare to watching your hard-earned savings decline and facing the real, terrifying possibility that you won't make rent/mortgage payments.
Admittedly it's possible that my CV looks a lot more attractive than the average CV, but personally I wouldn't know why. It's possible the job market in Netherland is better than in the US, though.
If you've got children, you hopefully also have a spouse with his/her own income. I'm fortunate that my wife makes enough to pay the entire mortgage on just her income, so my money goes mostly to child care and various extras and luxuries. With a bit of savings we can make it for quite a while.
If you're maintaining a family on a single income, then yeah, that kind of step is rather irresponsible. But if you live on your own, you'll have your hands free for anything.