A Plan for Funemployment

Up until last Tuesday I had worked 2.5 years for a large semiconductor company that shall remain nameless. They're a household name. Their CPUs are in your laptops & desktops... but the problem that's causing them much consternation is that their CPUs are very likely not in your phone or tablet. OK, you know who I'm talking about now, but I'll refer to them as MegaCorpCo in this post.

So why the heck would I leave my job at MegaCorpCo? Especially since they're working on some of the most interesting projects in the area?  MegaCorpCo with it's 100,000+ employees was the largest company I had ever worked for by at least 2 orders of magnitude.  In a word, I think the main reason was bureaucracy.  That bureaucracy was primarily fed by a quaint kind of 20th century security paranoia that made it very difficult to share information internally (code, documents, etc.). This security paranoia led to very real delays and frustrations. It's as if they never got the memo about the benefits of sharing information openly.

The other part of working at a mega corporation is that you work on such a small piece of the puzzle that it's kind of tough to get your arms around the product and when the product is done you don't get to actually "play" with the it (and the product was actually very interesting, I must admit).

Let me be clear that the people I worked with and for were great. And I think my manager was certainly one of the better managers I've had; MegaCorpCo seems to do a great job with manager training. 

But there was the gnawing sense on Sunday afternoons that Monday morning was coming which led a sense of dis-ease (BTW: check out Kent Beck's excellent talk on experiencing Ease at Work ). Then last summer my appendix burst and that gave me about a month to think as I recovered. And by the time I went back to work I had concluded that I need to probably be somewhere else. Someplace a lot smaller.

Enough 

Around that time I started reading the excellent Mr. Money Mustache blog where the topic is generally about early retirement. Not "retirement" as in the cessation of all work. More like working on things you want to be working on - sometimes for even for money. I went through some of the calculations and figured that if we were very frugal I could probably have enough saved to "retire" (to work on projects of my choosing not necessarily for money) in 5 to 7 years. So for a while I figured maybe I could tough it out for 5 to 7 years (MegaCorpCo did pay pretty well, after all).

Then early in the year there were beginning to be rumblings & rumors of layoffs at MegaCorpCo. This goes back to the lack of success in getting their CPUs into mobile products that I mentioned earlier. In February that was formalized. We were told that it would be X% of our supergroup. (where X is actually quite a bit larger than the numbers published externally, which is why I'm keeping it as X here). Then we were given an offer of a voluntary severance package (N months of pay and M months of paid insurance). It was a pretty generous offer given my short tenure, so I decided to apply for the VSP which was billed as a sort of lottery.

It wasn't that I was worried about being laid off, it was more that it seemed that after laying off X% of the group that it would become a much less pleasant place to be. That and my general dis-satisfaction as outlined above led to the decision. Near the end of March I found I had been selected \o/ and that my last day was to be April 1. 

Of course, I don't yet have enough to really "retire" for good - Like I said that would take another 5 to 7 years of working for pay. But who says that "retirement" period has to happen all at once? Another way to look at it is that I really only have to work for money for another 5 to 7 years.  Why not mix periods of funemployment with paid employment?

This is quite possible now because the Affordable Care Act breaks the tie between insurance and a job. Prior to the ACA, once you were in your 40s or 50s it could be very difficult and expensive to obtain insurance. By the time people turn 50 pretty much everyone has had some pre-existing condition that would disqualify them from getting insurance under the old regime. And this kept people tied to their jobs.

The fun part

As programmers, we have certain advantages over other occupations when it comes to times of unemployment. We can start or contribute to open source projects and by doing so build our portfolios on sites like GitHub. Future employers can examine these portfolios.  I can't imagine that accountants, for example, can or would work on accounting in their spare time and put the results up on a GitHub for accountants. ( But who knows, maybe it happens, some accountant decides to audit some corporation's quarterly report and finds discrepancies and blogs it - I suppose that could happen, but it doesn't seem very likely). 

As a programmer it seems to me that we're living in a sort of golden age. So many open source projects out there. So many new languages to learn. So many new frameworks to try out. So many free classes (MOOCs). Now that I've got some time, I'm really looking forward to digging into learning. I'm taking the Coursera Machine Learning class now, for example, and plan to take a few others.  I'm also looking forward to reading more. And I plan to dust off some long dormant programming projects and start some new ones. 

Of course, having the Spring and Summer off means I can also do a lot of outdoor activities that I wouldn't have as much time for if I was working in a job for money and I plan to do some of that as well. 

The Plan

I'm aiming for a 4 to 6 month period of "funemployment". I suppose that if the perfect job comes along after 2 months I'd probably accept the offer, but at this point I'm not planning to start looking around much in the first 3 months and figure it could easily take 3 months to find a good fit (given the current good job market for developers - if it slows, it could take significantly longer). I'm planning to do at least one blog post per week related to programming. I'm also looking forward to playing with my Parallella board when it arrives (hopefully in the next few weeks). And I want to play with Mirage OS as well.

Plans can change, of course. I did something similar back in the Summer of 2001. I figured it was time for a break after paying off the mortgage of our first house. I quit a job I had had for 8 years to take 6 months off. Yeah, the Dot-com bubble was bursting, but these things generally only lasted about 6 months, right? Heh. Then there was 9/11 a couple of months later and the economy got really slow. The six-month-off plan turned into 10 months off (and even then when I went back to paid work it was only a 4-month contract gig... though it was also one of the most interesting, enjoyable gigs I've had and I learned a ton.).  I can recall going to user-group meetings in Portland back in 2002, 2003 and asking for a show of hands of who was working and it wasn't unusual to only see half the hands go up. But on the positive side, due to the slow economy I decided to go back to school and get a Masters degree and related to that I got to go do research in Italy for 3 months back in '04. Money was definitely tight during those years, but they were also very good years.  

So while plans are good, one has to remain flexible.