Have you ever quit a job without anything else lined up?

This is how I (eventually) got into software development. Finished my degree, worked in a library. Realised I was stuck in a deadend job in the countryside at the age of 25. So, quit the library and moved to London with nothing lined up. At the beginning of the financial crash. That was hard.

Eventually found work writing copy which sort of turned into a career in marketing. Changed companies and found myself in a bad place. Hated my boss, hated the company, was desperately unhappy - so I quit without anything lined up.

Did a bit of temping, found a lovely company who took good care of me and for whom I enjoyed working. But I wanted to change careers entirely - I didn't enjoy marketing and I wanted to be more satisfied with my work. So took the plunge and went to a twelve week bootcamp.

It was hard; no money, no security, no idea what was going to happen next. I got lucky and found work about a month or so after I left. That was about four years ago. Haven't looked back.

What led to these decisions? Necessity. It was necessary for me to escape from these things or else I would be miserable, and there was no time like the present to do it.

I couldn't have done it without my wife to be honest. Both financially and emotionally she kept me afloat.

Yes. Hated the job.

Was burnt out due to poor management and technical processes that led to a lot of late night deployments, testing, last-minute fixes. (That's how I became so obsessed with automating testing.)

Not to mention, no code reviews, no feedback from senior engineer, miserable pay raises, no bonuses, little transparency from executive management about the company's health.

My departure was preluded by a exodus of the engineering team. Sad to say that within two years, I was the most senior in my team. The final straw was when the technical lead role was given to an arrogant prick who just joined the company but didn't want to be onboarded to the project by someone who knows the entire codebase (and that of the crummy underlying frameworks too) even in her sleep.

Oh did I mentioned that I was conned into joining the company thinking I'd work on analytics but ended up doing front end work most of the time? To be fair, I enjoyed front end engineering, and making things not just beautiful, but also blazing fast before everyone started talking about progressive asset loading and virtual DOM.

I just quit.

But at the back of my mind, I was pretty confident that I have very employable technical and people skills!

I spent some time off afterwards doing gardening for my mom, studying @addyosmani 's JavaScript Design Patterns, and learning Unity in a attempt to build a strategic resource game for fun. Planned to do Masters, but ended up complaining to @picocreator too often about front-end testing (oh hey, wonder where did all these rants about front-end and testing come from), so we founded UI-licious to build a super awesome UI testing tool for the busy developers.

Twice as an employee (2010 and 2013) and once as a freelancer (September 2018).

First time because I saw no career prospects though I loved my colleagues and learned a lot from them (first full time job!). Second time I was "forced" to quit because the startup went bust, wasn't a great period, personally and professionally. Third time I quit one of those never ending consultancy gigs because after the acquisition of the agency I collaborated with and a year at the new company I felt everything was going nowhere and my managers were shuffled around too, I opted to quit instead of the risk of growing bitterness. I gave them three times the agreed notice to help with the transition and both parties were satisfied.

I've never thought about this in the past but having free universal health care was (unconsciously) a factor in my freedom (and privilege) to make these choices.

I'm really close to doing so. Some day, I'm going to make an amazing manager because I have seen every possible combinatorial of what NOT to do. I read about workplaces where there's mutual trust and it sounds like a fairly tale.

2008 was a bad time to work at a startup focused on commercial real estate lending. The founder took out a second mortgage, we started doing more and more general consulting on the side, but it just wasn't enough to keep the lights on or make payroll consistently (especially when our biggest side client started ignoring invoices). Eventually I quit to job hunt full time because I couldn't afford to come to work.

Yep, the first time was right before I got into software development. I had been working at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and just couldn't take it anymore. The worst part was I spent all that time developing skills (sales & customer service) that I did not feel were a good fit for me. This was still the height of the recession so there were few jobs for people with soft skills, no less soft skills that I didn't want to cultivate as a long-term career. Looking backward I find that I use those skills every day as a developer. I look back on it as the best, worst experience of my life.

I have done this a few times since becoming a developer but because I had a hard skill in a field that I enjoyed overall it would never be as scary as that first time. Taking that leap all those years ago stripped the fear out of it each subsequent time. I also found that the discomfort of imposter syndrome as a developer is nothing compared to trying to sell someone rental car insurance 30 times a day (or collecting their $1000 deductible after returning the car with damage).

Two years ago I quit my job as a contractor for the US Coast Guard. I had some vague business ideas I wanted to try, but mainly I left to take control over my own life. In that respect it's a failure, but I've learned a lot about my ability, or rather inability, to function outside of certain environments, and disproved my theory that the reason my side projects never got off the ground was because my job was sapping all my energy. (Turns out the problem was me all along. 😬👍)

A year or two before I left, I had tallied up my expenses and determined that I could survive for a while without an income. When certain things started to go south at the local facility where I worked, I looked around and said to myself that I was done with this, and set a date when I would give notice. When the time came, that was a hard e-mail to send, and it took me about a day to actually do it.

I consider it the best decision I've ever made, even though I haven't quite figured out how to move on from here.

I think I've only quit jobs without anything else lined up. I tend to work at a place until it's no longer the right fit, then don't try to stay longer.

yes, and while I told them it was because of my thesis...

the truth was that we had no projects and I was bored out of my mind. Since I was a student I think it didn't matter too much, nowadays it might be a terrible idea for me to just quit for whatever reason, not only career wise but my visaa D:

I think if it wasn't for the visa I'd be a job hopper but, forcing myself to stay in a place that I "didn't like" has taught me a lot of valuable lessons and I think I've grown a lot as a professional and as a person.

Sometimes things happen for a reason :3

Currently in this situation and the first three months has been rewarding while scary. The timing in my life worked out well as I needed a break from burnout and to spend time with family on hospice. I've since been able to catch up on all the things in life that were on the back of my mind; I've re-established an LLC contracting business and have been able to invest in that, I've pruned and polished all of my online accounts and resumes, I've spread out my income opportunities to places like upwork and patreon, and now I feel like I'm just sitting back in my chair waiting for the next big thing to come my way.

I think it's really important to have side projects or passion projects that keep you on your game. I took a 2-month burnout recovery break from coding and spent my time being productive in other ways. I've been able to make time for practising interviews and meeting with low potential employers to get a feel for where I'm at and what has changed since the last time I was looking for work -- ahead of the more important interviews. And I've been able to travel and enjoy myself as well during this time, which is an absolute miracle.

I think it all comes down to timing and the time had come, the universe decided. I am lucky that I had savings to carry me through the first couple of months instead of feeling frantic to get work by next week to pay the bills. If I had left my job and had no options, feeling felt pressured to make ends meet more than I currently do, I know that would make things more challenging.

Ultimately, the biggest factor that lead me to this situation was the salary. I just wasn't being paid enough to be on-call 24/7, working the long hours and weekends that I was working, and feeling like I wasn't being valued at the end of the week. Inevitable burnout is something I charge extra for, but there are a lot of places out there that will underpay and overwork you. Nice desks and monitors, unlimited snacks, company outings with free booze, and a foosball table are awesome but if I can't pay rent can I sleep on the couch at work? No. My time was worth more than I was being offered, it turned out.

I guess that the final reason why someone can even think about taking this decision is to have passive earnings or enough savings to survive some months without income.

I did this in the past. I had a good amount of savings and I was in my 20's, so I didn't mind so live frugally. Also, worst case scenario, I could go back at my parents and eat and sleep for free until finding a new job.

My reason was that I wanted to travel. I went to London and found a job there. It was a really nice experience, that leaded me to more travel and better jobs. Now, in my 40's and with a familly, I would not be able to do it again.

The position was impossible to work in, it was advertised as a "professional work environment with exceptional developers" biggest amount of bs I've ever read. Hired as a network developer no one worked until a few days before the deadline, we were given a project that had to be done within 3 months. Okay wasn't impossible so I got straight to it designing the architecture, writing our requirements for the company to buy, specifications etc. My colleagues, on the other hand, were working on the UI, 2 and a half months in all they had done was watched Netflix, YouTube and some days didn't even come in leaving me in the office alone. When it finally came round to them getting their work done I was bombarded with questions, basic questions that any "exceptional developer" should know. Me as a network dev I didn't touch UIs, in all honesty, I don't like making them, they're just not for me. To get this project finished I had to write 90% of the UI system for them as they didn't know what they were doing, it became very obvious that they had either faked their degrees (or past experience) and followed some tutorials online. Once it came to handing over the Git repo the company asked why I had written the majority of the code, they tried to say that because I merged branches it shown up as I had written all of it...Not really how Git works.

The company we did the project for said that it was clear that I had written the entire project and gave me a huge bonus alongside my payment. Left the company I was working for after that with no plans where I was going to go next. I was just glad that I was out of that place, I don't mind if people need a little downtime every now and again but when you're just watching Netflix for 2 and a half months and doing no work entirely that just took the piss.

Yes, I did this last year, after much agonizing about how quitting a job without something else lined up is the last thing you should do. I was working as support staff at a hospital where I had been since 2004. I had gone through some college for web development, quickly switched to self-study after I saw how out-of-date the curriculum was and core classes I needed to finish my AS weren't being offered. My hours at work shifted from 11-7 to 9-5:30, which doubled my commute to a whopping 3 hours a day and reduced my paycheck thanks to the loss of evening differential. I had reached the point where I knew I was good enough to work professionally as a developer, but it's hard to apply to things and schedule interviews when your time is completely monopolized from 6:30am-7:30pm.

This completely broke me: i had low energy, and was miserable and cross with friends and family. It soon dawned on me that if I was going to be underemployed, I needed to do so in a manner that would let me move forward more quickly career-wise. I had a healthy amount of earned time, so I formulated a plan to quit my job, focus on the job search, and get local barista work if I didn't find dev work over the summer, and this was exactly how things played out. I work evenings, so I can go to interviews with little to no schedule wrangling. Getting to work is 20 minutes of walking a day instead of a 3 hour slog on public transportation, and I have more time to write, code, apply to jobs, and sleep.

My day to day is hard (but nowhere near as hard as it used to be), and I am so grateful literally every day that I made a choice that might not read as the correct thing to do to some people, but paid off for me professionally, and in terms of mental and emotional health.

It's crazy that I see this pop article pop up on my feed now, because I just quit less than a week ago, and not have anything lined up, for the first time.

For me, it's been a weird emotional ride. I've second-guessed my decision to quit several times, but I ultimately committed. I wanted to make a decision based on courage instead of fear. I basically just want to see if I'm cut out for making it on my own without a security blanket (although I have a good financial cushion saved up for a while). My job was quite stressful at times, which also pushed the decision. I wanted to leave in the best graces possible, before burnout became an issue.

Right now, I'm taking a bit of a vacation, but I have some side projects and ideas lined up that I'm going to try and foster on a full-time schedule, which is an opportunity I might not always have. I figure I'll either succeed, or learn something (or many things, ideally).

I'll probably write post about this after a while, and let you know how it goes. Wish me luck!

Decided not to renew my last contract as things had been going for a while and the work was becoming less fulfilling. It didn't help that I was in Dubai at the time taking a break for a few weeks when my contract expired. It felt too good to just not go back unfortunately.

Spent a few weeks doing not much, didn't worry me but picked up 2 new clients after a month. Stuff always works out, it has to.