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 I had gone through some college for web development, quickly switched to self-study after I saw how out-of-date the curriculum was and core classes I needed to finish my AS weren't being offered.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.
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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 I had gone through some college for web development, quickly switched to self-study after I saw how out-of-date the curriculum was and core classes I needed to finish my AS weren't being offered.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.