A week ago, I made the big step and presented my resignation letter at Google. It was not an easy decision, to leave a good job to pursue a blurry plan that sounds a bit infeasible, but I feel this what I want to do: it's a dream becoming reality.
After the 31st of May, I will become self-employed, working as a freelancer, while travelling around the world. I plan to live with a small budget, working with my laptop from wherever I am, instead of stressing about getting many clients to keep an expensive lifestyle.
I've had the travelling bug for some time, always thinking about my next trip, leaving for the airport just after finishing work, coming back on Monday and going directly to the office. You end up wishing for more vacation days all the time (and I had a fair amount of them). Now, for different reasons I want to spend some time in my old house in Nice, and in Argentina. There was no way I could do that with my current job, and that was the trigger for my decision.
After that, I will come back to Ireland, just to think where my next destination will be. I know this is going to be a great experience, we'll see how well it works!
If you think you -or your employer- might need my services, I'd be more than happy to talk! I'll be concentrating on the kind of work I've been doing at Google and before: finding creative solutions for difficult problems, be it systems administration, or (systems) programming. Think of hiring an SRE for just a few hours or days.
Hello,
Congratulations on your courage! I have the same plans and I am already working on a sustainable voyaging lifestyle.
In my opinion, if your plan is to travel for a long time (i.e., several years or even decades) the cheapest way to achieve this is by buying a sailboat and living on it! You won't have to spend money on hotels, hostels or rent, you'll spend very little money on transportation (wind is free, you'll need to buy fuel only occasionally), you can do your own cooking, etc.
It's not my idea, lots and lots of people have done this in the past so it works. I already bought my boat and I'm currently getting it ready for travel so I can say it is lots of fun.
It's strange how I reached from - https://github.com/BeWelcome/rox/issues/174 to this page!
Ironically, I left my 9 to 5 job 3 months back, and currently working as a full time freelancer!
Cheers, Yash