I quit my Software Engineer job to become self-employed!
Hi, I’m Arif Hossain and for the first time in the past four years, I’m unemployed. This is 27th February and it’s been almost four weeks since I quit my job no it’s not about mental healing, taking a break, burnout, or all that stuff. I believe my story is probably a little unique. 🤞
So sit back, relax, and read to my tale. and in case you are more of a visual person, you can watch the video version of this article. 👇🏼
Background
I’m a developer, based in Dhaka which is the capital city of Bangladesh. Remember this because this is crucial information for the whole.
So I’ve been working as a software engineer for the past one and a half years at a local ed tech startup called Programming Hero, where I was used to making around 70,000 taka(Bangladesh currency) per month, which is roughly around $9,000/year.
Now depending on where you live it may or may not be a lot of money but being from a country where the average salary is less than $3000/year, dollars I was happy with what I was making.
Until last year I married my beautiful wife Kimberly who is from the US and she used to make $90,000/year! So you can see this is a big salary disparity between us. As soon as we started living together, traveling together, and eating together, I realized my salary wouldn’t be enough for our living standards especially since we have plans to move to the US in the near future.
Why I decided to quit
I knew I needed to find a new way to make more money. So as 2024 came along, it was a new year and my salary reviews were near, I had to decide whether I should keep this job or not! Because if I do, I might get a small salary bump but compared to our new lifestyle it’s not that significant!
So keeping this job didn’t make a lot of sense… And that’s when I decided to quit my job and think of ways to work on something or somewhere that’s financially more rewarding.
After all the research I came up with two options, either get a job at companies in the US, and Europe that pays enough money or pursue this other dream of mine, which is to be an entrepreneur and make money through my business.
The problem with the first option is, that those companies don’t typically hire from Bangladesh, and even if when they do, they don’t typically give you the US standard salary. They give you a salary that you can find in other local companies. So that doesn’t really solve my problem…
There are only a handful number of companies that hire from anywhere around the world, you can find them on some remote job boards. but there are still there’s like two problems with those…
- One is the time zone difference. US European market being so far from Bangladesh, we typically have like 8–12 hours of time difference!
- They typically have a very high amount of competition. 🤺
So I had to decide if I should spend 6+ months doing all these leetcodes and applying to all these companies with very little hope of success or focus on my own products.
and I picked the second option… 😬
What next?
For the first next one year I’ll be focusing on a few of my side projects and will try to grow them, so by the time my visa stuff is sorted out, I will have at least some money to survive in the US.
My goal is to reach $5,000/month by the end of this year and this is the first post of the whole series. Every week I’ll post an update on what I have done, what I’m going to do next week, and how we are progressing through the journey.
For the first project, I’m working on a game called Catris. I will post more updates on that in next week’s post.
Yeah, see you next one. Bye
