Hello. For the past nine years I have been working primarily in computer science research roles in industry in Silicon Valley after completing a CS master’s degree in an abortive attempt to earn a PhD (I wanted to earn a PhD and become a professor, but I had to drop out due to family circumstances). Unfortunately there have been abrupt and dramatic changes at my company where our former way of doing research, which encouraged more time for exploration and had longer timelines, has been abandoned in favor of a system that demands rapid turnaround and immediate business impact. I’m chafing under these new requirements, and I’m exploring my career options. Unfortunately without a PhD, it’s difficult to get another research position at another company, and I’m also coming to the conclusion that I would prefer to treat research as a side hobby than as a job. I would love to transition to teaching; I did some part-time online lecturing at a university during COVID and loved it, but I need a stable job and I can’t find any full-time lecturer positions that guarantee a full teaching load; I don’t qualify for a tenure-track professorship due to my lack of a PhD. My need for a stable job also prevents me from starting my own business at this time; unfortunately recent family emergencies have eaten into my savings.
One possibility is to work as a software engineer. However, this means having to grind Leetcode in order to pass interviews, and moreover, I’m concerned about working in a high-pressure environment; I had a brief stint as a site reliability engineer in the middle of my career that went horribly for me. I want to work in a low-pressure environment where I am able to put in 40 hours of work and have enough time and energy left over for side projects and hobbies. I’m concerned that all my years of working in a research environment would make it difficult to obtain work as a software engineer; while I can code in various languages, I admit that I am a slow coder, and many jobs require experience in specific tools.
I’m also open to other roles, though I prefer to avoid sysadmin, devops, or SRE types of roles. I’m wondering what other roles are good for ex-researchers who can code who have teaching and leadership experience.