Ask HN: I want to leave tech: what do I do?
write.as
write.as
Practically every recommendation is also a tech job, its just not "big tech" where you have very little real decision making power.
Tech itself is not the issue here - tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue. And after you have a high paying job its hard to justify leaving it, and every other similarly paying job is basically the same thing in a different package.
The thing is that the software business has discovered its Three Big Lies:
- Everything is Exponential (Sigmoids are For The Small Thinkers)
- Breaking The Law is Progress if You Do It With a Computer
- Computer People Know What's Best
Other industries that have become tentacled over the years have had similar Big Lies (High Finance has Price Movements are Gaussian Distributed for example, and Bailouts are The Business Cycle).
I'm at the age both in life and career terms where its like, this could be a cyclic thing and these assholes are going to get thrown out soon, or it could be I came of age in an aberrant exceptionally good time, this is how it always ends up.
What I do know is that that software is an effective tool for mitigating the damage of malware, excellent computers are cheap now, and so it might be possible to fund an effective resistance doing rewarding work for the greater good with frugality and some creativity about paying the bills, I'm still figuring out the details.
I think there's a dividing line in society between those who understand systems and those who don't. The systems people look at the non-systems people as stupid; the non-systems people look at the systems people as evil.
But for human systems? Eh... Yeah I struggle with agreeing there. I think much harm has come from trying to think about human systems like computer systems both in the small of my own immediate life and in larger regimes. No matter how you feel about Elon Musk and DOGE? That didn't look like it went great for either side of that equation to mention one recent high-profile exanple. That looked pretty lose/lose.
What's odd is that you'd think tribal thinkers would respond to a track record of being proven correct but they emphatically do not. Moreover they're invariably convinced that you too think tribally.
As an example, I can think of one politician (edit: not trump) who is definitely a systems thinker (who is not nice, but is successful and generally outplays his opponents because of it) and ~80% of Hacker News is convinced beyond the shadow of any doubt that he's an evil idiot loser who invariably makes stupid mistakes.
"Vices and virtues" are pretty much irrelevant to systems thinking but they are the bread and butter of tribalism.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/994/418/48b...
bizarre. tribal thinking doesnt seem to let you comprehend this.
Not sure whether you’re talking about the Orange Man, but calling him a systems thinker is a hard sell given the damage his tariffs, defunding, and other nonsense are causing.
But yea, definitely not him.
You have a man who was not part of the elite establishment and yet has managed to get wealthy by breaking the law and avoid getting caught, then managed to become president against all odds, twice.
Sure, he came from wealth, but plenty of other people came from even more wealth and had way more political connections and failed to become presidents.
Hate him all you want, but if achieving all that is not a form of intelligence and system knowledge, I don't know what is.
That still isn’t sufficient evidence in his favor, given everything happening now.
Q: If this was such an obvious slam dunk on how to win the presidency, why didn't the Dems come up with such a candidate? Wouldn't that make them stupider than the Donald for such an obvious oversight of the electorate?
>That still isn’t sufficient evidence in his favor, given everything happening now.
Managing to become president twice is insuficient evidence?
The Democratic party in it's current state is ineffective & incompetent in many ways.
> Managing to become president twice is insufficient evidence?
Yes. You are ignoring the damage he is doing now, which is direct evidence against him being a good “systems thinker”
All world leaders are cut from the same self serving cloth as you don't get to become a presidential nominee if you're a genuine threat to the establishment.
How? They keep giving themselves more tax breaks. Sounds like their ground is just fine.
For one thing, the GOP have had a successful campaign over the last 50+ years to win the framing war. They're now able to present themselves as the plucky outsider who'll come in and fix things, even when they're not. Likewise, the Dems are *not* able to do this, even when they are.
Also the Dems are incompetent boobs.
The morons who support them dont see why this is not the optimal strategy
For the average voter, the grifts are irelevant since all candidates do it anyway, they just want a candidate that executes on their dissatisfactions with the system and that turned out to be the Donald.
Just follow the portfolios of those who funded the campaigns of the presidential winner, it doesn't matter if it's Clinton, Bush, Trump or Obama, all politicians are grifters, since once elected they need to pay back via grifts those who funded their campaigns as that's the main reason wealthy elites spent million for their candidate to win, to get into grifts with the government that make them even richer.
>The morons who support them dont see why this is not the optimal strategy
What IS the optimal strategy? I think MAGA base is getting what they voted for (mass deportations and shit) so for them IT IS the optimal strategy.
If you know both sides are going to leave you worse off, it's probably pretty understandable that I'm always mad at the last guy to take a strip off my ass.
^^ this bit was in anticipation of a response exactly like yours.
I was actually referring to Putin. It was quite impressive to watch him successfully provoke sanctions to just about the level needed to result in a steady and sustainable level of import substitution and export oriented industrialization over the course of 12 years. It reminded me of that scene in die hard where the FBI cut the power.
This was the same thing Trump fell flat on his face trying to do even when he was setting his own tariffs.
The number of people who have done this is vanishingly small (and skeptics raise credible objections about even the best examples).
Jim Simons was such a man, and (to the satisfaction of most) proved it. Some might say the same of Buffet. After that a list that started controversial rapidly gets into the zero consensus asymptote.
So if you genuinely believe that your systems thinking prowess is prescient in its scope like something out of a Herbert novel, I can point you the narrow way through: get an account on Interactive Brokers and ascend!
My pet peeve is the "S-curve argument":
> Everything is Exponential (Sigmoids are For The Small Thinkers)
Yes, that's technically true because universe is finite, yadda yadda, but in practice where you are on the curve and your time horizon matters. Plenty of things are still effectively exponential[0], and I feel some people bring up sigmoids specifically because they you squint hard enough, it seems nicely and comfortably linear. But it isn't.
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[0] - Random example from a recent HN discussion: total amount of all written text to date. It's obviously going to be a sigmoid (or worse, if disaster strikes), but right now, we're still before the inflection point, so I wouldn't short the stock of storage providers just yet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44442770
But really what you're doing is arguing for a nasty status quo with a bunch of deflective name-calling because this is hard to argue against in good faith: calling a potent, contrarian-to-the-gravy-train argument a "cliche", and in so doing implying that it is "asked and answered", that it has been raised, addressed, and disposed of, is the worst kind of argument on 2025 HN. To the extent that it's been raised before and is being raised again, it's precisely because no one has addressed in a satisfying way. And we're going to keep raising it until someone does.
Saying "we're in the the pre-inflection part of a sigmoid" is not the same as manipulating everything from stock markets to wars premised on log-scale-and-ruler math.
"They are not identical. The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. Robbery is not just another way of making a living, rape is not just another way of satisfying basic human needs, torture is not just another way of interrogation." - Erik Naggum
Litmus test: when you hear soundbites like "in the last N years alone, the world used more energy/emitted more CO2 / did more whatever than it did in all recorded history", are you shocked? Surprised? If so, you failed to understand what exponential growth means. I mean, I assume you do understand this, but most people don't.
> implying that it is "asked and answered", that it has been raised, addressed, and disposed of, is the worst kind of argument on 2025 HN
If it were, I wouldn't have written my comment in the first place. I see the HN commentariat, on average, to be still enamored with sigmoids, treating the s-curve nature of growth in real world as some profound insight that invalidates the entire concept of exponential growth.
> Saying "we're in the the pre-inflection part of a sigmoid" is not the same as manipulating everything from stock markets to wars premised on log-scale-and-ruler math.
For one, it worked (and still does), so there's that. But secondly, this is not just about capitalism and wars. It's everywhere. COVID-19 was actually a nice demonstration. Yes, infections ultimately followed a sigmoid, as they were expected to, but the first part of the sigmoid is exponential, it was also the part that mattered at the beginning, and which most people across all social and economical strata failed to grasp.
Also thanks for the Naggum quote. I do consider myself a moral being and I am proud to be firmly in the S-expression camp.
I see all of the CEOs lined up at the inauguration kissing the ring, buying up the commons that the DoD and Bell Labs built with taxpayer dollars into oligarchic empires straight out of Russia circa 92-94.
And at the apex of the Altman Era you have the swindler in chief peddling the absurdity that we weren't deep into the LLM asymptote a fucking year ago with implications ranging from wild infringements on the power of states to enforce their regulations in conflict with "AI Innovation..." /cuts to Amodei/ ..."to stay competitive with China!"
This is a fucking disaster for everyone but a small clique of Battery-frequenting bottom feeders who a better generation would have put in prison for crimes innumerable.
But it works for a few people. Those people are building bunkers though, and its not to keep out rogue AI.
This is one of the many reasons I tend to be vehemently in favor of decentralization. A lot of these problems are just because organizations become too large. It also feels kind of dystopic, or sterile at least, how you can be a thousand miles away and have a main street that looks largely indistinguishable from the one you just came from.
But markets are effectively part of the natural world: if you engineer the most oppressive, regimented, panopticon nightmare prison available to human deviousness you will succeed in creating a black market, not in eliminating markets.
So any solution has to be about preventing market failures, not eliminating markets. If North Korea can't effectively inhibit markets from forming, it's a pretty convincing demonstration that no acceptable amount of anti-market intervention is going to be okay.
On halting monopolies I would vote and canvas for you if you ran on it.
I agree about the appeal of decentralization, I just don't know how to make it happen in a world where centralized control is enforced by MQ-9 Reaper drones with sole executive discretion on "kill or capture" of anyone and decentralization is considered a national security priority.
An example would be the people who argue that inherently sovereign and anonymous money would liberate people. What it would do is get you shot for fucking with the Mint.
This is one of those comments where I'm like, I bet the big LLM can write a FireFox extension that will block HN comments by username now...
In general (with a few exceptions like finance that are generally up front about what they are), the chillest, sanest jobs with the most accomodating environments tended to pay the best and vice versa.
I also have too many friends who tried sacrificing pay for better working conditions and more meaningful work and ended up bitter because they were sold a hollow dream.
I was fine having a lower paying job, but what I didn’t expect was that the lower pay meant that the skill level for my colleagues was also much much lower. Years of the “Dead Sea effect” [0] had turned it into an environment where the blind were leading the blind and they weren’t even aware of how bad things were.
So high pay also means “better coworkers”
[0] http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...
Being 'underpaid' is different than being paid less, though. Describing a job as underpaid is, almost by definition, assuming a company is exploiting its workforce. It's not hard to believe such a company would also be a toxic environment in other ways. But if two companies pay different amounts, but they're both paying a fair salary, it doesn't necessarily imply anything about the company that pays less.
Most of your co-workers you cannot trust to do anything e.g. Today I was investigating an issue (screen for X not updating). I open the dashboard and there was a sea of read over my console. They hadn't even checked the terminal for errors.
> Tech itself is not the issue here - tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue.
That is a matter of point of view. I've worked in industries that most consider amoral. I've had the most job satisfaction from working in those industries. I actually got to do interesting work. Every other job has me over-engineering basic web apps because they are a <Azure/Sitecore/AWS/Google Cloud> partner.
The worst job was working for a large charity, do you know why? They literally pissed money away on bullshit, while collecting large sums of via unpaid volunteers. That sickened me and so I left.
I put "standard of living" in scare quotes because I strongly believe that, after a certain point in the US, people are conditioned by society and marketing to spend gobs of money on shit that doesn't make them happier and often actively makes them feel worse. I'm going through the process of moving and downsizing, and I can't even begin to go through the gobs of crap in my house that I'm throwing or giving away. Even home ownership itself is something that I feel is a bad lie - you're signing up to spend huge amounts of money to live in a box where you'll also need to spend huge amounts of money to slow its inevitable decay.
But I digress. The main point is that leaving (or changing) tech is easy, but you just have to have an honest conversation with yourself about how much you, your family and your self image requires a lot of money.
If you are in a situation with two parents making a professional level salary, which I suspect is the case given you stated paying $2k/kid/month for child care, well frankly you should STFU. In those cases, that is simply a choice you are making. There are certainly other options (which millions of people do because they don't have a choice), so you're not garnering much sympathy pleading poverty because you have to pay for your children's daycare.
And they all paid $180k+, the last two $200k+, in salary alone, plus benefits and equity. I only work over 40 hours if I’m working on something I’m passionate about. I realize FAANGs can go into the $400k+ range, but… do you really need that? Is it worth it? For the stress, the rat race, the pressure and all that?
Granted, they’ve been remote roles, and I live in North Carolina, not one of the HCOL metros (I don’t see how anyone can justify living in NYC, SF, or LA, honestly).
But like… this just seems untrue. There are plenty of good-paying, ethical roles to be had. Moreover, I’d say if you spend some time actively seeking out ethical, fairly (not excessively) compensated roles… they’ll find you, without you having to search for them.
Well, a lot of them. Not every. There are jobs at big tech companies where you work on good things benefiting society, like improving security in open-source, or developing a lot of the OSS tools out there. (Think Project Zero, or many of your favorite major OSS project, which are developed by engineers at big tech.) They are not nearly as common as other roles obviously, but they do exist, and it's worth at least attempting to get them.
A thousand times, yes.
And even if you find ethical jobs (e.g., paid-for and ethically committed open source work), they are much-much more difficult to do well. Distrust and secrecy are absolutely rampant between you and your (inevitably proprietary) partners; reverse engineering plays a central role. It's a warzone -- and the constant fighting, battling, against measures put in place by other humans, just takes the will to live out of me.
It should be possible for well-paying, ethical, interesting, and co-operative jobs to exist. They only exist as exceptions.
I think we need a monthly "who wants to be fired" thread where we share our progress on this.
Leaving the grind when you already kind or rich is easy mode. Leaving it when your net worth is negative is another story.
Tech pays better, though - so I work in tech to pay the bills, then spend the money on tools to get that creative thrill somewhere else.
Now I stay in tech for the same reason most people stay in their careers - it's comfortable and pays well, but because that's mostly a function of "time served"[0], it also means that I'm trapped now. I can't just switch fields anymore - at this stage of life, switching is a major multi-year project!
(Also I question whether it would help. Working in some field never looks much like you imagine while being outside of it.)
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[0] - Tech has an unusually large multiplier here, but the trend is the same as with any other job.
Of course people like this still suffer due to overexposure to work and js frameworks; and many eventually grow to dislike tech jobs and want to leave.
The only small businesses I know that are succeeding in my area are basically services - restaurants, cafes, etc. They rely on exploiting a bunch of underpaid workers in a way I wouldn't ever want to.
In your other comment it sounds like you're just kind of doing "handyman" stuff in a low CoL area. It's great if you can handle your own plumbing, electrical, etc. but there's definitely a ceiling on how much work you can get as a single, unlicensed person with a van driving around. Maybe that's enough to live on but it doesn't feel like a sustainable plan for 30 years.
Even if you don’t live paycheck to paycheck, the life style of owning a place AND living off your investments, is extremely hard to pull off.
You most likely need to be single (or couple both in tech), no kids, making FAANG salary, living frugally (no travel, no expenses outside of food, shelter and necessities). Or you need to use geo arbitrage, which again means probably no kids, while being able to secure a high paying remote job in the US.
I wish it was more affordable, but it’s not. Therefor advice like “buy a house and live off your investments” are equivalent to filling a winning lottery ticket.
But I strongly believe you're making this out to be much more difficult than it is if you are making decent (not "FAANG level") tech-type salaries. Where I live tech jobs generally pay at about double the amount of people in trades, for example. E.g. a mid-level software engineer is making at least 160-180k, while a trades person (plumber, etc.) with similar experience is making 80-90k.
So obviously if you can live at the level of these trades people, you can save up enough to be able to live without a salary for some time.
The problem is that most people just get used to their standard of living and find it hard to downsize. That's fine, but it's still very much a choice.
And then comes the downsizing. Sure you can live only with necessities, but then question do you want to find yourself in mid thirties, or early forties, without any travel experiences, no relationship, living in your parents basement? I exaggerate a bit, but the math does not work out. You either live very frugally, or you use exploit geo arbitrage (low cost of living area, with a high paying remote job). There are no other shortcuts.
First, I wholly agree Europe salaries are far worse. But in the US, there are plenty of locales besides SF that pay comparatively high tech salaries (I live in Texas). But the main point is that making a professional software engineer-level salary at a tech company with 5+ years of experience in a mid-to-large American city should put you squarely in the top 10% of American earners. I mean, what you decry as "very frugally" is simply figuring out how the vast, vast majority of Americans manage to get by. It kind of reminds me of those NYT articles that would explain how people were basically living paycheck-to-paycheck on $500k a year: private school costs $X, a nanny costs $Y, Upper East Side co-op costs $Z. I'm like yeah, no shit Sherlock, expensive stuff is expensive, but don't pretend forgoing that stuff means you're living in poverty.
You see this a ton on social media. People make excuses after excuses of why they can't get out of debt, why they can't lose weight, why they can't…
And, sure, some people have it tough and have the odds stacked against them. But most people would just prefer to swat down ideas on how to get what they want like they're playing Beat Saber.
(And I can be sure that someone will come through and accuse me of being insensitive because I haven't considered someone who has X, Y, or Z that only impacts .5% of the population, and almost never the person making the complaint.)
My wife and I moved to a rural area after covid. You're not magically saving money by doing so. And there is a shit load more work in terms of maintenance. I like it but this is such a strange recommendation.
> monthly "who wants to be fired" thread Reminds me of Mad Fientist blog.
You might find the messaging more effective if it was declared in more direct terms though, its a pretty different problem than still needing to make a living when computers are your stock in trade.
Most of the smart and talented people I know that dropped out to create companies abandoned them and ended in someone else’s company later. The two exceptions were salesmen who ended up becoming rich after selling their companies.
Because for the rest of the world rural (or a village) means literally rural or a village. What the people from the developed world may never understand is the wide gigantic chasm between urban and rural here, in every aspect of(un)imaginable.
I actually grew up in a place like this (yes they exist in the US) so I know how it goes.
sell my house, put my kids in a different school district, be terrified about health insurance
if I fail I'd have to go back into tech and would have uprooted everything in a way that's probably irreversible
the thing is… if you and your spouse get a 25% bump in salary right now, a year or so from now it is likely you’d write the exact same comment as this one above even though a year ago you were in the same boat and obviously managed beautifully without the extra 25%… :)
Not to mention, costs of everything also go up, and our bodies are not getting younger and healthier either. If you're to give up your current salary for the one you had 5 years ago, you wouldn't afford the kind of life you had 5 years ago.
> I want to significant change, but not to my income!
I realize that life is expensive, but if you feel stuck, not needing a high salary gives you more options. It's often easier to control spending than income.
That's not it. The issue is (as the GGP mentions) irreversibility (and, I'd add, unpredictability). When you go for a less-paying job, two things are sure: (1) it'll be nearly impossible to return to the previous (better paying) job, if shit hits the fan, (2) the new job will pay a lot less than you are used to (and what your entire current way of living is based upon) from day 1. Whereas, what you desire in return for this, is totally unpredictable: the new job might or might not give you the meaning and inspiration you are seeking; and you'll only learn the outcome months later.
Thus, the negatives are immediate and certain, while the positives are delayed and uncertain. It's a totally irrational and fiscally irresponsible choice.
Of course, sometimes you do have to make that choice; for example when you get psychosomatic symptoms from the stress and the violation of your core identity at work. But then -- let's be clear about it -- the decision does not come from "carefully weighing the pros and cons"; you do it (literally) to survive.
See the author's story <https://write.as/conjure-utopia/the-verbose-story-of-how-i-l...>:
> I almost died [...] to this day I still suffer from chronic issues. This whole experience forced me to slow down, accept my limits, and reframe my plans for the future. It was very liberating: I was forced to quit the rat race [...] I started to appreciate the freedom that comes from restrictions.
You don't implement such life-uprooting changes, you don't take such risks until/unless you have no other way to survive. These changes are inaccessible through reasoning.
I have tried to move away incrementally from the tech industry by working less and consulting, and it is not effective. There's simply nothing else you can do that pays as well for so little effort. It draws you back in like a tarpit because there's always more work to do. Committing to a clean break and immersing yourself in a new field seems like the better approach.
[*] I don't consider expenses that improve health and lifestyle "cuttable" -- organic food, locally produced meat, food supplements / vitamins, therapy, dentist, gym / sports, etc. I've recently learned that even holiday trips (which are insanely expensive, assuming you are not from the US, to the point of being financially injustifiable) are crucial for mental and marital health.
I understand that this option may not be available to all. I suppose my point is that you may not actually need to leave the industry permanently. Just long enough for you to recharge and find a way to repel the BS without psychological trauma (and without causing psychological trauma to others).
Alas, as you say, this is mostly pure luck. And not sustainable over the longer term, financially speaking.
Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44393304
Ask HN: I don't want to work in software anymore. Where do I go?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43836353
Ask HN: Facing unemployment – what now?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44008554
Ask HN: Decided I no longer want to be a SWE – what next?
There are so many problems to solve. I always like to post these lists when an article like this is posted on HN and the discussion ensues about what feels good to work on. There are so many problems that need your help to solve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_global_issues
My father always told me: "you will have a vocation, and an avocation. They are separate activities." What he was telling me is that I should find a job, and a hobby. And they should be separate.
I believe that there has been a severe injustice done to students over the past 30-40 years by instructing them to find a job that is their passion. That's putting too much pressure on a person; and it’s largely unachievable.
It's okay to make money doing one thing, and enjoy yourself by accomplishing something great doing another.
Maybe.
First, the thing done for money (or the way it is done) shouldn't at least be at odds with your identity (and/or work ethic).
Second, if you consider how large a proportion of our waking lives are spent at work, you start questioning whether just "neutral" is good enough, for a job.
You can be in a large non-tech company (or government agency, technical or not - source: I survived one) and have the same miserable experience. You can work in a small tech company and get very little of it.
The idea that you'll escape by "Working for a public institution" is goofy.
I agree. Where I live, "public institution" is code for "infinite inefficiency and corruption".
half of the questions on /r/cscareerquestions are about how to deal with working in this type of company ("why does the boss always defer to his nephew who cant code his way out of a paper bag?") or how to get out ("where are all the jobs paying over $100k?").
I don't think such a thing exists (unfortunately). Show me a business leader that says, "oh we've been successful, we've got orders and new clients lined up, but no, I won't hire more workers, more managers, and turn our flat org structure into a hierarchy, because I want my employees to have a sustainable and fulfilling work experience, and because I want my current customers to enjoy the usual, stable service or product quality". Only a unicorn would not perceive saying "no" to growth as leaving money on the table.
> Working for a public institution
This may vary from country to country, but in my part of the world, public institutions are mostly dysfunctional, political, nepotistic, filled with cronies and people with negative productivity. And then there's one bright eyed idealist who actually does most of the work until they realize they're being taken advantage of, learn their lesson and starts behaving the same (or leave for private sector).
> Joining a tech co-operative
ie. become a freelancer or start/join a consultancy; sure, but after a couple dozen projects, it starts feeling the same as a corpo job.
> Joining a tech NGO
Again, may vary from country to country. Here NGOs are incredibly political things and desperately dependent on continous outside funding (the two are interconnected). You'll switch office politics for NGO politics.
> Working for a union or a party
Politicians and union representatives are some of the last people I'd ever want to socialize with.
> Becoming a mentor or a teacher
That's nice, but can you live on that salary?
> Becoming a techno-political hustler
For an article that starts with one's quest to find a more meaningful job, this is about as far removed from it as "used car salesman that exclusively uses bitcoin payday loans financing".
At the same time, some of the more promising alternatives that crop up at local IT watering holes are floor tiling, plumbing, roofing, ... All honest work, good pay, visible results, and zero bullshit.
> floor tiling, plumbing, roofing, ... All honest work, good pay, visible results, and zero bullshit
I'm not sure. First, you need to be good at it. "Leaving tech" does not necessarily imply "good at trades". Second, you need to be very flexible in the quality vs. delivery time tradeoff (and personally I find that really difficult). Third, I'm not keen on talking with clients directly. Fourth, even if there's a general contractor, representatives of the different trades always blame each other, when things go wrong, or the schedule slips.
One of the reasons that I stayed there, was because I was satisfied that most applications of our products were for artistic, creative, or scientific purposes. I felt decent about working there.
Also, the culture was very focused on delivering the very best to our end-users. Unlike almost every tech company in existence, these days, the company was not interested in selling itself.
They weren't always peaceful, though. Their Nishi-Oi factory had a rail and mount system for submarine periscopes.
In my case, I had done a lot of "extracurricular" learning and work, which was attractive to the people that interviewed me. Like I said in another post, on another thread, I have always enjoyed doing tech, and spend most of my free time, working on software.
I also come from a hardware background. My experience in connecting software to hardware was important. I should mention that most hardware companies treat software rather casually. I hope that's starting to change.
The job market, these days, is drastically different from what it was, but I suspect that these companies may be more "traditional" than a lot of tech companies.
- healthcare (where I live, we have public health care, i.e., my salary is taxed to oblivion, but if you want good for yourself and your family, you'll pay a second time, and seek out private practices / clinics)
- housing crisis, with unpreditable and unreliable rental market: you really want your children to start their own lives in small apartments that are owned by the family. And in the opposite generational direction: at some point your parents (or in-laws) will start dying, and the widow(er)s may have to be moved to different towns, apartments, assisted living facilities.
- healthcare#2: food supplements, therapy, gym, sports -- requires both a lot of money and a lot of time. No time for side jobs.
- home maintenance, car maintenance, etc.
In short, there's never enough money. If you don't spend your income all at once -- and you really should not spend it at once --, you will definitely spend it later, on valid things.
I guess it depends on how you view the world. Trustworthy and reliable? Then less money is fine, and the "sacrifice" that you mention only seems to apply to "exorbitant living standards". But if you view the world as hostile, unfair, at best indifferent and uncaring, then money equals safety, and you'll never feel you have enough of it -- even though you could be a responsible and frugal person already.
Problem: How to leave tech. Solution: Enter tech!
To continue working without coding, while still making use of coding skills and experience, I suppose roles like CTO or technical project lead might be suitable?
Kinda related.
You have to either have a specific target in mind. Like you actually love doing some other thing and want it to be your career. Or, as the article lays out, just keep doing tech someplace more fulfilling.
Having spent time in tech in both government and nonprofit space, I can tell you the organizations are not very different from corporate ones. Day-to-day frustrations are very similar. You have to just take heart in doing something constructive for the public good.
Contrary to popular belief, in the US there are state/federal government software jobs.
They don’t pay as well as the private sector, but it’s only a few steps down, not “get used to earning 20% as much”.
Is the bullshit rate in many of those jobs incredibly high? Absolutely. But can a talented generalist from the private sector make huge improvements for real people? You bet. So much of government IT is crippled by dated approaches and over-reliance on contractors (and the lack of knowledge of best practices that comes from very few folks transitioning from the private sector—those few steps down in salary are not a road often travelled).
As a result, someone with talent and familiarity with how much better things can be (and a willingness to push on broken rules/processes) can have a huge impact. You’ll have to do a lot of “here is a prototype nobody asked for built in a way nobody here is currently allowed to build it”-type performing in the first year or two, but at the right government agency folks who do that get to deliver massive benefits to real people every day.
There are enough sub components of government (agencies, sub-agencies, state, municipal) that you can easily find work you agree with. It’s frustrating to apply, but truly: once in the door, talented folks can achieve a huge amount.
The public sector may provide more relaxed environments but it isn't clear that you will work on more meaningful problems.
Reality is - if you’re an American and got into tech and are working for well paying tech companies, you’re not leaving and there’s no escape unless you fatFIRE. This is why FIRE is so big among the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Everyone knows. What’s the alternative for an American tech worker (primarily the people who read HN) who wants to stay where they live, keep a similar quality of living, and not work in toxic faang-esque H1B factories? There ain’t one.
For instance, embedded systems is pretty good. Yeah, they don't pay FAANG levels, and they never will. They typically aren't a "toxic faang-esque HIB factory", though.
Either way, you’re asking for people to leave the regions they’ve built their life.
Other regions don't have competitive pay? They also don't have Bay Area cost of living.
You sound like you don't like the situation you have. You also sound like you won't look elsewhere. Your choice, but realize that you're making one.
This Maoist third worldism rhetoric has no place here.
Well, I live in Central-Eastern Europe, and even though I 100% agree with the problem statement, the proposed solutions sound unrealistic to me as well ;)