Ask HN: Anybody who left IT?
Why did you do so? What do you do for a living now? Do you regret it? And why do you still read HN?
I am fulltime farmer now: growing wine grapes and making wine, building my own independent winery. It is tough and you have to invest tons and tons of money into it, which I don't really have. There is reason, why are wineries started by rich people. I still have to work few hours a week as a developer to supply my income.
I am in my fifth year and I am happy this way. Working outside is awesome. Work can be very hard, your body hurts sometimes, your income is determined by weather and compile time is one (or more) years.
There is something calming in the rhythm of this work: your work is changing by season and you have to wear tons of hats (which doen't mean that you are doing BE, FE and then maybe devops).
Not that I am caring about it, but I find interesting that being broke winemaker seems to give you much higher social status than being developer.
I am also building prediction model for my NIR spectrometer, using ML to predict various analytes in the wine spectra. This is ongoing research project, which might be commercialised someday.
I don't blame them, most of the laws actually require them to keep paper version of their documents filled in special purpose paper notebook with numbered pages. Law mentioned that you can keep your document in computer format, but this software have to be accepted by ministry of agriculture and after speaking with them the chances of getting this permission is very slim.
I keep trying, but it is uphill battle. Well at least I have some activity to fill my rainy days.
I am also planting new vineyards, but it takes about 5 years (+ 3 years of prep work) to have any production.
Are you in Sonoma or somewhere land is cost prohibitive?
That means you have to buy land with vineyard from somebody. Current situation is also that we are in golden years, all holdings are trying to buy more land and very few people are selling.
Nowadays quality is rising up and wines from the region are great. International marketing and global wine trade is quite complex subject, but you can find quite a lot of Romanian wine in UK and Germany. In the US this niche of market is usually taken by wines from South America.
Oh, you said Romanian.
:-)
But at the end, I decided on Moravia region, as my family is making wine here for few hundreds years and it is always good to continue tradition.
http://imgur.com/a/KWSy7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb0ur8cdOfY
As you also noted, being a broke cheesemaker seems to be far more interesting to folks than being a developer. :)
They're also notoriously difficult animals to get right. Most vets do either cats and dogs, or cows and horses. Goats are an entirely different beast, and really, the best education I had was just doing it, and learning things the hard way.
I'd spent some time prior to farming working with herds in both France and England, which was very informative. If you're able to find someone who's at the scale that you imagine your self to be at, some day, learning from them is likely the best option.
After a few years in which I became really, really unhappy to the point of depression due to certain events at the company I used to work I went to a small organisation which is currently starting to get into technology to support their consultancy business.
It's a much friendlier place to work, with people who honestly care about each other. If I knew this was possible I would have done it ages ago.
A small thing I would also like to add: people claim the problem in technology is men. This is not the case. The problem in technology is assholes. And they exist at both sides of the gender divide.
I got into IT for the sheer love of programming. I am someone who is detail oriented. I have observed "detail oriented" as the key issue I have with the assholes is that they don't care about the details. Their approach is to throw 10 things and see what sticks. They are very impulsive and very impatient.
So i decided to drop everything and go back to school to become an electrician. I loved it and i loved working with my hands, and compared to working in IT i loved it so much more. I loved the people i was working with, and we worked well. Mainly installing surveillance for SMB's.
However about a week before my apprenticeship ended i was installing a ceiling camera, and a perfectly fine ladder ended up collapsing and giving out. I landed in the worst possible way and severely damaged my spine and lower back.
End result even after a ton of physical therapy i couldn't do what was required of me as an electrician. So i ended up going back to IT to do devops. I am extremely fortunate that i had a second skillset to rely on or i am not sure how i would make ends meet.
However i still find working in IT, soul crushing and draining. I hope eventually i can go back into the trades and do something i want to do.
Since you are trained as an electrician, I have a suggestion which you might enjoy. Why don't you try microsoldering? I show a nice [article](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/watch-the-master-...), there is also a video related to it. That is a job you can do sitting down. The lady doing it was biologist by training. Don't give up.
I left because I was utterly sick of churn, NIH, and the endless succession of this week's magic (javascript framework etc) bullet. OK. It's different. It's almost never better.
Also felt most of my efforts were NOT making the world a better place but tech was contributing HARD to the throwaway world we need to cease, not increase.
I now work maintaining and restoring an early Elizabethan estate. Some of the things I do might outlast me, and it seems a worthwile contribution to the world. Some of the work done will count in a century or two all being well.
Do I regret leaving? Hell no. Best decision I ever made.
Still read HN because I am still interested in tech, but mostly not the 80% that the world seems to have settled on. I am extremely agin many of the uses, decisions and techs that give us the modern world. Exponentially increasing throwaway hardware on a finite planet? Surveillance? IoT? Security? Everything as a data slurping webapp? Disrupting perfectly sensible things that work nicely? Meh ^ 200.
I'd be glad to get involved in a project that I could believe made a significant substantive difference. Like if a Mr Musk phoned (not terribly likely) about alternative energy, climate change or some such...
how did you pick up the necessary skills to be able to do this? It looks like something that would take years of focused effort, rather than an easy jump.
Sometimes I'm glorified handyman, sometimes more significant, almost alwats learning more about old methods and tech, or previous centuries' restorations. I'm still collecting pieces of paper, including for some required modern things like electrics, that usually feel like basic commmon sense, until you see the folks in the class who are barely grasping it.
There's opportunities for specialising more as I go on.
Europe is littered with old sites, some owned by the large conservation charities are pretty formal in recruitment and role. Some of the individual estates and smaller organisations are more flexible probably because some of the niche skills are needed only more rarely. So I'd probably have never got near the National Trust without a 5 year run up.
It turns out lots of fields benefit from having tech people join them. For example, a surprising number of technical research/analyst jobs are filled by absolute non-tech people (those fields seem to grab liberal arts majors at incredibly high rates), but they need people who can understand technology at very deep levels. So I made a name for myself by applying technical knowledge in those domains (not by doing tech work, but by knowing how tech worked).
In management and business roles it's very much the same. Most managers tend to enter management by either growing vertically into more and more senior positions within their domain, then suddenly need to learn all the other skills needed to manage effectively or they go to some kind of management school or business school then head directly into management without learning how any of the workforce actually operates.
Very few are cross disciplinarians who understand tech and soft skills and management at any kind of functional level. I find that tech is a part of the portfolio of what I manage, but I've made a name for myself by being an effective bridge between corporate operations and technology and the technologists appreciate (I think) not being treated like maintenance staff and being able to have a reasonable conversation with somebody about what they do.
I think startups are very interesting in the sense that they really combine all the skills in one area and I bounce back and forth to startups as my career path today. I sometimes regret not staying in pure IT, but I also don't regret avoiding many of the very negative (to me at least) aspects of that life.
It's not hard to find a variety of diagrams purporting to illustrate how the myriad management functions in ITIL fit together. You'll see lots of silos with names beginning with "Service..." this and that (because, in a massive injection of double-speak, IT likes to describe itself as a service rather than what it really is: a racket).
Here's a typical example: http://www.itsm.hr/brosure/ITSM_CHART_V2.0.pdf
I dare you to find an appropriate place in this diagram to place your dev team. Pity the poor CIO: not only does he/she have to decide whether to buy or build but the build option comes with strings such as also having to invent a management process to go with it!
So, again, most "Service Design" managers don't bother: they just hire the nearest TOGAF-certified architect team and hand over all development to them.
It's hardly surprising that corporate dev team managers often find themselves in the role of "supplier", on the outside looking in. No-one with ambitions in the organisation wants the job and anyone who ends up in there has probably done something wrong or emerged as a natural also-ran in previous political games.
What this means to devs (particularly) and some testers (depending on which box they live in) is this: They Are (so) Fscked.
I saw my role become disenfranchised over the course of 6 years as a result of a regime change which imposed ITIL upon us. I avoided suicide by jumping into the contractor market and, through nothing more than sheer luck, have found myself working for a small autonomous team looking after an important business function (worldwide royalty payments). My boss has a rebellious streak which I strongly identify with and she also has sufficient career capital to keep her team identity intact.
I'd like to leave IT and do something which delivers more personal self-worth (pimp or drug dealer at a minimum; international arms dealer if I just can't do without the Bond lifestyle) but I need to clear some capital debts first so it's contracting for the next 5 years or so. Beyond that? I'm just hoping there's still a world left to walk out into.
British: Closer to the literal meaning of IT, it refers to pretty much any tech job, including software developer.
American: Exclusively refers to jobs in corporate IT departments. Most software development jobs would not be considered IT. A sysadmin would be IT if working on the internal company systems, but would not be IT if working on production web infrastructure.
However, it's not about British vs American English at all. It's only a very few people who make that nuance, most of which are devs because they are the only one to actually understand it :D
Truth is, you really don't want to be assimilated to IT anywhere in the world. Most people will think of you as the guy called when the computer breaks.
I think people do this already. A lot of people I know seem to assume 'web developer' = 'expert in configuring/fixing Microsoft Windows'.
I've frequently heard Americans with no particular reason for unusual degree of foriegn influence use it in what you claim is the British way; I've even heard some distinguish between the broader general sense of IT and internal IT.
> A sysadmin would be IT if working on the internal company systems, but would not be IT if working on production web infrastructure.
Outside of companies that view technology as the product rather than a tool to deliver it, yes, sysadmins working on production web architecture are often, in America considered part of IT and located in IT organizations, as are developers, testers, etc., working on the web (and other) apps.
Then I worked mostly in operations at a couple telecom companies. I mostly automated and integrated a lot of stuff, at that time Perl was contemporary and not looked down upon by the cool kids like today. Programming is different when done in a revenue generating department rather than an expense only department so times were better.
Somehow I eventually ended up in engineering writing tool integration and automation stuff mostly for telecom company end users (like telecom techs not end users at home). This is somewhat weird in that engineering is usually not revenue generating but it kind of is here so its kind of in between.
Where I work now IT is infrastructural and replace mice and image PCs and pull cable and fix printers and so forth. There are a tiny handful of interesting sysadmin and router operator jobs but mostly going back to IT would mean imaging PCs. The fun programming is done in engineering by engineering on the production (and test and dev) networks. Under those conditions I have little interest in going back to IT and being paid solely on bean counting metrics like trouble tickets cleared per day and PC hardware replacement average outage time and so forth.
Sounds like you could do well in devops if you still have your Perl and automation skills.
I've worked with Perl in the past and it's as capable as any programming language out there, but the ecosystem isn't there anymore. At least not for DevOps.
Demand for something in job ads does no always equal what is used out there. My current job was not announced as a Perl job. The HR department had listed Python though. We use zero Python in our product or tools.. There was already some Perl here. Actually when looking past the makefiles I discovered that the build system was 90% Perl. Let's just say they got lucky with the hire since no one had a clue when they were recruiting.
I think this is the situation in lots of places and if you know your devops and prefer Perl you will do as good as or better than anyone using those other languages that "surely must be dying now that we have Go.."
I think that Steven Little summed Perl's situation up correctly in his talk, "Perl is not dead, it is a dead end"[0]. I strongly feel that Perl became a competitive disadvantage for us. New systems that we wanted to use, such as Openstack or Kubernetes, are not being written in Perl. SDKs for services that we want to interact with do not exist for Perl. Simply dealing with the distinction between numbers and strings in JSON was a constant source of pain. Everything we wanted to use we had to make ourselves, which is a huge amount of work. We simply couldn't leverage the open source community's efforts on languages that are much more popular.
This is not to ignore the success of the company, which was only possible because of Perl. But in 2017, if you really want to use Perl as the basis for your tech stack or even just in any sort of tooling, you had better expect to write everything on your own. Meanwhile, your competitors can leverage the vastly more active communities of Python, Javascript, Go... heck, even C# nowadays. CPAN was once tremendous, but it really doesn't compare anymore.
[0] https://speakerdeck.com/stevan_little/perl-is-not-dead-it-is...
First let's address the talk you are referring to. That rant was about the authors frustration with Perl 5 vs Perl 6, the state of the Perl 5 core maintainers politics at the time rather than actual problems with using the language. The author is the creator of some great modules that could have been made core at the time e.g. giving Perl 5 a new core OO system but it did not happen. From what I can see he is still active in Perl 5.
Another point to be made is that the community tried to address Perl 5s "marketing problem" which led to many rants that in hindsight perhaps did not do any good.
About SDKs you are right that there often is not an official Perl one for new Cloud services but I have had no problems finding what I need on CPAN for AWS etc. Also there are very good modules for doing generic REST things and with many services using the REST API is less opinionated and less of a hassle anyways. I just don't see the problem. Why even bother to use the language specific SDK for infrastructure like AWS. Terraform is winning that battle right now.
I have been working in mostly Java, PHP and JavaScript shops lately and trust me, the "cool" tooling you get there starts sucking the minute you need to doing more unixy/glue scripting. I have replaced 10000 line tools that in the end just does shell commands with 500 line Bash or Perl scripts that does said commands.
I guess this all boils down to the use case but if you are doing mainly unix scripting (which is what you are doing in a Linux based web DevOps setting) you will excel with Perl and Bash as your main tools.
Given this and your earlier comment, you seem to think that people who have had bad experiences with Perl simply want to be cooler, to use cooler tools, because if only they had your experience they would see how useful Perl is.
This is exactly the kind of echo chamber that the talk condemns. Criticisms of Perl as experienced in the real world -- and yes, I have done plenty of automation and devops work in Perl and bash -- are brushed aside with ad hominem attacks. If Perl works for you that's great, but clearly it had problems for my coworkers and I, which you completely brush aside.
This attitude that the Perl community consistently demonstrates is just another reason why I intend to never use it again, and why I thoroughly dissuade any newcomers to programming from spending their energy on this language and its community.
But seriously, shell scripting in JS or even Go is not a pleasant experience when you know of other tools. You can not deny that.
And to be clear there are many tasks where I would rather choose another language than Perl. Mostly for applications where compilation is a win.
But I still maintain my position that if you stick with Perl and of course have other skills like web/infrastructure you will be ahead of the pack.
And the Perl community is very friendly these days. Despite very strange attacks from outsiders where it is obvious that they have not seen any Perl code written after 5.8 and pull their examples from 90s websites etc.
Also it seems like the author of the talk you linked to has been way more optimistic about Perl the last couple of years. Perhaps things has changed a bit from what you remember from 4+ years back.
Don't take my word for it, I am JAPH. Go see for yourself, talk to the guys doing the booths at conferences. You will be amazed how welcoming they are.
I most certainly can and do deny that. Writing scripts in Go, in my professional experience, was extraordinarily better than writing them in Perl. Go's ability to asynchronously run processes using the built in exec package, including capturing stdout and stderr (or piping them as streams!), works awesomely. After much searching of CPAN, the best module that my boss and I could find fails to properly capture output that interleaves stdout and stderr. In general, doing anything async in Go is worlds better than Perl's various competing / community rejected / author abandoned event loops.
I went to a small Perl conference in 2015. Yes, the people there were nice. I met TimToady and found him to be very humble. I respect the people in the Perl 5 community, but it simply astounds me as to how much of an echo chamber it is. If Perl 6 can be criticized as taking too much inspiration from other languages, then Perl 5 is essentially the opposite.
Trust me, I used to defend Perl very strongly, especially when that guy made a big deal out of the vulnerability that he found in CGI.pm. I've tried many of the modern -- and also the ancient -- parts of the Perl ecosystem and have hung out and helped newbies in #perl. I also spent quite some time in #perl6, trying out its various async capabilities and reporting and documenting bugs (I'm noted in the Christmas release). I don't say this to puff myself up, but rather to explain to you that I _tried extremely hard_ to work with Perl 5 and Perl 6 (most of my language-level criticisms of Perl 5 are rectified in 6). It's simply astonishing to me that people will insist that somehow I'm missing out on something that makes Perl 5 superior to everything else, to the point of denying my very experience, as you have done here.
Concurrency is definitively a pain point since it is not built into the core but for Web and even certain terminal apps I have found Mojo/Mojolicious to be both well designed and well maintained.
I don't deny that sometimes Java, Erlang or Go is the correct tool. I am actually very interested in Go and use many tools written in it like Docker/Kubernetes, Consul, Terraform etc. Go will probably be my choice for anything that needs concurrency until Perl catches up or something else better comes along.
But I will not abandon Perl for my unix scripting needs as it is still the best in my opinion. Getting max work done in a short time and with less code with max convenience and unix-y feel is where Perl whipes the floor with every other language. And that is also a sweet spot for DevOps needs where you don't develop everything from scratch. You take the best practices tools of the day and glue it together with Perl.
I am sad to see someone like you that clearly was involved with Perl at one point abandon it completely. The thing is that for every negative comment someone with a bit of clout spews on the internet there needs to be hundreds of positive ones to counter it. I still hear that "Perl is dead" because of that guy who clearly did not know Perl and used an example from the Stone Age that at one time was considered a feature but we now know is a vulnerability. It also exists in PHP by the way, and web developers worth their grain of salt have known better than to let user data just pass unsanetized to internal execution for quite some time now...
I call TIMTOWDI and hopefully we will se you back in Perl some day. You know it is a very special little language and if you ever "clicked" with it you will always miss its good stuff.
Personally I'm still in IT, but i have the strong feeling that if i were to leave this field I'd get into farming, as it is a line of work where scientific method and accurate measurements and methods yield to better results.
Huge, huge mistake.
When I tried "returning" I was either too corporate for startups and too startup-y for large organizations. I was both too young for roles I had already filled and too old for technical roles I was interested in.
I bounced through a series of startups, averaging less than a year before leaving.
I tried consulting but could never command the rates that would make it worthwhile.
I tried my hand at my own startup and failed miserably. I did not have the business sense, could not find a partner, and failed to convince a single investor to invest.
I suck at business and organizational politics.
I fell into the role I had in the 1990s which gave me some brief status and minor wealth, but was too busy firefighting then to learn how to leverage that into a better role.
While I believe I excel at managing stuff: people, projects, technology, it is hard to convey that in an interview.
Eventually I said fuck it.
I stopped applying for the CTO and I/T management roles I was interested in.
I told recruiters I am retired, but this had adverse side-effects I did not expect. I now reply that I am not interested in whatever role they are offering this week.
I used the knowledge and experience I have to switch to investing full time, now about a 50-50 mix of publicly traded stocks and startups in various stages of success/failure.
I mentor students in local bootcamps and try to help them find jobs after graduation.
I am still deeply technical, I throw together mock services and run them on different platforms to see what works, what fails and use that to guide my investments. I play with things like containers and IoT crap at home to keep current.
I hang out here to learn what the new hotness is (both what HN thinks it is, and what is coming in from the edges).
I learn a lot from the great writers here like patio11 and tptacek and others.
What startups have up and coming personnel to track? Which startups have people to avoid? I definitely check out founders and lead technical staff of the startups I invest in. If someone is a jerk here, they are unlikely to be someone I want to invest in.
I do not know if any of this counts as "leaving I/T" or not.
Most memorable was being told I was unqualified for a role because I did not clearly whiteboard how to use some aspect of the Spring Framework. Memorable because: the company did not use Java. At all. Was a RoR shop.
Another time I was recruited to step in as an "emergency" CTO, like, could I start Monday (this was the preceding Wednesday) because the technology team was melting down under the current CTO. One catch: they wanted the current CTO to interview me to get his opinion. You can guess how well that went.
I did not pitch myself as a hardcore techie and did not apply for roles which appeared to be hardcore technical roles. The CTO roles I interviewed for were really CIO roles, management, process, that sort of thing, with some technical awareness. But what I find is companies want to hire hard core technical people for these roles, and then have a mutual miserable experience as they learn that knowing everything there is to know about the latest whizbang framework does not necessarily guarantee that person will be great at hiring, managing people and process and projects or negotiating the growth of the organization. Sure, there are hardcore technical CTO roles, but I mostly avoided those. And not so much because I didn't know the technical aspects, but it's not where my strengths are.
I find companies avoid hiring managers as managers, in either startups or large organizations. They seem to prefer promoting their senior most technical people into management, even at the expense of that person's technical skills atrophying while they stumble through learning how to manage people or projects or products or whatever.
And you know, peace. This is how people think technology organizations should operate. Not my job to fix technology recruiting or personnel management.
After that I had a choice to go back or do something else. I saw an opportunity to do a real estate development deal and I went for that.
I liked doing the first real estate project so much, I put together a group of investors and am pursuing a larger deal right now.
I do more interesting programming now than when I was working for others and keep my skills fresh. I really like real estate development for a number of reasons.
1) Much better tax treatment of income. Rents are not subject to self-employment taxes, a 15.3% discount.
2) Real estate benefits from access to the fountain of all money, the federal reserve. It's national policy to support RE prices.
3) The ability to do a project, put in a lot of work, and at the end own something valuable in perpetuity.
After a year of a very large ops contracting project the checks just stopped. I really didn't like that.
4) Real estate is a market that is very local, with a lot of opportunities for advantage through information asymmetry. It is also something that resists reaching global scale and the race to the bottom competition that induces, and resists automation.
5) I really like the physical quality of the work. I physically feel better due to all the running around and not sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours a day.
All of my software and hardware experience benefits me. I see all kinds of possibilities to save time/money with these projects with software. One day I will probably create a startup in the RE space.
Most importantly there is a zen like nature to the work I do now, and I do a lot of the work on these houses myself, as the going rate for skilled craftsmen is not far off from a remote dev contractor in a lot of cases, and its easy to do many more hours than many employers would be willing to pay for.
Very importantly, the value created is put into the property which is only realized through higher rents (taxed as passive income) and/or a capital gain if the property is sold. This probably means that in the long run I take home more money rehabbing a house than I would coding for cash, due to appreciation and better tax treatment.
My only regret in all of this is that I didn't do it sooner. In America real estate investing is a pretty reliable path to wealth for the right kind of person with the right kind of eye.
They are pretty honest about things, but I feel like there's kind of a similarity with their messaging and the passive income/get rich quick world, although they will definitely tell you it's a get rich slow method, but it sometimes has that kind of feel to me.
But they cater to a lot of newbies. I come from a different perspective because my father was a landlord of a decent number of properties and I grew up in it.
I would say the biggest predictor of success is going into the right market and finding a good deal. Your profit or loss is determined by the deal you make.
There are a lot of people that buy houses far away from themselves and get property managers to operate for them for a fee. I personally would never buy a lot of properties far away from my home, and I feel like a lot of the people that do, do it from a kind of Dunning-Kruger false confidence, or maybe just a way lower anxiety level about what could go wrong than me.
You want to walk the property, you want to keep an eye on things, you want to make sure things are taken care of because you have a lot of liability as a landlord, and that's why I would only buy fairly close to where I lived.
Also at the level of buying and renting single family homes, duplexes, triplexes and so on, if you start paying contractors to do work every time something breaks it's going to eat into profit margins or possibly destroy them, at least until you've owned the property for a long time and rents have risen.
At that level of investing your profits are going to come from the work you put in yourself, or the price appreciation of a rising market over the long term. It's different if you can do bigger deals, larger buildings with more units.
If people are interested I might start blogging about real estate investing for developers.
Also, I'm curious how far you think is too far. And/or how often you run by a property you own.
I was born into it, but then didn't want to do it after college. I got back into it because I saw an opportunity that was too good to miss and I took it, now I'm hooked and expanding.
Some of the reasons I stayed away have changed. Just one example, paints used to be fairly heavily laden with VOCs and breathing that stuff is terrible for you for a number o reasons. Now zero/low-voc paint is really good and cheap. I wouldn't have wanted to paint an entire interior of a house with that stuff back then, now I am like Michaelangelo and the house I am working on is like my Sistine Chapel :)
1) Opportunities for their money to make money 2) Diversification 3) Tax deductions and going into a partnership that owns RE can do this for them.
The thing about real estate is its not passive like investing in equities is. You can get property managers and maybe if you find a really good one it will work out ok, but no one will care about your property the way you do. So if you can find good deals, and have the skillset to work them productively and can show that, you can find the money to buy them even if you can't qualify for bank financing. It's not going to be as cheap as bank financing, but it's possible.
Software developers with a good W-2 income can get really good mortgage rates from banks right now however. If you can do that, do that as much as you can. But you will find that doesn't scale as fast as you might like. That's where private money makes sense.
Internet startups are really cool and can mean big growth, billion dollar growth is possible, but that's a winner take all market with high failure rates.
I shot for the stars with internet business and had some success but never had the huge exit I really wanted in the time frame I wanted it in. I had really wanted to make big FU money by the time I was 27 or so, so I could live the big, free life I always thought I wanted.
But then I realized I was very free when I was growing up, and that freedom came from the rental properties my father built and managed, and I wanted to recreate that life for my children, and I couldn't take big chances like I used to. I needed something that would definitely work if I worked hard at it.
And a foundation of rents will let me take big chances again in the future, but then there really won't be a chance of failure, because the default mode will be some comfortable life collecting rents.
It's pretty cool when people just constantly owe you, and pay you just for owning something.
I still read HN because I am still deeply interested in coding & tech culture. It's been a strong interest for over 20 years, I don't think it will go away.
I didn't like the 60-80 hrs week with no overtime really.
I also didn't have any real life and wanted to spend my free time looking for a girl and concentrate on my health (exercise). 60-80 hrs really kill most of your plans...
I left to go back to school to become a data science... so I guess it's not really leaving.
But I'm not giving up my years of experiences to go to a totally different field. Just web dev isn't there any more with the recent bootcamps pumping out tons of, in my opinion, ok-ish web dev. Beside who am I to say when I can't do those google interviews anyway. I didn't have enough grit to compete or tell the "CTO" why they should hire me over two other web devs that graduated from some bootcamps for the same salary. I left two startups after they hire pretty bad people, they came calling me for freelance works though even though I left because I disagree with the CTO and the other because too much free overtime.
So I said fuck it, and went to school and get another hard degree (other than my bs in comp sci, I'm doing master in stat). I doubt a bootcamp can do that and plus the data science field is very wide. Maybe who knows one day I end up in Google or some nice tech company in SolCal, a nice stable job and concentrate on other aspect of my life while enjoying my career instead of slaving away and hating my passion.
BTW that non IT years were one of the best in my life as life is not a job.
Ivan Starkov github.com/istarkov
I can't personally reconcile how I'd go from $500k+ to an entry-level role in another field on <$50k and every time something frustrates me about the industry, the cold reality is it still feels smarter to milk these "golden years" and to sock away a lot towards quality of life in retirement.
No longer needing to work from 40-45 and having a house paid off with 20+ years to learn a new trade, do whatever is interesting, or travel, that remains compelling to me.
How have those who've left the industry managed with the substantial drop in compensation? Do you have families, retirement plans, all that stuff, and just decided you'd rather be A++ happy with less wealth, instead of B- happy whilst earning a lot?
Started a family, I became a stay at home dad :)
> What do you do for a living now?
My wife works. I plan to return to work once my son goes to school in September this year. Probably not in IT though, I love IT but more as a hobby now.
> Do you regret it?
Not for a second. I love my life now!
> And why do you still read HN?
Because tech is who I am.
I don't regret it. But I do miss it some. I still have a passion for creating in general, but anything technology related is even better. In particular software. So I think that answers the last questions.
Though I want to make an extra point here. As I'm sure many will probably point out. At least most of my friends and family have. I know that I can find jobs as a remote employee. This is not my point. I chose to leave a good full time job, simply because I do not want this type of life anymore. Doing it remotely is not going to change the deadlines and working 40+ hours. The type of life I'm trying to set up is a life of more time to actually enjoy my life. Not spend it behind a computer or any other type of work. There are numerous other things I'm trying to do to make income. Blogs, Vlogs, affiliate marketing, etc. Those will all take time as well, yes. But when it is a result of capturing the content of my travels I am going to capture anyways. Why not make some money off of it. Also, you have to keep in mind, I have sold all of my belongings and have no debt (which I am very fortunate and thankful for) but my cost of living is significantly lower to where I do not have to make as much. Plus most other countries I'm visiting things are much cheaper than in the US. So in summary, need less income, lower my spending, find ways to make tiny fortunes off of results of things I am already doing.
It is a process, and still takes time upfront. My hope is that I can find a happy work life balance. It can work, I have already met many people that are doing these exact things and it is working for them. And if it does not work out for me, the IT industry is not going anywhere. There will be a slight adjustment getting back into the swing of things. But it is not an impossible task.
I regret leaving IT because i was making good money just coding python and html/css/javascript. And being broke is really, really stressful, especially now that I'm in my thirties. I'm probably going back to programming, but things have changed a lot since 2009 so I'll have to spend some time learning new things like react, es6, new deployment techniques etc.
I don't regret it, it had become rather tedious to follow every FotM and deal with crappy software and artificially obsoleted hardware etc. - and most interesting problems are now too big for small companies, the rest is mostly solved/engineering. Also, had some nasty surgery in my spine (spinal cord tumor) and can't type as fast as before.
Still read HN because IT is still a hobby.
So basically I left the Service Provider realm, and moved into local government doing predominantly SysAdmin work. It's pretty good, I get paid more than what I should, long contracts, lots of leave and entitlements, and they don't care if I duck down the street for an hour or two here and there to go to lecture or tutorial. I still read HN because there's useful info from time to time, and getting into fights in the comments is always fun and somewhat beneficial to what I'm studying.
Reason for the change in my case is I've simply got no interest in technology. The only reason I wound up in IT in the first place was because I got a free TAFE course on it, which lead to a job. Without tooting my horn to much, I'd say I'm pretty good at what I do, but I just don't care at all about it.
I quickly found that what enthused me about programming was not present at all in the real industry, that apart from the paycheck, the job would be, probably for my life, identical to that of a Fordist production-line worker: insert necessary letters and punctuation here, repose, repeat. In a room in some building, sitting all along, dabbling with deadlines, weird demands. This was boring, and not what enthused me for programming at all, that was the explorative aspect, the tool-making. So I quickly decided that I'd never ever be a professional IT person.
In the two years I had perfected my English, to the level that I'd say that my English level was near-native. This proved very useful to me, allowing me to qualify for an Italian philology course, from which I'll graduate with a GPA of 3.80/4.00 in a year and a half, and which for me has been a part of a literary/humanist adventure which started about the end of my teens.
For a living... I don't really know. I have two main paths: academia as a phylologist, or sth. else. I really want to run a cafe, but I don't have any capital at all to start such a business. My overall plan for the future is pursuing my curiosities on one side and moderate, mentally-light and sociable work on the other, because, for me at least, the life is way too ephemeral and short to do otherwise.
As for HN, well, I've not lost my interest in tech and programming. I use, for example, Emacs for any kind of documents, email, RSS/Atom feeds, etc., there are some bits of Elisp that I've published. I'm slowly studying Common Lisp as a programming language. Writing programmes is pleasurable and useful still to me, and following HN helps me keep in touch with it. Also, HN is the only ONLY _o_n_l_y_ place where I can share the same platform with people like Alan Kay, many other CS celebs, creators of software that revolutionised computing and is maybe used by billions of people, and the sheer fact that I'm typing into the same textbox that these smartest people are typing and that one day our paths may cross on this forum on an interesting topic is, God, oh God, exciting.
So, here is some more than what you bargained for, I think :)) A really nice and relevant Ask HN that helped me get these out, so thank you so much!
edit: add the missing `identical'.
They did mainly admin stuff.
Now they are happier, even with lower pay.
For example, one helps students at university with their study planning.
Another one helps kids that have shown problematic behavior.
* Farming
* Sailing around the world
* Musician
* Retired abroad
* Photographer
* Illness
And apart from the illness one, I think that change was definitely needed for all, and that, for the most part, they're happier in their new, non-IT, lives.
If this was more about reading HN though, I don't think many of these were HN readers.
It goes a little something like this:
My friend had over 10 years of experience in IT, and for what it's worth never even intended to get into the field, it's simply a job he could have that adjusted well enough with his school hours. He wanted to be a Math Teacher. Anyways, after getting through school he realizes that any job he takes will likely pay less than his IT job. He had gotten his hands on certificates in networking, red hat and others during his career and managed to have a lucrative post as a IT senior manager at a large Bank. Stable if underwhelming and not much room for advancement. Then he realized one day, he told me he realized it in a meeting he was in having to do with I want to say doing an overhaul of some of their networking: Therr was more money in being the outside firm they contract to handle these things and train staff then there was in staying on and helping consulting/services firms in his current role.
You see, his insight was that he could get away with making more lucrative amounts of money in contracts with large institutions or companies which often, for various reasons, depend on IT services firms to handle their deployments. He also noted that a lot of these companies don't specialize in high quality mission critical deployments. Accenture is a big IT firm that mostly highest in his opinion cheaply and doesn't attract top talent and a lot of these guys don't have an ongoing training arm.
So he founded a company that focuses squarely on filling a niche: he mostly contracts services with non-Technical firms like Banks, Hospitals, Governemnt institutions and agencies etc. and he does 3 things:
By focusing only on highly critical or inftrastiricre that needs massive changes to rollout or other such opportunities, he doesn't go for low rent contracts. Instead he focuses on delivering high margin services for niches like rolling out tech solutions for high speed trading for hedge funds or critical infrastructure deployments for banks hospitals etc.
He secondly trains existing or ramping up IT staff in the things his company actually sets up, it's part of the services contract. This training arm even does just training now and does well. Big companies often contradict out their training for new technologies and his love of teaching really shines.
The third thing he does I find most remarkable: he sets it up often where his company can exit doing business. His goal isn't to milk services contracts but to empower organizations to do it themselves over time. You would think this would be a losing strategy but it isn't. It allows him to keep the company small and garners a lot of respect from people who make these decisions. A lot of the big IT firms want to keep you on as long as possible because the contracts are more lucrative that way. He inverts this and it has garnered some respect. Which in turn creates a lot of referral and repeat business.
Now granted he left his jo with a list of good solid contacts to get up and moving and had a clear vision. Did he leave IT per say? No. He did become his own boss and successfully does well for himself and his small company does well over all.
The one thing he told me which me or may not be still true is he wishes he would have become the IT firm to VC firms and startups. A lot of startups have massive challenges to scaling infrastructure properly and could do a lot through just good training and having a guide. I don't know if this is still an area of opportunity but I remember having an at length conversation in regards to trying to become the go to devices firms that VCs and or startups could call in to help themselves or in the case of VCs the businesses they provide support to a leg up on this
*For privacy reasons I'm not going to reveal names.
Yep. Definitely an area of opportunity. There are some contractors specializing in startup, charging them a lot at critical stages.
I think the biggest challenge with them is to get the money. Startups by nature don't have the money to pay thousands of dollars per day to contractors, there are only a very few who can afford it after a big funding round. That's a niche market. Unfortunately, startups usually have an abysmal business culture, they don't hire/don't understand contractors and they don't expect to to pay that much for a service.
Then again, VC/startup business culture is not unilateral or one way. Like all business relationships, both sides can be blind to the needs or wills of the other.
I had a brief stint as a well paid consultant before being offered full time work with the government. I enjoy the people but felt I was always solving the same problem. Collect data, insert it into a db and built tools to work with it. Wash - rinse - repeat.
To keep me sane I had learned to fly small airplanes and found myself teaching and craving for more challenges. Since childhood the dream had always been for me to fly helicopters. In 2006 I took a 12-month LOA from my permanent gov job and went to college to learn to fly helicopters.
I can't tell you how much fun it was/is!!!! Being outside, seeing the world from above everyday, and knowing that each flight would present new challenges.
After I got my license I was extremely fortunate to get a job flying aircraft (airplanes and helicopters) with special sensors on board at very low level 200-400' above ground collecting geophysical science data (i.e. magnetic field, pull of gravity, background radiation, induced electromagnetic response). The work was literally on every continent and I spent the next 7 years flying in some amazing places, including (favs): Papua New Guinea, Greenland, North West Territories and BC (Canada) and several countries in central/south America and the west/east coasts of Africa.
I realised after a while that being away so much while a blessing was also a curse. My friends were getting married, having kids, getting divorced and generally moving up the life ladder, I was living in hotels for 2 months at a time in random places (often 2nd and 3rd world countries) and then spending a couple weeks at home before going off to do it again.
In 2013 I was offered a job flying a larger multi-engine helicopter for a provincial air ambulance service in a major city. This offers the best of both worlds - I get to fly 14 days in a 28 day schedule and I am almost always home after my shift. Even better the way the schedule falls I have 10 weeks off a year and 14 days off in a 28 day schedule. With this extra time I've actually returned to a developer/prototyper type role for my employer and get to work on projects that I propose that have the potential to make my flying job better and easier.
It was a serious kick in the butt to go from making nearly 100K in 2006 to 32K in 2008, but after a few years I've worked my way back up and am feeling better balanced for it. There are only a few things I'd do differently (mostly I would have prioritise relationships more and stopped travelling a couple of years earlier than I did).
If your dream is to fly, it's a very personally rewarding choice, but career wise, especially in the U.S. the money is poor. Also I wouldn't be surprised to see drone tech starting to replace pilots 15 years from now or even earlier.
As I've gotten older (almost 50) and IT employment has become more structured (with new approaches devised to make business and processes more profitable and controlled (agile, devops)) my interest in the field has waned. I still like the creative aspect of the work where it pertains but if I was in corporate IT (instead of small scale hybrid cloud, HPC and scientific computing) would rather do something else.
What did you not like about them? :)
Agile + scrum were transparently about providing leadership/managers with a reason to be involved at higher rates of compensation. Streamlining customer/developer communications or promoting the creation of well designed solutions were not part of our agility. We didn't need paid moderators to chuckle at our jokes, enjoy our insights, and make bad decisions on our behalf.
Devops and the whole automation phenomena I ignored till the realization creeped in that companies were hiring HR folks who thought that automation and the anti-pattern of SA OPs were silver bullets 'everywhere'.
The tools that are in use that have become part of the devops 'stack' like ansible and chef or jenkins and atlassian and all this...cruft. If I want to deploy and CM for *nix please don't tell me I have to work with Ansible specialists doing deploys and orchestration + CI and builds behind some Atlassian sales masterpiece.
You may not be able to hire someone who can understand our shell scripts and deploy|test automation for cheaper than us but you actually have people who can write a shell script and diagnose a systems problem without handing off to a developer to decipher '312:yaml malformed button hook, dict value unbuttoned.'
I'm just a veteran of some psychic wars and probably don't know what is good for me though. :)