Ask HN: Meaningful jobs outside the office | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Meaningful jobs outside the office

12 pointsHarey5 comments

After nearly 10 years of being in IT, wearing different hats: a software dev, lead, account manager and now a founder I feel like I want to leave the tech world. Firstly, I’m fed up with no-value-for-humanity, intangible projects. Secondly, I can’t sit in front of my desk that many hours anymore. I just want to go out and feel the nature. Has anybody here left the IT and found a meaningful job, possibly at least partially including working outside? Looking for inspiration.

View on HN

I hear you. I've been in the industry for less than 4 years. I love coding, but not the industry. Last spring i burned myself to the ground building a project with unreasonable deadlines. I was sleeping less than 4h a night and couldn't keep any food down. In the end, the project was replaced by a newer shinier library. It all felt for nothing. I left soon afterwards and have transitioned from office work to fulltime remote freelancing & consulting while I attempt to bootstrap a small company that will hopefully cover my living costs and allow me to help my family. I haven't left IT but I'm hopefully getting closer to an arrangement where i can keep coding without and have a healthy balance.

How did you start into consulting ? I'm tired of the office.

About the software you wrote as wasn't even used said: that st happens, and we can't get too attached to the things we produce - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost right?

I would recommend you use your expertise wisely to the less areas to build tangible product outcomes that actualy help humanity. I recently brought a drone kit & raspberrypi and built one with a vision to use it help for farming/agriculture/seed-bombing etc. This required me to move out of my desk and play with the hardware and eventually go outside to test it. At fist you may think its impossible to learn robotics stuffs since you are just a programmer. But trust me, if I can do it with no experience in Robotics, you definitely can. That way you can make use of your existing skill, learn new ones and see tangible outcomes. IMHO I always wonder what happened to the future. There is a huge gap in robotics today. We should've built better things than facebook, twitter with computers by now.

Sounds like you are burned out.

Think back of the times when you were actually excited and driven to write software. What was different back then? You probably had an awesome team and build some really cool and interesting stuff.

Take some time off, 2-3 weeks and change your environment. I.e. long cruise, backpacking through Europe or South America. Something that will pull you completely away from technology.

You need to rest your mind.

When you come back, if you think your work sucks, or your job sucks, then go out there and find something that aligns with your values. There's plenty of software to be build, and plenty of people building it, some of which align closely with your values. You just have to keep looking.

Having basically the same feeling, albeit with different amounts of experience, I took up a moving job. Lifting things in and out of a truck. Most of the time it was much more satisfying, but I wouldn't call it fulfilling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com