Ask HN: Why did you leave your “primary” career? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why did you leave your “primary” career?

13 pointsa3n5 comments

The recent submission of the postal service LLV mentioned a lawyer who became a letter carrier. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18795323

If you've left your "primary" career, be that software or legal or whatever, what can you say about that?

I'll go.

I have a BSCS, 1988. I mostly liked software development for most of the time since. But, I was never more than a B player. I suspected that early, but never admitted it to myself. This, combined with lifelong depression, made for a more and more miserable life.

I left software development for a few years, for personal life issues. I came back sideways, in quality assurance. I liked that well enough.

Finally got my depression diagnosed and successfully treated. But I also have anger issues, may or may not be correlated with depression; no matter.

I rage-quit my last QA job due to a conflict (for which I share only partial blame, but full blame for the sudden resignation), only to find that I was now too old and irrelevant to "walk across the street" and get hired.

Had to take a security guard job for survival. Came into contact with a lot of semi truck drivers, as most shippers' checkin/checkout is done by third party security services (no responsibility for those people, so cheaper). I also spent a lot of time walking around and in buildings under construction. No meaningful benefits, which is difficult at my age.

I slowly realized that I could do what those drivers were doing.

In the nineties and early oughts, it was extremely easy to get a software job, even for B players. That is the case for semi drivers, now and into the future.

For me it's an ideal job. My son's grown, I have no SO, and while I like people, I also like isolation; it's emotionally quiet. The pay is nowhere near software wages, but it's more than enough to get by, with meaningful benefits.

And I haven't had a single meeting in the year I've been driving.

EDIT: Subject line.

I was a structural engineer for 10 ten years then switched to software. I had graduated in Civil Engineering, then took my professional Structural Engineering exams 5 years later, came top of my year and everything looked peachy.

Then I started suffering from increasing amounts of anxiety stemming from childhood problems and increasing responsibility. It became so I was terrified in my daily life.

So I quit SE and worked part-time at a library whilst I earned a Masters in 'Computing' so I could switch industries. When that was over I moved countries with my wife and started over as a software developer.

I won't say it's been plain sailing (those issues follow me wherever I go!) but I'm glad I made the change - I had to, it was killing me.

Sometimes I wonder if I'd be happier as a construction worker but I'm too old for that now and it has very destructive long-term consequences for the human body.

ps. I spend a lot of time keeping my life very simple such that it would appear boring to most people. pps. I was rage-entrenched from my first software job (I raged then was politely let-go).

> Sometimes I wonder if I'd be happier as a construction worker but I'm too old for that now and it has very destructive long-term consequences for the human body.

Sometimes we say "Well, I can always do X." But as you observe, we often can't always do X.

Ironic that the conditions of some professions, like construction or truck driving, contribute to limiting the time you can spend in them. Sitting in the driver seat all day long, and eating poorly for convenience, contribute to obesity and diabetes, for example.

I know a guy who drives a truck - he told me that, on many days, he gets up at 5:30 am, goes to work, is back around 5 pm and then he’s so tired that he basically eats something and goes to sleep. How demanding is your job?

It sounds like your friend is a local driver, who possibly makes many stops in a day, and possibly does his own loading/unloading.

I'm a long distance trucker, driving a "dry van" (the typical 53 foot box trailer). It's very rare that I touch my freight, it's either preloaded and I bring an empty trailer to swap, or I sit there while the shipper/receiver loads/unloads.

Since a trip is typically 500 to 1500 miles, all I do is sit and drive for a day or three at a time. I sleep in a pretty comfortable bunk in the truck. I take my federally mandated and electronically logged breaks.

It's mostly not physically demanding. Once in awhile appointments will be at odd hours, and your sleep shifts because of that. But in my experience, mostly not. Once in awhile you have to struggle with some aspect of securing your load (but they're usually sealed when you get them) or wrestling with a stubborn trailer, mostly not.

It's an easy job. I mostly get paid to look out the window.

My friend does one pick up and one delivery per day - he’s delivering products from a local large industrial plant to various clients.

Interestingly, long distance truckers around here (Poland) make roughly twice as much as local ones, presumably because most people don’t want to live the nomadic life.

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