Ask HN: Why did you leave the software industry? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why did you leave the software industry?

24 pointscauliflower9927 comments

Have you left the software industry? If so, why?

Which industry and job did you transfer into and are you happier in your new job?

I’ve been solidly programming since I was a teenager, over 30 years now, in many languages, frameworks, operating systems, whatever. I have been building complex networked applications since the mid 1990s. I got tired of the constant “you must have 30 years’ experience in this four year old framework or language” filter used by hiring teams.

You see it here on HN often with people allegedly in hiring positions claiming that if you indeed have been in the industry for 30 years they expect you to shit diamonds and emit industrial strength code in whatever language and platform they decide is important right here, right now, on the spot. The fear of making a potential "bad hire" is so paramount that hiring managers would prefer never to fill the role than to consider maybe, just maybe, it is unrealistic to expect someone would have more years experience with a required skill than is actually possible.

If you are not 100% up to speed on the latest big thing you are a zero, no middle ground, no "give me a couple of days to see how the new new thing maps to last week's new thing".

Just tired of it. The credentialism, the sexism, the ageism, the misogyny, the thinly veiled nationalism.

I am not a genius, I don't have any patents. I'm a decent, solid, hard core coder. Give me a word mess of APIs and the target language or framework you want to use and I can pull together an MVP that solves your problem fairly quickly (is it production code at that moment? No, of course not, is it ready to be iterated and turned into production code? absolutely).

I can't get a phone screen, let alone an interview.

So, yeah, I am out of the software industry. I do other things that leverage what I have learned but I am not writing code, am not babysitting some system. I would not say I am happier, but I am content, and I sleep better at night than I ever did in the time I was "in the industry".

Great account - thanks for sharing! Can I ask what you are doing these days?

Personally, I see the problem solving skills of coders as completely transferable into other industries. I'm interested to hear where people go with their valuable skills.

Sadly credentials are not as transferable.

where exactly are you located? There are a ton of "boring" software jobs that exist to support a business in medium sized cities, not like them "world changing" tech jobs in the bay area but they pay the bills.

Honestly, from everything I've heard about the tech jobs at tech companies, the boring business related jobs treat you worse, pay you less, and give you less satisfaction.

I work as a tech lead in banking and honestly there's zero pressure and we're just pampered. The job is mostly bog-standard boring - i.e. we get to play with the newest tech for tech's sake (again - pampered), but the use cases are standard and simple. If you can get this job to pay well, it's basically a variant of "rest and vest", where you can top up your bank account and recharge for a couple years before your next adventure. And, if you're not the adventurous type, it's a great job for life.

That hasn't been my experience in finance. There is zero tech for tech sake at my company. There is a lot of pressure to deliver on schedule and reduce cycle times. They pay ok, but not great.

It must depend on which area of business you're in. It's good to land in departments which generate most revenue (in our bank, that's trading) or in "this is the future" areas, which for us is big data and cloud. There, the money flows more freely and developers are more pampered.

Also, I'm working in a Scandinavian bank and work-life balance is important there (overtime is very rare).

Am almost 53, and after 33 years in the field, I encountered a lot of ageism (at least in hiring) in the Bay Area, so I moved back to the Midwest and worked a gig for a year, then budget cuts axed the newly expanded team. As one Bay area firm said in their rejection letter )the last straw that got me to pack up:)

"You're great technically, but you're not a good cultural fit"

(Yes, I was current at the time. I know node and frontend, did two decades of JS, SQL, cloud, Java, C, rails, PHP, Perl)

Well fuck me then, because all I've done is worked in coding forever. I've managed teams but like coding much more.

I tried getting remote work, had some 20-30 interviews before COVID hit, but no gig. Haven't tried much since and that's my own fault.

So it's been two years since I worked in software. Am not working at the moment. Wouldn't say I'm happier

There is definitely a bias against engineers who choose not to go into a 'management' role as they progress in their careers, particularly if they've been there for >2 decades. It sucks in my opinion. It also means we have to think about potentially changing careers when we are at the peak of our ability!

Are you working on side projects or you have another source of income to ease the pressure?

I keep hearing about consulting path, is that something you can take?

I'm not as old as OP yet, but have already encountered some of the "cultural fit" replies since I'm not into the whole silicon valley tech bro culture. As a result I've started dabbing into part time consulting on the side as a way to test the waters. It's not for every one, especially not for people who just want to code and not deal with people. The same type of skills that you need for the "management route". So people avoiding the management route in their tech career life will probably not like it.

I liked coding but I got tired of staring at a screen all day especially when working from home. Just felt lonely and pointless.

I also never seemed to get a seat at the table. I was paid well but I always felt like just a pawn in someone’s game.

In my last job the new boss spent three months moving everyone to new locations around the office. Made up all kinds of rules about who was worthy of a window office or the bigger cubicles. I literally felt like I was a doll and the boss was playing dollhouse.

It's really odd but it bugs the hell out of me whenever I get assigned a seat. I thought it was just me being unreasonable. But maybe it just leads into the powerlessness of the situation.

I worked as a consultant on one job, and one of the managers on a different consulting team pointed to all his men and joked, "We don't have the best people but we make up for it with numbers." It was a self depreciating joke, but there was some truth to it.

There's just something about full time jobs that bugs me. The drab walls, cramped rooms, noisy air conditioning. The way I can't get sick days when my child is sick. I quit a job once because the HR tried to negotiate that I was worthy of only half a sick day because the clinic wouldn't say I was sick enough to be classified as sick, and they also forgot to pay me the trivial clinic fee they promised to. The CEO bought me a lot of nice meals and he was a good friend but in the end it was a transaction.

I feel you. Assigned seats feels like you’re back in kindergarten.

So much of workplace happiness boils down to respect and dignity.

In fact I believe a lot of our current problems stem from not treating adults like adults, but that’s another topic.

I understand how you feel. Playing musical desks is a big pet peeve of mine. Being shuffled around because it is "more optimal", or whatever usually makes me feel like the person doing the rearranging is on a power trip, exerting the minimal amount of power they do have. Divvying up seating arrangements based on worthiness is another level of this.

It reminds me of a teacher I had in high school. He went to Columbia Law and was an attorney for a few years before becoming a teacher. I asked him why he left law and he told me a story about one day a senior partner coming into his office to count the ceiling tiles. When my teach asked why he was counting the ceiling tiles the senior partner explained that they were going to reallocate offices so that those who worked the most hours got the biggest offices. My teacher said that was when he knew it was time to do something else.

What do you do now?

Self appointed inspector of rain storms.

I have not yet, unfortunately, but would really like to.

It turns out I’m really not that great at it for one. That provides some limitations I’ve not quite come to terms with and I really don’t want to be stuck in the cycle I am till retirement or death.

Unfortunately there’s just not much else out there without highly expensive re-education. On top of that almost any other field is going to incur not only a pay cut but a loss internet maximum earning potential that is probably not worth it.

Another one here who is really not that great at it. I also find my interest in getting better at it waning by the day, because I know I'll still be mediocre no matter how hard I try.

But right now it's a choice between software or an unskilled low paid job, as I have no other skills.

I have not left the software industry. During full-time assignments. I used to deal with burnout symptoms.

On a break for now...

> This book did a great job of describing my feelings.... https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici...

I haven't yet, but would love to.

I'm tired of unrealistic expectations, especially when you are constrained from delivering more because of the business not making smart choices. I'm tired of being underpaid, expected to learn new tech only to have that effort being thrown away by the company.

I don't know what I could do. It seems like nothing pays very well anymore. Maybe being an electrician or mechanic would be good. My main plan is just to tough it out and then maybe I can run a small farm that will allow me to retire sooner. Margin is pretty low on that, so it might be more of a cost saving subsistence thing.

I was a programmer in the 1980s and 90s, then went into a System Administration in 1997. As time went on, there was less and less work, but I still was there to put out fires. I tried multiple times to do upgrades to their database system, etc... but was stopped by production wanting to avoid any possible outage or change of habit. Eventually the job was outsourced.

I took a job making gears, because I was interested in becoming a machinist, and our income situation was secure. I figured I'd spend 5 years in the industry, then exit and get back into Programming, with the added knowledge of machining as a combination skill.

I learned a ton about gears, and small job shop machining environments. What I failed to do was keep up with programming in the intervening 20 years.

I'm trying to figure out how to dive back in, and get work, especially now that I can't do physical labor anymore due to long covid.

I did the Advent of Code last year in Pascal, which was challenging, but fun. I'm up for almost any language or task. The tools are a lot better, GIT is amazing, but the GUI builders aren't any better than VB6 / Delphi for Windows was 20 years ago.

The incompetence and ignorance of literally everybody above me makes me sick. I worked for multi-million/billion dollar companies with extremely stupid C-level people who are not even capable of plugging a cable into a laptop, but make IT decisions that don't make any sense, and then I have to build it. Oh, you "need" a company expansion to Asia ? By next week? With a tech team of ... one? On your 15 year old PHP4 codebase on an un-updatable Linux version from the late 90ies? Sure.

Everywhere I go literally everything is beyond repair, but nobody gives budget for improvements, it's always just pure pressure to deliver insane results within unrealistic deadlines. I'm about to leave the industry, but have no backup plan yet. Just coming in every morning to pay the rent.

The industry has become absolutely stupid! I abhor all the crap you have to take just to get considered for a position.

Unrealistic expectations and stupid code tests!

I'm sick of it!

The ageism, the misogyny, the racism, and all the "Oh, we're one big happy working family!" Working family!? Are you f*cking kidding me!?

Currently I'm not working, but are considering something really simple like a cleaning job!

I have more than 3 decades of experience in multiple programming languages and sysadmin tasks for many different systems. I don't even want to waste my time doing any interviews any longer.

My first job I worked designing new jamming systems for fighter aircraft. Really interesting work and I was really good at it but basically the end goal of the work was to make planes survive so they could get to a location where they could kill people. Left that to do QA on a GUI builder used to run nuclear power plants, trains, and chemical factories (wanted to work in computer graphics which I had a lot of experience with but there were no other jobs available e.g. in the film industry). The work was boring and the people were horrible but I was lazy and stayed until the company lost $2M and I was fired because I had just trained someone younger and cheaper to do the same job. (The company was a small cash cow for a while after that, then had its IP sold off so everyone lost their jobs. Getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to me.) Tried doing software QA consulting for a while. Exciting to meet new people and solve new problems in medical billing and geographic mapping, but always had to be looking for the next job and I'm not a great people person and jobs were sparse in my region and I didn't want to move since I'd just bought a house. So then I went into education as a software engineer, supporting research in computer science at an Ivy League college, completely out of industry. Very interesting work, seemed like it might make a difference in the world though I've never seen anything I've helped develop used very much (maybe some of the wireless sensor work has been copied in industry, I pray that some of the electronic animal herding and computer log analysis work is never used at all). Job security was awful, grants run 1-3 years, then either I had to switch professors by joining a new project or try to look for work elsewhere. Yet a few profs and I, with some effort and scary times, managed to keep me employed in the CS dept for 20 years, last 10 years mostly with the same prof. He grew bigger and bigger britches while my pay stayed the same. He kept demanding more and more because now he was important and felt his work should be more important or whatever. When my retirement savings grew large enough I retired and have never regretted it. I was never entirely happy with various aspects of any of my jobs. Some of the work was way more interesting for some jobs and grants, some of the people way worse (working in a company with 3000 people, almost exclusively men who have been through wars has unique advantages and drawbacks), the pay generally not great in any of them (except consulting). Looking back I think I would have been happier becoming an artist, but it is extremely tough making a living as an artist so I probably would have died early or had to go back into writing software anyway. I have my name on lots of patents (but get nothing from them) and papers (fame is pretty useless). It is still a question in my mind as to whether anything I did ever really helped society. Some days I think it did, some days I think it didn't. I certainly helped make a few other people rich, but I never could be as mean and insanely ambitious as they were. Being retired is the best job I ever had, I may yet become an artist just for fun. Doing it for money would probably ruin it.

I live from a website I built. I got out of the 40 hour work week and I'm not going back.

I'm happy to have left the working world altogether. I'm also happy to program for fun again. It's back to being the craft I fell in love with.

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