Ask HN: Those of you who left tech, where are you now?

Leetcode is a very different skill and interest than software or building.

You say you picked up Elixir quickly, built cool stuff and enjoy reading about software. I know a lot of software engineers that software is just a job for them not a vocation or an interest.

I suggest you look at yourself more closely, are you leaving software or tech because of collateral hardships like interviewing and leetcode? or do you hate it?

Few things are interesting to a person, fewer yet interesting that they are also good at and rarely something that they can also get paid for handsomely. And everything will get harder and harder the more you want to grow in it.

You could get a cushy stagnant job somewhere. Consider if you would like it. If yes then you can do that right now in software.

If you wouldn't and you want to keep growing, the pain you're feeling could be from that drive within you.

Also please consider, the grass is always greener, do you feel about other professions the same way you feel about picking up a new book? learning something new? because the sweet promise of new beginnings definitely should not be the only reason to dictate a major decision.

Hey, I want to transition into this full time development side of things, from Security. Is doing Leetcode and Design problems enough?

In my opinion you need a curriculum. If you are willing to spend, I suggest a bootcamp type of program and algoexpert. Otherwise an equivalent free version, i.e. a guided program into development and algo/ds.

The problem with leetcode and self study is that, as a student, you don't know what to focus on, everything has uniform weights.

I had the same realization as you about a year ago. I didn't feel like I was a strong "lead" on the team, people around me could always seem to come up with a more original idea than my inside the box ideas. I decided to take some time away from coding and embrace interests outside of work.

Right before I quit, I was taking PTOs regularly to spend time at Wheaton Labs (the founder himself retired from tech) and really learned alot from there about gardening and being energy efficient with utilities around me.

I then quit my job three months ago and started doing everything I've always wanted to do / learn! Here are some of them:

1. I had no idea how food is grown. I started maintaining my own backyard to learn about how to grow different foods. Most of them are still growing, waiting patiently for harvest.

2. I had no idea why people eat gluten free foods and what types of food allergens there out there and did some digging (Wow really learned alot there)

3. I've always ate out and my cooking skills sucks. I started cooking my favorite foods and trying to get good at it (PIZZA!)

4. Music! I always felt left out when my coworkers were having music jam sessions. I've been practicing the 3 main cords every day in the past 3 months and I can sometimes improvise and sing to my wife throughout the day.

And the most important is time! I finally have the time to dive deeper and deeper into whatever topics I find interesting.

Are you retired or enjoying funemployment?

funemployment, only have about 20k in savings and it should last me a year or two depending on how much I splurge. My friend also works in tech and she's nice enough to let me live rent free.

The rent part is awesome. Do you scrimp pretty hard? Or is life still enjoyable? Nice to be able to go on a little trip or eat out sometimes. Most good stuff doesn't need to cost a lot though.

> Do you scrimp pretty hard?

No, my reasoning is to enjoy life by pursuing what I love and I don't want saving money to get in the way, even if it meant possibly cutting my funemployment short.

> Nice to be able to go on a little trip or eat out sometimes

100% agree! I'd caution against over indulging on consumption though, it can lead to a trap where you spend all your money and not gain much value. Instead of spending money on consumption, I try to optimize spending on money on things that increase my creative output value. I haven't eaten out in a while, in its place I've bought a nice pizza oven and I make pizzas for family and friends. They usually bring the finer things, so I don't spend much money when I'm hosting but I end up having an incredible amount of fun.

Also when I host we usually have alot of leftover food, which then goes into my compost pile and I get to build up more high quality dirt. Win win. I'm thinking of buying a duck next week for companionship and also to help around the garden.

> Most good stuff doesn't need to cost a lot though.

From my personal experience, most good stuff comes from investing in tools that increase your creative output. Those things are always worth the money

Haha awesome. Sounds like you know how to live your life... it's admirable. I'm considering the same thing. I have a good amount saved but my creativity and general expression is suffering a lot.

Too bad you're struggling with this, I hope you get some inspiring reactions here!

This made me wonder, though:

> I can't for the life of me get into a place where interviewing seems natural at all and still after four years of experience struggle to get through medium leetcode problems.

Are you considering a career switch for the right reasons? If you've done OK at your jobs so far (aside form the covid startup thing), and still suck at interview-style algorithms, doesn't that just mean you're not doing those types of algorithms in your day job? Surprise: lots of interview processes are broken. Most of us developers are here to do some basic information transformations and to keep our application's structure from becoming unmaintainable. Not to fizzbuzz a binary tree palindrome.

When I last switched jobs, I didn't reply to companies that wanted me to do irrelevant hackerrank-y assignments, and still got multiple good offers on the table. Don't make something that isn't your job decide whether or not you like the job.

OP's posting certainly reads as if he really [!] enjoys programming but doesn't enjoy interviewing or startups. So, if he hasn't left something out, he really should stay in this profession but try to find ways out of the interview process (e.g. long-term employment with one employer or finding jobs through contacts or MAYBE go for contracting as the interview process there is very different etc.).

> Are you considering a career switch for the right reasons? If you've done OK at your jobs so far (aside form the covid startup thing), and still suck at interview-style algorithms, doesn't that just mean you're not doing those types of algorithms in your day job? Surprise: lots of interview processes are broken. Most of us developers are here to do some basic information transformations and to keep our application's structure from becoming unmaintainable. Not to fizzbuzz a binary tree palindrome.

Yahtzee. I've been in software for 7 years now, and I've never had to write any fiddly dynamic programming code. The most bit twiddling I've needed to do is like if (x & MASK) {...}. I don't think I've ever had to write a graph algorithm more complicated than DFS or BFS (but, to be fair, a lot of graph problems reduce to DFS or BFS).

No, mostly, I just pull stuff out of the database, munge it a little bit, and send it somewhere else; or, receive data via an endpoint, munge it a little, and stuff it back into the database. I wouldn't say it's "just your basic CRUD" programming, but it's not insanely more complicated than that.

I'd be willing to bet my experience is pretty typical, even in Bay Area tech companies.

> When I last switched jobs, I didn't reply to companies that wanted me to do irrelevant hackerrank-y assignments

Man how? I’ve actually been shocked by the number of companies that do use these and have struggled to find jobs that don’t use these. The few that don’t tend to either not pay well, have some other sort of god awful criteria or just never work out.

I was complaining about exactly this - practically every company worth working for seemed like it was gatekeeped by exhaustive leetcode interviews.

However I just landed a job at a company whose interview process was very practical, had zero leetcode, and while not FAANGMULA, apparently still considered on par (if not better than some letters) with them in prestige and pay. A lot of my new team/department seems to be alumni from FAANGMULA or other brand name tech companies; I'm the odd man out coming from a boring kludgy old school conservative non-tech company.

Shocking. I literally attribute the experience to an Act of God.

The only downside I can think of is that all those years grinding leetcode proved to be worthless here. That's not to say the overwhelming majority of good companies are still probably gatekeeped with leetcode though, so I'm sure it will still come in handy one day. An Leetcode A Day Keeps Unemployment Away.

There is more to tech than software development. I reached a point when I no longer wanted to program yet another application. So in succession I had roles as project manager, business analyst, network engineer, systems architect and adjunct lecturer in software engineering.

I still program home automation stuff and various utilities but strictly for my own use. That way I minimize feature creep, have no software support / maintenance obligations.

Do you have any guidance as to how to best make this transition? It also seems there are many better trajectories on the tech org side compared to just being purely technical.

I never really planned my transitions. I'm an introvert so I mostly ask questions and let people talk. If something grabs my interest I offer to help and sometimes opportunities emerge. I'm not afraid of diving in and learning as I go. Have to admit I'm a fast learner and willing to do extra work just to get on top of the learning curve. I read a lot and maintain an interest in most things technical and related.

There is a lot of need for coding skills in many other roles. I am an accountant by trade, but have learned Python in my spare time.

Because I can code I have been able to develop an interesting niche. And people look at me like some kind of wizard.

Pure accounting is kind of dull, but I get interesting roles because of my mad skillz.

The moral is that maybe you should look to develop other skills and try other areas out.

I went rapidly from support to infrastructure to applications business/systems analyst roles in corporate.

Due to circumstances I was then ‘promoted’ to IT mgmt very early and followed that for a while before realising that I enjoy the process of bringing new improvements to an org, and not the BAU/operational stuff (and not the line mgr stuff that comes with managing people).

So I switched to being a project manager initially in IT but nowadays for general business projects, and increasingly business strategy projects. It’s cool but it’s definitely not where I thought my career would go.

I get bored with too much of the same thing so this works for me. Find what works for you and don’t be afraid to try new things.

I’m not in SV so no idea if the pay is equivalent wherever you are but where I am it definitely is, in fact, I probably earn more in project management (I’m a program manager now)

i occasionally get thrown a Program Management job listing

they seem cool, but usually require more people management experience than i have

but when i think of jobs i might actually find interesting, Program Management is up there.

then again, some of them are pretty business analyst-y...which sounds fund for about one project. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah definitions can differ by company putting out the job listing - there can be some grey area with BA work and others, Procurement and vendor management for example.

In terms of the people side the key difference for me between this and being a line manager is that I regularly am setting tasks for people, following up, mentoring, clearing roadblocks etc but I don’t have to deal with the HR side of it - performance, recruitment (unless contractors in my budget) etc.

I started military doing satcom work, went to school for cybersecurity & linux system admin, got a job doing network engineering and hardware stuff (technician type work mainly, designing how to setup network in a building and then actually running & terminating the cable, both glass and copper).

Now I work as an electrical engineer and do a lot of logic programming with microcontrollers (arduino-like stuff) and PLCs. My background with IT made this a really easy transition, especially since messing with electronics has been a hobby all my life. I never wanted to get into programming, I found scripting to be the limit of how deep I wanted to get into the world of coding, just basic automation of tasks and things. And what I do now is pretty much exactly that, along with a lot of other fun things to me.

It sounds like teaching, product management, or developer relations are in your future.

Teaching doesn’t pay well at all.

Was that one of the constraints?

And it does pay pretty well in some areas. A high school teacher with a masters can make as much as I do in my area.

There’s more to software than coding. In fact that’s the point of computer science. So think of the business of software. You have an advantage there because you know how the process works.

I left tech to work in the government ministry. Ended up working in tech there. I felt, if I have to work in tech, I better work in private sector only. Now trying hard to move into the data engineering, science domain.

Probably not reading hacker news

I suppose some that have "left tech" still browse HN, but I think you're right, many that have "left tech" will likely also stop browsing HN and similar forums.

Permanently travelling https://ghuntley.com/the-office