Ask HN: Any experienced engineers took a lower position as a “vacation”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any experienced engineers took a lower position as a “vacation”?

49 pointsJustsignedup37 comments

Have any experienced (10+ years) engineers gone down to say working as a mid-level engineer at a FAANG company just to keep getting paid but work at a lower responsibility, as a 1-2 year break?

Was it beneficial? Was it just tedious? Did it hurt your career?

Figured I'd ask as I can't be the only person who thought of this as a way to still earn but handle the burnout from working a tough engineering job.

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You can be even more creative than that.

Almost thirty years ago, my wife and I were in the process of adopting our two sons (now in their thirties). I had defined my career at the time as a Software engineer for hire (consultant). Technical projects, then and now, really require full attention and devotion to getting things done so I had to find a way to step out of that for a while without losing too much money or technical chops.

I found a position as a Technical Writer having Software reverse-engineering skills which was a step off of the more intense technical treadmill. Over time I found that experience complemented my original trajectory as companies are always looking for better communicators.

Given the rate of change, managing your career in consideration to your life goals is worth curating.

> ...I found a position as a Technical Writer...

That's quite a clever move...I would have not thought about! You got me thinking; thanks!

This is brilliant. How much was the pay cut, if any?

Because it was a contracting gig I think it was more or less lateral. If it was less, not by much.

Similarly, a person I know took a Customer Support role (the technical kind) for a few years as a "rest" after their startup died. It makes sense -- the technical skills help a lot with debugging issues, and support at big tech co's is fairly well-paid.

I just took up a position involving coding and technical writing and it's been great! I've been keeping my own tech and life blog for years and have been getting more into writing, but have been hesitant to apply for technical writer positions because I didn't want to fully give up code either. I wanted both.

So far it's been a really great balance of coding and writing, and it's been really nice to switch between modes. I'm still feeling quite stressed and time-pressured as my first two projects involved creating quite large demos in a language I hadn't used in a while (and then writing about them!), but I think I'll find a nice mental load balance there with more practice.

I've done it on and off. Lower paid jobs are often highly correlated with bad jobs though. The people are more toxic, lazier, less intelligent. It can end up more stressful, because you're used to doing things faster and more efficiently, and then just end up with people problems.

FAANG is probably less likely to face this, but if it's a step down from where you are, there's probably reasons why it's that way.

You're also going to deal with shittier code. It doesn't matter how good you are; shitty code hurts. A problem with smarter companies is they have more educated people who don't know what they're doing. Optimizing underengineered code is easy. It's harder to merge overengineered code - often new programming languages, compilers, code being on the wrong abstraction layer. Often people argue that overengineered code is just merging, but it's usually merging things that are built in such a tightly coupled way that it can't be merged. Long build times are a frequent side effect too.

Also don't stick around too long. When I go in, there's some admiration and even a little skepticism why I chose to join. After a few months, you get treated as just another person on that rank, even if you were CTO-tier. I ended up staying longer than I should have because the engineering was fun and there was some desire to prove that I wasn't there for just a vacation.

I did manage to sit around and learn a lot more, but it's slower than learning from a better group. I spent so much time putting out fires that there was rarely ever any time to really learn something. It didn't exactly hurt my career, though, just gave me more drive not to do it again.

I would guess that a typical good engineer could half-ass their job and still get good reviews. You might lose star status on you team and lose out on promotions, but I bet you could work half the hours and not get called out for bad performance.

My "10x" thing was designing efficient architecture, to the point the code was little different to pseudocode. I could work solo on jobs that need 4 or more people on other teams. At some point, expectations went up, and I was then the lead FE developer and UI/UX designer at no extra salary.

But when I join different teams or different codebases, I go back down to 1x status or so.

Stress doesn't scale with seniority. There are laid back positions out there at every level so downlevelling yourself seems pointless. Especially since there's a reasonable chance that you'll take a paycut and get nothing in return for it.

I highly doubt this, at least at any occurence to reasonably allow one to get such a job. I have yet to see any easy jobs that are senior or higher. Even my current midlevel job sucks.

I tried this...and got as high as director (which i know isn't that high)...but i started as a lowly full stack web dev...and even tried moving laterally across to product management, and then to director, etc...and nope...life did not get easier...and i even tried at different orgs...I'm so burned out...i'm thinking of leaving tech altogether.

I'm a mechanical engineer, not software, but a few years back I was feeling pretty burnt out from a high stress job so I took a much easier though less fulfilling gig with the plan to get back to interesting stuff when I'd recovered from the burnout. It didn't work out great. Yeah the job was a lot less stressful and I liked my new coworkers, but job difficulty was only one factor in my burnout and it took me a lot longer to recover than I'd expected, and meanwhile there were new sources of stress. My pay wasn't bad for what I was doing but it was still objectively low compared to what I needed to maintain my standard of living and I definitely wasn't padding my saving account. A lot of stress inducing parts of the job like the commute don't scale with pay; I could put up with things like this when I was making good money and working on interesting projects, but I don't want to sit in traffic for an hour just to sit in an office and be bored. Even though the stakes were lower, I was still heavily involved in a lot of projects and my coworkers depended on me, so even after I was ready to go back into "real" engineering, I still dragged my feat for a while as it never really felt like the right time. Looking back on it, I'd much rather have just taken 6 months off from working entirely and either worked on personal projects or travelled than wind up spending about 3 years spinning my wheels with little to show for it.

It’s unclear what you mean here. You are a large system engineering lead with a lot of pressure, and would like to go back to making sketchy internal tools for HR to relief the load for a while? That kind of thing?

I’ve not been in that position, but if I was, I think I’d rather take a 6-month break and do nothing than spending 2 years at a desk doing meaningless work.

Depending on your definition of mid-level, some FAANG companies wouldn't allow this: companies are sometimes "up-or-out" for entry-level and mid-level engineering, and require engineers to get to senior engineer after about 5 years of total of relevant experience or risk getting fired.

At such companies, someone applying with 10 YoE will only be considered for senior engineer or higher roles. But you could go from staff to senior if you wanted.

If you need a vacation, then take one. Negotiate a couple of months off. Travel, do things that you couldn't try otherwise. When you come back to your job you will be recharged and performing better than before you left.

I'm about 7 years in the industry and removed all the full stack stuff from my resume. I haven't been noticing a significant salary delta between jobs that ask you to do front end, back end and dev ops at the same time and more pure back end roles, but I have noticed that I get leaned on harder than my peers have specialized.

Yep, my company changed from dedicated roles to full stack, then to devops. There was no salary range adjustment.

I hate this.. this removes any opportunity for deep work instead you are constantly context switching. Your cognitive load is through the roof, and you feel like you can do nothing well.

My company did same, but they didn't hire any devops, they just started calling us devops and fired sysadmins, told us to figure out Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines. Our velocity is less than 50% compared to before but I am sure on paper it looks like company saved tons of money.

Exactly what I told my managers.

Exactly what my company did.

You may end up working more. Companies that pay less do so because they are inefficient. This means people work a lot more but in very inefficient ways. I’ve found that companies that pay more usually have figured out how to use the workers to produce real value instead of having them use 3 different tools to ask for a device f.e.

I took a part time job at an airline. After we load the bags on the airplane, the airplane leaves and there is no more stress. No long running projects. No big egos. The pay is rough, but would highly recommend.

Are you at a regional airport or a larger one? Is it tough being in the belly of the plane on a regular basis?

Tourist destination in Montana. We’re a small enough station that we get to do many roles. (Drive tugs, in the plane, gate agent, etc). It’s not bad, but I’m still in my 20s.

This sounds amazing. Have you ever regretted it?

What is mid-level FAANG a downgrade from . . ? Mid-level FAANG seems like it'd be a huge "upgrade" in compensation and scale for most developers, and would be the crowning jewel of their career.

This. I was a Senior SWE at a non-tech company (investment bank). I was under no illusion I was of the same caliber of Senior SWE at most tech companies, let alone a FAANG level one. I would have been delighted to have been hired and downleveled to midlevel SWE at a FAANG. I would learn a ton, and the pay would likely have been double what I'd been paid at the bank as a senior SWE.

Thank God I made such a transition to a FAANG level company while not being downleveled.

I moved to Europe, Denmark specifically. Money is not as good but there are min 5 weeks of vacation per year, first day of child sickness you can take off, ppl leave office at 4-5 pm with rare exceptions, unlimited sick days, 37.5 h work per week and an attitude of "this sounds like a Monday problem" when you get some bug Friday afternoon.Oh, and if you need to be on call they cannot force you unless was specified before in the contract and needs to be paid. I call it my semi-retirement after working both in a FAANG company, startups and Wall St. I do miss sometimes being at the center of tech or the fires I put out that made me feel like super hero, but with a family this life fits me much better.

Mechanical engineer in Canada here, I took a research assistant job in academia (after a few years in industry) to get similar benefits. 35h hours weeks, 5 weeks vacation, lots of flexibility for kid sickness (has been a godsend for the past two years, getting called all the time to pick up kids with sniffles for mandatory COVID testing), relatively low stress yet fun and interesting projects.

Low pay, but enough for a good lifestyle in a LCOL small university town.

You might find this is not an easy thing to do! Would you want someone on your team who you even suspected viewed their role as a vacation? Would you hire someone like that above someone who was ambitious and keen to prove themselves?

I dunno, if they get their stuff done with little supervision and bring in a little maturity and experience, I would call that professionalism.

> Would you want someone on your team who you even suspected viewed their role as a vacation?

Totally! If a heavy hitter is willing to teach me 3 things a day (or even just let me watch them get stuff done), I don't mind if they consider the job a vacation.

I do this (mid-level when arguably capable of senior) but in the public sector. This enables me to deal with some challenging caring responsibilities and also have some time for hobbies and family in general. And get to do a 4-day week, which is maybe harder as a senior. Sure it means we have less £, but time is more important than £, and in tech we have the luxury of being able to do this and still get by (with frugal habits). IMHO people should ask themselves why they want to be a senior. Sure you get more money and status if that floats your boat, but you also get more responsibility which could mean stress. If being more senior grants you more autonomy, that could be worth it. Where I work its equal whether you're senior or not, in fact as a mid-level you get more time to code and less meetings. As a way to fight burnout, sounds potentially good, but depends on your employer. If they have a full-on performance mgt system, well, its easier to make the grade for a mid-level than a senior, so that's less stress immediately. BTW this is not a "vacation" to me. Maybe best to think of it as a "sensible life strategy defending against burnout". ;)

A mid level engineer at FAANG is typically a large financial upgrade compared to other industries.

I don’t think it’s a break. Mid level FAANG engineers are expected to do a lot of work, and it’s can be extremely stressful.

I think you’re seeing these as much simpler or less stressful than they are. I don’t think FAANG is on the low stress level, at least not Amazon.

I’m going to quote a NY Times article from many years ago. It was true like 7 years ago, and it’s still true today. The quote was something like, “Amazon is a place where over achievers go to feel bad about themselves.

I work as a senior contractor, and yet I am happy to take more junior roles in teams and let others be the tech lead while playing down my own experience. It’s easy street. It is a bit boring, but it’s not mentally tiring or taxing and I find that I have plenty of headspace to work on my own projects in the evenings, or for other clients.

Do not jump back into that bucket of crabs. There is no clicking your heels to go back. Source: self.

Well, there is such a thing as coast FIRE, but otherwise I don't see why people would choose this. This ki d of job is stressfull on a basic level I believe, and work is work, you're not going to squeeze a lot more of job satisfaction out of it.

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