I quit my Netflix engineer $450k/year job, money wasn't worth the boredom
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This depends on who the product's consumers are and how mature the company is. A skilled product manager uses the expertise of engineers to build a great product. Being an ex-engineer is arguably useful in a fast-paced small team like an early stage startup but it can also turn into an annoying (to engineers) liability in an environment where product and engineering responsibilities are defined.
Salaries in Europe are shit compared to US and I've zero incentive to move to Western Europe for the average wage I'd be making there.
Couple 1: bought their house in 2011, have no kids and no car (because they live in a walkable city). So they overpaid their mortgage every month and paid it off. They are piling up savings and putting a lot into their pension funds. They could probably retire by the time they're 50.
Couple 2: bought their house in 2008, so it's overpriced and small. They only bought it to get onto the property ladder "before it's too late". They had kids around 2013. So they need 2x cars (because kids) and had to buy a larger home (2x mortgages, because home 1 was still in negative equity). The rental income from their first home is heavily taxed. Honestly, I can't see how they're ever going to retire. Their 2nd mortgage will be with them until they are both around 70 years old. Hopefully their first home will appreciate in value and they can sell it. If not, it'll provide some income (rent) or a place to boot the kids out to when they hit their 20s.
Also I feel like developers are a bit too self-centered.
Compared to whom (at Netflix) are developers (at Netflix) self-centered?
Can you elaborate?
Personally speaking, after COVID I think I just learned what mattered most in life was how I spent my time rather than what I could do in order exchange my labour for material things that justified being bored, upset, unenthusiastic etc...
I was rather active during COVID (I volunteered where I could just to get out of the house) and then traveled quite extensively from late 2020 onward, and to be honest I'm glad I did because I had grown tired of most things but 'the money' was making me do it. That has all gone away, now I feel I want to be challenged in my next role to keep me engaged but I don't want to be dependent on my employer for purpose in some existential validation cycle like I have at other times in my career, either.
I'm taking my time studying a BSc in AI/ML and it's given me a chance to study at my own pace while looking and interacting with the projects that appeal to me most to see if it can meet the aforementioned criteria.
At the end, they didn't know what to do with me, and I didn't want to deal with much of the day to day nonsense. I moved back to the midwest because being closer to friends and family became very important.
Now, I mess around with https://www.adama-platform.com which is fun when I can mess with it, and I can run the company how I see fit. For example, I believe in being 100% honest with no B.S.
> I succeeded as a leader and put myself out of a job.
I can relate.
As a former co-founder of a fintech startup I measured my success not on ARR or ROI (it was bootstrapped 75% of it's existence before we reached profitability) but how soon I would be deemed unnecessary as the network and ecosystem had matured sufficiently in order for my userbase to not rely on me as I was mainly hand-holding in that regard: I automated what I could when I could and what task was left became ever smaller as we transitioned to B2C to mainly B2B and what little customer facing tasks remained I could just do with standardized weekly consultations or speaking engagements at conferences which felt more like sales more than anything.
It's off putting at first to think this is success after grinding just keep your head above water all those years, but it's rather gratifying isn't? To sit back and just say 'well, I guess that's it for me.'
I've been struggling with the 'what's next' thing more than I thought I would, but that may be because of I've monetized all my hobbies and I subconsciously fear doing it again.
I also recommend doing something crazy and not by the book. For example, my new company is https://www.adama-platform.com/ which is going to be exceptionally hard to turn into a real business since my focus is so diluted. However, instead of focusing on profitability, I'm focusing on joy of building. I'm doing everything "wrong". If you read the blog, then you can read between the lines as I struggle between "doing the tactically smart thing" versus "doing the joyful building".
I used to do MDMA and psilocybin after hitting certain benchmarks/projects, and while it was useful to get the 'bigger picture' to come into focus, I'm not sure I want to do that again as all it did was justify why I acted with such imperatives to take those kind of risks/damage and never correct my behaviour.
Ketamine is interesting, I went to a lot of DnB nights and that was often the drug of choice depending on the kind of night and I didn't like what it looked like when people on the dance floor gave into the 'k hole' so I steered away from it entirely. It's gaining usage in the US as a way to help with depression and such, which I don't think i have as I'm usually the most optimistic person in most rooms.
Also, Ive never done anything 'by the book' either, I was always defying conventional wisdom as I simply didn't think my efforts contributed to much by doing the same thing that everyone else was. My startup in particular used Bitcoin to bypass financial censorship, and at the time no one cared about building a payment processor or offering financial services for Ag related businesses that were suffering from illogical censorship laws because alts and then ICOs (and then NFTs) were where the money was made from VCs.
No, what I struggle with is with the enormity of the problems I see and not wanting to get involved even though I achieved my goals' I can't help but expend a large significant part of time and mental bandwidth hyper-focused on these issues, and seeing very little financial backing outside of minuscule angel investment.
I did the MIT Clim-CoLab and their were a lot of promising technologies that didn't require much funding but most would never be able to go beyond a proof of concept phase.
Thanks a ton in advance
The good news is that, assuming you are not pre-allocated, then have a choice between teams. I recommend choosing a team that has had a manager in the manager role for at least 2 years.
And they force these tangential goals/tasks on their reports. Many individuals are not ok with hypocrisy, leading to depression/burn out or outright quitting. Often all this tangential work doesn't even get rewarded monetarily or with a promotion.
Management is left puzzled why people are not happy to do work. It's because reports can see through the hypocrisy. They just don't think management politics is worth their time.
Back on topic: I make similar money post tax in a cheap LCOL in Europe and the boredom is real. Building easy crap you don't care about. It's a grind and it wears you.
I think once I finish building my house + save enough for kids' school, I'll move back to only do small projects I care about. No client work, just shipping and outsourced customer support.
Source: me doing dumb stuff in the past, nothing to the tune of ditching nearly half a million dollars a year or anything, but I would hope the OP had significant savings, you don’t have the same capacity to abuse your body sitting in a chair after a couple decades or so…
Are we hardwired to find meaning in our lives and work?
Not in California. It's now illegal to ask about salary here.
I mean if you wanna take a break or live life that’s already a fine reason to quit. No need to dress it up as entrepreneurship when there’s no tangible goal after 8 months.
>By day, I’m a full-time engineering consultant, career coach, and speaker.
>By night, I’m one of the fastest-growing writers on the internet.
It doesn’t sound like blogging is his day job, just something on the side, likely to drive business to his main gig.
Exactly this, prolonged gratification and robust coping mechanisms are skill sets you (can) develop if you've had to endure significant hardship in your Life.
I've burned out 4 times already (twice in tech), and people misattribute it to losing the will to live, but honestly, having worked so many manual labour jobs before I got into tech it's more like finally giving into the tedium of the job and the people more than it is an existential crisis. It's total prima-donna preening and you can tell much about a person when they behave like this.
As soon as I left my tech job as dev and consultant at a megacorp, I went knocking on a few restaurant doors to ask if I could stage that week as a cook as I had looked forward to coming out of retirement for one last tour in kitchens.
I didn't even go back to collect my last check (2-3 days worth of salary?) at the megacorp (they didn't want to DD it) and instead just started working on my knife skills again after having retired 4.5 years earlier from the culinary world.
It's all relative, really, and I think software developers live in such a cushy bubble where every accommodation is made for them that most will never venture out of it until they have years of savings that insulate them from the harsh realities of the World and they decide to leave for good and start a bakery or build a hobby farm or something and realize what real hard work looks like and that getting 4 hours of work done a day really doesn't work in either of those roles.
Reading through the article I never got the sense the author was ever going to be happy. It seemed like ever getting comfortable in a position in life or work gave them some sort of dread that kept spurring them to move on to more work. That kind of constant fear based stress response causes most humans(and other animals) to just collapse at some point
Add lower standards of living, and lower prospects over all and you're understanding the plights that most millennials and perhaps all of Gen Z have and will continue to endure.
It's why they've given into this level of pessimism and nihilism. As a Millenial myself, I know fundamentally that Capitalism is a flawed system, which entirely relies on perpetual growth models that are not just unsustainable, but are only possible if extinction is not a concern.
With that said, yes, I agree; it's still my contention that tech workers still give into this absurd idea that what takes place in their sheltered World and leads to 'stress or burnout' is in any way a reflection of anything other than triviality compared to the majority of what the World deals with.
What's crazy is when you see former tech workers go into conflict zones, like in the case of Ukraine where many in Kharkiv had their lives entirely destroyed are forced to pick up arms and excel in these endeavors.
It's few and far between, but when you see it it gives you hope (?) that whatever we've done to the Human Condition be undone, and my hope is that it can occur in a way that doesn't require outright total war.