Ask HN: How successful were you getting out of tech and where did you go? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How successful were you getting out of tech and where did you go?

44 pointsmorphicpro44 comments

I want nothing more than to do any other line of work.

Honestly I feel more inspired to drive Uber than ever do another tech challenge or deal with another incompetent manager.

Fuck malicious compliance and the assholes who put you in that position.

I love programming, but the people and this industry is a whole other beast.

I have given 20+ years of my life trying to make a living for my family.

It has provided me an income but it came at a cost way more than I ever imagined.

I know I'm not alone in feeling this way.

I would like to start over, but I have no background or time left to start over with.

The idea of burning it all down just to start all over again is painful, but not as painful as it has been working in tech.

What success stories of leaving the tech industry can you all provide?

I guess for the ones who really got out they probably will never even see this.

I know if I had I would not be here reading any of this.

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> Honestly I feel more inspired to drive Uber than ever do another tech challenge or deal with another incompetent manager.

It's not the first time I am hearing this. "Driving Uber" could be plumbing, farming, woodworking, but gist the same. Here's the truth: six months of driving Uber ought to long you for the tech job back. Hell, I imagine even a few weeks is enough. The back pain, being on the road all the time, and having to work even when "you're not in the mood" is enough to make you realize that there's no better money than IT money.

This isn't to disagree with your complaints, but other jobs are arguably even worse—much, much worse. In fact, the best jobs are to be found in the IT world. You just have to try enough. You can try joining a small company that gives you more autonomy over your work. Or you can try joining NGO, if having a direct impact is your priority.

Or you can take a sabbatical to recharge. Focus on outdoorsy activities or hobbies that have made you happy in the past.

The root of the complaints is human tendency to think that there's a glimmering better world that's just waiting for you. There's none! This is life, and this is it.

Thanks for the honesty. While I can also agree with you I'm also still look for something that is fulfilling. I made a bad example of that to be disrespectful of the current state I'm in. that not really fair of me. But its also fair to say its not been healthy either. I'm sure again I'm not saying anything exclusive to tech per say.

That's awesome! It's completely normal to be dissatisfied. But what you're facing, you're likely to face in other industries also. I, too, thought that I had a deep dislike for tech. But when I got a better job, I realized how fulfilling programming can be when your core focus is on actually coding, not navigating the bureaucracy and how far you can grow when you're constantly challenged. Your post does indicate you like programming to an extent. So maybe autonomy is something you can try to fix.

I hear people saying this, but there are lots of people like myself who worked in the service industry, and as professional drivers for a long time before getting into tech (I was a delivery driver long before Uber was a thing though).

Every job is stressful, but I often miss the other jobs I did (and would go back in a heartbeat if I could even net the equivalent of 45K USD). They're stressful in a different way, but at the end of the day you leave and your time until your next shift is your own in a way that I haven't experienced in a few years.

> The back pain, being on the road all the time, and having to work even when "you're not in the mood" is enough to make you realize that there's no better money than IT money.

I'm not sure how you figure the back pain from driving an Uber is worse than sitting at a desk all day long.

And I love being on the road, listening to podcasts etc (obviously if I was driving passengers I might not be able to, but then again, I think a headset would be fine)

Tech is depression and brain-breakdown inducing. Driving an Uber is tiring, boring and neck-breaking. But it's not going to make you mentally insane. Of course, this depends on the road conditions and the traffic of the city you are driving in.

On the other hand, one month of tech is probably equivalent to 6 months of ubering? May be less or more, depending on the actual job. So, instead of driving uber for 6 months, just do a tech job for a month and then heal and recharge for five. Of course, this has to be amortized over time, but that's what I've basically been doing for the past 20 years.

Also, the good gigs are never in the super-optimized meat-grinders, such as Uber or McDonalds or Amazon warehouse. The good gigs are in places like the local city museum that almost on one visits, or being a personal driver for the mayor. So, basically, in places which don't care about efficiency that much. Of course, they're not trivial to find, and require some social capital (knowing the right person) to get.

There are some fun aspects to the service industry. I worked in food service for a decade and enjoyed it, but it's worth noting the obvious downsides.

In food service particularly abuses run rampant, including widespread wage theft. Many restaurants have a toxic culture, all the way up to the top. I've known chefs who got violent, restaurant owners who brandished a gun at work, and have both experienced firsthand as well witnessing others being abused verbally or even sexually at work.

Sure it can be fun, but the price for that fun is high. Lots of uncertainty about your financial future, high turnover as staff are essentially disposable, physical wear and tear on your body... I wouldn't want my kids to do it outside of a summer job.

Sure, product managers are annoying. But nobody is going to fire me for checking my messages at work. I don't have to beg for time off or cover my shifts. Nobody has ever admonished me for stopping to catch my breath by saying "if you have time to lean, you have time to clean". I don't come home smelling like seafood or soy sauce or fryer grease. I don't have to miss birthdays or holidays anymore. And I make an order of magnitude more money than I ever could waiting tables (with health insurance to boot). Going back is unimaginable.

> I don't have to miss birthdays or holidays anymore

Interesting, my experience is the same except for this point.

I feel like I never leave work now, I'm so stressed out I don't feel like I can properly socialize. When I'm not "working" I'm still trying to keep up with the latest tech, make sure I'm a competitive candidate and can get another job if I don't have one tomorrow (and I haven't felt any sense of security with my job for 3 years).

Contrasting with service industry, I never missed birthdays; even if I had to show up at the tail end of the party sometimes, I showed up in a good mood and was generally excited for all the fun things I did in life outside of work.

Yes, the pay wasn't as good, but I was much happier. I did get pretty lucky to never get sexually abused or a gun brandished on me at work though, I know that happens to people as well (though let's not kid ourselves and pretend sexual abuse doesn't happen in the tech industry as well)

Also, the only time I've ever been physically struck by a superior was in a tech job (in Canada believe it or not). It was a light slap and after work drinks, but still, there are problems in all industries (and I slapped him back)

Truck drivers usually net 6-figures annually, don't they?

Can you seriously not tell the difference? Being on the job as a courier forces you to be in a sitting static position. I have an electronic standing desk with a treadmill underneath it. Every 20 to 30 minutes I can swap from sitting, to standing, to walking.

Daniel Vassallo (ex-Amazon) has a community full of people who have left or are wanting to leave tech. Several have been successful in creating info-products, courses, coaching, flipping micro-SaaS, etc

I got laid off from tech for the third time in August 2021. Decided I was done with it. Tried a bunch of things. Now I have my own “portfolio of small bets” (that’s the name of the community).

I take on 12 week co-founder for hire contracts where I do go-to-market work for 10 hours a week in exchange for base plus commission instead of equity. I learned to draw and have a couple of illustration contracts. I have a micro-coaching business where I help people get unstuck in 15 minutes with 3 questions. I’ve written some e-books. I also hold workshops where I teach founders and product managers how to put together their go-to-market strategies.

I love the flexibility. I own my time and can work on whatever I want. Downside was it was stressful trying to figure out what I wanted to do. In hindsight I wish I had enjoyed the journey more.

To see what’s out there check out the community. Look into creating courses and info-products. With your background you probably have a lot to teach. Also check out microacquire, Pencil Pirates, and Codie Sanchez’s YouTube channel. There’s a great book called Million Dollar, One Person Business. Follow Justin Welsh on LinkedIn.

I wish you all the best. Happy to answer any questions

I took 2 yrs out. Does that count? Did plenty of travelling. Worked a couple of ski seasons in hotel. Hotel job really chill compared to working in tech, just check people in, take their bags up, hit the slopes between shifts. I used to feel very sorry indeed for the stressed IT guys who came to try to fix our systems. Been there done that, know its no fun. However... in the long run, while more chilled, it doesn't pay the bills in the same way and you can't raise a family on it. During the time I looked into alternatives to tech e:g retraining as an electrician since that was in demand and tech skills help with it. Lots of training and certs to get though. Travel, working in sub-optimal conditions not a comfy (albeit open plan s**) office, or nowadays WFH. Ultimately I returned to tech and glad I did. jobs outside tech are not all roses. Working in tech in public sector e:g government, academia, where the organisation isn't constantly trying to make more money, is generally better I found. After 20 yrs in tech, you might need a long sabbatical. In some ways it'd be surprising if anyone didn't really after 20 yrs, unless they do 4 days weeks, long vacations, some other kind of pressure-release perspective-reclaiming activity. Good luck :)

I don't work in tech so I can't relate to you, but I'm not entirely sure you can avoid incompetent managers or assholes in any field.

It's not fair of me to put it all on that. I have role in that too. All I can do is reflect on all that I could change within myself. I've come to a place where I feel I have compromised my integrity to belong to something that I never really was allowed to be in. I didn't go to school and learn C. I was too poor for that. To far already broken as a run away adult at 14. I found coding at the age of 16ish but I then ignored it till I was in a place stable enough in my life where I could learn it on my own. That didn't come till I was about 23, and at that time at best I was working fast food. I'm 43 now and I peaked my income this last year, but I don't ever see that happening again. Frankly I don't want the money. I want a life. The money was just getting me to a place in my life now where most in IT got to start at. I had a lot of damage to repair over the years. A whole other life long past. I just got my first adult couch and bed that I paid for with my own money not some second hand used thing.

The science of scarcity destroys any happiness you could have had. Its a privilege many over look. That said I'm not a victim, that was my bed and I laid in it. The best I can offer you in that is I try to look towards empathy in the people I see in my community who are in a much worse off place. I now know so much better now how truly privilege I've been. I'll never be that ignorant if I can help it. Thats a big part of the reason why I want out of tech now because its just not me. Its a different world of egos. I don't want to sit next to the dude who orders a $200 stake with cheesecake on it. I would rather sit next to a disable homeless adult man so they knew their not really alone. I can't even fucking explain that to dude eating that stake next to me. Thats when I have to face myself. And your right not all the issues I've listed are exclusive.

As I said in some other post, you can just work a tech job for a year and buy several years of freedom with it. You can even work a part-time Uber during that time - but from a position of freedom, not economic neccessity.

You can set up on your own. You still have an incompetent manager who is an asshole, but at least you know him for as long you can remember.

Honestly though, this is sound advice sometimes.

You sound severly frustrated. You don't need another job, you need a good coach or psychologist to treat your burn-out (which is a form of depression) I can only speak for myself: yes, corporate it teams can be mentally draining, but working there will make you money more easily than in most other professions.

frustrated is fair, I would say disheartened but yeah it's semantics.

I know mental health does not fix itself. I guess I'm looking for an environment conducive of supporting mental health. Not just supplementing it with therapy.

Funny, I worked trades and wanted nothing more than to get into tech. You can make real good money if you're with the right crew on the right jobs with the right clients.

Yeah corporate can get passive aggressive and subvertly malicious, but have you had a shouting match with your boss in 95* weather in August? ... And have to go back to that same job like nothing happened?

If you've got that big of a resume you're in the top 0.01%. most of us street kids can never become corpos, the u.s. socioeconomic caste system doesn't allow for it.

You can go anywhere you want. You're not tied down by petty debt, litigation, lack of experience, lack of job history, employment, credit, felon status, etc.

A plane ticket sometimes is all that's needed to change your life.

Spend the winter in Chicago plumbing a highrise -10 hour days, standing on cold concrete getting screamed at by the foreman because you moved slower than a jog. fuck that. Like a lot of people I have a laundry list of jobs I've done before my IT career took off and none of them I'd wish upon anyone. There were good days but mostly they were just hard days everyday and money -even as a journeyman I couldn't come close to making what I make now unless I worked 12h days and Saturdays too boot -again, fuck that.

The good thing is after 30 years in IT I can do the vast majority of my work on autopilot, I've seen so many things and I know how to work around problems so while stressful it's still better than coming home from the job site and you whole body hurts. Maybe people don't know what a bad job really is.

The thing that bothers me the most about all this and while I 100% get where you are coming from. I feel it just shows how broken everything is where the guy who will die from being crushed by a boom (yeah that was a good friend I still miss you Brandon) while digging a ditch laying a gas pipe line gets paid fuck all, while there is a guy sitting on his ass making 100k+ a year for sucking corporate dick. I hate it all. Sorry, I hope I didn't offend you, I just wish we supported the people who really work in this world. Programming is not work, its dick swigging at its best. There is no justify able reason why I make 3x as much as my wife who easily works harder than me on any day. I just made 90k in 6 months doing fuck all, spending half that time sitting next to people who wear suits to a dinner only to order a $200 stake with cheesecake on it. I did nothing to earn that money. I want nothing to do with these people. I'm just grifting capitalism, and I hate myself for it. I want to be reminded that I'm a human again.

Honestly if any of you idiot CEOs see this, fuck the corporate get away at the stupid vineyard, Take me to a shelter so we can volunteer if you want to build team mortality.

Amen.

I never worked harder and got treated worse than when I worked for minimum wage, that just seems to be how things work -it might not be right but it's how it is.

"morality"

Try to optimize for free time. Work four days a week. Get a remote job where you can do some errands during the day or take a more extended lunch break, and you are now working four days 5-6 hours for six figures. Hard to beat in any other profession.

Anecdata: I did this, it had a very noticeable effect at first, but after half a year, I still dread Mondays.

What did you end up doing?

Yeah, it's a bit of a drag. I'm four years in - but supposedly two job changes and one experimental year as a technical product manager at an early stage company seems to have nuked any modicum of hire-ability I had.

If I spend more than 3-4 months looking for work I'm just going to pickup a trade and not look back. Shame I wasted so much $$ and time on college but at least I'm not in debt.

I'm 2 years into "leaving tech" and it's been magnificent to not have to really think about the latest JS libraries, silly bugs, or misguided feature requests during that time. Got into psychedelics research, hardware projects, and other stuff but I'm increasingly thinking I should eat the cost and go back to tech to save some money to have a kid in a year.

Been teaching/tutoring. The pay is not great but it’s survivable. Much more flexibility with my time. I can basically just show up, though I can’t get away with coasting or not having energy when I do show up (which is actually good!). Much more freedom to pursue my interests outside of work.

Perhaps I will want to do software again in the future, but if I do, it will be something hourly, contracting perhaps. There are still things I’d like to learn/explore in software but it’s hard to find a job to do that where it doesn’t suck all my headspace (I think something in the nature of salaried jobs and promotion structures, etc are designed to not be 40 hours a week, rather all of the hours in a week, even if one can theoretically choose to maintain their “work-life balance”).

You consider something like IT or dev for non-profits or universities? Not as much money, but the working environment can be a lot nicer without the same pressures

Funny story: I have worked at one of the largest non profits in my state.

What I learned was sad. In short: There's motivation to go after grants that you don't even have the resources to facilitate correctly to keep the plane flying.

This non profit was even self aware of this, which I do give them credit for. But the sad truth was the corners they had and were willing to cut I think puts real people at real risk of harm. I had to step away I even gave 3 months advanced notice. Their response. Fire me on the spot.

I really wanted to help, but I had no way of doing so that did not also put me and my family at risk. I just was not willing to keep playing the fool.

That said I would rather work towards something tangible in this world. Too much of what we do is too ephemeral.

At one point in my life (a few years before this non prof work) I had to override the code of a coworker who committed suicide. That moment really put it in to perspective for me. I wonder if my boss even considered what it was like for that team to just code over that person's existence just like it was nothing a few days later. I refactored his legacy. Optimized it. While the boss was too worried about his exist strategy after this successful sale of this lovely start up. I even ran in to that boss a few times later in life and he would always be so impressed and also so bewildered that I knew people in his circle or that they even knew me. We really do live in alternative worlds. That said I don't think he was malicious, just naive.

I switched to teaching at the secondary level and after a couple years teaching in the States, got into international teaching and it has been great. There's good and bad about specific jobs but my overall experience has been positive.

I did this 16 years ago and it has been a good ride. I will say that unless you want to move into administration, which to me would be a special sort of hell, then there is no upward mobility. You will end up teaching the same thing after awhile and it can get boring. I'm actually taking time off this year and doing some education related work and possibly looking at jumping back into tech for a bit.

What do you mean by international teaching? In other countries? If so, which one(s)?

I don't get it. Every job is stressfull (that's why they are called jobs!). Now, unless one is working for non-profit organizations or similars, the goal of any regular job is:

1. do a decent job (e.g., don't be corrupt, know your stuff, etc.)

2. get decent pay

Point 1 is just so you can sleep good at night. Point 2 is just so you can stop working for others as soon as possible (so you can start doing other more interesting things full-time).

There are assholes everywhere, even when driving Uber. Uber pays shit, though, so I don't think that would be an intelligent move.

Image working at McDonald's where all the employee's have their own way of making hamburgers and you are constantly at odds with how they do it. That just barley scratches the surface of what its like.

The pain is self inflected due to the level of dysfunction and nepotism. Its completely the same as other jobs but also sooo different.

Incompetent, even malicious, managers exist in every industry as do difficult co-workers. I would have thought that you may have had difficult to please bosses when you worked in the fast food industry or even at the non-profit. There are some rude and inconsiderate Uber passengers.

So getting out of tech due to experiences of interpersonal conflicts is unlikely to be a solution to your pain.

If you are willing to move to a lower cost of living area, and prepared to have lower income, and willing to do more physical work, then you could look at the many areas that are short of staff and choose one which aligns with your values.

My experience was to leave analyst/programmer job, work on house building for a couple of years. I then returned to IT as a network engineer and systems admin. So changing is feasible. The variety of experiences makes me grateful for what I have now. Spending far less than what I earn gives me peace of mind.

I feel your pain. I've thought about dropping out for a bit, taking a good 6 months to a year off, helping with the family business, or even going back to school. But I've done none of these things. Many of us suffer in silence.

I used to be an English teacher, my classes were doing fine, my schedule was complete and money was good. However, I started to lose passion with teaching. Since I taught English to IT employees, I started to feel interested in Crypto and Blockchain, now I'm working as a Community Manager in Rather Labs (https://www.ratherlabs.com) The transition was good and now I feel satisfied with the changes I made.

Many people in other fields feel similarly. Bureucracy, bad managers, bad working conditions are not limited to tech. But, on the other hand, great salary is more or less limited to tech, and a few other sectors.

Pursued FI.

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