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Comment by strix_varius | Hacker News Reader

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strix_varius

Thanks for more first hand insight, from a related but different perspective.

I'm curious: what led you to leave software engineering? SWE to corrections officer sounds like a rare journey.

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I was going to make a joke like "He probably wanted to do less stressful work."

Then I read that it's not far from the truth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32554517

Correctional Officer is the job that requires the least amount of work of any job I have ever encountered. You literally do nothing the entire day. If your facility is cool you can just play Angry Birds on your phone or desktop all day, or read a book if they're not that cool. You can get infinity overtime at double or triple pay.

Plus, you get the added bonus of making the lives of everyone around you as miserable as you desire.

I walk around, stand around, turn keys, and tell inmates no for about 10% of my day. The rest is cake.

My life circumstances were such that I needed a job in a new area where that's all I was qualified to do (meaning I can breathe) while earning enough to live on. Software engineering is not an option within 90 minutes of here. Even if I could get a job in software here and it paid the same, software is significantly more stressful than my current job, the future is unsure as tech is always changing, the people I work with are closer and more friendly/outgoing, and the time off is amazing. When I leave work I'm done, there's no reading up on/practicing the latest stack without any guarantees it's going to increase my employability. When I walk out of the prison, my own personal life is all need to think about. I'd probably not take the job for less than a 50% increase in what I make now. And wages here are so low it just wouldn't happen. I do still enjoy coding but I like it as a hobby. And honestly, I was probably never very good at it.

That’s it folks, corrections officers and prisoners are more friendly/outgoing than most of us tech workers. Fuck every single one of us

The prisoners are not our friends. The officers are stuck together without phones for 8-16 hours/day. We spend hours crammed into the same small area with no distractions but each other. We have to entertain each other or lose our minds. I've met the best and worst people at work.

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