Ask HN: How can I get out of tech? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I get out of tech?

100 pointspotta_coffee78 comments

Long story short, I'm a veteran and I receive treatment for PTSD. I've struggled for years. Treatment is helping but I feel that I am no longer "hacking it". I have an easy job right now, but I have no idea how long it will last. I'm barely doing anything. I'm interviewing at a new company but I can no longer cut it when I get to the tech screenings. I don't sleep much, maybe 4 hours a night if I'm lucky. I have decent chops but I've never been amazing at the interview game and I feel like this time around, my mind is so fuzzy and stupid. I really, really need to just slow down and do something simpler, but I have kids and a mortgage to pay and I don't know how I can afford to stop receiving the income I have.

I'm welcome to any thoughts / ideas / suggestions, but I'm especially looking for ways I can just slow down, change careers and quit tech altogether. I have a few irons in the fire, but nothing that I could get off the ground quickly and make a decent income. I'd really love to be a guitar teacher.

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Hello, I don't have PTSD but I do have extreme anxiety and have been in the state you sound like your in now. It sounds like you are being triggered by something and your body is in a constant state of fight or flight causing your brain fog. I would talk with your therapist to try and tease out if it is definitely your work that is doing it?

I think it would be best to try and get to a state where you are sleeping properly and do not experience brain fog before making any larger changes. If therapy is not working try a course of SSRIs if you are not already one, coupled with really focusing on avoiding sugars, alcohol and caffeine, while drinking enough water.

If you experience no changes after doing the above after 4-6 weeks try to put together a game plan for long term change, that will require slow methodical thought about what you need and what your family requires. Best of luck and PTSD is the absolute worst, feel free to message me anytime.

I second the part about avoiding sugar, alcohol and caffeine.

I would also try to add meditation and/or yoga, walking or swimming, or any activity capable of turning your worring mind off for a certain period of time.

I have no frame of reference for how PTSD must impact your life but it must be so hard - thank you for your service.

I do have empathy and a frame of reference as someone who also struggles with quality and quantity of sleep - sleeping only four hours a night makes you a train wreck of a person. Even if you could and do this now, it is not sustainable and can create feelings of extreme burnout. You likely you have become numb to how vast an impact this is having on you. (I say this as someone who ignored this for years and realized I was losing weeks at a time to living in a fog of exhaustion). I urge you to work on this and then make a bigger life change.

There's a lot of programming gigs in the public sector or in larger boring organisations. They pay less but are also have lower expectations and more structure which are both great

No PTSD but dealing with burn out I needed to find something else, and that's what I tried. So far it's paying off.

Seconded.

Especially since you're a veteran, look at government (and in particular DoD) contractors. The pace is slower and as an SME you could contribute in many areas.

I’d especially recommend the VA: they’re both generally inclined to hire veterans and specifically against writing people off, and they have a ton of modernization projects which will improve matters for millions of people.

like this? https://www.tinker.af.mil/Units/Oklahoma-City-Air-Logistics-...

There are also a lot of tech jobs which pay well which don't involve programming!

(Everyone assumes a poster is a SWE here - not necessarily the case)

Tech jobs not involving programming:

- Support - Ops - TAM - Networking - Architect - etc.

Be careful, there are also programming jobs like this that pay less and also have less structure and higher expectations.

It's not an absolute rule that "boring" companies or whatever are walks in the park.

In a lot of cases they aren't because they actually have to make a profit and so they tend to be incredibly understaffed at least by the standards I kinda got used to in the tech industry. I can only speak for finance and insurance though, maybe the government really is slow paced but people said that about insurance before I got this job and its the hardest I've ever had to work and it isn't even close.

Now if most of the stress is actually coming from fear of layoffs, that genuinely is better in my experience, there havent been any programmers laid off in the three years I've been here, but only because you are working so much harder that they literally cannot afford to lay anybody off. Checks would probably stop going out on time if they did.

Anyway, definitely people should look into it and maybe interview around, I'm just warning everyone not to take the tech industry meme about sleepy banks and insurance companies at face value without a lot of evidence. If you think about it it never made much sense but I think everyone in tech falls for it due to us having a tendency to think we are the smartest and the dude-bro-fratboys in underwriting or <other stereotypically boring job> are all hanging out having a party all day.

I hear you. It's definitely important to be careful; less prestigious jobs can also just mean getting treated with less prestige AKA like shit.

Have you tried talking to your wife about a change of income? Becoming a guitar teacher would be a wonderful career and give you riches money can’t buy. It might be disappointing at first for the family to adjust to a different financial situation. But having a happier and more present dad/husband will be worth it. By the sounds of it you’re ready to implode anyway. So it’s better to make the change in a controlled manner than with a sudden influx of pressure.

Army Veteran here. I had mild PTSD after my one tour. It's resolved now.

Now I work in tech (SWE and now Engineering Manager) at a SF startup.

I'm sorry you're going through this. Feel free to contact me at jacobmarble at gmail.

We moved from Southern California to the Idaho mountains a few years ago, because working for BigCo in BigCity was numbing. After the fun I had in college, and the intensity of the Army, it's easy to get bored and distracted by the beige walls and brutal politeness of everything since. The mountains have helped a lot, and I still get to work in tech.

You're not gonna get the combination of good compensation/agreeable workload anywhere other than tech.

I work in general STEM and the compensation gap even between tech STEM and non-tech STEM is huge. A mid level IT guy with a handful of certs will pull more than a senior chemist with a masters degree. And work from home to boot.

Just figure out how to stay in tech if you need a decent livable income and want free time.

God do I hear you. If I could make the same money painting houses or working in a library I would do it in a snap.

It's probably mostly me, but tech today seems so boring, dumb, and shallow. It was so much more fun 10 or 15 years ago.

> It's probably mostly me

It's not.

Maybe it's not tech and it's just that you were younger 10 or 15 years ago?

15 years ago I remember a lot more experimentation was encouraged and a lot less process. I could have an idea and get an enthusiastic "go for it". I could improve the way we deployed code. We had some semblance of "agile" but it was much more informal. I had passwords to everything.

Now everything is locked down. Everything is decided. The technologies are chosen, the process is complete and rigidly enforced. I pull tickets off the board at the start of a sprint. I finish the tickets. Day in and day out.

I think this is more of an organisational thing, as well as likely your team within the organisation

I can't tell the last 3 companies I worked for apart. It seems like a large percentage of companies today operate the same way. "Agile with 2 week sprints" never ending death march.

(As someone who often works for smaller orgs) It doesn't HAVE to be that way. None of the smaller orgs I've worked for use those systems. Only the big techy ones with a lot of bureaucracies do. They pay better, but you do much less, and push around a lot of paperwork instead of code. There ARE alternatives. Your average small town non-IT company probably still needs developers here and there, and they won't have the resources for the overhead of Agile bullshit. You'll typically have the keys to the kingdom and have to make shit work with very limited resources and a tiny team, but it's a heck lot more fun.

I tried a big corpo job for a bit, ugh, never again.

The things people experimented with 15 years ago are mostly settled now. Maybe you'd like a research engineer job in a lab or startup?

The main difference I've experienced is how people take themselves so seriously. The incessant hustle culture is so laughable, especially when you're working on a dumb app.

The tech itself is also an issue as you said. 15 years ago I was writing code, or at a minimum reading code to make it work. Now it's all these off the shelf AWS/GCP things that sort of work but you spend days to glue them together. You keep relearning the same thing because they all use slightly different versions of the same scripting language just because.

You are probably not in the right company. A lot of startups are what you are describing.

I was in tech for 35+ years - yes, I'm old. I'm out now not because I don't like the work, I really do and I'd prefer to be doing interesting work. I'm out because I'm tired of the interview games that are played now - that and I've pretty much got my retirement nestegg saved up.

Tech has definitely changed. Having to go through 8 or 9 rounds of interviews for one position only to find out you weren't selected at the end (that is if they don't just ghost you) wasn't a thing when I got into this line of work. In fact most of my early jobs I got after only 1 or 2 interviews for maybe a total of 90 minutes.

Part of it is that companies are just so damn afraid to hire the "wrong" person that they just can't make a decision. Part of it is because there are so many people looking for tech jobs right now that companies feel like they can play these silly games. More people need to refuse to play.

I still remember my 1st interview for my 1st job out of college: "You know java?" "Yes" "when can you start?"

I'm downright awful at the interview game and it causes me so much anxiety that I turn into a complete moron when I have to code in front of someone. Also the process involves completely different skills than the job actually requires.

You can make quite a decent income painting houses. I did it for awhile, got really good, and live in a very nice area. Painting a house can get you a ~$10k paycheck for ~2 weeks of work. Of course there are lots of variables here. Competition, slow seasons, bad customers, etc. It's stressful, and can be back-breaking.

I remember wishing to sit in an office all day, programming, in AC, making lots of money. But, man, I miss the freedom and fun.

I've thought about doing something like this. I have the income to buy all the equipment I could need, sprayers etc. Was also looking into pressure washing.

> Was also looking into pressure washing.

Why not both?

As pressure washing is necessary before painting a house. You can offer both services and just add to your customer base. I'm rethinking my life now and wondering if I should start it up again as well, lol.

Yeah after talking about it here, it immediately made sense to me to combine them. I've thought about just banking some income for a couple of months and buying the best equipment I can afford and then starting something. Also it's dumping snow right now so there won't be much house painting / pressure washing going on.

I dealt with crippling depression and anxiety for most of my adult life. I used alcohol to try and tamp it down and that went about as well as you can expect.

After decades of failed therapy, failed pharmaceuticals, etc. what really worked for me was taking mushrooms and thinking deeply about myself, my life, and who I wanted to be.

It sounds nuts, but it dramatically changed how I perceive myself and my place within the world. It saved my marriage and my relationship with my kids.

I realize that it is utterly unorthodox, but nothing else was working for me. For those that I come across who feel like nothing is helping, I recommend trying it. Preferably under the supervision of a clinical psychiatrist, but otherwise if there is no other option.

It's been about 18 months and I'm a fundamentally different person today.

Did you take mushrooms just once or did you take multiple doses and over what time period?

I took them intermittently over a period of 6-8 months. In the beginning, I did so while also creating an enormous flow chart/mind map of everything in my life, how I felt about each facet, and what I wanted or thought about each part.

It helped me immensely see a bunch of negative patterns that I'd heretofore actively denied, and through that allowed me to make some hard decisions about who I wanted to become. In effect, it gave me the opportunity to see myself with some objectivity and empathy, and through that it allowed me to choose a path forward that wasn't so destructive. I have no idea if that methodology would work for anyone else, but it worked for me in a way that nothing else had.

I work as an engineer at a university. The pay isn't great but cost of living is a fraction of somewhere like SF. The pace of work is pretty relaxed. The interview process was more relaxed too, less intense problem-solving and more conversations about experience.

Do you mean you work as a software engineer, or some other type (mechanical, civil, etc.)?

I'm currently studying to become an environmental engineer (after burning out on web dev) and would love to hear more of your experience, if you did something similar?

Or if you meant software engineering, I apologize for misunderstanding :)

Software engineer. I understand the burnout feeling. The repetitiveness is especially taxing for me.

One benefit of working at a school is the free classes

When you say you work as an engineer, are you a professor of engineering or doing engineering stuff for the university as a staff employee?

If you are staff how does that differ from any other non-big-tech company? Is there something (besides location in a LCOL area) that makes it more appealing than working as an engineer for any other small firm?

If you are on the academic side was that job particularly easy to get? I don't have any friends who are academic engineers, but my friends who got Ph.D's in humanities and hard sciences found building an academic career very difficult, is academic engineering an easier career to make and keep?

I work as a staff employee at the university library. I expect there are a lot of similarities to working at a smaller company or for the government.

Here are some specifics, some good, some bad:

- Schools have a certain vibe. The campus where I work is absolutely beautiful. Being around students can be invigorating to some extent.

- I can take classes for free. I took a MS in CS course last semester.

- Compared to small companies, the university I work at is very well-known. I considered the name recognization on resume a minor plus.

- Compared from Silicon Valley, it feels like being a big fish in a small pond. I'm given something close to carte blanche as far as most technical decisions.

- There is a weird dynamic between "faculty" (needs degree) and "staff". Lacking a Masters in Library Science is a REAL limitation if you'd like to do any sort of work in an official capacity that's not purely technical. Even our UX people need MLS degrees.

- The pace is astoundingly slow. For example, there is a vended software solution the library wants to subscribe to, and the process of choosing a vendor is expected to take 5 years. Almost nothing is considered a matter of urgent importance.

- It seems exceptionally hard to get fired here, partly I assume because deliverables are so lax.

- The interview process was super weird. There was no coding. There were hours and hours of "Describe a time when..." type questions. I think this is meant to reduce bias in the hiring process or something, but I hate it honestly. I can't imagine trying to hire another engineer and not being able to see their code. If another role on my team opens up, I plan to fight like hell to get at least a basic coding task on our interview protocol.

Slightly tangential but in case you aren’t aware: there are a lot of very promising treatments for PTSD in clinical trials these days. It may be worth looking into those. Navigating the clinical trial ecosystem can be pretty grueling and confusing but if this is something you really want to try, I am willing to help (email: my first name + @ selectiq.ai)

Not a doctor, not a trial expert, but I probably have a better grasp on the system than a layperson.

I'm being treated and it's helping but it's not an immediate solution, it takes time. In the meantime, I simply lack the capacity that I once had.

Have you thought about going to your local church and volunteering there?

I feel communion and fellowship with humans can really help when trying to break out of a rut.

How about the mortgage, the mouths to feed and other financial obligations? Or are you suggesting volunteering in addition to keeping the tech job?

I know that's hard. But honestly I had fallen into something similar to what OP is saying a long time back and it is a bit of a one step backward first to go forward kind of a thing. Without nourishing the soul genuinely these things can take over your life. Maybe he can volunteer for a short while / after hours.

This reply is full of assumptions... What if this person is secular? Or from one of the other hundreds of spiritual flavors? How would you react if somebody tells you to head to a mosque because you are not feeling well?

>How would you react if somebody tells you to head to a mosque because you are not feeling well?

Personally, I'd thank them for showing a genuine welcoming kindness and sharing something that has made their life much richer.

There are secular and religion-agnostic churches. Unitarian Universalism, for example.

Oh please I am tired of this whole assumptions and tippy tappying around just general things which help.

If there was any sort of better alternatives to a church, I would have recommended that. Sports and board game night don't really cut it. And church = whatever place of worship this person might be interested in.

And if they truly despise the idea, they can simply not apply it. The whole preamble to ask if they are religious and which flavour might that be, before giving a piece of advice is ridiculous.

I do this already. It's a wonderful part of life, it's just not enough to cure some of the internal stuff I have going on. The treatment is helping a lot, it's just a long slow process, I have a lot of junk to work through.

Firstly, you have a LOT of skills which are highly valuable to the world. Secondly, you might feel and even be right that due to your psychological state you can't perform at the level that a hardcore venture-capital-backed tech company requires and that's OK. Thirdly, even at whatever level of performance you are capable of there are companies where you'd be the best tech wizard around. Look for places where technology is mostly considered a supporting factor. As an example from my previous experience: academic publishing. Nice, clever people, academic vibe, mostly haven't a clue about technology. You could do some kind of data work to make their publishing process more digital first, or help them build a better online direct-to-consumer e-shop. Probably there's a hundred industries just like it that are not the tech industry but are having to become tech companies in some way. Don't waste your valuable knowledge but find somewhere that you can work at a different tempo.

I would suggest reading "So Good They Can't Ignore You" and specifically the part about making diagonal career changes instead of restarting from scratch.

https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/14555091...

The short version is: Don't think of it as "get out of tech." Think, how can I move into a career that builds on what I already have in terms of skills and so forth, but has a very different day to day experience.

I don't know if this will work in the long term, but I'm currently going back to school to try to change careers after doing web dev for way too long.

I imagine there must be some scholarships for vets? And if you've never done this before, any US citizen should be eligible for a bunch of federal and state financial aid and loans that can help you offset the income. There are also many on-campus jobs (not necessarily just for youngins) that can provide a somewhat livable wage along with benefits and discounted tuition -- nowhere near tech salaries, of course. Might that be worth considering?

Afterward, I know many colleges also teach guitar, but I don't know if those teachers are actually considered faculty (i.e. full-time with benefits) or just one of their exploited "lecturers" =(

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Separately, a friend of mine is a "self-made" guitar teacher who mostly just played gigs at restaurants and cafes for a few years, slowly built up a student base, and now does it full-time, both in-person and online (via Zoom). His students love him... it was a hard road to get there (6-7 years of really really hard work) but he eventually made it work!

What you’re describing sounds a lot like early/partial retirement. The effect of changing careers could have a similar impact financially too. So probably the same kind of principles you’d use when retiring apply here. The challenge is that you still have big expenses/dependents.

Government help seems worth pursuing if you aren’t already. You may consider changing locale to cut living expenses or to arrange your life around your biggest expenses. Could refinance or get a home equity loan to float you while you look for a new path.

But I’m no finance expert and I’ve never retired or changed careers.

Overall the constraints here are probably financial. So your hard constraints are likely going to be what dictate your options. It might help to find a financial advisor to help put your constraints into clear terms so you can see what your options are.

Best of luck; I hope you can find some peace of mind and/or hope from some of the comments in this thread. Take care~

Perhaps you could try basic technology freelancing as a way to keep a basic income running. There are always lots of people, local business owners etc., who want basic websites but don't have the time to maintain them. As you're a veteran and have experience in the technology industry, I would imagine that you'd be pretty well-respected in your community. Keeping a Wordpress or Drupal instance up-to-date and the DNS secure is already way beyond most people's ability, but it really requires a trustworthy figure to manage, especially when their businesses' reputation is tied to their website.

If this is practical, you could gradually increase or lower the amount of sites you manage to keep an income up while you test the waters teaching the guitar.

(I'm assuming by 'tech' you're referring to software development)

Man, I feel for you. I'm fortunate in that I'm able to retire out of tech. It wasn't always this bad. Companies didn't used to be so scared to death that they were going to hire the "wrong" person - which has led to long chains of interviews and decision paralysis. I'm hearing that 8 or 9 rounds of interviews for a position isn't unusual anymore. In the late 80s, mid 90s it wasn't unusual to get hired right there on the spot after an hour or two of interviewing.

As for advice... I'm not sure what to tell you. I think if I were in my 30s at this point I'd look into being an electrician. The pay is pretty good and there will be plenty of work. And it's not likely to be automated for at least another 20 years.

Enterprise support pays pretty well, is pretty stable, and requires less deep thought type of stuff; if you can transition to supporting something that's expensive (finance, payroll, ATS, CRM stuff) you can probably just close tickets and talk to folks.

So you sound like you have burnt out. The ability not to think and have fuzzy thoughts are a classic sign of this.

Not to minimise your PTSD in any way, but I had all that when I burnt out.

My advice: Take a holiday, put down the software tools for atleast a few weeks maybe a month.... Build real things with your hands, play some games, spend time with your family... do nothing ... Please recharge your creative batteries!

*note: I am only looking at your problems and basing them on my experiences ... Please seek appropriate help too. The brain is something we need to get more help with and most people don't...

The most important thing for a guitar teacher to do is to convince potential students to choose you as their teacher, and the most cost-effective way to achieve this goal is through the internet. You can try posting some of your understanding of guitar playing and some videos of you playing the guitar, and attempt to attract potential clients from the internet. YouTube and TikTok, as well as building your own WordPress website about guitars, are good starting points. Of course, you can also combine online and offline methods.

I don't have PTSD, but do struggle with other health complications.

Focusing on the aspects of your health you can control (diet, exercise, to at least some extent sleep) won't cure you, but it'll make it easier to cope with the problems you have.

If you haven't already, by the way, look into melatonin. I get a couple of bottles of the liquid from a company in the US called Pure Nootropics, and a 0.25ml under the tongue every evening really helps me fall asleep and stay asleep.

Getting a tiring physical job that you can't "take home with you" will help with your quality of sleep as well as your mental stress. It probably won't solve either entirely, but it would be a big step in the right direction.

There's good paying work for general contractors in large metros. It will never pay as much as tech. Nonetheless, it will get you enough to support your family.

Have you looked into options around medical leave and/or disability? It certainly sounds like your health is impacting your ability to do your job so those seem like appropriate avenues to explore. Hopefully if you are able to make use of those options they would provide you enough of a buffer to relieve some of the stress you are experiencing and get back on top of your health.

> but I have kids and a mortgage to pay and I don't know how I can afford to stop receiving the income I have.

Start doing what you can. You can't make it on half of your income, but can you make it on 80%? Start trying to live that way, to build up your runway.

Can you afford to stop for, say, six months? If so, can you ask your job for a leave of absence for six months?

Why would you leave an easy job to take on a new challenge now when you are struggling with sleep. It's the worst time to interview. Slow your role a bit.. spend a few months practising interviews or learning a new skill. Be happy to be where you are now. Revisit in the summer

Thank you, it's good advice. I also have a problem where current job is easy, but requires almost nothing. The lack of work makes me anxious and they've been laying people off in the company.

Well you can always do IT style tech work for a non-tech company. You will still easily solve 90% of their problems because it's configuring gmail or adding a form to a Wordpress site or getting a printer to work.

Have you considered being a product owner instead of an individual contributor?

It's not "out of tech", but: look into the WordPress ecosystem. The tech is kind of boring and doesn't change that quickly, but there are still a ton of jobs available.

What about an adjacent move? For example IT you could leverage your knowledge for a for less emotionally heavy 9 to 5? (And you would be really good at it!)

All I can say is, sleep first. Sleep. Listen to "Why we sleep" on audiobook when you try to go to bed each night. You need sleep.

Management? It might even let you stick around at your current place of employment while meaning that the ever changing tech stuff wouldn't be your problem anymore. The techs under you will appreciate your experience, and you can spend a lot more time sitting in meetings, working with spreadsheets, and dealing with employee/scheduling issues.

If you think this might be a temp situation, why not just take a leave of absence and get whatever job pays the bills for a few months. Keeps the door open to come back at least.

Management is stress. The last thing this man should get into is management.

I suppose it depends on what the old job entails. Management can be a lot more relaxing for coders dealing with burnout, those with a lot of metrics to meet day to day, or anyone in a customer facing role.

Thanks everyone who answered me. Just getting back to this.

- Start a music school, record label or You can just join any of them?

I've been in the same boat. IMHO you need rest. Having PTSD or any anxiety related disorder is like having dodgy knees. If you hurt them running, it is best mot to run and instead get some physio.

Your brain is more complex than knees (sadly) and so it is even more important to get rest and physio when strain happens.

In this case physio is therapy. Take the weight off your knees. Stop trying to run. Heal up. Go slow. Regain stamina slowly. Walk. Then run.

It may not be ideal, it may result in lower income, but that's life. You don't need to give up a certain career path or get out of tech.

Move to engineering management, join a gov org, move to something slow moving like defense. Something so encumbered with legislation that the whole thing moves slow. Incidentally those are the areas of tech that often change the least, helping get off that treadmill.

I just want to comment on the "move into engineering management " but because I've seen it 2 or 3 times on this thread.

I've been in management for 6 years after 15 years as an IC and I still hate tech. Probably depends on the organization and the person, but being accountable for the work of others is stressful and draining as F.

I personally sometimes think about how relaxing it would be to just start the day, pick up a ticket, do it, and go home. But I know it's a "grass is greener" fantasy, being an IC comes with its own cross to bear.

I'm currently going through this now myself. I'm 42 tomorrow and I'll have been programming for 27 years. I'm just so tired of it all, but I don't want to lose the joy of programming. Im trying to just go freelance and be in charge of my own destiny. We'll see where it goes.

Just know you're not alone.

Not sure if you’ve looked into psychedelic therapy? It has a high success rate for PTSD in veterans. In particular ketamine, psilocybin and MDMA.

Not to call it a “one pill solution” but there are cases of people’s PTSD being cured after a single session.

If you leave tech your taking a salary cut. If you can't afford that you need to cope better. That means no booze, clean eating and at least 30 minutes of cardio a day. If you do those things and still have issues its time for medication.

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