Ask HN: Has anyone quit programming and switched to a passion field? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has anyone quit programming and switched to a passion field?

10 pointsnovagameco24 comments

It seems there's a meme that programmers burn out after X years and become carpenters or yak farmers. I love programming, but the industry is very high-pressure and high-stress for me. I'm considering going back to school to learn a scientific discipline, but it seems that the job market there has you dealing with even more BS than software.

Have you or anyone you know quit software engineering (without retiring) in order to do something they're more passionate about?

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Programming is my passion, so no, I haven't. I have friends who have taken a break from it and done something else for a while, but they've always come back.

> I love programming, but the industry is very high-pressure and high-stress for me.

"The industry" is very broad and diverse with all sorts of different characteristics. Not all involve high pressure and stress. You can be a dev without having the high pressure and high stress by carefully selecting where you work.

Personally I wish work hours were more flexible. I would be happy cutting my pay in half if I only had to work 20 hours a week.

Assuming that includes health insurance, same here.

I love programming but have burned out on doing it for others a few times now. I once jumped to fly cargo for UPS.

I gotta say. It's nice to remember how good we have it. Doing a harder job for 1/10th of the pay refilled my empty gratitude bucket very quickly. :)

Today I gripe about waking up at 8am to do another useless standup meeting, but once in awhile, I remember waking up at 3:30am to meet the UPS jet and wait until they loaded my little Beech 99 so that I could fly through low clouds and ice so that the folks in roseburg, eugene, and la grande could get their amazon prime tchotchkes. Then waiting around in the bumblefrick motel for 6 hours for the UPS truck to return that afternoon with the unwanted returns of last week's amazon prime tchotchkes.

Yeah programming for others sucks. But it sucks less than a LOT of other things, and pays a whole lot better. Get while the gettin is good. When you want to run screaming in the other direction, may I suggest a pause, a walk, and a reflect first -- lest you kill the golden goose and never be able to get it back.

$0.02 :)

Out of curiosity, what level of prior experience with flying aircraft did you need to work as a cargo flyer?

> Get while the gettin is good

Now more than ever, people may be wondering if the goose has already been killed, or whether there's any good getting left to get.

Not OP, but it's pretty tough right now to see a near future where _any_ income can be derived from applying my existing skills in a web/software related discipline, and the question of switching to a trade is a scary but potentially practical one. A year or more into having zero income, and I wish I had a fallback like flying for UPS tbh.

It was already hard to get in if one wasn't already in before 2023, now it's an existential crisis.

Not a programer, but pretty good systems admin I worked with was going to school to become a medical doctor. Looks like he graduated, but just an undergrad, not a PHD. Next thing I knew he bought a sailboat and was starting a YouTube channel to chronicle is journeys. I fellowed him, but he only made a few videos.

I just checked out his LinkedIn. Looks like that didn't pan out, as he bounced around to about 9 different companies and is now at a FAANG.

I think about it a lot, but keep waiting for the company to force my hand and lay me off. We usually have a couple rounds of layoffs per year. I figured I wouldn't make it past a few years and now I'm closing in on 20 years. At this rate I'll be hoping for a well timed early retirement package.

It's a fuzzy line between "retiring" and "quitting to do something else" when nothing else a software engineer might want to do is likely to provide more than a quarter to a third of the income they are used to.

Second careers I have witnessed include: yoga instructor, aerial-performance studio operator, author & public speaker, eco-village manager, photographer, carpenter.

Second careers I have considered include: fashion designer, boutique drum-machine manufacturer, and DJ - but while I have taken a couple of long sabbaticals over the years, software keeps drawing me back. I don't suppose I will ever really quit.

I haven’t but thinking about how to make it possible. There are 2 major things that burn me out:

1. Technologies are constantly changing and I can’t keep up. I used to do .NET MVC (4.7 or whatever, the old stuff) development. Then switched to cold fusion for a different employer and recently tried to do the latest .NET web stuff. It has changed beyond recognition. I have to start studying everything from scratch. I don’t have neither time nor motivation for this. What if next years update to .NET will make all my knowledge obsolete again? Screw that.

2. Job interviews and finding jobs.

I wish I could make a living playing in a rock band.

Have you considered teaching software fundamentals in say an AP computer science class at a high-school or as part of a CS program at a university? This way you'd not have to follow the latest and greatest stuff at the bleeding edge but instead would get to focus on the fundamentals and make a difference by helping students and providing your insight and war stories to the next generation.

Teaching barely pays the bills (for some, it doesn't pay them at all), and the most you could hope to be at a university is an adjunct professor.

You don't have to jump directly into full-time teaching. I work with plenty of folks who volunteer for TEALS year after year (helping high school teachers skill up in CS to teach AP CS), as well as some who teach a single class a semester as an adjunct while keeping their full time job.

I mean something has to give right? Trade the stress of the corporate programmer hell for something more emotionally rewarding? Reduce your burn. Live more stoically and adjust to the relatively low drama world of teaching?

Because if FAANG and other related companies keep paying insane (relative to everyone else in a white collar job) salaries — aka above market rate or outlier high salaries — then it’ll be able to command the kinds of demands and stress that paying such a ridiculous salary affords a company.

Basically if you wanna be a highly paid engineer who gets paid high six figures possibly with RSUs/options and/or bonuses and perks then the company will in return get to work you to near death.

Or …

Move to Europe and enjoy a good salary (albeit a fraction of what the US FAANGs pay) and work life balance and nearly 30 days of paid holiday every year. Plus no gun crime and healthcare for everyone. Oh and a public transit system that works. (I am talking about Berlin but this basically holds most places in Western Europe).

I think there's a middle ground between taking a job that pays almost nothing and taking a high paying job that kills you. You can just take less money to do something you can tolerate more.

Unfortunately, the European economy has been stagnating for the 16 years since the financial crisis and median salaries are FAR below American ones. I would not gamble on the EU economy holding up as demographic pressures and regulation push productivity and GDP into negative territories. I also wouldn't bet on the healthcare systems getting any better from this point on. Europe is in for some rough decades coming up

That's sad to hear. MVC[0] is still there if you want to use it! Most other changes are there to reduce the amount of written code and the patterns that existed when 4.7 was released are still valid, regardless if newer alternatives were introduced or not.

The big difference is the workflow for containerized deployments, but it affects all languages

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/mvc/overview?v...

> MVC[0] is still there if you want to use it!

I was not able to generate old style project using newer visual studio. If it’s possible I’d love to know.

What do you mean by "old style project"?

I switch between 4.7 and .NET (and .NET Core) pretty often.

The differences are primarily around configuration and dependency injection. Everything else is mostly the same.

Don't give up! You aren't starting from scratch, and your skills will easily translate. Once you get past the app startup stages, it's all the same patterns and paradigms.

Wow, thanks, I was expecting hackernews to eat me alive for being so unenthusiastic about latest technologies. Maybe I’ll give it another try at some point. I wish I could find a short, straight to the point tutorial that can catch me up to speed in under an hour. Like, give me highlights of differences. But all tutorial I was able to find are either too long, too much rambling, or don’t focus on highlights, etc. I don’t have time, I’ve got life to live and fun things to do.

Another thing that discouraged me was when I generated authentication template I could not find authentication related files in directory structure. I had to generate those files to be able to see them.

But your words give hope. Maybe I’ll try again when I have time. Thanks!

I don't think you'd find a good tutorial of any framework changes across two major versions.

I quit commercial coding, switched to PM role and own SaaS. Currently consider to quit coding in my personal projects too. I like software industry but probably coding is just not for me and I need years and X burnouts to understand this and that's ok.

I want to stay some years to have stable house and savings situation and I consider to study something more interested and work in less stresful place.

The closest I've come to switching to a passion field is that I worked a landscape crew for a summer when I found myself out of work twenty years ago. This was obviously prior to the race to the bottom of landscaping by aliens and robots. Then I cofounded a startup that didn't involve aliens or robots. I know it sounds absurd - but I'm hyperactive.

Aliens?? as in extra-terrestrials? Roswell-esqe sentient beings?

I did. I dropped everything for years, bought a one way ticket to Taiwan and grabbed the first ESL job I could find. In my mind, it was the most natural way to gain fluency in traditional Chinese which had always been a passion of mine.

I enjoy education as much as I enjoyed traditional software engineering.

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