Ask HN: I don't want to be a Software Engineer any more. What else could I do? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I don't want to be a Software Engineer any more. What else could I do?

35 pointstrwhite46 comments

To those who left software to do something else, what did you do?

I’ve had the same thoughts lately, I think AI has made software lose its “magic” for me. That and the stress of delivery.

Here’s what I did: I switched from 5 day weeks to 4 day 32 hour weeks. That has helped immensely. So you could consider that, or even a partial career break.

If you do want to quit cold turkey, heres some roles you could transition into in the same ballpark:

- DevOps

- Tester

- Firmware/embedded Engineer

- Technical Writer

- Data Engineer

- Data Scientist

- Statistician

- Business Analyst

- CAD architect

- Startup founder (easier than you think to start a startup and get funding)

Things I’ve considered that play well with a software mindset but require re-skilling

- Electrical Engineer

- Electrician

- Carpenter

- Gardener

- Farmer

- Welder

- Barista

What reasons have you found that make you want to stop being a Software Engineer?

Barista is a fun job but it's about being on your feet while multitasking and talking to strangers. It's an endurance sport. When I was a barista I burned so many calories at work that I became underweight.

Interesting. I don't speak the official language of my city so that's not doable. But just curious, wouldn't you eat a lot of food?

You get free food yeah but you get tired of eating the same limited menu every day. And it's simply hard to eat as much as you burn. At an 8 hour shift, I burned the equivalent calories as walking 10 miles. (Not that many steps but that many calories from adrenaline and whatever.) You'd have to basically eat an extra large meal a day on top of your normal diet to make up for it. Plus you're flat out working for those whole eight hours, so you're too tired to cook dinner when you get home.

I'm not sure Barista is going to hit the 200k / year or whatever US engineers are used to earning! Elec engineer is what I started doing, but moved out of quickly, and requires probably a 4 year time investment. If I was more practical I'd definitely consider a trade (plumbing, electrician) but they can be hard work as you get older. Tree surgeon seemed to be a popular route for outdoorsy problem solvers here in the UK. You also missed off anything in the project management, coaching, agile space - possibly for a good reason!

Plumbing, instead of electrical engineering?

You have to be joking.

Plumber's pay is about on par with that of software engineers in the Pacific Northwest of the US. Job satisfaction, anecdotally, seems to be a bit better than software engineers, too.

I talk to a lot of both parties. I'm personally in a jack of all trades job that has me doing everything from occasionally using shovels in dirt and other manual labor, as well as higher-end stuff, like programming. It's pretty nice, mental health-wise.

The problem with manual labor is, they are really paid peanuts unless you have the education and the certification and whatever, which takes X years.

I'm actually thinking about getting into home demolition. I had to remove every piece of floor and plywood underneath and cut off the bottom 4 feet of the dry walls of the basement due to flooding and I found it extremely satisfying. I don't need a license to do that too. I'd be happy to do it part-time for maybe $25/hour.

The person that “demolished” the house on a property I bought did it for free and made a nice profit. Before going with them I got an estimate from a “house recycler” that wanted $45-50,000, plus disposal charges for anything they couldn’t use for resale, to remove the house. That was a ridiculous ask in my opinion.

The person that did the “demolition” carefully extracted anything of value (timber, fixtures, hardware, etc.) and resold as they went. It was a mid sized house from the 80s and had good bones (but significant issues) and some nice updates. It was a great deal for us both. He cleared about $10k per week (after his costs) for two weeks and I ended up with a pristine lot.

Plumbing is so much more than manual labor.

I guess I tend to view things from the perspective of top performers, because I am a person who tries to excel. That said, technology people are usually paid peanuts unless they have the education, skills, and sometimes certifications.

I agree, demolition work is very fun and a very nice foil to working with technology, especially after a difficult week.

> What reasons have you found that make you want to stop being a Software Engineer?

this is an excellent question. each individual may give different reasons, and the reasons could suggest completely different occupations as a good fit. this requires a bit of self-reflection to unpack what exactly is motivating a change.

dislike being on call? struggle with delivery pressure? don't pick a new job with on-call responsibility or a "real time" delivery aspect.

dislike having low autonomy? don't pick a new job that also has low autonomy. pick something where you're the boss or have some well-defined responsibility.

dislike being stuck in a cube farm? don't pick another job where you wear a different hat but end up stuck in an equivalent cube farm.

dislike not being able to see real world results of your work in less than a year? don't pick another job in an sector with very slow feedback loops.

(i'm revealing a bit about my preferences with the above example questions, but hopefully the general idea comes through... )

Electrician generally requires a number of years working under supervision in order to get your apprenticeship, journeyman and then master status. A not so insignificant part of that supervised work is just digging trenches or other hard physical labor and not actually running circuits or wiring things and you're not really allowed to do solo work until you're a master electrician so starting your own company takes a while at relatively low pay, long hours and hard labor. It's tough to transition to later in life.

Sorry, but in what country are electricians digging trenches?

I am an electrician, technically. (I do high voltage testing for a living.)

In the US it's common for entry level or apprentice to be the ones making a trench on residential jobs. It's part of the hazing culture, my best guess, that the older workers pass down. I hired electricians and they did the trenchwork with shovels.

Anywhere that builds houses

Not at all. I have never seen electricians dig a single trench here in Europe.

Who digs them then?

How did you manage to switch to a 4 day 32 hour work week?

Just asked to

I'm in similar shoes as OP, want to do something else. I think I'm burned out, and don't have the way to fix it (e.g. taking a year long sabbatical)

I was looking into a lot of these things you mention here, problem is the "golden handcuff" from software engineering. I could only start doing anything new by taking a HUGE pay cut for many years, and I simply can't do that in my current life situation.

Let me know if you have a solution to that :D

At this point in this industry and in my experience, the further up the chain you go, the more “SWE” becomes a tool in your belt rather than your career.

The problems you solve for the business are using your tool belt. Even within software, there are sales roles, people management, subject matter expertise, vendor management etc…

For those who have said similar things in my area, most of the time, the better question they ultimately had to ask themselves was “what kind of problems do I want to solve, regardless of the tools? Who do I want to help? What VERY SPECIFIC part of my job don’t haye? Are there parts of my day or events in my career that I genuinely loved?” The last couple of questions are there to help you focus on areas you want to focus less and more on, respectively. No matter the job, you’re gonna have parts you dislike and parts your like, the key is to maximize the things you like.

I don’t mean to undermine the SWE industry standards and practices as a whole, but peeling this onion away, I assure you that you’re using a hammer that can be taken to any industry and will benefit you in general knowing how to use it.

I thought about leaving, even went to 3 days a week IT, and 2 days something else. I was making some serious headway, but in the end...

In IT, people are pretty chill. We share open source, we create new things all the time, we get to solve interesting problems. It's fun! The rest of the world is full of people with a... different outlook on how to interact with the world around them, to put it mildly.

Now I'm back on 4 days a week, and I absolutely love it! Two afternoons off per week. It's not too much of a strain on the budget, yet gives me a lot of free time. It's really the best.

Find a good team, stick with it. Do your job during office hours, and then do your other stuff on your side. We're lucky to have a stable, high paying and relatively ok for your (physical) health job.

If you're really set on leaving, I'd highly encourage you to switch to 3 days a week and start a side business in anything. You can sponsor it with your IT salary, and then figure out what you want to do when you're ready.

Do you use Windows to do software development?

I've talked to several people who described why they left "software development", and recently worked in a Windows development shop -- I'd leave the field, too, if I had to work like that!!

If so -- try switching to development using a more traditional *nix philosophy, but make sure you have a seasoned mentor! You may just find that you actually love software development, but didn't know it because it was hidden under a pile of ... Windows.

Only on HN would the answer to "How do I find a new career?" be Linux fanboyism. smh

It's not a bad advice change of OS and distro hopping could ignite some spark.

I’ve been doing this for 40 years. I love it, every day.

I’d quit today if forced to do what I saw 100% of the guys doing in that Windows dev shop…

Or, continue to believe I’m a “Linux fanboi”. Cut my teeth on Gosling emacs + make on a Vax running BSD Unix. It was great, 15 years before I installed Linux 0.8 + X from a stack of 40 floppies.

Get the off my lawn.

Probably they don't read Hackernews anymore.

I personally think re-learning into construction / architecture as a backup plan. IMO we are all living in overly costly and ugly houses, so maybe it could be improved at least a bit :)

Agree housing is expense no matter where you look US, Europe, Australia and so many more. You do mention “a bit” annd I’d argue the material, design and housing cost itself to build is by now a far smaller portion for most urban/suburban places where the majority of people are. IMO land and regulations/policies is really where majority of prices have driven up for housing price.

If you want to get far away from software, I'd recommend mathematics (as code is built on logic, the same thing math is), law (the first barrier to entering law school is the LSAT, which is basically a logical reasoning test, which says a fair bit about priorities), or philosophy (which requires many of the same skills, e.g., logical reasoning, precision, et cetera), none of which have been recommended yet (I'm especially surprised by 'mathematician' - it's pretty similar.) If I had to rank, mathematician would be easiest to switch into, followed by philosopher, then lawyer.

Good luck!

As career paths, mathematics, philosophy, and law have pretty high barriers to entry. Positions within the former two tend to require a PhD in the discipline, and lucrative careers in law require a JD or LLB plus admission to the bar.

I have been thinking about this too but figure out I won't be able to do so due to my responsibilities.

My advice: find the best paying SWE job you can find. Try to get $250k+. Do double job if possible, or better, a permanent one and a contractor one in another country. Maximize post tax income. Since you hate it, better get a maximum pay out of it.

At the same time mininize your expense. Don't marry. Don't get a kid. Those are expensie items.

Grind for a few years and call it the end. If you have a million liquid and a condo with some down payment, you are good for a long period of rest.

Figure out the original question afterwards.

  > My advice: find the best paying SWE job you can find.
  > At the same time minimize your expense.

Some people frame this as first accumulating savings, then quitting the job & depleting those savings to buy time while taking a holiday / switching to a new career. That's valid, but it glosses over that you can put your savings to work to generate income.

Another perspective is the FIRE (financial independence / retire early) angle, where you accumulate savings and invest them, then when you pass the point where your passive income from investment returns exceeds your living expenses, you achieve "escape velocity" and no longer need to perform income-generating work. indefinitely. You need to accumulate investments worth roughly 25x your annual expenses to hit this point (assuming a 4% return on investment, net of inflation).

One way to do this is to achieve an after-tax savings rate of 75% for about 8 years. Suppose after tax, for each $100 you earn, you consume at most $25 of it on annual living expenses, and invest the remaining $75 surplus in the stock market. If you can repeat this for 8 years, and you've been holding your annual living expenses to a sustainable level (not artificially low) then there's a very good chance you'll be financially independent and the "long period of rest" can be indefinite.

A simple tool to visualise this and help build intuition around the relationship between savings rate and years to financial independence is https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement

You could become a home builder. . . I'm a home builder and rather be working on computers

For me AI helped me to implement all those things I was lazy to do all those years. Feel proud now! In the actual code writing it helped me a lot on writing boring unit tests. Sometimes it's just a hit of enter key to write the whole test with GH pilot.

Just telling you all those things to maybe help you see AI differently and more friendly. Writing code and trying to follow all those new technologies is a very mind intense and stressful activity. Maybe it's just this. Changing career was never bad for anybody. You can always make a comeback if you change your mind.

Maybe you try to become a product owner or something?

in my life i have become convinced that work does not bring happiness, no work at all will bring happiness, you are simply exchanging part of your life, your precious time for devalued money, therefore do not look for a favorite job, but a well-paid one, but at the same time, so that you do not want to puke from it. the main rule of job search is that the job should have a beginning of the working day, and end at a certain time. after the end of the working day, you are not obliged to pick up the phone from the boss. if you work until 4 pm, at 4:01 pm you should no longer be interested in anything that is happening there, the shift is over - you are already in your outerwear and leaving the building. do not invent reasons for yourself to stay at work, or to finish something, this will not be appreciated. no one cares who you work for, even if you are an astronaut, the only question will always be the amount for which you work. your time spent on this small planet is not infinite. appreciate it, love yourself. and you can work as absolutely anyone you want, no matter what profession. you work to support yourself, your family, your mother, your dog, your cat, you don't do it to impress anyone. nobody gives a shit. one day i quit everything and went to work in an open warehouse as a foreman-forkman, i calculated the work so that from 6am to 12pm we did all the work that had to be done by 6pm, from 12pm to 2pm we had a long lunch, and from 2pm to 6pm i slept, and they still paid me for 12 hours. i drove a forklift and i liked to crush and destroy. at the same time i am a teacher and a musician by education. everything is in your hands!

Personally, I enjoy detail-oriented activies, so software suits me just fine. But if I was going to switch to something else, I'd ask myself "What other detail-oriented industries could I thrive in?"

* Restaurant / hotel management (specifically, the atmosphere and ambience of a space)

* Architecture / architectural engineering

* Real estate development / planning

* Movie set dressing (!)

How far do you want to go? I hear the Amish have no software engineers.

Beverage Originator at a boutique beer disbursement firm.

Enterprise API/proxy development. I still have to program a bit at the job and I still write personal software.

You already got a bunch of answers in different directions here, I suppose what you could clarify is: Do you want to leave the industry (i.e. no longer be involved in software creation in any capacity) or just move away from writing code?

I _could_ understand if it was the former. Quite a bit of the industry got pretty annoying, from my perspective primarily corporate and early stage startups. But there is for example many wonderful NGOs that build software that helps a cause. Less money in it, but I always find it incredibly refreshing to work with these kinds of people on their kinds of problems, pretty much zero BS.

>But there is for example many wonderful NGOs that build software that helps a cause.

Are you working in that sector, can you suggest some NGOs that are good in this respect?

Well, I'm not sure they're NGOs per the US definition, the concept doesn't translate all that well (I'm in Germany), but publicly funded projects essentially. I was personally just part of Prototype Fund, a German thing that funds open source software for public benefit.

Some cool projects in our round:

- https://www.oceanecowatch.org/

- https://github.com/Viraaj-A/ecthr_prediction

- https://privact.org (what I worked on :P)

These things aren't well funded, they don't have permanent staff. They get some funding to make some progress, then look for some more. I'm sure there's bigger ones with fixed staff, but so far I've been involved only in smaller niche ones, and the people that do this kind of stuff are usually a pleasure to work with. And almost most importantly, they don't have the funding to finance any top down "agile transformations", chase short sighted questionable ideas from marketing, or any of that stuff.

The world is certainly full of depressing stuff, but it's large enough to also host a life time supply of wonderful people and efforts. At least that's my sunny disposition.

Take 6 months off, Travel, Find your passion, Write software for that industry or thing

> Write software for that industry or thing

Did you miss the part where OP said he didn't want to be a software engineer anymore?

Maybe you did not really want to be one in the first place.

Practice this phrase: "Would you like to supersize your meal?"

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