I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I make a tangible difference for people, and get to work on things I care about. Instead of pleasing investors or VCs, I focus on maximizing impact and breaking even every year.
There are some things that are worse, mostly around compensation and benefits, but I don't really care. I'm lucky to have a working spouse with decent health insurance, so we use hers. We paid off our house and put a ton into savings while I worked in tech. I didn't get rich in the sense that people who work in tech think rich means, but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America at whatever point I choose and never work again. That's likely the plan after my wife's parents are gone.
My advice, actually take the time to research the number you need to quit. Mine ended up being a lot lower than I thought it would be because I had been used to six figure salaries, but never lived above a five figure lifestyle.
Oof, this one is a knife to the heart. One of the biggest drawbacks of BigTech (and many other industries) is the goddamn time zones and early / late meetings. It's subtle and creeps up on you. It starts out having to take an occasional late meeting to sync up with someone in India who isn't answering your E-mails... then it moves to "you have a team in India to sync with weekly"... then "we need to work with team XYZ on this bigger project who's in China"... then "we're opening a satellite office in London and will need you on calls to them, too." And one day, you look up and your calendar has daily meetings from 5AM to 11PM. I won't miss this when I retire.
I didn’t realize this until I was 32.
Obviously some companies will actually punish you. You might get fired from your Amazon or Microsoft job, for instance.
But typically what happens is the work just gets offloaded to another yes-man.
And the funny thing with promotions is most orgs don’t reward work volume. Nobody will remember that you took 11pm meetings or did that one unpleasant migration nobody wanted to do anyways.
I actually think it’s easier to cut back vs chasing some magic high networth before retirement.
The average salary in Costa Rica is only 1200$ a month. Meaning if you live an average life there you might be able to retire with 240k. Assuming 6% yields per year.
The one thing you do have to factor for, though, is what happens if you don't keep your health. The thing that kept me in tech a little longer than I hoped to be there was a parent with long-term care needs. I could live a happy life on ~$2k a month, but it took five times that just to keep my mom alive the last few years of her life.
Living that cheaply does require adopting the lifestyle. But cooking at home or eating a casado from the local soda instead of a US-style restaurant meal sounds preferable to me anyway.
It’s really designed to drain every last dime.
As bleak as it sounds I made sure to take a long vacation last year at the spur of the moment. Tomorrow isn’t promised and you might save for a retirement that you never see.
I hope to do this every time I’m laid off or otherwise with an abundance of free time
I always tell my kids that they won't inherit much cash, but they're having a great time with all of the vacations and fun equipment we have.
We will have enough money to retire and live for 30-35 years at most, frugally, and 15-20 if we really go nuts. I'll be dead waaaaayyyy before that, so it'll be up to my spouse to piss away the cash.
After seeing how fast my family wasted the proceeds of an estate that took 60 years to build, I don't think leaving a large amount of money is a great idea.
A certain someone just didn't want to work, and while that's fine if you invest the money and move to Vietnam, it won't sustain you if you want to stay in America.
I'm sure your spouse would rather party with you today vs having no you and a lot of money. Can you retire today ?
My reason for wanting to move comes more from culture and place than cost of living. That said, I do expect my cost of living to be lower, because my cost of living is artificially high where I live today; I could probably cut it in half by moving domestically in the same state.
Crime is a legitimate concern, but it's highly variable across the vast expanse of Latin America. There are very safe places to live across the region, but you need to do your research.
Where I live (BC), power costs around CAD 0.085/kWh. In my home state in Brazil, the cost is CAD 0.25/kWh - 3 times higher. Natural gas is 20 times more expensive, although you'll only be using it for cooking. Basically any consumer good is as expensive or more expensive. Inflation is higher, credit is much more expensive. Housing is significantly cheaper than in large US/CA metros, but isn't exactly cheap: a nice apartment in my city rents goes for about 1500 CAD.
Like you said, its a big region. I don't know much about the rest of Latin America, but from the conversations I've had with people from other countries, they say yeah, we're on the same boat. Crime is also increasingly metastasizing as a problem in previously safer regions (Uruguay, Argentina, Equador).
I did spend significant time in Asia and I found myself actually more comfortable than in the US. People just leave each other alone.
This line really hurts! I made my first website in 1999 and my first online business in 2010, and I've never had a real vacation without emails since then.
However, in my 40s, as self-employed, I've never paid myself a six-figure salary either. So perhaps I need to reconsider my plans for the rest of my life.
Great post but this is what it reduces to.
99% of people on the planet work because they have to work, not because they want to work.
This is hardly news for anybody but it still has to be pointed out from time to time.
I find that space really interesting. Do you by any chance have a blog, or would you mind sharing a bit of your experience with it?
Also, any advice on research or reading materials? :) Thank you!
That said, I'll take the word of encouragement that maybe a blog would be interesting. You can do some really fun things at smaller businesses because it's fine if it doesn't scale. I can actually save us money by 3D printing or laser cutting things myself, and have done some fun projects around that. A lot of the tech projects I do are pretty much solo endeavors, which is challenging but also rewarding - that self-hosted project you tried out at home will almost certainly be robust enough for work. I'm one of two people here who write code at all, so I get to make pretty much all of the architectural decisions myself, and even a shitty Bash script is probably still 10x better than whatever process existed before. I also manage our product and marketing teams (did I mention it's a small business, lol?), which means I get to shape our message and values, and even be our taste-tester-in-chief.
What are your responsibilities at the co-op? I thought the idea was that people would work a few hours to get access to the product, but you said you work full-time.
I run a lot of administrative functions that don't fit neatly elsewhere: POS, web, marketing, member services, community outreach, pricing, purchasing, product selection, vendor management, etc., but because I came from a tech background I also was gifted a lot of digital transformation and operations projects, which is fine because I enjoy that kind of work too. I've got a two pizza team helping me, although one would need to be vegetarian and the other gluten free. :) Ours is a fairly large co-op, with four retail locations and a wholesale operation. The median number of retail locations for food co-ops is generally one, so in many ways we behave more like a chain than most co-ops (although still small enough that locations run pretty independently).
It consists of two broad strategies:
1. Consumer Non-Cooperation (Boycott): Boycott of stuff sold, or given by these companies, irrespective of how attractive it is.
2. The Constructive Program (Self-Reliance): Building and supporting alternatives, even if they cost you a little bit more.
All it needs is little self-discipline and a very very tiny bit of sacrifice on daily basis.
IMO the ability for individual employees to negotiate for themselves is a positive? As is being able to get rid of bad performers
Unionization would hurt the startup ecosystem, at least at the margins, no?
I agree it would be a good counter-factual, but I think the differences would be more around industry stability. Particularly, I think the ability for employees to push back against historical threats like off-shoring would have made the industry more appealing to younger people looking for something stable, and prevented this weird cycle of labor shortages causing salaries to explode, unqualified candidates pivoting to the industry using low cost training solutions (bootcamps, shitty masters programs), then companies failing to deliver on initiatives because the people they hired are poorly trained.
If we had 30 years of steady growth in CS education, then we'd have more experts in the field, doing a better job at executing. And it would likely cost companies less in wages as well. There are many industries where incredibly talented people make fairly modest salaries while producing world-changing products.
Also, statistics usually merge all computer and technology related majors into a single bucket.
I keep hearing this, but FAANGs don't allow individual negotiations. You are banded, like you would be at a union.
Also you're assuming that unions would be able to, or want to block the firing of bad performers. Since the bad performers would also hurt the bottom line, and therefore your pay.
Unionisation might hurt the startup as it would stop certain levels of exploitation (ie not being able to ask people to work for free in exchange for shares that will be worth nothing.)
Pretty much, you can use level.fyi to work out what someone is being paid.
If the tech workers wanted those things they could make it so, but they already could have made those things so already and didn't so...
Why in the world are you convinced that you as an individual have a stronger bargaining position than the entire labor pool?
How in the world does that work in your head?
I don't strive for 996. Is this really the bar we want to meet?
Even the Chinese don't believe you can grind at your desk non-stop for 12 hours.
Don't get me wrong, 996 is awful, but the American re-imagining of it is even worse.
Then don't? How is this a union issue?
This measure would either be toothless or it would make it impossible for the most toxic (non-criminal) team members to be fired.
The issue at present is that everyone is being laid off. If we accept this anti-union trope, let's t least accept that it is strictly better than the current situation where no job is safe.
Unions are just another way to find a single solution that fits everyone and we all know how that turns out. They’re just be another bureaucratic institution for corrupt politicians.
Tons of evidence out there, especially in EU.
We have to think about this critically. If there were no unions, do you believe there would be more jobs for everyone? If so, what is happening to those jobs? What is happening to the demand that would support those jobs? I'm missing some of the logic here, so want to understand better.
There's no excuse anymore for being ignorant of how this industry works, the mask has been off for years.
And there is no money cushion anyone [0] can leave to future generations that could offset just leaving it to the worst of the worst, the "synergy" of the insane running the asylum with no counter efforts, like pulling all cooling rods in a reactor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice
In that story the sorcerer saves the day. There is no such person in our story, and no group that play its role, and if we don't step up -- all of us, all of "them", everybody -- everything will be "awash", and nobody will "win" anything worth talking about, not on any timescales beyond what I would consider very short term.
They don't like your age and prefer some fresh face to pull with no family alnighters and work for half the money? The performance review will show you as lacking motivation or some such shit.
And any review that's based on hard metrics, can be manipulated by the reviewer just as well.
I love building software, but I can't stand working in the industry.
It's such an unholy combination of bad corporate culture and questionable moral principals.
> experience has made me a lot more inclined to not leave money on the table.
Sorry for the dark humor, but I'm imagining you meant collecting the pocket change that fell out on the operating table.
Very apt description of "Big Tech". That's why I decided to leave as well. This combination just creates a lot of stress and it was negatively impacting my health.
If people don't like building tech that's one thing.
But the problems most of this thread are discussing are just people and organizational problems.
If you want to live and make money you're probably going to have to put up with some level of bullshit.
Find the company with the least of it and enjoy the rest.
Should’ve learned to program. At least writing python scripts with Claude has automated a lot of my job away.
Anyway, there’s a support group for your shitty job, it’s called the bar, and we meet daily.
There are so many small companies, research groups etc that can pay a livable wage (just not as exuberant as big tech) without the ethical scruples, while still posing challenging technical problems.
Believe it or not you can have your cake and eat it too.
And so at the appointed time, I walked away.
(My retirement plans though also involved leaving the Bay Area—which I did not want to do while I had kids in school. Selling the Bay Area house, buying one in Nebraska paid the early retirement—why I thought it necessary to move in order to retire.)
[1] Told the wife I could get a job at Home Depot if it looked later like we needed an income injection. (Wondering if I subconsciously want to work at Home Depot.)
The more I spoke with, the more I realized that they were there entirely by choice. Most were given packages to "retire", but they were still in their 50s and their spouses hadn't retired yet, hence the job. All of them loved the physical work, interaction, and especially leaving work at work at the end of the day. They seemed relaxed and genuinely happy.
If you end up at Home Depot, chances are you'll really enjoy the work, plus I think they were still using an AS/400 the last time I peeked at their displays!
The key is budgeting and living a not so extravagant lifestyle. Figure out how much you need per year and multiply it by 25. That's your FIRE number, what you need in an investment portfolio with a return of 10% per year on average. Then live off 4% for the rest of your life.
When I do get out I'll definitely miss the salary. I'll miss lunch with the other devs. Miss the walks with other devs around the building. Theres something special about folks in engineering. When I'm serving up lunch and overhear some folks talking SDLC I'll smile and reminisce. But its not for me any more. I'm the gray hat now and have no desire to write code for someone elses fortune. Good luck getting out!
Hopefully in a few years I have a couple mildly profitable applications, and I can pull the rip cord on working in tech and coast while I figure out next steps for myself professionally.
I've been contemplating the same. Saved my whole life. But I still don't feel like I have enough saved for a long retirement (i'm in US, and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements, like you hear so many people around here tout).
How about quality of life improvements? Or life in general?
I'm not convinced living in the US that all the financial planning algs that big finance institutions are using and going to hold up in the future, and curious how it works for a whole generation. But time will tell. So far the cycle always corrects itself. I'm especially curious how it works when there's going to be a lot more early to mid-50s employees being forced into retirement, who are going to be living a long time, yet.
I'm especially paranoid about my prospects of retirement if the market dives 50%. It's happened in the past, and plenty of old hacker news articles about how it really screwed up people's retirement plans. Look back at Stock market returns for some tech companies from 2000 - 2014. That's a big span to fill.... ( I think I read somewhere that the market return for 2000 - 2010 was just over 1% year, someone should fact check that, though).
Personally, I’ve focused on finding a place I enjoy being, rather than optimizing for income and planning to retire ASAP.
Nowadays insurance costs upto 5000$/month with high deductibles and plenty of bureaucracy and paperwork.
I have decided to not get any insurance and negociate directly with healthcare provider (They almost all give you huge discount if you pay cash so they don't have to deal with the insurance backdoor deals). If you FIRE anyways, you should really consider medical tourism and do major procedure abroad.
Everyone is afraid of a catastrophic 1M$ one time event. I get that. But if you end up paying 50k$/year in insurance cost for 30 years that you could have invested and compounded instead, do you really need insurance? For that one-off event that you could have saved for instead?
I guess my view is that I'm also ok to have a 0.1% to go bankrupt over this. We all got brainwashed into getting insurance at absolutely any costs. It is clear to me that it is not worth it at the current price.
In the past without insurance I was able to negotiate down a spine MRI from 2000$ to 500$ if I paid on the spot. Do with that what you want...
But essentially we are being forced to pay higher prices with insurance. Absolute scam.
That was my thought, too, until I researched what a catastrophic event can cost and in the US it's a lot more than $1M!
Do you also account for the chance that you might die everytime you take your car? Or that a meteor might hit you next time you take a walk?
At some point we need to be ok with some level of risks. That's just how the world is.
My wife has a small business and she does not pay anywhere even approaching 40K for a pretty much bog standard policy for a ~50 year old woman. She does not go through the ACA marketplace, she gets a group policy through the company she uses for payroll.
That gives you a bronze plan with a really high deductible and out of pocket. Basically you will be paying the inflated insurance prices and mostly not reach the deductible.
> she gets a group policy through the company she uses for payroll.
That's why she pays less though. they are poolling people together through that company. (healthy and unhealthy)
In the end I paid less than even the inflated copay I would have had to pay with insurance. (And I had a lot of procedure and visit that year).
There is a good chance your 5-10k$ of copay would become 2-3k$ without insurance (Copay are absolutely inflated based on catalog prices that insurance negociate in the background).
Not sure what to do next, I know it probably won't pay as well, but damn I want out
Im thinking about getting certifications to become a drone pilot. Try and get on with a GIS firm to do aerial surveys for farm land or mining companies or something
However, the industry has just changed so much in the past 2 decades that I find it insufferable.
The leetcode grinding interviews. The bureaucracy. The weird psycho finance people who poured into the industry over time. I just can't stand being a Jira ticket coding monkey anymore.
I'm trying to do my own thing and go my own path. I've deeply suffered financially as a result. I burned through my savings and I don't have any kind of fallback but freelance work.
Hang in there and stay with it.
It takes time to ramp up, but 100 orders a day is nothing. We do more than that in an inexpensive suburban strip mall. You can easily get into the hundreds in a high traffic location.
The key is to develop a base of regulars. Even a couple hundred of them is enough to keep the lights on.
We are open from 7:30-3 and do about $50k/mo. Work is like being at a party all day and cleaning up at the end. It’s the same people all the time so you’re basically hanging out and chatting with them all day.
Alternatively, how did you figure all of this out when you first started out? Who did you go to so I can find a local analog here.
It took between $150k and $200k to start up. We had to demolish and rebuild an existing retail space. We also spent a lot on our equipment. You can definitely do it for less.
We picked a location near our house because we were tired of leaving our city to get good coffee. It's in a fairly busy shopping center with a supermarket.
We did the best we could with our business plan. It was wrong though - both good and bad.
We were pretty much cash flow positive by the second or third month. There were a few occasions where we had to put in a little extra cash during the first several months though. We were maybe 7 months in the last time we did. We turned a profit our second year. It's not easy though. You struggle to survive for at least 12-18 months.
We started with 3 employees. We still have 2 of them and the other went off to college. We have more now, but it's mostly part timers with the original 2 picking up most of the hours. We extended our hours since we first opened and we were open 360 days last year.
We selected our beans like idiots because we didn't know any better, but it turned out to be awesome. Normal people hook up with a local roaster. We went to Costa Rica to meet farmers. We visited a bunch of places and ended up with a direct trade agreement. We started importing green coffee in bulk and roasting it locally in small batches.
For marketing, we make silly social media videos and run ads on Google and Meta. We also did some local news stuff in the beginning. We do the typical local SEO stuff, get great reviews, etc. We are the highest rated shop in the area so a lot of people find us that way. We do some influencer marketing - a lot of bang for your buck there. We also offer a great loyalty program - nearly 60% of our revenue goes through that.
We have SMS opt-in from thousands of customers so it's easy to blast out a quick promo and shake the money tree on a slow day. Offering double points can turn things around quickly.
A surprising number of people will provide an email address or phone number on their first visit. I'll keep track of those first timers and load them into a retargeting campaign on Meta if they go a few weeks without coming back. I spent $16 doing that this month and got $940 in revenue from those customers.
Ultimately, the most important thing is to make sure everyone leaves happy. We work hard so that people leave happier than when they came in. Mistakes are made too. When you're making a couple hundred drinks a day and doing food orders, you're bound to screw something up. All our employees have the authority to give discounts, refunds or comp items. They keep an eye on people when they get their order. If it looks like they don't like it, our staff will be proactive about it. It was hard in the beginning when we were scraping by and giving away a drink because somebody didn't like what they ordered, but it pays off in the long run. You must have solid repeat customers to stay in business.
You can usually find a local roaster who will help show you the ropes. Often, they are the local channel partners you go through to buy your espresso equipment anyway. If you call up La Marzocco, Sanremo or Simonelli, they will put you in touch with some people. Local chamber of commerce meetings are good too. You can also meet other coffee shop owners in the area. I'm friendly with a couple owners of places that are far enough away that we don't compete with each other.
Make a dumbphone (that is actually smart and works for you). An open-source television. local AI models. A browser that doesn't spy on you.
I dream, often, of working somewhere where the problems are simple and the work is rewarding. I will likely end up retiring before that happens, and then spend my time volunteering and gardening.
Or I’ll finally get around to obtaining an Irish passport and move to the Med.
At least that’s what the CEOs seem to expect.
It took me a long time to teach myself how to do this and I was making sites for family and friends (weddings, birth announcements) before finally starting to gain traction building sites for local businesses. Eventually a small marketing firm started using me for content updates and then bigger and bigger things. I build sites, created user management systems, handled databases and struggled to learn it all because my fine arts mind was chaotically bouncing all over the place with ideas and designs and finding there were a dozen different ways to do anything. After a few years of this I moved to a large consulting firm, quickly became a technical manager (mostly coding and problem solving but some people management). Then I moved to another and another. By the end I was leading small teams and working with some San Francisco based companies (as a contractor... no bonuses and I was hiring and managing people earning twice what I did). I eventually decided to move to work on a product at a single company.
Pay increased, bonuses appeared but I was now in my 50s and realizing that the corporate ladder favored me about as well as the marketing and sales part of photojournalism had. I am pretty much stalled out now. Salary is solid, bonus is great, upward trajectory has stalled and I am in my late 50's.
All of this is to say, I have given no thought to switching industries at this age. I think it would be too daunting and I am not willing to give up the higher salary that tech is providing this late in the game. I am holding tight (hopefully, lol... sigh) until 62 because my slow start in the industry and lean early years means that I will need to add social security into my income streams in order to lead the life I want to in retirement. I cannot afford the overall cost of living without that extra chunk added to my retirement drawdowns.
I began pursuing a biology degree on the side maybe 3 years ago so I can do that kind of work. Several of my professors are involved with projects that have recently lost funding due to NIH cuts and can't retain their engineering support. It hasn't been encouraging.
Going into something like nursing - union gig, a relationship with AI and tracking I'm comfortable with, walking around money, a job I can show my kids that is about service vs. the inhumane aspects of tech, a career that scales despite technology of the next 20 years (or at least my best estimate of these risks).
End of the day, writing on the wall is clear as day
- Automation of a professional class is coming, just like in trading from '90s-2000s. It's ugly, the pros will deny it until the end, but I've seen it happen to the last technically-inclined 500k+ job class that was untouchable by all accounts. Engineers are up, financial analysts are up, jr lawyers are up... that is a scary future, I don't need to wait for 5 years for thought leaders to catch up to this.
- Labor rights and labor conflict are always a thing, it has been fair that SWEs exempted themselves from caring about it pre-AI, but post-AI I'd buckle up. If you're an engineer that has dug into AI heavily, and understand how the nature of your job for the next 5-10 yrs has changed, then you should be thinking about your relative labor advantage. Is it still a cake 500k/yr job if you're tracked every 30 minutes? Give me a break.
Fwiw, this tracking shows up at Big Corp and should be expected - Fortune 500s, likely FAANGs, and other spots with top-line insider threat risk. There are specific vendors worth seeing if they are installed via the MDMs or local processes.
Past that, most IT/Sec teams can do it with existing tools, but it's often down the line after getting capable detection/response for real security issues, insider threat, and then monitoring a workforce if so desired.
And what job class was this?
Is it too late for that already?
So... no! It's not too late!
You can absolutely do that. But you'll have to network hard and find those people.
It's not impossible, and you may have to work some of those less-desirable jobs in the process. I have a theory that you'll actually find more of those companies as AI proliferates because the work that a single good engineer can do is being scaled very quickly.
The right answer should be "until you are able to do it".
That's the whole premise of welfare. Anything less or more is privilege/vice
Switching industries is a romantic idea but it is very difficult, especially going from the tech world with big money to the normal world with small money. You can still work to keep yourself busy but thinking about it as retirement will better help you plan. Going part time in tech is usually more sustainable than trying to switch industries.
A good place to start is thinking about what you want from life without work. Where do you want to be? Where does your partner and your kids want to be? What do they want out of life? From there you can assess the financial needs and plan accordingly.