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thank you for sharing. im planning to leave software for the same reasons.

were you able to reclaim the space in your head that your software salary took away? like, are things clearer? do you feel like you "own" your thoughts and brainpower again? do you have more mental energy at the end of the day to pursue your own interests?

if i take a 75% pay cut, i really hope i can have my brain back again.

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Yes, things are infinitely clearer. I think I underestimated just how much space in my brain I needed to keep up with my own company’s software, let alone keep up with the state of the art in AI, source control, IAAS, AWS services, Linux patches, etc.

My brain is full of knowledge about technical things still, but all the know-how I have about what caulking to use in which scenarios is going to be useful 30 years from now. The know-how I used to have about my teams proprietary sorting algorithm used to be invalidated almost daily. That is a lot of mental overhead to keep all those diffs

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