I’m 28, I just quit my tech job, and I never want another job again | Hacker News Reader

I’m 28, I just quit my tech job, and I never want another job again

vox.com

37 pointspaublyrne11 comments

Posting anonymously as my usual account would draw suspicion and is probably in all the company firewall logs.

This is actually exactly where I am now. Literally on every point. However the company has been a royal shit to me over the years, undermined all of my technical decisions (I am the technial lead on it supposedly) and fragmented the platform into several piles of mess by hiring outsourcers and numerous technical leads. They hire someone, piss them off after they've built a new monolith and they quit leaving a new completely different wheel everyone has to maintain. Now I get used as a scapegoat but the only part that still works properly is the original port from the pile of cack COM and VB mess that my team wrote. Everyone else has moved on now due to the shitty state of things, leaving me the only person who knows how it works. This isn't some small thing either, it's about 2 million lines of code written over 5 years by a pile of people.

You might think I'm stupid for hanging around but what am I doing? Well I'm doing what any logical person would do and slacking the fuck off and pocketing all the cash I can and living my life. That's how it works at the top of the company.

I know this is contraversial for some people but you know what, fuck it. You live once. I wrote 50 lines of code this week, spent two days out on a beach sending the odd email and shifting work elsewhere. Suck it.

Inevitably this will come to an abrupt end but I'm going to make the most of it before it does rather than hang myself by quitting. I have an exit plan that is deployed when it becomes necessary but I'm making the most of this situation.

For reference, the company does nothing ethical or important. All they do is work out how to top slice some cash off another industry by being a monopoly and then cranking the pricing up and locking your data in. And they know it.

I can't criticise you really for not working very hard at a job you hate. If you have a very clear plan for what you will do with the money you are saving to make the your life closer to the way you want it to be, then go for it. Life is very short. Very short. Don't waste it living someone else's.

There was only one period where I was in a job that I truly, utterly, despised. And it was the my manager, more than the work. He was quite passive aggressive, and constantly made condescending remarks about me, my attitude, my work, and would then make silly jokes like we were good friends. When I eventually spoke up about it I was further rebuked. I felt trapped. And my health actually suffered. I slept poorly, woke up with anxiety, and one day I burst into tears in the office. As I cried I felt astonished that I was actually crying in front of people, but I couldn't stop. The whole thing was surreal. After I left that job I realised that I had been suffering from depression.

Of course we need to keep perspective. Most commenters on hacker News live relatively luxurious and privileged lives. Depression in a wealthy country, though, feels the same as depression in a poor one. So pay attention to your mental health.

Yet another post about quitting your job with a similar quote, "I had some old stock options, which thankfully were worth enough to pay off the rest of the house."

99% of us don't have that luxury and makes this "dream" of yours unobtainable for the rest of us.

<quote>The lightbulb finally came on when I made time for a recent two-week vacation.</quote>

Taking time off is critical to recharge your energy levels and increase motivation. Good managers understand this and literally kick you out of the office.

Life is a marathon, not a sprint.

Indeed. We call this "voluncation" :-)

Funny that the original eevee post to HN was a personal blog last month and said "my job at yelp". The one on Vox says "a bay area tech company".

I thought that little drawing/diagram looked familiar. Now it makes more sense.

> I never want another job again

I hope that the author uses some of his free time to visit an impoverished part of the United States, or a third-world country, as it might encourage him to reconsider this statement from different perspectives.

While this post focuses on the author's job in tech, I believe the author's decision to leave his job has very little to do with his job. The impression I get from the post is that the author is confused about what he wants to do with his life and will probably find himself unhappy in most employment scenarios. Comments on his Patreon page like "I like to start things but I'm really bad at finishing them" and "in general I like to flit around a lot" suggest that there's a lot more here than just a desire not to be a cog in someone else's machine.

    "I never want a job again"

Followed by:

    "Vox similarly paid me to write this article"

Uh...

Step 1: Find something, anything that can be construed as a contradiction.

Step 2: Harp on it.

Step 3: Win at the internet.

I think I find issue with a hyperbolic title designed to get a rise out of people, followed by a dozen paragraphs describing a brief work history without any substantial self-realisation that ends with a contradiction of the original point. when taken together, it just sounds a bit like whinging.

Plus there are no winners on the internet...

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