
Ask HN: Anybody who left IT? - bizon
Why did you do so? What do you do for a living now? Do you regret it? And why do you still read HN?
======
dejv
I spent more than 15 years working in technology. During my career I did
various jobs as a developer, product manager and pre-sales engineer as an
employee, contractor and freelancer.

I am fulltime farmer now: growing wine grapes and making wine, building my own
independent winery. It is tough and you have to invest tons and tons of money
into it, which I don't really have. There is reason, why are wineries started
by rich people. I still have to work few hours a week as a developer to supply
my income.

I am in my fifth year and I am happy this way. Working outside is awesome.
Work can be very hard, your body hurts sometimes, your income is determined by
weather and compile time is one (or more) years.

There is something calming in the rhythm of this work: your work is changing
by season and you have to wear tons of hats (which doen't mean that you are
doing BE, FE and then maybe devops).

Not that I am caring about it, but I find interesting that being broke
winemaker seems to give you much higher social status than being developer.

~~~
sprocket
I'm in a very similar situation as you are, except instead of starting a
vineyard, I started a goat dairy and cheesemaking business. We produce a
variety of raw milk goat's cheeses:

    
    
      http://imgur.com/a/KWSy7
    

and raise +/\- about 100 dairy goats:

    
    
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb0ur8cdOfY
    

Weather definitely affects our income as well; we were in a drought for the
last couple years, which limited our grazing time.

As you also noted, being a broke cheesemaker seems to be far more interesting
to folks than being a developer. :)

~~~
vram22
Interesting. I have an early background in farming (before I got into
software). What online resources or books would you recommend for the goat
rearing business? and in what sort of climate do you do it?

~~~
sprocket
Resources out there are going to be dependent on the scale of goat rearing you
plan on doing. What works for 2 goats won't necessarily work for fifty, and
what works for fifty goats won't necessarily work for 200.

They're also notoriously difficult animals to get right. Most vets do either
cats and dogs, or cows and horses. Goats are an entirely different beast, and
really, the best education I had was just doing it, and learning things the
hard way.

I'd spent some time prior to farming working with herds in both France and
England, which was very informative. If you're able to find someone who's at
the scale that you imagine your self to be at, some day, learning from them is
likely the best option.

~~~
vram22
Thanks for the answer. That makes sense, to ask someone doing the same.

------
mindcrash
I didn't leave IT. I left the hotshot tech companies.

After a few years in which I became really, really unhappy to the point of
depression due to certain events at the company I used to work I went to a
small organisation which is currently starting to get into technology to
support their consultancy business.

It's a much friendlier place to work, with people who honestly care about each
other. If I knew this was possible I would have done it ages ago.

A small thing I would also like to add: people claim the problem in technology
is men. This is not the case. The problem in technology is assholes. And they
exist at both sides of the gender divide.

~~~
amorphid
Upvoted for reminder to strive for "no assholes".

------
Azeralthefallen
I worked in IT for around, 10 years as a sysadmin/devops/backend developer.
Around 2010 i realized i was simply not happy at all with what i was doing. I
hated it, and felt like i was constantly borderline burning out. I had grown
fat and lazy. Nothing about my job brought me happiness regardless of where i
worked.

So i decided to drop everything and go back to school to become an
electrician. I loved it and i loved working with my hands, and compared to
working in IT i loved it so much more. I loved the people i was working with,
and we worked well. Mainly installing surveillance for SMB's.

However about a week before my apprenticeship ended i was installing a ceiling
camera, and a perfectly fine ladder ended up collapsing and giving out. I
landed in the worst possible way and severely damaged my spine and lower back.

End result even after a ton of physical therapy i couldn't do what was
required of me as an electrician. So i ended up going back to IT to do devops.
I am extremely fortunate that i had a second skillset to rely on or i am not
sure how i would make ends meet.

However i still find working in IT, soul crushing and draining. I hope
eventually i can go back into the trades and do something i want to do.

~~~
relaxman
Check out 'Foundation Training' helped me a lot with the back problem.

~~~
relaxman
I went from not being able to be sitted, standing or walking to be able to do
everything again, including running and walking for hours.

------
moralrobots
I belonged to the first generation of kids who had programming as a hobby.
Started programming BASIC from a book that I found in the library when I was
12 or so (on paper, no cheap computers then), then got a ZX81 at the beginning
of the 80s, and then went on to an Amstrad CPC, and finally an IBM PC. I also
got to play with a PDP 11 on the way. Later studied philosophy, but kept the
hobby, then worked professionally as a programmer for 20 years, until I got a
chance to work as a philosopher. I dropped a safe, lifelong IT job that was
going nowhere in the long run, for an extremely insecure philosophy lecturer
job in China. The call of adventure, I guess. In my heart, though, I'm still a
programmer. I enjoy hacker humour, not philosopher humour. In my free time, I
read programming books, not philosophy books. When you started programming at
12, it stays with you for life. I'm now a programmer working as a philosopher,
and if I do something else I'll still be a programmer doing something else.
There's no regret, just a feeling of belonging to a particular culture, and
this will not change, no matter what I do. That's why I read HN, and still
play around with some of the new tools, frameworks, languages etc. But the
philosophy job was too good to miss.

~~~
rmchugh
What does a professional philosopher do? Philosopher working as programmer
asking...

~~~
moralrobots
Sorry for the delayed answer. We're on China time here :) For me, it's mostly
teaching, but even "extreme" amounts of teaching as a lecturer amounts to
about 15 hours of classes per week. Compared with my 60 weekly working hours
as a developer, this is almost perpetual holiday. Of course, there are exams
to grade, lecture notes to write, and such. Also, you need to publish stuff in
academic journals, and this is quite hard sometimes, because there are only
limited amounts of journals in which everyone has to publish, so the
competition can be fierce. Contracts are fixed-term for the lower ranks, so if
you are unlucky, you can easily find yourself out of work every two years or
so. So it has advantages (less stress, nicer work, more freedom), and
disadvantages (unsafe job, cut-throat competition, generally less money)
compared to IT.

------
anexprogrammer
This has come up a few times!...

I left because I was _utterly_ sick of churn, NIH, and the endless succession
of this week's magic (javascript framework etc) bullet. OK. It's different.
It's almost never _better._

Also felt most of my efforts were NOT making the world a better place but tech
was contributing HARD to the throwaway world we need to cease, not increase.

I now work maintaining and restoring an early Elizabethan estate. Some of the
things I do might outlast me, and it seems a worthwile contribution to the
world. Some of the work done will count in a century or two all being well.

Do I regret leaving? Hell no. Best decision I ever made.

Still read HN because I am still _interested_ in tech, but mostly not the 80%
that the world seems to have settled on. I am extremely agin many of the uses,
decisions and techs that give us the modern world. Exponentially increasing
throwaway hardware on a finite planet? Surveillance? IoT? Security? Everything
as a data slurping webapp? Disrupting perfectly sensible things that work
nicely? Meh ^ 200.

I'd be glad to get involved in a project that I could believe made a
significant substantive difference. Like if a Mr Musk phoned (not terribly
likely) about alternative energy, climate change or some such...

~~~
riffraff
> I now work maintaining and restoring an early Elizabethan estate

how did you pick up the necessary skills to be able to do this? It looks like
something that would take years of focused effort, rather than an easy jump.

~~~
anexprogrammer
Well the luck of finding a place that can deal with a middle-aged apprentice
means I'll be collecting those skills for a while yet! I came across the
opportunity whilst looking for options and directions for degrees to drive the
career change. Well, that and deciding quite what other field I wanted to land
in. Opportunity arose, I leapt. :)

Sometimes I'm glorified handyman, sometimes more significant, almost alwats
learning more about old methods and tech, or previous centuries' restorations.
I'm still collecting pieces of paper, including for some required modern
things like electrics, that usually feel like basic commmon sense, until you
see the folks in the class who are barely grasping it.

There's opportunities for specialising more as I go on.

Europe is littered with old sites, some owned by the large conservation
charities are pretty formal in recruitment and role. Some of the individual
estates and smaller organisations are more flexible probably because some of
the niche skills are needed only more rarely. So I'd probably have never got
near the National Trust without a 5 year run up.

------
bane
I started my career as a regular old software dev but realized that at most
companies that aren't specifically tech companies, IT is simply treated as
highly skilled janitorial staff. At the time there wasn't as robust of a tech
industry where I wanted to live a there is now, so I left to become an
industry analyst, then moved into management roles.

It turns out lots of fields benefit from having tech people join them. For
example, a surprising number of technical research/analyst jobs are filled by
absolute non-tech people (those fields seem to grab liberal arts majors at
incredibly high rates), but they need people who can understand technology at
very deep levels. So I made a name for myself by applying technical knowledge
in those domains (not by doing tech work, but by knowing how tech worked).

In management and business roles it's very much the same. Most managers tend
to enter management by either growing vertically into more and more senior
positions within their domain, then suddenly need to learn all the other
skills needed to manage effectively _or_ they go to some kind of management
school or business school then head directly into management without learning
how any of the workforce actually operates.

Very few are cross disciplinarians who understand tech and soft skills and
management at any kind of functional level. I find that tech is a part of the
portfolio of what I manage, but I've made a name for myself by being an
effective bridge between corporate operations and technology and the
technologists appreciate (I think) not being treated like maintenance staff
and being able to have a reasonable conversation with somebody about what they
do.

I think startups are very interesting in the sense that they really combine
all the skills in one area and I bounce back and forth to startups as my
career path today. I sometimes regret not staying in pure IT, but I also don't
regret avoiding many of the very negative (to me at least) aspects of that
life.

~~~
pjbster
To avoid having to explain themselves, some IT execs simply outsource their
imaginations and adopt ITIL.

It's not hard to find a variety of diagrams purporting to illustrate how the
myriad management functions in ITIL fit together. You'll see lots of silos
with names beginning with "Service..." this and that (because, in a massive
injection of double-speak, IT likes to describe itself as a service rather
than what it really is: a racket).

Here's a typical example:
[http://www.itsm.hr/brosure/ITSM_CHART_V2.0.pdf](http://www.itsm.hr/brosure/ITSM_CHART_V2.0.pdf)

I dare you to find an appropriate place in this diagram to place your dev
team. Pity the poor CIO: not only does he/she have to decide whether to buy or
build but the build option comes with strings such as also having to invent a
management process to go with it!

So, again, most "Service Design" managers don't bother: they just hire the
nearest TOGAF-certified architect team and hand over all development to them.

It's hardly surprising that corporate dev team managers often find themselves
in the role of "supplier", on the outside looking in. No-one with ambitions in
the organisation wants the job and anyone who ends up in there has probably
done something wrong or emerged as a natural also-ran in previous political
games.

What this means to devs (particularly) and some testers (depending on which
box they live in) is this: They Are (so) Fscked.

I saw my role become disenfranchised over the course of 6 years as a result of
a regime change which imposed ITIL upon us. I avoided suicide by jumping into
the contractor market and, through nothing more than sheer luck, have found
myself working for a small autonomous team looking after an important business
function (worldwide royalty payments). My boss has a rebellious streak which I
strongly identify with and she also has sufficient career capital to keep her
team identity intact.

I'd like to leave IT and do something which delivers more personal self-worth
(pimp or drug dealer at a minimum; international arms dealer if I just can't
do without the Bond lifestyle) but I need to clear some capital debts first so
it's contracting for the next 5 years or so. Beyond that? I'm just hoping
there's still a world left to walk out into.

------
antoncohen
It should be noted that IT has different colloquial meanings in British and
American English. Based on the time this was posted, and the context, I'm
guessing this is about the British meaning of IT. But we are getting answers
for both.

British: Closer to the literal meaning of IT, it refers to pretty much any
tech job, including software developer.

American: Exclusively refers to jobs in corporate IT departments. Most
software development jobs would not be considered IT. A sysadmin would be IT
if working on the internal company systems, but would not be IT if working on
production web infrastructure.

~~~
user5994461
There are the two meanings of IT, either designating kinda any jobs in
technology OR only the low income jobs in technology (e.g. support monkey).

However, it's not about British vs American English at all. It's only a very
few people who make that nuance, most of which are devs because they are the
only one to actually understand it :D

Truth is, you really don't want to be assimilated to IT anywhere in the world.
Most people will think of you as the guy called when the computer breaks.

~~~
CM30
> Truth is, you really don't want to be assimilated to IT anywhere in the
> world. Most people will think of you as the guy called when the computer
> breaks.

I think people do this already. A lot of people I know seem to assume 'web
developer' = 'expert in configuring/fixing Microsoft Windows'.

------
VLM
I worked in IT at a financial services provider as a WAN technician in the
90s. That was my last IT job.

Then I worked mostly in operations at a couple telecom companies. I mostly
automated and integrated a lot of stuff, at that time Perl was contemporary
and not looked down upon by the cool kids like today. Programming is different
when done in a revenue generating department rather than an expense only
department so times were better.

Somehow I eventually ended up in engineering writing tool integration and
automation stuff mostly for telecom company end users (like telecom techs not
end users at home). This is somewhat weird in that engineering is usually not
revenue generating but it kind of is here so its kind of in between.

Where I work now IT is infrastructural and replace mice and image PCs and pull
cable and fix printers and so forth. There are a tiny handful of interesting
sysadmin and router operator jobs but mostly going back to IT would mean
imaging PCs. The fun programming is done in engineering by engineering on the
production (and test and dev) networks. Under those conditions I have little
interest in going back to IT and being paid solely on bean counting metrics
like trouble tickets cleared per day and PC hardware replacement average
outage time and so forth.

~~~
vgy7ujm
Perl is still cool. Lots of new improvements happening. Perl 5 has yearly
releases in case you did not know.

Sounds like you could do well in devops if you still have your Perl and
automation skills.

~~~
vgy7ujm
Hey, downvoter: Perl is cooler than you.

~~~
gtirloni
I didn't downvote you but I see zero people using Perl in DevOps and no job
posting I've seen lately asks for it.

I've worked with Perl in the past and it's as capable as any programming
language out there, but the ecosystem isn't there anymore. At least not for
DevOps.

~~~
vgy7ujm
I use it. And bash more often than any of Python or Ruby. I use Go tools more
often than tools written in Python or Ruby these days.

Demand for something in job ads does no always equal what is used out there.
My current job was not announced as a Perl job. The HR department had listed
Python though. We use zero Python in our product or tools.. There was already
some Perl here. Actually when looking past the makefiles I discovered that the
build system was 90% Perl. Let's just say they got lucky with the hire since
no one had a clue when they were recruiting.

I think this is the situation in lots of places and if you know your devops
and prefer Perl you will do as good as or better than anyone using those other
languages that "surely must be dying now that we have Go.."

~~~
muraiki
I have an anecdote to add. I worked for a web hosting company that has around
20 years or more worth of Perl code doing all aspects of devops and also for
building numerous services along with web applications. I spent a lot of time
learning Perl, using it for both maintenance programming and greenfield
development. I also made an effort to interact with the greater Perl community
and to keep up with new technologies they've created (such as Mojolicious and
Dancer). I've used both old school barebones Perl OO and "Modern Perl" with
Moo and Moose.

I think that Steven Little summed Perl's situation up correctly in his talk,
"Perl is not dead, it is a dead end"[0]. I strongly feel that Perl became a
competitive disadvantage for us. New systems that we wanted to use, such as
Openstack or Kubernetes, are not being written in Perl. SDKs for services that
we want to interact with do not exist for Perl. Simply dealing with the
distinction between numbers and strings in JSON was a constant source of pain.
Everything we wanted to use we had to make ourselves, which is a huge amount
of work. We simply couldn't leverage the open source community's efforts on
languages that are much more popular.

This is not to ignore the success of the company, which was only possible
because of Perl. But in 2017, if you really want to use Perl as the basis for
your tech stack or even just in any sort of tooling, you had better expect to
write everything on your own. Meanwhile, your competitors can leverage the
vastly more active communities of Python, Javascript, Go... heck, even C#
nowadays. CPAN was once tremendous, but it really doesn't compare anymore.

[0] [https://speakerdeck.com/stevan_little/perl-is-not-dead-it-
is...](https://speakerdeck.com/stevan_little/perl-is-not-dead-it-is-a-dead-
end)

~~~
vgy7ujm
For someone that involved in Perl I must say you are getting a couple things
wrong.

First let's address the talk you are referring to. That rant was about the
authors frustration with Perl 5 vs Perl 6, the state of the Perl 5 core
maintainers politics at the time rather than actual problems with using the
language. The author is the creator of some great modules that could have been
made core at the time e.g. giving Perl 5 a new core OO system but it did not
happen. From what I can see he is still active in Perl 5.

Another point to be made is that the community tried to address Perl 5s
"marketing problem" which led to many rants that in hindsight perhaps did not
do any good.

About SDKs you are right that there often is not an official Perl one for new
Cloud services but I have had no problems finding what I need on CPAN for AWS
etc. Also there are very good modules for doing generic REST things and with
many services using the REST API is less opinionated and less of a hassle
anyways. I just don't see the problem. Why even bother to use the language
specific SDK for infrastructure like AWS. Terraform is winning that battle
right now.

I have been working in mostly Java, PHP and JavaScript shops lately and trust
me, the "cool" tooling you get there starts sucking the minute you need to
doing more unixy/glue scripting. I have replaced 10000 line tools that in the
end just does shell commands with 500 line Bash or Perl scripts that does said
commands.

I guess this all boils down to the use case but if you are doing mainly unix
scripting (which is what you are doing in a Linux based web DevOps setting)
you will excel with Perl and Bash as your main tools.

~~~
muraiki
> I have been working in mostly Java, PHP and JavaScript shops lately and
> trust me, the "cool" tooling you get there

Given this and your earlier comment, you seem to think that people who have
had bad experiences with Perl simply want to be cooler, to use cooler tools,
because if only they had your experience they would see how useful Perl is.

This is exactly the kind of echo chamber that the talk condemns. Criticisms of
Perl as experienced in the real world -- and yes, I have done plenty of
automation and devops work in Perl and bash -- are brushed aside with ad
hominem attacks. If Perl works for you that's great, but clearly it had
problems for my coworkers and I, which you completely brush aside.

This attitude that the Perl community consistently demonstrates is just
another reason why I intend to never use it again, and why I thoroughly
dissuade any newcomers to programming from spending their energy on this
language and its community.

~~~
vgy7ujm
When the attacks are coming someone has to hold the flag up high.

But seriously, shell scripting in JS or even Go is not a pleasant experience
when you know of other tools. You can not deny that.

And to be clear there are many tasks where I would rather choose another
language than Perl. Mostly for applications where compilation is a win.

But I still maintain my position that if you stick with Perl and of course
have other skills like web/infrastructure you will be ahead of the pack.

And the Perl community is very friendly these days. Despite very strange
attacks from outsiders where it is obvious that they have not seen any Perl
code written after 5.8 and pull their examples from 90s websites etc.

Also it seems like the author of the talk you linked to has been way more
optimistic about Perl the last couple of years. Perhaps things has changed a
bit from what you remember from 4+ years back.

Don't take my word for it, I am JAPH. Go see for yourself, talk to the guys
doing the booths at conferences. You will be amazed how welcoming they are.

~~~
muraiki
> But seriously, shell scripting in JS or even Go is not a pleasant experience
> when you know of other tools. You can not deny that.

I most certainly can and do deny that. Writing scripts in Go, in my
professional experience, was extraordinarily better than writing them in Perl.
Go's ability to asynchronously run processes using the built in exec package,
including capturing stdout and stderr (or piping them as streams!), works
awesomely. After much searching of CPAN, the best module that my boss and I
could find fails to properly capture output that interleaves stdout and
stderr. In general, doing anything async in Go is worlds better than Perl's
various competing / community rejected / author abandoned event loops.

I went to a small Perl conference in 2015. Yes, the people there were nice. I
met TimToady and found him to be very humble. I respect the people in the Perl
5 community, but it simply astounds me as to how much of an echo chamber it
is. If Perl 6 can be criticized as taking too much inspiration from other
languages, then Perl 5 is essentially the opposite.

Trust me, I used to defend Perl very strongly, especially when that guy made a
big deal out of the vulnerability that he found in CGI.pm. I've tried many of
the modern -- and also the ancient -- parts of the Perl ecosystem and have
hung out and helped newbies in #perl. I also spent quite some time in #perl6,
trying out its various async capabilities and reporting and documenting bugs
(I'm noted in the Christmas release). I don't say this to puff myself up, but
rather to explain to you that I _tried extremely hard_ to work with Perl 5 and
Perl 6 (most of my language-level criticisms of Perl 5 are rectified in 6).
It's simply astonishing to me that people will insist that somehow I'm missing
out on something that makes Perl 5 superior to everything else, to the point
of denying my very experience, as you have done here.

~~~
vgy7ujm
Working with text in general is what Perl excels at so it baffles me that you
guys with 20 years experience was not able to make that work. Capture::Tiny is
one module just from the top of my head. That module lists 10-20 other modules
that probably can do the same things like IPC::Open3. Now I don't know exactly
what your use case was but I have always been able to solve my capturing of
stdout and stderr with Perl.

Concurrency is definitively a pain point since it is not built into the core
but for Web and even certain terminal apps I have found Mojo/Mojolicious to be
both well designed and well maintained.

I don't deny that sometimes Java, Erlang or Go is the correct tool. I am
actually very interested in Go and use many tools written in it like
Docker/Kubernetes, Consul, Terraform etc. Go will probably be my choice for
anything that needs concurrency until Perl catches up or something else better
comes along.

But I will not abandon Perl for my unix scripting needs as it is still the
best in my opinion. Getting max work done in a short time and with less code
with max convenience and unix-y feel is where Perl whipes the floor with every
other language. And that is also a sweet spot for DevOps needs where you don't
develop everything from scratch. You take the best practices tools of the day
and glue it together with Perl.

I am sad to see someone like you that clearly was involved with Perl at one
point abandon it completely. The thing is that for every negative comment
someone with a bit of clout spews on the internet there needs to be hundreds
of positive ones to counter it. I still hear that "Perl is dead" because of
that guy who clearly did not know Perl and used an example from the Stone Age
that at one time was considered a feature but we now know is a vulnerability.
It also exists in PHP by the way, and web developers worth their grain of salt
have known better than to let user data just pass unsanetized to internal
execution for quite some time now...

I call TIMTOWDI and hopefully we will se you back in Perl some day. You know
it is a very special little language and if you ever "clicked" with it you
will always miss its good stuff.

------
sethx
Reminds me a lot about another thread on HN, where people in IT decided that
the product of their IT work is so immaterial that they decide to pick up
tangible hobbies to have something to show for their crafts. I remember
reading quite a few people talking about woodworking or carpentry.

Personally I'm still in IT, but i have the strong feeling that if i were to
leave this field I'd get into farming, as it is a line of work where
scientific method and accurate measurements and methods yield to better
results.

------
hn-VZ4N8hcYCjKw
I took a sabbatical after my dotcom imploded in 2000.

Huge, huge mistake.

When I tried "returning" I was either too corporate for startups and too
startup-y for large organizations. I was both too young for roles I had
already filled and too old for technical roles I was interested in.

I bounced through a series of startups, averaging less than a year before
leaving.

I tried consulting but could never command the rates that would make it
worthwhile.

I tried my hand at my own startup and failed miserably. I did not have the
business sense, could not find a partner, and failed to convince a single
investor to invest.

I suck at business and organizational politics.

I fell into the role I had in the 1990s which gave me some brief status and
minor wealth, but was too busy firefighting then to learn how to leverage that
into a better role.

While I believe I excel at managing stuff: people, projects, technology, it is
hard to convey that in an interview.

Eventually I said fuck it.

I stopped applying for the CTO and I/T management roles I was interested in.

I told recruiters I am retired, but this had adverse side-effects I did not
expect. I now reply that I am not interested in whatever role they are
offering this week.

I used the knowledge and experience I have to switch to investing full time,
now about a 50-50 mix of publicly traded stocks and startups in various stages
of success/failure.

I mentor students in local bootcamps and try to help them find jobs after
graduation.

I am still deeply technical, I throw together mock services and run them on
different platforms to see what works, what fails and use that to guide my
investments. I play with things like containers and IoT crap at home to keep
current.

I hang out here to learn what the new _hotness_ is (both what HN thinks it is,
and what is coming in from the edges).

I learn a lot from the great writers here like patio11 and tptacek and others.

What startups have up and coming personnel to track? Which startups have
people to avoid? I definitely check out founders and lead technical staff of
the startups I invest in. If someone is a jerk here, they are unlikely to be
someone I want to invest in.

I do not know if any of this counts as "leaving I/T" or not.

~~~
mailshanx
Would love to hear more about your experiences, both at various startups as
well as job hunting. What are some of the more memorable startup experiences
you have had? What kind of roles did you try applying for, and how did
recruiters / hiring managers react?

~~~
hn-VZ4N8hcYCjKw
Roles: mostly management or CTO. Usually, but not always, recruited by the
management team, but bounced in the early stages of the process.

Most memorable was being told I was unqualified for a role because I did not
clearly whiteboard how to use some aspect of the Spring Framework. Memorable
because: the company did not use Java. At all. Was a RoR shop.

Another time I was recruited to step in as an "emergency" CTO, like, could I
start Monday (this was the preceding Wednesday) because the technology team
was melting down under the current CTO. One catch: they wanted the current CTO
to interview me to get his opinion. You can guess how well that went.

I did not pitch myself as a hardcore techie and did not apply for roles which
appeared to be hardcore technical roles. The CTO roles I interviewed for were
really CIO roles, management, process, that sort of thing, with some technical
awareness. But what I find is companies want to hire hard core technical
people for these roles, and then have a mutual miserable experience as they
learn that knowing everything there is to know about the latest whizbang
framework does not necessarily guarantee that person will be great at hiring,
managing people and process and projects or negotiating the growth of the
organization. Sure, there are hardcore technical CTO roles, but I mostly
avoided those. And not so much because I didn't know the technical aspects,
but it's not where my strengths are.

I find companies avoid hiring managers as managers, in either startups or
large organizations. They seem to prefer promoting their senior most technical
people into management, even at the expense of that person's technical skills
atrophying while they stumble through learning how to manage people or
projects or products or whatever.

And you know, peace. This is how people think technology organizations should
operate. Not my job to fix technology recruiting or personnel management.

------
willholloway
I took a break from coding/ops for other people for money a couple years ago
to pursue a startup idea I had. It was a cool project but I decided it wasn't
a great business idea due to regulatory issues with the field.

After that I had a choice to go back or do something else. I saw an
opportunity to do a real estate development deal and I went for that.

I liked doing the first real estate project so much, I put together a group of
investors and am pursuing a larger deal right now.

I do more interesting programming now than when I was working for others and
keep my skills fresh. I really like real estate development for a number of
reasons.

1) Much better tax treatment of income. Rents are not subject to self-
employment taxes, a 15.3% discount.

2) Real estate benefits from access to the fountain of all money, the federal
reserve. It's national policy to support RE prices.

3) The ability to do a project, put in a lot of work, and at the end own
something valuable in perpetuity.

After a year of a very large ops contracting project the checks just stopped.
I really didn't like that.

4) Real estate is a market that is very local, with a lot of opportunities for
advantage through information asymmetry. It is also something that resists
reaching global scale and the race to the bottom competition that induces, and
resists automation.

5) I really like the physical quality of the work. I physically feel better
due to all the running around and not sitting in front of a computer for 8
hours a day.

All of my software and hardware experience benefits me. I see all kinds of
possibilities to save time/money with these projects with software. One day I
will probably create a startup in the RE space.

Most importantly there is a zen like nature to the work I do now, and I do a
lot of the work on these houses myself, as the going rate for skilled
craftsmen is not far off from a remote dev contractor in a lot of cases, and
its easy to do many more hours than many employers would be willing to pay
for.

Very importantly, the value created is put into the property which is only
realized through higher rents (taxed as passive income) and/or a capital gain
if the property is sold. This probably means that in the long run I take home
more money rehabbing a house than I would coding for cash, due to appreciation
and better tax treatment.

My only regret in all of this is that I didn't do it sooner. In America real
estate investing is a pretty reliable path to wealth for the right kind of
person with the right kind of eye.

~~~
cfitz
I am in a similar place but - very gratefully - at an earlier point in my
life. For a young person looking to funnel "tech profits" into real estate,
what educational resources do you recommend (if any) for mastering this field?
The tangibility of real estate and the ability to get your hands dirty with
property improvements engages me in a way that software cannot.

~~~
willholloway
Well there is Bigger Pockets, and some of their video podcasts on Youtube are
quite good when they interview a knowledgeable guest.

They are pretty honest about things, but I feel like there's kind of a
similarity with their messaging and the passive income/get rich quick world,
although they will definitely tell you it's a get rich slow method, but it
sometimes has that kind of feel to me.

But they cater to a lot of newbies. I come from a different perspective
because my father was a landlord of a decent number of properties and I grew
up in it.

I would say the biggest predictor of success is going into the right market
and finding a good deal. Your profit or loss is determined by the deal you
make.

There are a lot of people that buy houses far away from themselves and get
property managers to operate for them for a fee. I personally would never buy
a lot of properties far away from my home, and I feel like a lot of the people
that do, do it from a kind of Dunning-Kruger false confidence, or maybe just a
way lower anxiety level about what could go wrong than me.

You want to walk the property, you want to keep an eye on things, you want to
make sure things are taken care of because you have a lot of liability as a
landlord, and that's why I would only buy fairly close to where I lived.

Also at the level of buying and renting single family homes, duplexes,
triplexes and so on, if you start paying contractors to do work every time
something breaks it's going to eat into profit margins or possibly destroy
them, at least until you've owned the property for a long time and rents have
risen.

At that level of investing your profits are going to come from the work you
put in yourself, or the price appreciation of a rising market over the long
term. It's different if you can do bigger deals, larger buildings with more
units.

If people are interested I might start blogging about real estate investing
for developers.

~~~
mod
I'm interested.

Also, I'm curious how far you think is too far. And/or how often you run by a
property you own.

------
missizii
I started coding as a teenager, ended up with a Masters in CS. Had a great
career as a software engineer mostly in start-ups and companies with a start-
up-like culture, until I was 28, when we moved for my husband's job. Where we
live now, almost all the jobs are in banking. I became pregnant with my first
child a few months after the move, and now I am a housewife, homeschooling my
Kindergartener, and expecting our fourth child. I do miss coding, and I have
lots of ideas for open source educational software projects, but no
time/energy to pursue it currently. I hope when my children are a bit older to
get back into tech, mostly via open source projects and hackathons, since I
hope we will be homeschooling long term. I miss being a software engineer, but
my financial software stint taught me that corporate culture is hugely
important to whether I enjoy my job and can do it well. I love being home with
my children and teaching them, going to the park with them on a nice Tuesday
at 10am has yet to lose its novelty and pleasure.

I still read HN because I am still deeply interested in coding & tech culture.
It's been a strong interest for over 20 years, I don't think it will go away.

------
avenoir
I'm contemplating to get certified for mountain guiding and rescue. The
problem is of course going from making 6 figures to somewhere around 40k and
likely much lower at the start. On the upside I would be in the nature and
mountains almost every day and this is what I love.

~~~
gtirloni
You should definitely go for the training and start slow. I have seen mountain
guides that were passionate even after decades while others couldn't stand the
jungle any longer. I'd approach it as any other career change and get my feet
wet first. Even if you end up not liking it, that training is still very
useful.

------
digitalzombie
I left startup scene and more specifically web dev, I was full stack.

I didn't like the 60-80 hrs week with no overtime really.

I also didn't have any real life and wanted to spend my free time looking for
a girl and concentrate on my health (exercise). 60-80 hrs really kill most of
your plans...

I left to go back to school to become a data science... so I guess it's not
really leaving.

But I'm not giving up my years of experiences to go to a totally different
field. Just web dev isn't there any more with the recent bootcamps pumping out
tons of, in my opinion, ok-ish web dev. Beside who am I to say when I can't do
those google interviews anyway. I didn't have enough grit to compete or tell
the "CTO" why they should hire me over two other web devs that graduated from
some bootcamps for the same salary. I left two startups after they hire pretty
bad people, they came calling me for freelance works though even though I left
because I disagree with the CTO and the other because too much free overtime.

So I said fuck it, and went to school and get another hard degree (other than
my bs in comp sci, I'm doing master in stat). I doubt a bootcamp can do that
and plus the data science field is very wide. Maybe who knows one day I end up
in Google or some nice tech company in SolCal, a nice stable job and
concentrate on other aspect of my life while enjoying my career instead of
slaving away and hating my passion.

------
tccloud
I have not left IT, however, I left the tech and any for-profit company. A
year or so ago I came to the realization that working in big tech, although
provided a space to grow and challenge myself, the ultimate goal of what I did
was meaningless to me. So I decided to switch over to the non-profit world
(within IT). Although there are quirks for working at non-profit (limited
resources for example) the workload was less stressful and the people you
worked with was more reasonable in terms of timeline. The work that you do
even though may not be directly contributing to the cause will have an
indirect impact on the cause your organization is trying to improve.

------
cybice
I left IT 10 years ago, because of health problems and I was really tired of
programming. After 3 years of working as non IT specialist (negotiator in
investment company) I helped our analysts to develop a small script to parse
some data, then again and again, and I got that I still love to develop. So
now I'm in IT world again ;-)

BTW that non IT years were one of the best in my life as life is not a job.

Ivan Starkov github.com/istarkov

~~~
nilram
How did you become a negotiator in an investment company? It sounds
interesting.

------
hn-3b382489
I've often thought about leaving IT over the past 5 years but find the
industry something of a vicious circle in earnings. Annual above inflationary
increases in earning seems to cause something akin to "Short-term pain, long-
term gain".

I can't personally reconcile how I'd go from $500k+ to an entry-level role in
another field on <$50k and every time something frustrates me about the
industry, the cold reality is it _still_ feels smarter to milk these "golden
years" and to sock away a lot towards quality of life in retirement.

No longer needing to work from 40-45 and having a house paid off with 20+
years to learn a new trade, do whatever is interesting, or travel, that
remains compelling to me.

How have those who've left the industry managed with the substantial drop in
compensation? Do you have families, retirement plans, all that stuff, and just
decided you'd rather be A++ happy with less wealth, instead of B- happy whilst
earning a lot?

------
satysin
> Why did you do so?

Started a family, I became a stay at home dad :)

> What do you do for a living now?

My wife works. I plan to return to work once my son goes to school in
September this year. Probably not in IT though, I love IT but more as a hobby
now.

> Do you regret it?

Not for a second. I love my life now!

> And why do you still read HN?

Because tech is _who_ I am.

------
iamgopal
I wrote my first program when I was 15. I did masters in mechanical
engineering and own and work at centrifuge manufacturing company. I'm now at
35. Not a single week has been passed without me doing some programming.
Sometime making internal web apps for problems that can be solved with excel.
So not exactly the case OP is looking for, but primarily I didn't made career
in software just because there was no demand for it when I started. ( in
retrospect there was a demand, but sometime being good at something means you
can not correctly guesstimate how much people are willing to pay for something
you can make in couple of week. )

------
excalibur
I would love to get out of IT altogether. But I don't see any path away that
won't involve a huge pay cut, at least initially.

~~~
tspike
That's pretty much a given- can you reduce your lifestyle and start hoarding
cash?

------
sdfin
For the ones that left IT after getting tired or burned by it: Suppose you
worked on IT but only half-time. Do you think things would have been much
different?

------
dietrying
I had a job as a DevOps Engineer at a really good company, in which I left
about 6 months ago to travel the world. Currently I'm still technically
unemployed, so I'm just living off of savings. Though I've shifted most of my
time towards learning the ins and outs of drop shipping. I'm not selling
anything yet, though I feel I have enough research I will be very soon.

I don't regret it. But I do miss it some. I still have a passion for creating
in general, but anything technology related is even better. In particular
software. So I think that answers the last questions.

Though I want to make an extra point here. As I'm sure many will probably
point out. At least most of my friends and family have. I know that I can find
jobs as a remote employee. This is not my point. I chose to leave a good full
time job, simply because I do not want this type of life anymore. Doing it
remotely is not going to change the deadlines and working 40+ hours. The type
of life I'm trying to set up is a life of more time to actually enjoy my life.
Not spend it behind a computer or any other type of work. There are numerous
other things I'm trying to do to make income. Blogs, Vlogs, affiliate
marketing, etc. Those will all take time as well, yes. But when it is a result
of capturing the content of my travels I am going to capture anyways. Why not
make some money off of it. Also, you have to keep in mind, I have sold all of
my belongings and have no debt (which I am very fortunate and thankful for)
but my cost of living is significantly lower to where I do not have to make as
much. Plus most other countries I'm visiting things are much cheaper than in
the US. So in summary, need less income, lower my spending, find ways to make
tiny fortunes off of results of things I am already doing.

It is a process, and still takes time upfront. My hope is that I can find a
happy work life balance. It can work, I have already met many people that are
doing these exact things and it is working for them. And if it does not work
out for me, the IT industry is not going anywhere. There will be a slight
adjustment getting back into the swing of things. But it is not an impossible
task.

------
aleo
I left web development job to become a musician several years ago, and while
learning music was a great experience, it doesn't pay nearly enough to make a
living. I'm constantly broke and barely scraping by, currently i have $20 to
last until weekend when my student will (hopefully) pay me ~$10 for a lesson.

I regret leaving IT because i was making good money just coding python and
html/css/javascript. And being broke is really, really stressful, especially
now that I'm in my thirties. I'm probably going back to programming, but
things have changed a lot since 2009 so I'll have to spend some time learning
new things like react, es6, new deployment techniques etc.

~~~
number-sequence
I don't know your situation, but have you thought about part-time remote work?
Or just part-time work in general? Every job post seems to be looking for
people who can work with React. If you're looking for remote work, web dev is
def the place to be.

------
lazyjones
Started programming at the age of 10, studied CS, became lecturer/researcher,
funded a (web) company, exited successfully after 15 years, now investing
in/developing real estate (and some Angel investing in startups).

I don't regret it, it had become rather tedious to follow every FotM and deal
with crappy software and artificially obsoleted hardware etc. - and most
interesting problems are now too big for small companies, the rest is mostly
solved/engineering. Also, had some nasty surgery in my spine (spinal cord
tumor) and can't type as fast as before.

Still read HN because IT is still a hobby.

------
thom
Feeling incredibly burnt out after a few years of (mostly failing) startups, I
didn't want to give up on the only skills I had, and I ended up dabbling in
football analytics. I've found it very satisfying, and though there aren't a
ton of paying jobs, I'm somehow managing to make a living out of it. I wrote
about the experience recently:

[https://deepxg.com/2017/03/10/500-days-of-
numbers/](https://deepxg.com/2017/03/10/500-days-of-numbers/)

------
88e282102ae2e5b
I went back to school for a biochemistry PhD after a few years as a web
developer - no regrets, though I do miss not being broke. Computers are still
vitally important to my career though and HN serves as a convenient aggregator
of programming techniques and new technology that I occasionally find useful.
Also it's nice to be able to respond with a smidgen of insight to the odd
biology article that finds its way here.

------
jrs235
I'm about to leave IT. Resignation letter was submitted last week. I'm looking
to do something around leadership and business consulting focused on improving
communities. I'm not sure if I'll regret it. I obviously very well might if
things don't work out. I think I'll always read HN. I still find this forum
and the discussions that take place hear valuable in business contexts.

------
synicalx
I haven't left yet, but like a lot of people in here I've left the "high end"
game in favour of something a little cushier. In fact I'm actually back at Uni
part time studying something completely unrelated in the hopes of eventually
getting out all together.

So basically I left the Service Provider realm, and moved into local
government doing predominantly SysAdmin work. It's pretty good, I get paid
more than what I should, long contracts, lots of leave and entitlements, and
they don't care if I duck down the street for an hour or two here and there to
go to lecture or tutorial. I still read HN because there's useful info from
time to time, and getting into fights in the comments is always fun and
somewhat beneficial to what I'm studying.

Reason for the change in my case is I've simply got no interest in technology.
The only reason I wound up in IT in the first place was because I got a free
TAFE course on it, which lead to a job. Without tooting my horn to much, I'd
say I'm pretty good at what I do, but I just don't care at all about it.

------
interludic
It seems that most people are happier after leaving IT, can you rephrase the
questions to who left and is not as happy?

------
gkya
I spent two years of my life doing nothing but self teaching myself
programming. I was 19 when I started, and 21 when I found my first job as a
programmer: a junior in a Django e-commerce shop.

I quickly found that what enthused me about programming was not present at all
in the real industry, that apart from the paycheck, the job would be, probably
for my life, identical to that of a Fordist production-line worker: insert
necessary letters and punctuation here, repose, repeat. In a room in some
building, sitting all along, dabbling with deadlines, weird demands. This was
boring, and not what enthused me for programming at all, that was the
explorative aspect, the tool-making. So I quickly decided that I'd never ever
be a professional IT person.

In the two years I had perfected my English, to the level that I'd say that my
English level was near-native. This proved very useful to me, allowing me to
qualify for an Italian philology course, from which I'll graduate with a GPA
of 3.80/4.00 in a year and a half, and which for me has been a part of a
literary/humanist adventure which started about the end of my teens.

For a living... I don't really know. I have two main paths: academia as a
phylologist, or sth. else. I really want to run a cafe, but I don't have any
capital at all to start such a business. My overall plan for the future is
pursuing my curiosities on one side and moderate, mentally-light and sociable
work on the other, because, for me at least, the life is way too ephemeral and
short to do otherwise.

As for HN, well, I've not lost my interest in tech and programming. I use, for
example, Emacs for any kind of documents, email, RSS/Atom feeds, etc., there
are some bits of Elisp that I've published. I'm slowly studying Common Lisp as
a programming language. Writing programmes is pleasurable and useful still to
me, and following HN helps me keep in touch with it. Also, HN is the _only_
ONLY _o_n_l_y_ place where I can share the same platform with people like Alan
Kay, many other CS celebs, creators of software that revolutionised computing
and is maybe used by billions of people, and the sheer fact that I'm typing
into the same textbox that these smartest people are typing and that one day
our paths may cross on this forum on an interesting topic is, God, oh God,
exciting.

So, here is some more than what you bargained for, I think :)) A really nice
and relevant Ask HN that helped me get these out, so thank you so much!

edit: add the missing `identical'.

------
k__
I know a few people who left IT and went into social.

They did mainly admin stuff.

Now they are happier, even with lower pay.

~~~
isuckatcoding
What do you mean by "social" here?

~~~
k__
Uh, social work?

For example, one helps students at university with their study planning.

Another one helps kids that have shown problematic behavior.

~~~
isuckatcoding
Cool. Good important work.

------
davewasthere
I haven't left yet (tried, but it didn't take). But the devs/IT bods I know
who have left have gone to do the following/for the following reasons:

* Farming

* Sailing around the world

* Musician

* Retired abroad

* Photographer

* Illness

And apart from the illness one, I think that change was definitely needed for
all, and that, for the most part, they're happier in their new, non-IT, lives.

If this was more about reading HN though, I don't think many of these were HN
readers.

------
no_wizard
This is anecdotal, I would like to tell you the story of a friend who did just
that, as I myself actually work in Site Reliability which really seems to be
the new IT 2.0 (certainly not helpdesk, though I've done that too and I used
to manage it as part of a team until recently)

It goes a little something like this:

My friend had over 10 years of experience in IT, and for what it's worth never
even intended to get into the field, it's simply a job he could have that
adjusted well enough with his school hours. He wanted to be a Math Teacher.
Anyways, after getting through school he realizes that any job he takes will
likely pay less than his IT job. He had gotten his hands on certificates in
networking, red hat and others during his career and managed to have a
lucrative post as a IT senior manager at a large Bank. Stable if underwhelming
and not much room for advancement. Then he realized one day, he told me he
realized it in a meeting he was in having to do with I want to say doing an
overhaul of some of their networking: Therr was more money in being the
outside firm they contract to handle these things and train staff then there
was in staying on and helping consulting/services firms in his current role.

You see, his insight was that he could get away with making more lucrative
amounts of money in contracts with large institutions or companies which
often, for various reasons, depend on IT services firms to handle their
deployments. He also noted that a lot of these companies don't specialize in
high quality mission critical deployments. Accenture is a big IT firm that
mostly highest in his opinion cheaply and doesn't attract top talent and a lot
of these guys don't have an ongoing training arm.

So he founded a company that focuses squarely on filling a niche: he mostly
contracts services with non-Technical firms like Banks, Hospitals, Governemnt
institutions and agencies etc. and he does 3 things:

By focusing only on highly critical or inftrastiricre that needs massive
changes to rollout or other such opportunities, he doesn't go for low rent
contracts. Instead he focuses on delivering high margin services for niches
like rolling out tech solutions for high speed trading for hedge funds or
critical infrastructure deployments for banks hospitals etc.

He secondly trains existing or ramping up IT staff in the things his company
actually sets up, it's part of the services contract. This training arm even
does just training now and does well. Big companies often contradict out their
training for new technologies and his love of teaching really shines.

The third thing he does I find most remarkable: he sets it up often where his
company can exit doing business. His goal isn't to milk services contracts but
to empower organizations to do it themselves over time. You would think this
would be a losing strategy but it isn't. It allows him to keep the company
small and garners a lot of respect from people who make these decisions. A lot
of the big IT firms want to keep you on as long as possible because the
contracts are more lucrative that way. He inverts this and it has garnered
some respect. Which in turn creates a lot of referral and repeat business.

Now granted he left his jo with a list of good solid contacts to get up and
moving and had a clear vision. Did he leave IT per say? No. He did become his
own boss and successfully does well for himself and his small company does
well over all.

The one thing he told me which me or may not be still true is he wishes he
would have become the IT firm to VC firms and startups. A lot of startups have
massive challenges to scaling infrastructure properly and could do a lot
through just good training and having a guide. I don't know if this is still
an area of opportunity but I remember having an at length conversation in
regards to trying to become the go to devices firms that VCs and or startups
could call in to help themselves or in the case of VCs the businesses they
provide support to a leg up on this

*For privacy reasons I'm not going to reveal names.

~~~
user5994461
> I don't know if this is still an area of opportunity but I remember having
> an at length conversation in regards to trying to become the go to devices
> firms that VCs and or startups could call in to help themselves or in the
> case of VCs the businesses they provide support to a leg up on this

Yep. Definitely an area of opportunity. There are some contractors
specializing in startup, charging them a lot at critical stages.

I think the biggest challenge with them is to get the money. Startups by
nature don't have the money to pay thousands of dollars per day to
contractors, there are only a very few who can afford it after a big funding
round. That's a niche market. Unfortunately, startups usually have an abysmal
business culture, they don't hire/don't understand contractors and they don't
expect to to pay that much for a service.

~~~
no_wizard
I imagine the key insight is convincing the VC firms to have you on retainer
for a fixed amount to be deployed at a startup they are funding at their
choosing (this could obviously pay them back ten fold), not so much in getting
startups themselves to do it.

Then again, VC/startup business culture is not unilateral or one way. Like all
business relationships, both sides can be blind to the needs or wills of the
other.

------
opopie
I got my start as a kid, I was lucky to have a father who's an EE and
interested in computers. By the end of high school I was working full-time in
a start-up. This grew exponentially in 4 years and we sold just before the
bust in 2001. During much of this period I was also in school full-time for
SW-Eng. Studying and working in the field 50+ hours a week was very taxing but
rewarding. I received a stock pay-out big-enough to afford to small
downpayment on a house and to take flying lessons.

I had a brief stint as a well paid consultant before being offered full time
work with the government. I enjoy the people but felt I was always solving the
same problem. Collect data, insert it into a db and built tools to work with
it. Wash - rinse - repeat.

To keep me sane I had learned to fly small airplanes and found myself teaching
and craving for more challenges. Since childhood the dream had always been for
me to fly helicopters. In 2006 I took a 12-month LOA from my permanent gov job
and went to college to learn to fly helicopters.

I can't tell you how much fun it was/is!!!! Being outside, seeing the world
from above everyday, and knowing that each flight would present new
challenges.

After I got my license I was extremely fortunate to get a job flying aircraft
(airplanes and helicopters) with special sensors on board at very low level
200-400' above ground collecting geophysical science data (i.e. magnetic
field, pull of gravity, background radiation, induced electromagnetic
response). The work was literally on every continent and I spent the next 7
years flying in some amazing places, including (favs): Papua New Guinea,
Greenland, North West Territories and BC (Canada) and several countries in
central/south America and the west/east coasts of Africa.

I realised after a while that being away so much while a blessing was also a
curse. My friends were getting married, having kids, getting divorced and
generally moving up the life ladder, I was living in hotels for 2 months at a
time in random places (often 2nd and 3rd world countries) and then spending a
couple weeks at home before going off to do it again.

In 2013 I was offered a job flying a larger multi-engine helicopter for a
provincial air ambulance service in a major city. This offers the best of both
worlds - I get to fly 14 days in a 28 day schedule and I am almost always home
after my shift. Even better the way the schedule falls I have 10 weeks off a
year and 14 days off in a 28 day schedule. With this extra time I've actually
returned to a developer/prototyper type role for my employer and get to work
on projects that I propose that have the potential to make my flying job
better and easier.

It was a serious kick in the butt to go from making nearly 100K in 2006 to 32K
in 2008, but after a few years I've worked my way back up and am feeling
better balanced for it. There are only a few things I'd do differently (mostly
I would have prioritise relationships more and stopped travelling a couple of
years earlier than I did).

If your dream is to fly, it's a very personally rewarding choice, but career
wise, especially in the U.S. the money is poor. Also I wouldn't be surprised
to see drone tech starting to replace pilots 15 years from now or even
earlier.

------
DoodleBuggy
I know a few who left IT for various reasons, usually burnout or being
unfulfilled, sometimes money. They went into sales, management, investing,
consulting, medicine, teaching, the most satisfied became public school
teachers or are directly involved with patients.

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interludic
It seems that most people are happier after leaving IT, can you rephrase the
questions to who left and is not as happy?

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madphrodite
Worked in the industry for the last 20+ years as a network engineer, sysadmin,
test engineer, systems programmer and security analyst.

As I've gotten older (almost 50) and IT employment has become more structured
(with new approaches devised to make business and processes more profitable
and controlled (agile, devops)) my interest in the field has waned. I still
like the creative aspect of the work where it pertains but if I was in
corporate IT (instead of small scale hybrid cloud, HPC and scientific
computing) would rather do something else.

~~~
jv22222
You say agile and devops is the reason your interest waned.

What did you not like about them? :)

~~~
madphrodite
Chuckling at this ingenuous question.

Agile + scrum were transparently about providing leadership/managers with a
reason to be involved at higher rates of compensation. Streamlining
customer/developer communications or promoting the creation of well designed
solutions were not part of our agility. We didn't need paid moderators to
chuckle at our jokes, enjoy our insights, and make bad decisions on our
behalf.

Devops and the whole automation phenomena I ignored till the realization
creeped in that companies were hiring HR folks who thought that automation and
the anti-pattern of SA OPs were silver bullets 'everywhere'.

The tools that are in use that have become part of the devops 'stack' like
ansible and chef or jenkins and atlassian and all this...cruft. If I want to
deploy and CM for *nix please don't tell me I have to work with Ansible
specialists doing deploys and orchestration + CI and builds behind some
Atlassian sales masterpiece.

You may not be able to hire someone who can understand our shell scripts and
deploy|test automation for cheaper than us but you actually have people who
can write a shell script and diagnose a systems problem without handing off to
a developer to decipher '312:yaml malformed button hook, dict value
unbuttoned.'

I'm just a veteran of some psychic wars and probably don't know what is good
for me though. :)

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suff
What do you mean by 'IT'? Geeks who plug in printers? Yeah, that's a bad
business to be in. Software, on the other hand, R&D, product development;
those are GREAT businesses to be in. I can't help but laugh when people
'escape' a 99% margin business :-)

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wheelerwj
these answers are really going to be skewed.

