
Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry? - PirxThePilot
What&#x27;s your story? What do you do now? Any regrets? And how come you still follow HN?
======
hackyhacky
As a kid, I aspired to be a programmer. As an adult, I succeeded, and I stuck
around for a good long while. There are a lot of reasons to like working tech,
obviously: the salary, the flexible working environment, the prestige, the
opportunity to build products that real people use, the chance to play with
new technology, and of course working with occasionally brilliant colleagues.

I tried to convince myself that these advantages made it worthwhile to sit
alone in a dark room for >10 hours a day, but in the end I couldn't. I was
spending more time wrestling with package managers, version conflicts, obtuse
configuration files, pointless deadlines, egotistical colleagues, and almost
zero time solving interesting problems on products that I care about. You
might argue that I should have just found a better job, and I did, several
times, but I found that no matter how much enthusiasm I had for a job at the
beginning, eventually it got bogged down in software engineering detritus. I
didn't much care for my colleagues: no offense to those present, but I just
don't really like tech people, despite the fact that I obviously am one of
them.

Through a series of coincidences, I found myself with an opportunity to teach
programming at the university level. It was a lot of fun: I can talk about
problems that interest with me with people who want to hear it. I operate with
very little supervision. I still get to learn new technology, but fortunately
I can ignore the rough edges and focus on the benefits. Meetings are minimal.
The salary is adequate for my lifestyle. Best of all, I get to interact with
real, live human beings. (Although at the moment, of course, we're doing
everything via Zoom.) Fundamentally, the problems I'm solving are not
technology problems, but human problems. At this stage in my life, this is
more interesting.

I never imagined I'd end up a teacher, partly because I was a terrible
student. Over the years, I had gone back and forth between industry and
academia but now I think I'm in academia to stay: there's nothing I miss about
slinging bits for a living.

Ironically, I'm helping my students enter a career that I left, but I let them
make their own life decisions.

~~~
karatestomp
> I was spending more time wrestling with package managers, version conflicts,
> obtuse configuration files, pointless deadlines, egotistical colleagues, and
> almost zero time solving interesting problems on products that I care about.

That squares with my experience of software development. It's like being a
furniture maker but spending 80% of your time fixing your goddamn hammer
because it keeps breaking and no better hammers exist, or consulting glue-
drying tables because they keep changing your glue on you every hour or two
and for no good reason every single glue performs differently while
accomplishing the same thing.

... and then most of the remaining 20% is meetings and communication, which
would be fine if you had more time to do _the thing you 're actually trying to
do_.

~~~
ratww
And when you're doing woodworking and has to do some repetitive task you make
a jig or a template for your router.

This is something that you're supposed to know on the first day after you
finish apprenticeship.

In the modern tech industry you need authorization from your product
owner/manager and engineering manager just to build a new tool or abstraction
to automate or speed up your own job, because god forbid you do anything
that's not in JIRA.

~~~
naringas
at the other extreme, everybody does whatever the day requires and JIRA is
just an annoying after thought that for some reason (the agile coach tells us
to?) we have to keep up to date and yet is always outdated.

~~~
karatestomp
It's my opinion that coordinate-work-among-the-team and communicate-work-to-
management should not be functions performed by or in the same tool, and that
most of the team should never need to touch the latter tool.

------
notacoward
I haven't left myself yet, but at almost-55 I know a fair number who have.
Here's what I know of what their answers would be.

The first simply had another passion - travel. Work was just a way to pay for
that. Eventually went to work for an agency, been there a long time and AFAICT
couldn't be happier (despite being less well off materially). I've known a
couple of others who fit this pattern. One left the industry to raise goats
and make cheese instead.

Multiple have left to become full time parents. I hope they don't regret it,
since this group includes my wife. ;)

Several others have left _the industry_ but have not necessarily left tech.
Some do light consulting. One's writing a book. Most are working on long-
deferred personal tech projects.

I just about joined this third group before my savings took a 15% hit, so I
might as well say why. I'm _tired_. I'm tired of the artificial deadlines, and
processes that slow people down more than they improve quality, and the
omnipresence of coworkers who exhibit every kind of bad engineering or
interpersonal behavior (even though others are awesome). I want to _enjoy_
making things again, and the moments when I can do that within the industry
seem all too fleeting. Even the best of my dozen jobs stopped being fun, or
just stopped. The thought of going through a modern tech interview process yet
again so that I can do all the rest again just fills me with dread.

~~~
asdfman123
You know, people worry about age discrimination a lot because there aren't a
ton of older programmers around. But when the discussion comes up, people
don't talk much about the reasons you describe.

Sure, bad programmers age out because they were never great at programming in
the first place. But I would assume the HN crowd falls in the top half of
competence because there are so many people here who seem smarter about
programming than me. If you're good, you don't have to worry.

Maybe good programers age out because the technical side gets too repetitive,
their jobs become more about politics, and they have enough money to change
tracks later in life.

~~~
notacoward
The changing nature of the job is definitely part of it. When you're on the
steepest part of the learning curve, that makes up for a lot. I still learn
plenty, but less than I used to. Instead, I spend a good deal of my time
correcting mistakes made by those who hadn't learned yet. Mistakes happen,
that's OK, but it's still less fun than learning new things myself. At my
age/experience there's also an expectation that I'll do more "force
multiplier" work - for me it's often fixing broken infrastructure - so that
_others_ can stay more productive with straight coding. Again, nothing wrong
with it, but still less fun.

When it gets downright tiresome is when being the project janitor puts me in
conflict with young "tech leads" who denigrate those contributions because
they've only ever worked on that one project where other people took care of
those things for them. It's like the difference between living in a college
dorm where everything's taken care of for you, vs. having a house and kids and
bills of your own. Being a strict individual contributor with no cares beyond
the one piece of code in front of me is just a fond memory.

Unfortunately, few companies will hire someone with 30+ years' experience just
to write code, even for a salary appropriate to that role. Companies want to
pay those lower salaries not only for direct work product but also for growth
potential. The worst part is, I know they're not wrong. The only way to do the
kind of work I really enjoy, and _only_ that work, is as a hobby.

~~~
Yhippa
This is one of the saddest yet truest things I've read here on HN. Really hits
home.

~~~
awill88
Same.

------
encom
I left it before I really got started, and looking back at it now, I don't
regret it. In my mid-twenties I decided I'd rather be an electrician. I don't
sit on my ass all day. I get to meet new people, and see new places all the
time. Some places that few ever get to see. Power plants, clock towers, police
stations, homeless shelters, church attics. All sorts of stuff. Not all of it
equally exciting, but a lot of it interesting. I get to build physical things
that people will use for many many years into the future.

I get to play with lots of tech still, except it's more of the layer 1 stuff.
Doing fiberoptical backhaul work, or installing DSL in peoples homes.

I'm still interested in both hardware and software. I run Gentoo Linux on my
machines at home, and I have a DO VPS for "cloud things", but I'm glad it's
not my job, because software issues can piss me off like no other thing is
capable of.

~~~
TheCapn
Find your way into Industrial Electrical work if you can. You get a strong mix
of tech and electrical, moreso than Residential, can't really say the
comparison to Commercial work though...

My company (Automation & controls) is partnered with electricians for all the
jobs we bid on. Having electricians that know wiring for specialized bus
networks, how to do basic troubleshooting on control circuits and all that is
amazing to have.

Alternatively, for those reading this in the tech side, the job is super
engaging. I get to work on programming machines the size of my bedroom. I get
to travel and see equally interesting locations (Dam spillways, Agricultural
facilities inland and at port, underground mines, etc.). The fact that I get
to get out of my office a few days a month is a big reason I've stuck with my
job for as long as I have (7+ years now)

EDIT TO INCLUDE SOME PICTURES (Both the Cool and the Ugly):

[https://imgur.com/5uOWDGB](https://imgur.com/5uOWDGB)
[https://imgur.com/oJozMBr](https://imgur.com/oJozMBr)
[https://imgur.com/95HSxlx](https://imgur.com/95HSxlx)
[https://imgur.com/yhrPUC3](https://imgur.com/yhrPUC3)

~~~
non-entity
I recently became kinda intrigued by PLCs and even consider buying one just to
play with it (idk maybe it's the novelty of it) and the various programming
languages for them and how they can be so different. What kind of education do
you need to work on this kind of stuff?

~~~
mkipper
I don't have a ton of PLC experience, but you really don't need much of an
education to create basic PLC programs. I wouldn't personally recommend PLCs
to anyone who enjoys programming, but I understand the appeal of trying one
out.

The programming languages are all defined in IEC 61131-3, and you can more or
less use them interchangeably. You can use structured text for (clunky) text-
based programming, ladder logic if you want to feel like an electrician in the
70s, or functional block diagrams if you like flowcharts. They each have pros
and cons, and being able to use the different languages (with different
paradigms) in a single application is one of the more interesting things about
PLC programming. There are probably good textbooks for this, but I don't know
of any.

PLC programs execute in a constant loop (scan inputs, execute program, set
outputs), so basic programming problems (e.g. delaying execution of some
function) often require some re-thinking on PLCs. Having a basic understanding
of how a PLC actually executes your code is pretty critical. Again, there are
probably textbooks for this, but if you buy a physical PLC, its datasheet
might also explain this.

You'll need to connect the PLC to some hardware for it to do anything
meaningful, so having a basic knowledge of electronics would be useful. If
it's just a hobby, you probably wouldn't need to know any more than you would
if you were working with an Arduino.

There aren't that many major PLC vendors, so to get started, you could by an
entry-level PLC from one of the big players (e.g. Allen-Bradley Micro800
series). Admittedly, I haven't looked at PLC options in 5+ years so there
might be better options these days. Unfortunately, PLCs are pretty pricey, and
even a small one will probably set you back a few hundred bucks. There are
probably simulators available if you're just curious about PLC programming
languages, but I don't have any experience there.

~~~
lancewiggs
Check out some kit at defineinstruments.com - lightweight and more accessible
versions of PLC but also bridges between industry and internet.

------
docandrew
I was working as a SWE for a large defense contractor on some pretty neat
projects, and I felt like I was good at what I did. It was 40 hour weeks, good
benefits, good pay, but I was bored and miserable. I lived in a town with no
friends, and was so desperate for a change and some adventure, that I left the
industry to join the military.

I took what I call a 12 year sabbatical from tech. I became an officer, went
to pilot training, learned lots of new and useful skills, met lots of very
good and interesting people, some of whom are my best friends.

Taking off from a short airfield in a blizzard, at night, wearing NVGs is an
experience I don't care to re-live, but I'm glad I have something to talk
about at parties.

A quote that affected me greatly during the time I was thinking about leaving:
"if somebody wrote a book about your life, would anybody want to read it?"

After getting married (to somebody I met during one of my training courses),
settling down, and having kids, a quieter, 40-hour-a-week lifestyle started to
sound pretty good again. I had always been a hacker at heart, and realized
that I was getting to the age where it was probably now-or-never if I wanted
to re-enter the industry. So I went back into tech! It's better the 2nd time
around.

Zero regrets.

~~~
throw1234651234
I think the warning here is that most people will drop out of the pilot
program and/or aren't qualified for it in the first place (eyesight, blood
pressure, age, fitness to a lesser degree since it's "fixable" within 6
months). There's always army rotary, I guess.

~~~
docandrew
True - but a lot of people self-disqualify because of rumors and urban
legends. Make them tell you "no" if it's something you want. There are waivers
for many medical issues, but if you don't ask you'll never get one.

~~~
throw1234651234
Right. Don't you have to have a letter of recommendation from a Congressman or
something? It always felt completely inaccessible to me, much more so than
SOF, where you might get by on being fit alone.

~~~
docandrew
It's probably a lot more accessible than you think.

The congressional recommendation is for entrance into the US Air Force
Academy, which is a 4-year university.

If you already have your degree, you can apply for OTS (which is your initial
officer training - I think it's 3 months long now) and a pilot slot directly.

Another option a lot of people overlook too is getting to pilot training via
the Reserves or ANG. Those units can interview and hire you directly, and
you'll go through the same training and do the same job with a lot less red
tape.

------
normalnorm
I love computers since I can remember, and started learning to code when I was
still in basic school. This lead me to think that the tech industry was the
obvious career for me. During my time in the industry, I felt miserable. I
would say that the main reasons for that were:

* Meaninglessness. Most of the projects are simply not necessary, they do not help society in anyway, they just exist to make someone else wealthy.

* Tedium. The intellectual challenges aren't there after a while. There are countless intellectual challenges in the field of computing / computer science, but they are usually precisely the ones that industry has no interest on.

* Micromanagement. "Agile" and similar management practices (yes, I know, you're not doing it right, blah blah blah) are downright humiliating and infantilizing. Almost no other highly skilled professional has to tolerate such level of intrusion on their day-to-day activities. I love deep thinking and creative expression. The modern corporate setting prevents this _by design_.

* Open-spaces. See above.

* Idealism. I was so excited about the possibilities that the Internet opened for humanity. Now we have ad-tech and horrible exploitation of "gig-economy", warehouse workers and the like. This is definitely not what I have in mind when I started.

* Conformism. The tech industry is extremely conformist. Monetary consideration always wins. Deference to power always wins. "Hacker" used to mean something completely different. Almost opposite to the current definition.

I realized that what I always loved about computing was the endless creative
and intellectual possibilities allowed by the medium. This is more or less the
opposite of what the industry values, despite what they might advertise
endlessly. There is nothing cool about it. It is stale and anti-intellectual.

I don't need a lot of money to be happy. You probably don't either. Time on
this earth is the most valuable thing we have, and I would rather spend it
waiting tables than enduring one more stand-up meeting.

I think creative nerds are the life-blood of the industry, but they tend to be
shy and not assertive, so they have their life controlled by the "business
types". I honestly believe that if the nerds told them to fuck off and started
spending their time working on things they think are relevant, the world would
become much better quickly. This won't happen, I know.

~~~
chuck3201
> I honestly believe that if the nerds told them to fuck off and started
> spending their time working on things they think are relevant, the world
> would become much better quickly. This won't happen, I know.

Most of the "creative nerds" I have encountered in this industry are arrogant,
have grandiose beliefs about their own intelligence and have zero empathy for
anybody who is not exactly like them. I don't think things would be much
better if they ran the show.

~~~
volkk
+1 for this. The "business" folk might be filling your day to day with
features that only improve conversion rates which is soul draining, of course,
but nothing feels worse than working on something interesting surrounded by
these wannabe wozniak "nerds" that instill this unspoken aura of "youre too
dumb to be in the room with me." THOSE are the people that i hate the most in
this industry.

~~~
awayfrommypc
I have met people who are so focused on business/money that I find them
repulsive. At the same time, I know some geeks who are the most bitter and
angry humans ever. Even when they consider you smart and let you in their
inner circles, all they do is complain about un-worthy developers or managers.
It gets draining.

I am too old to hang out with negative people, also too old for people who are
only interested in making money. So I searching for a new tribe, I think
outdoors people are the happiest bunch. I just don't know what can I do.

~~~
chuck3201
Like everything in life you need a balance between the "business types" and
the "creative nerds". To think that any one personality type is far superior
to any other shows a lack of understanding of the human condition.

------
peckrob
I stated my career early - while I was still in high school. I went from
bagging groceries and doing checkouts at a grocery store to programming for a
local company my senior year of high school. I continued doing this for my
first couple years of college.

But then dot-bomb happened and it looked like the party was over. I looked
down at the job opportunities after graduation. I didn't really want to spend
the rest of my life wearing a tie, writing bank software and sitting in a
cubicle every day, so I decided to try something different.

I became a seasonal park ranger. And it was awesome.

Like most jobs, I got it through knowing someone. My grandparents had
volunteered for the NPS and were able to connect me with the right people. I
became a seasonal park ranger at Yellowstone.

It's not for everyone. The pay is not great, but you do get lots of good
benefits because it's a government job. And you're often living in remote
areas (the nearest grocery store was an hour and a half drive from where I was
stationed). It's also not conducive to family life if that's your thing
(again, the closest school was 1.5 hours away and everyone around me was my
coworkers). And the days are long, helping tourists, checking permits, etc.
Permanent jobs are also incredibly hard to get - you usually have to do years
of seasonal work to accrue enough seniority to get considered for a permanent
position.

But the benefits? Being able to crack open a drink after a long day and look
up at more stars than I ever thought existed - I spent many nights on the
front porch of my cabin looking up at the Milky Way. Hiking, camping, boating
on the weekends are easy because I was right there in the park. Clean air,
clean water. A good group of coworkers (for me) who legit really care about
protecting these astounding natural resources. And a feeling that you're
really making a difference and reaching people.

I did this for a few years and they were among my happiest years prior to my
marriage. Ultimately, I ended up going back into tech after things recovered.
But there are days that I really miss the outdoors and wearing the uniform.

~~~
matonias
Wow, what a story.

> A good group of coworkers (for me) who legit really care about protecting
> these astounding natural resources. And a feeling that you're really making
> a difference and reaching people.

This feeling of 'feel' for a thing, its what I miss in tech personally.
Companies offer a service, want a happy customer and make money that way. But
a 'feel' for the actual goal and way its done usually lacks. Too many egos...

~~~
sushisource
Agreed. People so rarely bring passion to the job. In fact, they often react
with hostility when encountering someone who is genuinely passionate about
software (to my mind, because they feel it reflects back on them poorly).

I think the industry is totally wrong about the type of activity that
programming is. It's a creative endeavor, not a mechanical one. The best
people are the ones who derive joy from it, not just a paycheck.

------
elroyjetson
I left after over 25 years. I love programming and love working with Linux,
but the jobs always came down to "help us steal peoples personal information
so we can slam them with spam for products the neither want or need." It was
unfulfilling. I went back to school and got an MA in history. I teach
humanities though I still teach a couple of programming classes. I miss it a
little. I would go back in a heartbeat for the right position, but I am
through getting mauled in tech interviews which turned into combat trivial
pursuit. I love technology and I still create applications mostly for myself
or to help automate my school. I get new ideas from HN.

~~~
rvz
> I am through getting mauled in tech interviews which turned into combat
> trivial pursuit. I love technology and I still create applications mostly
> for myself or to help automate my school.

This. Something has definitely changed in the last ~10 to 20 years since the
end of the dotcom era of interviewing in the tech industry. Before it was as
simple as reading the AUTHORS file in an open-source project like Linux to
vouch for a programmer applying to somewhere like Red Hat or Mozilla. But now
we are expecting them to write a proof of quicksort's worst-case runtime
complexity or to explain the Diffie-Helman public key exchange mathematically
on a whiteboard to "see how you think" and "prove programmer ability" which is
unnecessarily academic and they either don't use it directly or search on
Google for it anyway.

That's just the onsite interviews, pre-interviews are riddled with Leetcode,
Hackerrank and Codility tests which can be cheated or the solution can be
found on Google. What a shame that these flawed tests still exist.

~~~
potta_coffee
Interviewing is going to drive me from the industry. I'm skilled - I've
consistently provided high value at my jobs - but I'm not formally trained
(don't have a CS degree) and I don't have the time anymore to sit around
grinding leetcode just so I can land my next gig.

~~~
collyw
That or waste a day or two of your weekend on some trivial app to be nitpicked
on some nonsense not in the spec.

I had a go at our manager recently after letting two people do our tech test
then say they were too inexperienced. We could have worked that out before
wasting their time.

------
SamWhited
A mix of the fact that most companies I've worked for don't value their
workers (they say they do, but their idea of valuing workers is buying fizzy
drinks in the office and giving you "unlimited vacation" which just means they
pressure you to come back after a few days and don't have to pay out accrued
vacation time when you leave), and because they don't care about what they're
building or how much it hurts the customer as long as they can increase their
bottom line a few percentage points.

That being said, I haven't left but have been wanting to for ages. I'd be more
interested in staying if I could find a unionized work place (when Delta cut
salaries by 20%, the pilots union was able to negotiate for profit sharing
after the hard times were over, when my company did that, they refuse to even
discuss whether we'll ever be bumped back up to normal… even if we get paid
well already it doesn't mean we shouldn't work together for better working
conditions and more of a stake at the table) or a worker owned co-op to work
for, but so far that hasn't materialized.

------
snuusnuu
I haven't left but I'm trying to figure out something else to do with my life.

I've been doing customer projects for the last 8 years and it has been
horrible experience. 99% of the things you're building are the same thing all
over again (CRUD apps and various integrations) and pretty much 100% of the
problems are caused by people acting stupid in different ways. It all just
feels so pointless.

I wish I could come up with something else, but currently this is all I know.
At least it all pays well. So golden handcuffs of sort I guess.

~~~
zeroc8
I've been on a pilot track in my former life, but got out due to bad eyesight,
which made it risky to invest more. Now I've been a software developer for 20
years, but it doesn't make me happy. It's an ok job and provides food and
shelter for my familiy, but I wish I could get back into aviation...

~~~
scirocco
Meanwhile, if you ask a pilot today on advice... They will say, get a
university degree and look elsewhere than aviation

~~~
robohoe
We always think that grass no the other side is greener, but not really. It's
yellow :(

It's the same with how a lot of tech folks idolize farming. In reality it's a
tough job with long hours and cold weather.

~~~
Nursie
I know a family that did that. We're not really in touch any more but he was a
tech worker in London in the mid 00s and she was in corporate purchasing or
something.

A few years ago they upped and moved to Wales and operate a cattle farm, they
also home-school their kids. Mostly now I see their ads for pasture-fed beef
on facebook. They seem happy.

~~~
kkreamer
Everyone seems happy on facebook.

------
ativzzz
I've made a few rules for myself regarding working in tech:

1\. Do not work for a company where tech is not their primary product. If you
are only a cost center, you will be treated like a second-class citizen.

2\. Work for a smaller company. Your work is so much more impactful when you
are not part of a mega-machine.

3\. Work only remotely. The quality of life increase that comes with working
remotely is massive, and I am not willing to give that up.

Of course this is not always going to be realistic. For one, working for a
company that sells tech does not mean that you will be treated well, but it is
more likely. Smaller companies, and remote only tend to pay a bit less (and
definitely less than a FAANG), but still more than plenty to live a great
life.

Who knows where life will lead me, but I will try to stick to these points.

~~~
jonny_eh
> 2\. Work for a smaller company. Your work is so much more impactful when you
> are not part of a mega-machine.

That depends. If you work for a small company working on a product few use,
then what's the impact?

~~~
ativzzz
Impact meaning my impact on the product, not my impact on humanity as a whole.
I get more satisfaction from a larger impact on a product that affects less
people than less impact on a product that affects many more people.

------
Jemm
I left (mostly) when tech became a tool for greed and scummery. Was asked too
many times to participate in completely legal yet morally abhorrent actions.

Also saw that programmers were starting to be treated like factory workers
where attendance and metrics like keystrokes per minute were more important
than good well written and documented code.

The final straw however was "move fast and break things". Basically pump out
change for the sake of change and let the end user do quality control.

One could argue that app stores have also played a significant role, basically
taking thirty percent gross while depriving the developer of direct contact
with the end user.

Bottom line, I’d rather be sailing.

~~~
president
> The final straw however was "move fast and break things". Basically pump out
> change for the sake of change and let the end user do quality control.

The worst part is how this leads to more on-call and an increase in working
off-hours.

~~~
Viliam1234
Oh, exactly this! First I get lectured about how delivering a solution fast is
more important than getting the technical details right... and then I get
assigned for on-call duty. Because "move fast" means someone else gets a
bonus, and "break things" means I have to fix the bugs over the weekend.

~~~
president
> Because "move fast" means someone else gets a bonus, and "break things"
> means I have to fix the bugs over the weekend.

This is a great quote, I'm going to steal this from you!

------
gorgoiler
My personality changed around my early 30s in a way that meant I found it very
hard to align myself with anything less than the highest quality leaders in
the company.

Which is a euphemism for “I turned into an obnoxious punk” but I’m fine with
that too :)

It feels like as the years pass and ones sense of autonomy as a human being
overflows the brim, it gets harder to tolerate not being your own boss.

I took five years off work and was complete master of my destiny, which
finally wore off, and I now work at a private boarding school that is
recognized globally as being a center of excellence for teaching and learning.

The summary is it’s completely different and challenging to switch careers
like this. It’s also been fantastic because (1) I am naturally a very gifted
teacher (2) but I am completely unqualified, very raw, and full of newbie
naivety which is all very humbling (3) and yet very liberating as once again
the expectations on me are low and I have room to learn and grow, and (4) I am
surrounded by people who actually know what they are doing and are committed
to helping me get better.

The best part is that I can approach the day to day of the new role and the
skills it requires with the mindset of someone who has been through one career
already. I may turn into a punk again but for now I’m enjoying being a level
headed journeyman surrounded by masters.

------
sabman83
I worked in the industry for over 10 years and I have a PhD in Computer
Science. In my last job I felt miserable from Day 1. I had reached a point
where coding brought me no joy. In all of my job, at the end of the day, I was
serving ads to users. I was also an average developer and part of that is
because I never found the motivation to keep improving. I was only so much
interested in getting things done and never interested in going deep and
figuring out how it’s getting done at lower level.

So I quit. I decided that movies is something that I have always loved and
it’s what brought me most joy. I researched different career options and I
came across creative development and producing. It resonated with me. Read
movie scripts, give notes to improve it, work with writers, directors and
identify the best strategy to get a movie made. One doesn’t need need money to
become a producer. So I left the Bay Area and moved to Los Angeles and
interned at two companies. The second company was a great fit for my interests
(genre, etc) and I am now in full time Role and absolutely enjoying every
minute of it.

I earn a quarter of what I used to make but I am much happier. But there are
things about technology that I still like. And I am always curious about new
developments. So I still enjoy reading Hacker News everyday.

~~~
fluroblue
Did you have to do any training for that? I’ve been contemplating leaving tech
and have always been interesting in your area.

~~~
sabman83
I am avid movie buff. For training, I would highly recommend reading Story by
Robert McKee and look up information on how to do script coverage. There are
plenty of information on that. I am happy to answer in more detail through
email. saby83 at gmail

------
pansa2
Never enjoyed it. I knew from the second day of my first tech job that it
wasn't what I wanted to be doing, but I blamed the job itself rather than the
industry. Moved on after a year and tried other tech jobs (different size
companies, different types of software), but they were all essentially the
same.

I like building things for people to use, but as a programmer found myself
very isolated from users (even at small companies). It felt like I was doing
the hard work of building a product but then someone else got to do the fun
part of showing it off, while my reward was just... more programming.

Also, I found the job extremely boring at times, extremely difficult at
others. I decided that the stress wasn't worth it, especially when my work was
having a limited impact.

Finally, I'm not in the USA so tech jobs had no "golden handcuffs". Many other
jobs were available that paid as well as a Software Engineer.

I still work on personal programming projects, where I can be much more
involved in the whole product and not just the code. I can also choose to only
work on things that I really care about and/or that I feel can make a real
difference.

~~~
tngranados
This is resonating with me. I'm still working in the tech industry but
considering a change. To which industry did you switched?

------
clarry
I left before I got into it. It seemed like the whole field went to web &
mobile & saas, none of which I care for. And interesting things like OS
research got largely killed by excessively complex hardware & software stacks
and bloat that must be supported or nobody will look at the thing. Freedom got
attacked (saas, centeralization, nat and other efforts to kill p2p, drm,
browser & web apps to enslave you instead of user agent and desktop software
to empower you, portability and choice got killed for "our way or the
highway", list goes on) quite hard, hackers across the board dropped
principles for "pragmatism" or whatever. None of the job ads I saw had had
anything in them that resonated with me. So I got depressed, dropped out of
high school and gave up on going to college.

Since then? I did stints in various unskilled & skilled blue collar jobs.
Can't say I had much passion for any of them. So now I'm back, without
education (mild regret but I can always study more myself; I think education
should be increasingly on-demand and lifelong), but at least the pay is better
and I get to work in a clean office while listening to music of my choice. I
think the field still sucks (well, I imagine there are jobs I would really
like but the chances of finding them, without leaving my country and family
and everything behind, is probably quite slim), the grass wasn't very green on
the other side.

Of course, I'm still a hacker at heart and I hope to create something nice one
of these days. Probably nothing commercial.

~~~
non-entity
> None of the job ads I saw had had anything in them that resonated with me.

I occasionally see ones that resonate with me, but either require an education
I can't afford to obtain, or want over a decade of experience working in
similar roles.

------
throw_away2
Got sick of dealing with assholes. One weekend, a director said that we all
had to come in to finish the last features for a Monday launch, so we all came
in ten hours both days and finished the parts necessary for the feature. He
never showed up in the office. Monday rolls around and we find out that he
knew on Thursday that the launch wasn't going to happen.

I had been at the company for over a decade, and had gotten quite lucky in the
RSU lottery & thought, wait, I have enough money to last forever, so why do I
do this to myself?

My health was bad, I was overweight, smoked, was depressed. I felt like it was
going to kill me if I stayed another decade.

So I quit. In the years since, I stopped smoking, lost 1/3 my bodyweight &
really got my shit together. I dink around on personal projects and learn new
things. I follow HN because I'm genuinely interested in tech & now I can
pursue what things I want, rather than those I need for $JOB or $NEXT_JOB.

I miss the good people I used to work with, but this is almost completely
offset by how much I don't miss the assholes and the hassles (annual review,
recruiting, meetings, explaining basic math to MBAs, etc).

------
explange
I worked as a web developer for a couple of years after teaching myself ruby
and javascript. I got into programming because I found it intellectually
interesting, but unfortunately commercial programming is mostly mindnumbing. I
got bored of creating CRUD apps over and over again for boring business
applications. I considered upping my CS and maths skills to get more
interesting jobs, but decided to pursue more of a nonprofit strategy/research
path instead.

I now work for a small consultancy company doing research and designing
funding programmes for charitable foundations. It's great because I get to do
lots of research, writing, and thinking and have a positive impact on the
world. No regrets, I'm very glad to have made the transition.

Still follow HN out of mild addiction and because there are interesting
articles.

~~~
rustyboy
Can I ask what your job title is? This sounds like an area i'd be interested
in but having only experience with tech i'm not sure of any tips or tricks to
finding these hybrid jobs.

~~~
explange
My title is just 'researcher' \- it's not a well-defined industry so titles
are not standardised. Here's where I work in case you're interested:
[https://www.science-practice.com/teams/good-problems/](https://www.science-
practice.com/teams/good-problems/)

My route in was pretty idiosyncratic, and I think that's true of many people
in these kinds of jobs. A more standard way to transition into this kind of
research/consulting/policy work from tech might be go for jobs in technology
or innovation policy. If you're in the UK I can point out some orgs that do
that kind of work but in any country there will be various think tanks, policy
consultancies, etc.

~~~
EdAmante
I'd be interested in hearing about tech and innovation policy orgs in the UK.
Currently I think I either want to work in the civil service or in such an
org. As you say, it would be nice to have a positive impact on the world.

------
blendo
Why did I leave? I retired after programming for over 40 years.

I started with Fortran while in the US Air Force (yay CDC 6600 and VAXen), got
my CS degree, got out, worked in C/C++ and TCP/IP in the early '90s (yay
SunOS), got married, moved to a big buy-side investment manager (meh Solaris),
more C++, then Java. Lots of Sybase (yay JDBC).

7 years ago I quit after our big company was bought by a bigger company (yuck
Perl).

Took 6 months off for a sabbatical (yay Rome. wow Bernini), then entered my
"encore" career at a public safety agency. Introduced Python to that org, of
which I am slightly proud. As always, plenty of RDBMS (Pro tip: don't run
Oracle on (yuck) Windows Server 2008).

Regrets? Just that it's a shame programmers tend towards philistinism, and
that office culture and beer culture overshadow any appreciation of history,
philosophy, and the arts.

------
jjav
Open offices and the extreme micromanagement known as "agile".

Both are so toxic to mental health that I had to move away.

I haven't really left the industry itself but I've moved away from a pure
engineering role (which is my true passion) to a more specialized role which
is ok but not as enjoyable. But, I don't have to deal with open offices nor
agile, so it's a win.

The other aspect that makes me sad is that what we call tech companies today,
aren't. Their product isn't tech. Netflix is an entertainment company. Google
and FB are advertising companies. And so on. Very few actual tech companies in
SV today.

~~~
ScottFree
May I ask what the specialized role is? Management? Sales Engineer? Business
analyst? Data science?

~~~
jjav
I did independent consulting for a while and currently back with a larger
company in a roving architect/advisor role so it is similar to consulting. It
is nice in that I get to work with all the engineering teams but I greatly
miss owning a product and doing hands-on development.

~~~
ScottFree
Huh. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side. Consulting looks
like the holy grail when you're stuck doing staff enhancement freelance work.

------
_davebennett
I haven't left, but I'm thinking about it (despite still being early in my
career lol). For me, it's the frustration of "nothing really matters." I value
helping people, and building software actual people will use is one of the
ways of doing that. Unfortunately, I have not had that opportunity. I've had
to work on multiple projects that served no real purpose. It's extremely
annoying.

~~~
throwaway-9320
I have found myself with a similar issue. Haven't been in the industry for too
long (been working for over 3 years), but the constant shitshow that is FE
development is really taking a toll on me. No matter what you do, people keep
changing things, sometimes for the better, other times for no particular
reason other than to work on new shiny things. If what I am writing right now
will be thrown out soon or rewritten anyway, then why bother? Same goes for
some BE stuff, Go language seems to be the new hip thing to do stuff in,
repeating the cycle once more.

I have begun trying to find things I truly care about as a countermeasure to
this fatigue, so far it seems to be moving in the direction of just helping
with repairing and refurbishing used computer hardware. I know how to do it
for my own purposes, it's less mentally taxing, you get to save useful stuff
from going to the landfill and you will also help cut down on consumption. It
probably helps that the results are immediate (broken device -> working
device), but going this route will have a minuscule impact also on a larger
scale.

~~~
ehnto
> but going this route will have a minuscule impact also on a larger scale.

I think people trick themselves into thinking that "changing the world" is
their ticket to happiness. I think looking more locally is the key to
happiness. Make your community better in some way and the results are
immediate, and you get to be a part of something meaningful and present. If
you become the local guy that fixes people's old computer hardware, then
you'll be genuinely impacting people's lives for the better.

~~~
frosted-flakes
So, rather than maybe help lots of people a tiny bit (hard to see the impact),
help a small number of individuals a lot.

------
checkyoursudo
I started out in technical writing a little more than 20 years ago with a
masters degree, which turned into building websites. I built websites for a
few years, when I became involved in a lawsuit with
family/community/environmental org in a really novel and interesting area of
law at the time. I thought that was quite enjoyable. So I decided to go to law
school and become a lawyer, which I did.

Then I was a lawyer for around 15 years, and now I am moving on again. I am
currently pursuing a masters degree in cognitive science, and I am planning to
see if I can get into working on human cognition and AI/machine cognition in
some interesting ways. (If anyone is doing anything like this, then hit me up.
I am _really_ interested.)

I do not regret my path at all. It is entirely likely that I could have made
as much or more money if I had stayed with building websites and then gone
into SWE or something, but a career in law was fun and challenging. And you
can leave what you are doing at any time. I think a lot of people could stand
to learn the lesson that you can, you really can, just say "screw it" and go
do something else. It'll be ok, as long as you are even a little self-
motivated.

I still follow HN because it is still one of the best online communities I've
found, and it produces some of the more interesting and thoughtful
interactions online. You know, it still has its faults, but overall I like it.
HN is the primary way I discover new and interesting tech-related news, which
still greatly interested me as a lawyer.

~~~
ratkinson
I love your mentality checkyoursudo. I started in civil/environmental
engineering before getting into software development. For the past 5 years
though I have been thinking about cognitive science in my free time and all of
my idols are psychologists and neuroscientists. Might I ask where are you
pursuing a masters in cog sci? This is exactly what I have wanted to do but
the schools offering these programs are few from what I have seen. I'm in
central florida currently.

~~~
checkyoursudo
I was living in Germany when I decided to do this. I am studying at a
university in Sweden.

I don't really know the programs in the US very well. I didn't look at any
when I was considering the field. Do you want to try to do a masters and then
get into industry, or rather then continue with a PhD?

~~~
ratkinson
Ah thanks for the reply, that makes sense. I'm more interested in phd and
academia than I am getting into the industry. Unfortunately cog sci still is
still a bit of an obscure academic track given its "interdisciplinary" nature.
I'm currently trying to find a highly regarded online psychology program I can
take post-bacc to bolster my resume to apply for a masters/phd in cog sci in a
couple of years. (It'd be easier for me to relocate at that time as well)

------
chewz
Meetings took forever, goals and budgets limited my creativity, have been
getting fat on business lunches and life is simply too short to spend it in
the office. Couldn't breathe with recycled air.

I got cancer and when I got better I have never wanted to go back to the
office.

I have spent last 10 years travelling the world, reading, learning to live on
very little. Never looked back. Life is not a bliss but I am happier in
general and satified with tradeoffs I have made.

I still do some projects for my own satisfaction. Still enjoy programming and
learning new skills.

~~~
abyssin
Thanks for sharing your story. What is very little, and how do you make this
very little? How do you learn new skills, and what keeps you motivated?

~~~
chewz
Well I am learning the old way - take a laptop and try something new, starting
with small and then the project grows. Always enjoyed bottom up learning and
discovery. I mostly do that in winter as in summer I prefer outdoors.

Edit: I have been blessed that despite two engineering degrees (financial math
and electronic engineering) I have never worked as a programmer for living.

Since I have learned by trial and error 6502 assembler to hack strategy games
on C-64 programming have always been unspoiled free time, pure fun activity
for me. And 19 programming languages later it is still so.

I live in small summerhouse, eat simple food, cook, own old, small car that I
use only when necessary. I prefer biking whenever possible. Buy most clothes
and stuff used or heavily discounted. Buying used stuff is also good for the
planet. Learnt a lot of DIY which is both cool and satifying.

I despise urban enviroment but have to visit the city cause I take care of
older parents. So the summerhouse and living in the forrest is both a choice
and a way to spend less on rent..

In a way I always wanted this but given the opportunity I had been chasing
money, opportunities, new experiences, following the rat race etc. Now as this
is over I feel less conflicted which makes me happier.

------
collyw
I am ready to leave.

18 years experience. My Current job the tech lead is a diva, doesn't listen to
anyone else and just add more and more to our enormous codbase. There are now
3 devs. The other two just basically clean up behind him as he builds
technical debt. Trying to discuss is likely to end up in an argument.

I have had a could of technical test recently and failed them both. Today I
was given a number of reasons, for example was missing test x,y,z, when the
spec said if you were pushed for time, write down the test you would do (which
I did - along side that I actually provided the most complex test to
implement, to check the timing of the cache refresh). I was advised I should
have provided mocks (which would have taken ages to set up for example). They
preferred a REST API to the HTML that I gave as output despite the specs
asking for a "page". A couple of whitespace errors that made pylint complain.
I hard coded some URLS rather than make them configurable (it's a test, not a
production application) and didn't provide a setup.py (which was never asked
for). Am I expected to be a mind reader? "It should only take you two or three
hours"

Before that was a computer science fundamentals quiz for an hour and a half
where I had forgotten thing from a couple of decades ago. How to avoid
deadlocks in Java (I haven't done threading in years, I said I would need to
reads up on it again) and what happens when hash tables have a collision.
Again, couldn't remember off the top of me head as it was 20 years ago.

Does no on value the art of trying to keep code simple and maintainable? How
do I demonstrate to prospective employers that I am good at this and stop
wasting my time with nonsense described above?

~~~
perl4ever
"How to avoid deadlocks in Java"

I'm curious, this is not something I've needed to know, but what would be Java
specific to an answer?

If I was asked about deadlocks, I would say "always acquire resources in the
same order".

~~~
tomp
> If I was asked about deadlocks, I would say "always acquire resources in the
> same order".

I don't think that's the correct solution, unfortunately - see e.g. the dining
philosophers problem.

Edit: or rather, you have to be very careful what the "order" of resources is.

------
alexbaizeau
I was tired, stressed and bored of tech so I learned how to sail, sold my
stuff, bought a boat and sailed around in the Caribbean on a budget.

I didn't work for a year and now I'm working on contract 6 months a year and
try to maintain my boat/sail the other 6 months It gives me time to refuel and
enjoy working in tech again.

~~~
abyssin
That sounds like the dream. Is there anywhere you document the other 6 months?

~~~
alexbaizeau
I have an instagram account with beach pictures in it but that's about it.
[https://www.instagram.com/2marinsdeaudouce/](https://www.instagram.com/2marinsdeaudouce/)

------
brodouevencode
I haven't left, but I almost have on a few occasions (18 years in starting at
a call center, then to desktop/client support, then sysadmin, then web
developer, then system engineer, now dev lead that does a lot of architecture
work). When I almost quit:

Incompetent leadership: bosses and leaders that are seemingly nice people, but
have no clue as to what's going on in their organization. Typically managers
that aren't technical at all, but they just "fell up" in the organization
somehow.

Relatively low pay: speaks for itself. It's easier to deal with hard problems
and difficult people when you're also not worrying about which bills to pay
this month, and seeing your peers in other companies do a lot better than you.
This was especially true when I was in academia.

Toxic work environment: This unfortunately has happened a couple of times,
once in a small family-run shop (13 people) and once in academia (a different
role than the aforementioned one). There was a common denominator with both -
the person at or near the top was a nasty combination of incompetent, bitter,
and pit their employees against each other. In other words people that were
truly pathological. All in all in my career I've reported up through dozens if
not over a hundred people total through the various chains of command, but
these two stand out. With one in particular there's a bit of PTSD (in the
small shop the CEO would threaten jobs for minor things - this was ~2010 when
the economy was still near the bottom where I live, and his COO would do
equally vicious things).

I work for a great company now with some of the most awesome leadership you
could ask for. I'm glad I didn't quit.

------
Balanceinfinity
I realized that I was only a so-so programmer. the real ninjas were so
passionate and knowledgeable; I was only successful because of brute force and
overworking. I moved on to a career in the law - which is a much more natural
fit for me.

~~~
non-entity
> realized that I was only a so-so programmer. the real ninjas were so
> passionate and knowledgeable; I was only successful because of brute force
> and overworking.

I think I'm starting to feel this. I'm neither talented nor educated enough to
work on things I truly find interesting and my ability to learn feels like its
completely flatlined these days. Unfortunately, I feel trapped in what I do
rn, because it's really one of the only decently paying careers I can get.

~~~
collyw
As I age I feel the opposite. I can't work out whats going on as quickly as I
used to but when I do I am far more inclined to refactor stuff so that its
easy for the next person.

~~~
Balanceinfinity
As you age, you just can't bring the same focus and stamina to bear on a
project - which is ok, because experience, wisdom, and efficiency can actually
make things easier.

~~~
collyw
That's why I am forced to refactor it. I'll do worse in interview questions
but write nicer code.

------
6nf
I turned 40, so they took me out the back and shot me. As is tradition.

~~~
smoyer
I'm 55 but so far they haven't noticed! I guess HR can be as disfunctional
with mandatory executions as they are when they present us with coding puzzles
during the hiring process.

------
analog31
I haven't left the tech industry _per se_ , but have had a good career using
my programming skills without ever being employed as a programmer. I work for
a company that makes measurement equipment, and am in kind of an "architect"
and R&D role, so I use programming for everything but actual code that ships
to a customer.

Something I kind of like about the hardware side, is that you're forced to
keep at least one foot on the ground. Real physics problems are a good source
of real business problems because you can't wish them away, and mother nature
will tell you if your stuff works or not.

Granted, I'm not rich. I'll never see the kinds of salaries that get thrown
around for programmers at the big five.

I've read a lot of the posts here, about the headaches of programming in a
modern setting, and the ethical issues spanning a large swath of the "tech"
industry. At one time I thought that I'd encourage my kids to get into coding,
and I'd still do so, but they are aware of what the culture is like these
days, and I'm not sure the money is a big enough attraction for them to jump
through the hoops. Also, I can't honestly say that it's career worthy, given
the level of attrition and the specter of age discrimination.

One of them is easing her way into coding anyway, because it's fun, and I
always guessed that she might have a bent for it. I'm inclined to let her do
it as a hobby without pushing her to make a career of it.

------
talmr
I'm in it as a self-taught engineer mostly for the easy money, but honestly I
am finding that I don't really thrive any more. I managed to get myself into
this industry and four years later I'm a senior software engineer making
decent buck. However, it really isn't satisfying at all. I feel like I'm only
in it because this is the easiest six figure job in the world and I'm just in
it for the health insurance.

I used to be a business consultant and made a career pivot because I got
burned out from working 60-80 hours a week and flying 100k+ miles each year. I
loved all the projects I worked on, and many of them were very large scope
(50m to 300m+ USD) with tremendous impact. I got to work with people in the
senior leadership positions at multi billion dollar multinational
corporations, and we were understanding their problems and coming up with
solutions. It was so much freaking fun.

I barely feel that at my current work, where I'm just working on a CRUD app
lol. It is so boring. I don't really care anymore about code juggling, because
anyone can figure it out if they have a little dose of motivation. At first it
was fun to be a "problem solver", but not like this.

I'm not really that interested in becoming a specialist. I look around at work
at some of my colleagues who have years of experience in their specific subset
of work, and they only know and care about that thing. These are highly
qualified experienced people, but I really don't want to be like that. I like
to get a low-level understanding of things I am personally passionate about,
and I love learning so I try to get a high to mid level understanding of
everything else. I'll fuck with dev ops, database performance, product
strategy, marketing, sales, mobile app dev, whatever else that I find
interesting.

Being a software engineer at a larger company does not satisfy me one bit, and
it really sucks when you realize you're only in it because it is easy money.

I'm working on my own ideas now, and I'm learning as much as I can during this
COVID remote time to make it on my own.

------
awillen
I had a ten year career mostly in product management at enterprise software
startups, and I left last year to open a dog boarding business (which is a
whole mess right now, but that's another story).

For the most part I liked the companies I worked at (which tended to be ~50
people when I joined) and my coworkers. The problems were interesting, though
largely not things I was especially passionate about (I spent a couple years
making software for call centers, a couple years on enterprise
videoconferencing, etc.).

I decided to go my own way for a few reasons. First was financial - I had
already started investing in some real estate on the side, and it wasn't a
leap to see how much of a financial advantage you can gain from owning and
running an operating business vs. being a salaried employee. Second was just
that I really like to be in control. Even in a 100% self-owned small business
you find that you're not really in control on a lot of things (getting permits
from the city for stuff is exhausting, plus you've got a landlord, bank,
etc.), but from a day-to-day perspective, I am the one who makes the call on
everything.

Last was that it was a good way out of SF. I'm engaged (would've been married
in three days... sigh), and I just have no desire to have kids anywhere in the
Bay Area. This allowed me to move to San Diego, a place that I love and that
is also perfect for this business.

Edit: To answer the last couple parts of the question, no regrets (I mean I
guess in theory I would've kept working a steady job and started the business
post-pandemic, but I believe all my choices were sound at the time that I made
them). Also I still follow HN because I'll always be interested in tech.

~~~
cagmz
> I had already started investing in some real estate on the side

I have a few questions, if you don't mind.

How did you get started with this? Is investing in real estate something you
can do while being a salaried employee or do you need to do it full time?
Also, what kind of investments were/are you making?

~~~
awillen
Funny you should ask - I actually wrote a short book about it:
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M09FA5X](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M09FA5X).

I own two small apartment buildings in the Bay Area (seven apartments total).
I honestly just saw interest rates were low and thought real estate sounded
like a good way to take advantage of that. I didn't know much, so I just found
an agent through my local Realtor association and started looking at
buildings. From there it's not that complicated - you just build a pretty
straightforward model of your income and expenses, estimate conservatively,
and pay a price that'll make it profitable. Beyond that just use common sense
and don't do things like buy in dangerous areas.

I employ a full time property manager, so I have been a full time employee for
most of the time I've owned it.

------
shijiazhuang
At 25, I quit my job at Google to join a Bay Area mayor's office (~$30K pay
cut). My new job is intellectually stimulating, fast, and challenging in ways
that tech was not. I get to work with every type of person from firefighters
to economic development specialists. I love spending 100% of my time on public
interest projects and was never inspired by large corporate motives. I have
nothing against tech, but I'm so much happier in government.

------
reuben_scratton
Not actually left yet, but at age 48 I certainly want to. The trouble is it's
all I'm good at...

~~~
dominotw
yep same. Golden handcuffs. I am working on my ski instructor certifications
though, because you know being ski instruction is where are all the big money
is ;)

------
turrican
I left the tech field just a year out of college. I worked in cybersecurity.
It was a lot of fun for a tech job, with lots of travel and interesting
problems to solve. The pay was decent even fresh out of college like I was.

I left to be a pilot. Spending time traveling, watching the aircrews and
staring at airplanes taxi up got to me. I put my time in flying small planes
and just finished training for my first airline job on Valentine’s Day this
year. The work is amazing, and I’m still very solidly in the “I can’t believe
they’re paying me for this” phase of my job as I eat breakfast and watch the
sunrise from up high.

I’m not sure if I’ll still have this job by next week, much less October. Oh
well.

------
soulnothing
I've been thinking of leaving for the past several years. But as the primary
income for my house hold, I need the higher pay of tech.

I've gone to a number of career counselors. Trying to find something else to
do. I have a number of other passions/interests. Just not sure how to turn
them into a career? How did other people determine an alternate career to get
into?

------
alexilliamson
Didn't leave I just went out for cigarettes.

------
downerending
I'm half way out the door. Several very bad managers. Pointless and often
boring work. A shift in the tech community from iconoclastic but brilliant
people to ideological conformism.

It's all I ever really wanted to do, so yeah, regrets. Feels like I got to the
party ten or twenty years too late.

------
iaabtpbtpnn
LEAVE the tech industry? Are you crazy? Who else is going to pay me this much
money for this little work? And in this economy, I'm happy to have a stable
job I can do from home...

------
wrnr
Just can't get any respect for it, I was trying to quit smoking, a friend who
I did some projects with asked if I could do this boring thing in a language I
don't know, 3 times I politely declined the job, got angry and lit a sigaret
in my living room, so I took his make shift astray and threw it the garbage,
he left after that saying I wasn't a team player, all the other contract I
helped to secure he took with him saying he'll find some other autist.

~~~
quickthrower2
That sound like some shit from the Silicon Valley series.

------
jstahley
Worked in IT for a dozen years doing network administration. I felt alone and
irreplaceable. The job was nice enough to afford me time to study nursing for
a career change. I hired my replacement as I started school assuming quick
termination. As luck would have it, they gave me a raise when I went part-time
and I no longer had to do any projects I didn't care for.

When I started my nursing job at the hospital I continued to work with my old
company once per week. Now that I'm super busy as a nurse and continuing my
nursing education, I fear my old tech job will really end soon. I kinda like
it once per week!

I love my new career. I get to work closely with people and help them through
tough times. It's very rewarding and my new colleagues appreciate my tech
background. I've gotten 2 raises since I started 6 months ago and now make
more than my old job working only 3 days per week. The job is not easy, but
when I go home, someone else is doing the job so nobody is calling me urgently
to get something done.

At the same time, I moved from a small company to a large company. The
benefits are good and the perks are complete. Since I started my job as a
nurse I have received almost 200 hours of professional development training.
Useful classes that apply towards making me better at my job. In my old tech
job, I went to an annual trade show and that was about the extent of training.

Anybody else have a job like I did in tech? I had infinite projects to do and
unlimited time to do them in. It was weird and not conducive to productivity.
Now every day I go to work, I know I will do something important. My patients
will be grateful and my employers will support me. Yeah, no regrets here!

------
d3ad1ysp0rk
We opened a hostel (
[https://www.hostelofmaine.com/](https://www.hostelofmaine.com/) ). No
regrets. I have always intended to get back into tech in some capacity, and
just identifying how that will work and when is the best time is the trick.
Still follow HN because some of the content is really good, and keeping an eye
on tech's big picture changes is important to me.

------
blodkorv
I haven't left yet but i do less and less programming work.

The reason is simply that i realized that i was not as good at problem solving
as i thought, i also dont find joy in sitting for hours solving problems.

I used to be passionate when it came to programming, but i realized that the
reasons i thought it was fun was mostly because i thought i was better at it
than i actually where. I was the only kid in the entire school to program and
all that.

But after starting a startup and working with other developers i realized that
am pretty crappy at it. I also don't get enough joy to try to become better
and on one level i can kinda see where my limit will be.

I always been extremely bad at maths and logic solving, i always had problems
with sitting down and being focused on doing something like writing, playing
video games or coding. I never will be able to solve problems fast enough to
be a productive programmer.

It just is not for me, and its just a burden now when i have to do some
coding.

Also other people in tech are just annoying, people who only brag about how
smart they are. CEOs who are bullies and try to mimic steve jobs. Managers and
other people seen tech as a burden for the company etc etc.

~~~
non-entity
I've kinda had similar realizations to what you mentioned, althoughI can still
kinda enjoy programming occasionally. Any idea where you're gonna go from
here? Personally, the most realistic path is to just remain an enterprise code
monkey unless salaries get massively deflated, and then move to tech adjacent
business fields (management, etc.). I'll absolutley loathe the coming decades,
but there isnt a ton of well paid options for an uneducated person that doesnt
depend too much on luck.

~~~
blodkorv
If i did not have my startup that's starting to go well and hopefully i will
be able to live of it. I would be an enterprise code monkey, there are still
plenty of directions away from programming you can go from that direction and
still make an middle class to upper middle class salary.

That is if you still can deal with the people who work in tech. I rather work
with normal people who knows what they do is just an office job, other then
people who believe they will cure cancer with their CS degree and CRUDy mobile
app they are developing on their free time.

------
newhotelowner
Worked as a Frontend engineer. Now a hotel owner.

Few reasons why I left:

\- Wanted to try something different.

\- Incompetent management (Biggest reason), and politics at the workplaces.

\- I am not good at expressing my self. Not good at kissing asses. Political
correctness and all the stuff/

\- Getting old (40)

\- Single earner in the bay area with family. I couldn't afford a house in the
area that I was living in. I didn't want to drive far for a job. I had the
money for a downpayment, but paying $4000-6000 in a mortgage + taxes seems
scary. I end up buying a rental property.

\- The majority of the family is in the east coast.

So far, no regrets. I am not sure how this COVID-19 will affect the future.

I love writing frontend code (don't like react or other frameworks). Whenever
I am bored/feeling down, I write code. I write my own utilities that I needed
to get stuff done for my business. I was using JS for theming in one of my 5
years old PWA. Yesterday, I updated to CSS variables.

After all, technology is the future. Not sure any better place then hacker
news.

~~~
papapra
How much money did you need to start your business ?

~~~
newhotelowner
It depends on how big/small/location.

I invested roughly $600k. Typically, if you buy in rural or small cities, you
get a 25-30% YOY return.

------
UncleOxidant
I think I might be out of the tech industry. I'm 55+ and had a really nice
embedded gig that ended in November because the startup ran out of funding.
They held out hope that they could get more funding and promised that they'd
hire me back right away when they did. So didn't look around much because I
liked working for them and I hate the modern interviewing process. Now with
covid-19 I don't think it's likely they'll get funding. And I'm just done with
the whole arduous tech interviewing process at this point. If someone comes
along and offers me a gig without having to go through the arduous interview
process (it's happened, that last gig was like that) I'll take it. But
otherwise I think I'm done.

------
redcat7
I want to make software development so simple that cost of entering the
software industry and competing with current companies (except infrastructure)
will be close to nothing.

I really want that normal people would be building functions on their
computers which today are startups.

If everyone is super, no one is.

~~~
collyw
People already do this in Excel.

------
matonias
Did not quit yet, but slowly moving away.

I did a Ruby bootcamp 4 years ago at the age of 18, because I always liked
computers and hacking around a bit. 4 years later I don't regret doing it, I
learned a lot, but I have to motivate myself too much to keep on going with
programming.

I find more joy in doing activities where I get to use my hands and body,
being active all day. Last year I started working at a bakery which was so
much fun and these quarantine days I have been starting repair an old house
and painting artworks.

I guess I'll have to find out how to turn that into a living, but it gives me
more joy then chasing the money that is in the tech industry. We'll see how it
goes!

------
skadamou
I couldn't handle the isolation. My first job had me working in a basement
pretty much by myself for 12 hours straight. In retrospect the job really
wasn't so bad but I was there for four years and never really got used the
lack of socialization. I'm now in a wet lab that, while still in a basement,
has me on a standard 8 hour schedule and working with people semi-regularly.
My long term plan is to pivot into healthcare because I have found that I
really enjoy working with patients and take a lot of satisfaction from
teaching people about their bodies/conditions.

------
scrapcode
I got into facilities management. I get to create / manage construction
projects for my "company" from planning all the way to final acceptance. In my
area, the whole industry is quite behind technologically. Using tech has
helped me excel.

I'm now ~7 years removed from active development and am finding it
increasingly more difficult to find time to make a side project to show off
while trying to raise a family. I miss development and keeping up with all the
new stuff. It'd be hard for me to take the pay cut to return as a junior dev-
so now I feel stuck.

~~~
subpixel
My father-in-law retired from facilities management and he absolutely loved
it. Worked for a major manufacturer and built factories and clean rooms around
the world. Somehow lived in Vietnam for a year and didn't know what banh mi is
but we all have blind spots.

------
bob90
7 years in the industry here. Did not quit get but looking for a way out. My
experience in the industry (France) is that I never met a company that seemed
to know what they were doing. I feel like there is this whole industry of
mediocre skills building software badly again and again and again. Same
mistakes same "great ideas", same maturity as High schoolers. I mean I've
worked with aircraft engineer, the difference in maturity and skill is
astounding.

Well my case is biased of course by my limites experience but that experience
really bums me out.

------
logotype
I’m 38 and working as a developer at a well-known investment bank. I’ve been
thinking of running my own specialty coffee shop. Been working as a developer
for my whole life (front-end primarily). The day to day work is okay, and the
problems are challenging. Definitely not working on mundane CRUD apps, but
still it isn’t as fun as it used to be in the past. I started with programming
because I found it rewarding to build things, to master the art. But
programming today has switched from being a “master of tools” to “master of
change”.

~~~
hinkley
What do you suppose would happen if you started bringing specialty coffee in
to work and to technical events?

------
edw519
_What 's your story?_

Programming off and on for over 40 years. Left several times. Because nothing
is as fucked up as I.T.

Did sales, consulting, several small businesses, and writing. Kept getting
sucked back in. Because no one else digs as deep into things as us
programmers. Became frustrated because we were always "skimming on the
surface" of everything instead of deep diving into the cause instead of the
effect. Besides, _nothing_ turns me on more than watching something I built
from nothing working for the first time. I haven't found that feeling anywhere
else.

 _What do you do now?_

Back into enterprise programming. Should be having a ball, but I'm more
miserable than ever because of the total fuckedupness of management. Planning
my next one-person business now.

 _Any regrets?_

No. I had choices but picked programming. I often wonder how my life would
have been different if I had become a mathematician, teacher, writer, artist,
musician, or something else. But every time I talk to friends who went in
those directions, I realized they had their own shit to deal with and I
followed exactly the right path meant for me.

 _And how come you still follow HN?_

Because my "Delete Programming from my DNA" button returns a stack overflow.

~~~
donclark
> Because nothing is as fucked up as I.T.

In all different companies that I have worked with, the finance department
seemed to be consistently the most stressful, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants
part of the company. I am curious for people to tell the horror stories that
they had to go thru.

Should I do an Ask HN on the finance dept?

(edited formatting)

~~~
cafard
My employer has no finance department, just an accounting department. The
staff in the accounting department have their quirks at time, but in general
are very easy to deal with, and grateful for help.

------
panoramas4good
I previously worked in cyber security. Great job as a PM for a start up in the
space. Great industry, for the most part. I loved the tech. But it just got
boring.

At the same time I was running an environmentally focused project on the side
that I really enjoyed and was starting to take off commercially.

One day I just decided to jump into it full-time.

Now I must stress, I am incredibly fortunate 30 year old, no massive student
debts, large mortgages, kids, etc. In some ways, this was one of the biggest
contributing factors in the decision. Sure, doing good is nice, but we all
need to survive.

The reason I'm posting though, is that the project went full circle, and is
now what I brand as a tech company (non-profit) with an environmental focus. I
put this down to my background in tech.

Moral of my story (I think), is that most humans all long to do something new
and different, but typically head back towards what we are good at. I'm just
hoping I don't get bored this time around...

~~~
Winterflow3r
Could you please share a bit more about the environmental focus of your tech
(non-profit) company? Really interested in tech with environmental
applications, hence curious about your story!

------
epmaybe
I don't know if I really "left" if I never joined in the first place. I'm
almost a doctor, now, but I studied computer science in college and became pre
med in my third year of college.

I realized I didn't really want to be a cog in the wheel without human
interaction, and I wanted the perspective one gets in medicine to be able to
come up with solutions that help people. That evolved while in school to
building software/hardware that increased access to medical care, and it's
been a cool ride trying to figure out how to actually come up with studies
that prove my ideas work (or don't). It's also extremely gratifying to treat
patients and make them better, even if it's at the micro scale.

------
thomasbibby
I just left. I was an iOS dev for years, and ran my own (failed) startup
before that, but now I work in politics. My friend ran for parliament, I was
his campaign manager. He won a seat in the election, and he asked me to leave
my job to come and work as his parliamentary assistant, and I said yes.
Politics and software aren’t so different - they’re certainly both messy
behind the scenes. I miss cranking out code and being in the zone, but like
others I don’t miss the Taylorisation and faddishness of the sector. I took a
big pay cut with my new job, but I don’t regret it. I’m still on HN because
after a day of reading about politics and policy it’s nice to read people
arguing about different things!

------
edanm
I'm kind of shocked at the amount of people here saying something like "all of
tech is just finding ways to get people to click more ads". I mean yes, that's
a part of our industry, and because of the dominance of Google and Facebook
it's a pretty big part.

But that's still a drop in the ocean compared to all of the other tech out
there!

Literally every system you can think of, both good and bad, had to have
someone build it. Systems for managing schools? Someone built those. Systems
for managing your local restaurant? Someone built those. Systems for
internally managing some niche organization no one's ever heard of? Yep,
someone built those too.

Those kinds of things are numerous, and super important.

------
vatotemking
I am going to pursue farming. im tired of having to deal with something
breaking at any point in time due to the pile after of complexities built on
top of hardware, which is also built on top of more complexities. I am just
tired at this point.

~~~
therealdrag0
Isn’t stuff always breaking for farmer?

~~~
vatotemking
if its large scale mechanized farming yes. since tractor companies are
removing your right to repair. but that doesnt stop farmers from being
ingenious.

------
noiselistening
The workplace and managers made me so miserable I would drink every night and
be sick every morning. Vomiting was routine.

Not only was it an awful workplace, but I was capable enough to work alone,
and therefore did, so I had no colleagues to build strong comradery with.

We tried to hire myself a senior developer to mentor me and make me happy, but
to put it simply, if you were capable of doing that you were simply
overqualified for the company in the first place.

Imagine that, hiring your own boss...

Edit: I'm talking about 1 job because thats as many as I got through in this
industry. All my applications are custom made, so after a couple dozen with no
responses, I've kind of given up and have stopped looking.

------
braft
I sometimes want to leave the industry because I can't seem to find a job
dealing with interesting problems. I enjoy Rust and C, working with OS and
machine details, but there don't seem to be any such jobs that pay as well as
busting out features for a SAAS web app in a dynamic language. And it
consistently blows my mind how everyone else seems to be so enthralled with
"providing a positive customer experience," i.e. making as much profit as
possible with whatever product necessary. I've felt like the only cynic at my
last several companies, and feel guilty for not being able to give more of a
shit.

------
throwaway286
10 years into my career, after being under high stress, I quit my job with no
plan.

~~~
s1k3s
What did you do afterwards?

~~~
throwaway286
Lived off savings, studied new programming languages, deep learning, leetcode,
etc.

~~~
volkk
hows that going?

~~~
throwaway286
It was fine for a while; I'm definitely the best at solving algorithms
problems than I've ever been, but I want the structure of a job now.

------
sambarina
I am about to quit tech (being a programmer) in a couple of weeks. I mostly
tell myself it's due to improved mental health.

I always assume that 95% of programmers have some mental disability to do what
they do. Nobody with a sane mind can sit in front of a black screen with white
text for 8 hours each day solving weird shit.

I started as a CS student and totally sucked at programming, wanted to quit. I
finished my Bachelor and started at a StartUp. I totally loved it. I could
build things they way I wanted, had a great CTO who helped me along the way.

But of course, you are getting ambitious, so you move on. Next company, higher
pay, more complex problems. At some point I switched to freelancing and did
3-6 months gigs for several companies.

Now I taught myself Systems Programming, got a job at a really high paying and
interesting company - so it seems.

What I figured out: No matter how high the pay was, the problems were always
bigger. I quit a project early despite them paying me 20k a month and I was
basically sitting my time up, nobody cared. I couldn't do it.

Now I realize, the ones who are really good at programming have some mental
disability which lets them focus on this one thing for hours day in and day
out. There is no way you can compete with someone further on the spectrum then
you.

Then, what's the point?

You are either wanting to improve, but the better you get, the more
challenging the environment. And the problems don't stop. The higher the pay,
the more shit you got to eat. That's the whole point.

So you either give up, accept your situation and have a life outside of work,
or you switch careers.

My problem is that I just can't seem to find the right company with the right
people. Both smart, interesting but also ambitious. You either have super
smart introverts who don't want to talk and socilaize, or you have fun people
who can't code shit.

I had my first interview at a semi-technical role and boy this was the first
time a job interview was fun. People talked, cared about how you present
yourself and just didn't want to get as much money out of your mind as
possible.

Programming is great, but a too big of a power for smart people not to make
use of.

~~~
ethanfinni
How did you make the switch to Systems Programming? How did you train yourself
and what technology stack I (perhaps mistakenly) would think between the
front-end, back-end and devops jobs, Systems programmers are a dying breed.

------
cryptica
Engineers who work for companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft...
They aren't getting paid for engineering. They're getting paid to increase
employee head count which gives corporations political leverage. Also, they
don't want smart people to be thinking about the economic system in an
objective way - Hiring smart people and giving them massive salaries and
bonuses is a good way to keep those people focused on ideas which are aligned
with the existing corporation-friendly political order.

~~~
ratww
It's not just those four, rando startups have started to do it as well.

It's the third time in my career that I see a company making the developer
head count jump from 10 to 100 only to ask all the newbies to rewrite the
software from scratch in the most disorganized manner possible.

I'm becoming allergic of rewrites, but I'm pretty sure that I'll land into
another one if I switch companies again.

------
organicfigs
About to start med school, I looked around in the tech industry and never
found a role model and found that distressing. I never met a single person in
10 years in the industry and said "I aspire to problem-solve like him/her" or
"this is the career trajectory I want to take". I also never wanted to be in
tech, was a premed in college, but after taking 1 CS class before the twitter
IPO and getting internships at a string of popular companies I somehow became
locked into the CS degree.

------
werber
I left and came back, and honestly it was a 100% financially motivated.
Everything else that interests me requires basically being in poverty. I enjoy
coding, but i enjoyed working with people in the non profit space more. I have
this fantasy that I’ll find a way to merge the two worlds but so far i haven’t
been able to do so. On a positive note, I have made so many more friends
working in tech than at basically any time in my life. I gave mostly loved the
people I’ve gotten to work with in the industry

------
Nextgrid
I wish I could leave.

The tech industry nowadays is no longer about solving real-world problems and
making the world a better place, instead it's all about screwing the end user
in every single way possible, whether it's ads, stalking and privacy
violations, spam ("marketing" as they call it) or just plain fraud where the
company is happy to take the money but can't make it right if things don't go
to plan and the customer is left holding the bag.

Most tech products nowadays aren't there to solve a real problem and aren't
funded by customers buying them because they are good; instead they're funded
by some VC scum and they're there to capture the market (or rent-seek) and
prevent a _legitimate_ business from starting (nobody can compete with free or
below cost).

Technology-wise, we no longer use engineering as a means to an end to solve a
business problem. Instead, engineering became its own thing and most companies
encourage and reward those who opt for over-engineered solutions, which means
you spend more time fighting with dozens of layers of abstractions and chasing
the latest JS framework instead of actually delivering functionality. This is
mostly a symptom of the previous point where showing "growth" and bragging
about your (over) engineering is more important than actual profit.

Unfortunately there's just nothing out there that pays as well so I have no
choice but to tough it out.

~~~
adrianN
You could always switch to a company that doesn't make its money with ads. For
example I work for Snowflake and I don't feel like I'm building stuff to screw
the end user at all. I just make our database better. I also worked for
Siemens. There too I didn't try to screw any users, I just tried to make
trains run cheaper, faster and more reliably.

~~~
Nextgrid
Making its money with ads doesn't mean anything anymore.

There are plenty of companies that have _paid_ products and still do user-
hostile things including stalking, spam, dark patterns, etc.

I paid full price for a Playstation 4. I still had to opt out of "enhanced
data collection" and spend 15 minutes disabling every option on their bullshit
attempt at a social network. Even the _games_ themselves had their own
telemetry crap I needed to disable buried deep in some advanced settings.

Spotify still insists on ratting me out to Facebook by loading their SDK even
if I'm paying for the app. They also interrupt my flow every so often with in-
app popovers about some stupid feature I don't care about.

A client I worked for that has a _paid_ app had an insane amount of analytics
and marketing SDKs in the app (including Facebook of course), so much that I
actually refused to install the app or use the product myself even though they
gave me a voucher.

~~~
stagger87
The examples of paid products you used to support your point are not very
good. The PS4 console was sold at a loss and Spotify is barely profitable. In
short, you might have paid for them, but neither company made money from you
based purely on those purchases. Both companies perform data collection to
guess what, generate more ad revenue (through lots of channels).

~~~
blub
Sony isn't having money trouble, they're huge. That's a sorry excuse.

And Spotify doesn't make much money because most of their users are
freeloaders. Their poor business model should not become the problem of the
paying users.

------
axegon_
I haven't but what really disgusts me is the so called "marketing", which is
in 100% of all cases composed of incompetent idiots who have 0 knowledge in
any field, including marketing. If you want good marketing, hire a
psychologist with side interests in the field of your product, not someone who
thinks they can sell a product because they've spent most of their lives in
shopping centers and bars.

------
Mr_Sweater
Ive not left yet but have all but resigned myself to a different field, likely
EMS or nursing. Eight years in (health and ed tech) and its become project
management with little actual engineering work. Im only 27 but I regret
waiting this long. I started to see signs that my interest was waning a few
years ago and figured I just needed a change of scenery...three changes later
and I think the message is clear.

------
honkycat
I will tell you when I can get back in. I quit my job in January before the
economy crashed. Took a month sabbatical which is looking like it will an
indefinite sabbatical.

9 years professional experience, four year Computer Science degree, multiple
reviews of my resume and cover letter by trusted friends in the industry.
Stable work experience where I am not hopping around a bunch. Important
position at a successful start-up. Resounding success at every job I've had.

I've been putting my resume out. Radio silence. I have heard NOTHING back from
anyone. People don't seem to like my start-up experience.

____

Why I (might) leave if I get back in?

* Infantilization and Micromanagement: Agile is a plague. I hate being micro-managed and forced into meetings all the time. I hate the constant pressure to sacrifice code quality for expedience of release ( when bugs will be much more expensive to detect and fix ). I just want to do my job but anymore that entails being harassed by middle-managers who can't take "no" for an answer when their boss's boss sets an unrealistic deadline.

* The people. I've been saying over and over that one of the best things you can learn in programming is how to lose an argument. I am done with the divas and the control freaks. I am done with the 0 training, three-years of experience clowns that show up and work extra hours ( thus creating an expectation for the rest of the team to work extra hours ), who suddenly know everything and think you are now their bitch ( management loves these people for some reason. Probably because they are cheaper. )

These two things were what I experienced at my last role. Though, I suspect
these people exist in other careers as well.

Why do I want back in?

* I have had good jobs before. Jobs where the team is in sync and everyone just wants to do a good job. I think if I can find a team, I can create that environment around myself.

* I have learned a lot of lessons from my previous gigs. I think a layer of indifference is important for a developer job and I am ready to embody that role with kindness and mindfulness. I can deal with the people if I keep them on the other side of the bell jar.

* I love writing code and I am good at it. I even enjoy drudgery like writing a bunch of unit tests or writing documentation.

~~~
throwaway286
I have 10 years experience, no degree, and yeah, submitting my resume online
seems like throwing it into a black hole. And I have always been one of the
top performers at my previous jobs. I did get about 20-25% interviews though,
so I guess I just need to apply to a large number of jobs and I'll eventually
get through.

------
thrwn_frthr_awy
I'm trying to leave, but I'm having a hard time finding a replacement. People
that have left, did you know what you were going to do next before you left?
My partner suggested a career counselor of some sort, but that feels strange
to me for some reason. I'm in my mid-thirties and I side income that takes
care of my families living expenses along with savings for a few years as
well.

------
dima586
Been in tech (hardware) for about 8 years now. I've been close to leaving
several times due to all of the reasons listed in this thread. Unfortunatly
I'm still here. The right opportunity hasnt presented itself yet - so I will
keep searching/waiting. Its inspiring to read that people have managed to get
out and do interesting things after - thanks for sharing your stories!

------
kilroy123
I'm currently on month 18 of a sabbatical. I tried to bootstrap a small
lifestyle business with my own money and that didn't pan out.

I really don't want to return to tech, because it simply is not my passion.
I'm going to try to start an aerospace startup instead, which _is_ my passion.
Perfect timing right?

~~~
peacelilly
Yes the timing is good, the Artemis program is heating up and needs to
disperse grants for the 2024 moon missions. You will have a much better supply
of labor to choose from than our previous unemployment rate. Capital is cheap
right now and banks are still lending. Aerospace is a long-term investment and
you'll deliver a product when the economy is back.

------
martijn_himself
How do you find an interesting career to pursue outside of the tech industry?

I have no standout passion or interest, like many in this thread I am tired of
the industry in general and the job itself.

I am considering doing a part-time horticulture degree to dome something
_different_. How did you find your passion?

~~~
qkls
Try many different things. Or think what excited you when you were young.

------
Kye
I got a 2 year network admin degree and realized the kind of people I had in
class were the kind of people I would have to work with. At least the skills
didn't go to waste. Knowing how to operate Linux over SSH comes in handy
running a blog for the things I do now.

------
invinciblycool
I'm so glad that this thread, although meant to be something else, uncovers
all the wrongs in the tech industry from meaningless tech interviews to shitty
stand up meetings. Thanks to probably the best people with the best life
philosophy!

------
erdos4d
I left employment in the tech industry for freelance work. I really dislike
Agile/Scrum/Kanban or whatever the new thing is that lets middle management
put pressure on developers. I don't like the stress of open offices, meetings
to tell everyone how soon I'll be done, or working around many people who are
literally sociopaths and sycophants. I love to code though and find enormous
enjoyment in writing software, its very soothing in itself. So now I do
freelance and spend the extra time to make things right and try to improve at
my craft. Still reading HN because lots of cool stuff pops up on here. Zero
regrets on the move, I really knew I didn't want a career path that kept me in
an office after the first year. I just stayed around until I had the skills I
wanted and then went out on my own.

------
bernus
After I sold my company to FAANG, I moved back to my hometown and bought a
house. Don't plan on ever going back.

------
dchyrdvh
The right answer should be: I've build capital and started my own business.

------
mongol
What is "tech industry" really? Companies selling tech? Or using tech?

~~~
rvz
Very good question. Most companies that started out from being supermarkets,
fashion or restaurants who then have an app on the App Store and use tech made
from FAAMNG companies now call themselves "tech companies" which they clearly
are just are using them; thus are "tech-enabled".

Companies involved with both creating, producing or contributing to actual
"technology" like CPU design, OSes, SDKs, compilers and toolchains which most
of the FAAMNG and semiconductor companies do fit the definition of a "tech
company".

~~~
spaceandshit
Wikipedia has a good article on this.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_company)

------
kat-prosty
Academia is just so much more relaxed for the employee. Especially in Europe.

------
mehta_rohan
Are you planning to leave and looking for some suggestions?

------
_wdoa
I've been programming since I was 9, and I love and continue to love
programming as a hobby, but the industry itself is a whole lot different than
programming as a hobby. I haven't left but I've been considering it. My
reasons for wanting to leave are:

1\. The interview process

This is my biggest gripe. Imo it's a hazing ritual that pretty much doesn't
tell you anything about the candidate -- I think companies have it because
_they_ had to go through it, so why shouldn't _you_ have to?

I really wish I knew that this was a thing before I got into this profession
because I most likely wouldn't have gone into the field if this were the case.
If I knew that I'd be asked arbitrary questions on literally everything I
learned over the course of my CS degree + 3-4 years of professional experience
on virtually every programming topic, language and tool imaginable, I'm not
sure I would've entered the industry.

It used to be all whiteboard questions of leetcode, for which I would consume
many hours a week just practicing even though it has nothing to do with coding
unless you're writing C/C++ code, and even then, you'd probably use already
existing libraries for algorithms. Some say it's a proxy for an IQ test, but
I'd argue that's BS: it can be easily gamed, and I know a lot of smart people
that butcher those because they're introverted and/or don't do well with on-
the-spot performance tests with someone watching over their shoulder.

This now got replaced with often arbitrary coding projects that have nothing
to do with the job and often take up considerable amounts of time to write. 3
hours? sure if you want to deliver the bare minimum, but then someone else who
wants the job more will do way more, so you do (a lot) more if you want the
job. A lot of them are now at the screening stage, before you ever even talk
to anyone. I've often been ghosted on coding projects: I'd say I've dumped
maybe 100+ hours and been ghosted on those projects. It really wears me out.
Some places started to add time limits to the projects, which helps, but I'd
rather have a 1 hour whiteboard interview on a project than several hours with
a considerable amount of time spent setting up the tech stack instead of
working on the problem because you're building it from scratch. You could game
this somewhat by setting up a ton of template projects over a wide variety of
tech stacks to save time, but it's all just a time sink (tooling fatigue).

2\. It's always > 40 hours/week

Related to #1. The pay is high, but if you consider the fact that you need to:

\- Have a decent open source portfolio to stand out from the crowd

\- Constantly learn new tech and show that you know it (learning on the job is
apparently out of the question), usually as part of the open source portfolio
or a blog. The new tools usually aren't interesting -- they're usually a
rehashed version of the older tooling with _maybe_ one very small kind of
useful improvement on the old tooling, and possibly 1+ drawbacks, but requires
you to have to relearn a whole new api/way of doing things.

\- The interview process is incredibly time consuming now that everyone is
doing screening tests with several hour-several day coding projects, often
which never gets followed up or read

\- Meet arbitrary deadlines and create a bunch of technical debt because 'move
fast and break things', and then be expected to come in after hours to put out
fires that you have no control of preventing or didn't even start, because
feature creep trumps sound technical decisions

Then, considering all of this, the pay is actually quite low when you realize
you need to put in 60-70 hours/week to stay ahead. Unless you work for a
spyware company (unless you get into netflix), see:

3\. Detrimental to society: automate or spy

Most of the apps out there either don't actually improve society in any way or
are actually actively detrimental to society. You're often either writing
spyware (probably backed by some govt), or you're writing software to automate
away some white-collar job that society desperately needs as the middle class,
the backbone of a healthy society and economy, is continually shrinking and
politicians are doing jack about it (to be fair I'm not even really sure what
they can do about it...). Modern day spies are basically all in the tech
sector, so there's plenty of spy shit. I'm from an eastern european country
working for western companies, and I'm sure trust plays into whether or not
I'm even considered for positions. Same deal as #1: I really, _really_ wish I
knew this as well before going into this field because I probably would've
stayed well away

4\. You're not a software engineer

There's very little actual engineering involved in the day-to-day work. It's
really like 70-90% debugging (repairman) and 10-30% development (white-collar
construction). Maybe like 1% is actually engineering in most jobs. I thought
I'd get to be an engineer, and it's the aspect I liked the most out of my
classes. I like developing stuff but not if it's detrimental to society (#3)
and only with a reasonable amount of tech debt. Sound engineering practices
would reduce repairman down to like 10%, but tech goes in hype bubbles and is
often crap, and the best pieces of engineering are utterly unpopular for some
bizarre reason

5\. It's all getting automated away

There was a time when having strong linux and networking chops gave you a lot
of street cred. Now those people are obsolete as more and more people are
switching to cloud companies to save on costs (#3). Open source has killed the
engineering aspect as jobs are now all about slapping libraries together and
debugging (construction repairman). It used to be a white collar job but it's
increasingly turning into a blue collar one (bootcamps?), so I think it's not
surprising that the industry is treating it's employees increasingly like
replaceable code monkeys (we probably are, and soon to be obsolete) and making
us jump through all sorts of arbitrary hoops to get a job.

I've been thinking of getting into teaching + research and becoming a
professor, but I'm not sure because:

1\. I might just run into other issues in academia that I didn't know about
before entering the industry, just like with the tech industry

2\. There's also the aspect of bad luck/making your luck -- there are
companies where none of this stuff applies, and so I could try to find/target
those kinds of companies. My earlier experiences at companies were different.
And the culture could probably change on a lot of this stuff, like how
interviews are done, though some of it is probably inevitable and unavoidable
(like automation + spy shit)

------
richjdsmith
I have always loved computers. I'm a millennial, and a child of the internet.
I remember with fondness the day my parents upgraded to DSL in the early 2000s
and what effect that had on me. Raw excitement like little I'd felt before.

Despite that, I studied Economics in university. It fit my personality as
being a lover of data and 'business' but a lot more of the human side of it.
I'd always loved business, and while I started out in business school, I found
quickly I didn't like 'business people'. So I switched into Econ. Halfway
through my economics degree, I took a course on the history of labor markets.
This course made me realize I needed to learn to code to stay relevant for the
rest of my life. I didn't have aspirations of doing a trade and the course and
further research made me realize how vulnerable my skill set was to
automation.

So I finished school and then learned to code. I did a bootcamp, and became a
very junior full-stack dev. I absolutely loved programming at this point. But
I still missed 'business', so I decided to mix the two and start my own
software development company. I quickly figured out there is little money in
building businesses websites, but plenty in building custom applications or
add-ons for e-commerce businesses and focused my efforts there. I made good
money, got to live and work in Europe (I'm Canadian) and overall enojyed
myself for a few years.

All the while I was perfectly content in the back-end world of web
development, working mostly in Ruby, Elixir and PHP. But the front-end started
sneaking in. JS has a way of doing that. Soon I found myself spending more
time fixing broken node packages than I was coding. Someone above me said it
felt like being a carpenter, while spending 80% of the time fixing your tools.
That couldn't have described how I felt any better.

Turns out, while I love programming, I hate JS and the world that node has
given us. If you want to work on the web, sadly, you're often faced with
dealing with it at some point or another.

At this time, I was also discovering that while I always knew I loved
interacting with people, that managing remote teams and having occasional
video conference calls was not enough to satisfy my extroverted personality. I
was becoming lonely in my work.

So I quit. I spooled down my business, going into maintenance mode only. I've
since switched into the finance industry, doing underwriting for a small
private bank. I love it. I still write code. I spend a decent portion of my
time optimizing our company (we're small and the board is happy with any of my
tech proposals so long as I explain the value added) with technology wherever
possible.

Programming is now only a small portion of my day, but I treasure it now. I
still program in the evenings (Elixir Nerves is super cool!) for fun, and of
course at work. But it's not my primary role. I will still get paid, even if
Yarn breaks something that day.

I've since discovered that .asdf handles 90% of my dependency problems, and
that the finance industry doesn't care if your app uses webpack or any
javascript for that matter. Removing the need to follow or even keep up with
the latest trends in web development from my life has been a breath of fresh
air. I couldn't be happier.

~~~
kazinator
> _I remember with fondness the day my parents upgraded to DSL in the early
> 2000s and what effect that had on me._

You would have loved 2400 baud after using a 300 baud modem.

> _Turns out, while I love programming, I hate JS and the world that node has
> given us._

Thank you for this. I have long suspected that this crud is bad enough to
actually drive people away, right out of programming.

------
at_a_remove
My dissatisfaction, aside from the usual foolishness one has come to expect
from one's employers like a weekly viewing of _Brazil_ , stemmed from this
kind of engineering cruft that has seeped into a very small shop. The cruft
looked like this kind of enormous parasite that had battened onto programming,
slowing it down, draining it. I don't doubt that very large projects with tons
of developers and enormous LOC counts, with a few million users need that kind
of thing, but it does not seem to scale _down_ very well. What might have been
a symbiotic relationship with a larger host organism became like a lamprey
fastened to a guppy. Now artificial deadlines had their own artificial
deadlines inside them, ad infinitum.

Despite being an incredibly small shop, we "leaned in" to the Agile thing in a
way that was completely foolish. Scale was irrelevant, we had some services
that were hit an average of seven times a day, sometimes spiking to ten. You
will have to trust me when I say that they would never go viral. Ever. We did
not have teams of programmers working on one product, we had a few programmers
constantly bouncing from one little project to another as management demanded.
This "pivoting," (and I guess you have to be Agile to pivot so often)
resembled nothing more than Brownian motion from the ten thousand foot view.
Management would shift in and out, old work was looked at with "why did we
build that?" while never asking if the hotness du jour was similarly
unnecessary. Meanwhile, backbone processes were neglected and began to
crumble.

Ah, but the churn, that was huge. We kept switching from one platform for
engineering issues we didn't have before to another platform. We had this, now
we are going to Trello. Then it turns out that our parent organization was
going to switch to something else entirely in six months, but let's take a
little detour from Trello to this _other_ platform just for fun before we go
to what the parent organization will mandate. This was most likely to be just
another bullet point on the old resume for the lead, to say that he had done
it, on his way out the door to somewhere else; if I had to guess, he had
figured out what ecosystem his target job was using and picked some items out
of that for us to purely temporarily migrate to.

People would buy wholesale into services that simply were not going to last. I
would smell the stench of impending death upon them but no. And then later,
into the Google Graveyard or the like it would go. So much jabbering about
frontend frameworks when almost no Javascript was required, only to have to
then keep those frameworks current.

The churn was there in other ways. I had never used a particular backend
framework before, in fact had little experience with them. I was forthright
about this, so I bought some relevant books, set up a test machine to dabble
with, and was ready to go with a tiny little "get my feet wet" project that
would still have some minor value. The other "contributor" had agreed to all
of this, and when I was set up and ready to learn, somehow everything pivoted
to Django. No "buy-in," as the lingo I had to learn goes, from me. Time,
effort, money: wasted. Update update, migrate migrate.

I remind people often that nomads never left great architecture behind. If you
are constantly migrating, you are not building anything to last.

I switched to something tech-adjacent. I still program. I still use technology
to solve problems. Now, when I program to solve a problem, it stays solved. I
do not have endless meetings fractally interspersed into my schedule like some
kind of stuttering hardware interrupt all to talk about solving a problem.

I follow Hacker News because I am interested in some trends, pet projects, and
the like. On a purely cruel level, watching people simply tear into one
another again and again over what looks like religious differences (Agile in
particular is a fantastic example, makes top-posting vs. bottom-posting thing
look tame) reminds me of why I left.

------
LocalMan
I got old and retired.

------
Holmes
Mainly the grammar.

------
FlowNote
I left when project managers tried to Taylorize programming.

~~~
digitalsushi
Hear, hear. I find that process like Agile is exhausting, but necessary work,
when you cannot trust your workers.

I miss working at a small shop where we were fully trusted to deliver. I find
I am able to do very well under Agile, but it certainly makes me feel
dishonest that such a measurable portion of my day is spent measuring my
performance. It feels like a fractal waste of time.

But I completely understand why it exists.

~~~
commandlinefan
I can't figure out how I ended up completing an advanced degree (one that that
takes a lot of study to complete), and have decades of experience in a
profession that supposedly is hard to find people for, yet still find myself
putting up with a bi-weekly "end of sprint" why-didn't-you-finish-your-sprint-
commitments berating from somebody with less education and less experience
than me. I feel like saying that I've wasted my life would be an
understatement.

------
arkmm
I'm somewhat surprised you were able to snag this username! Aside from the pop
star, it reminded me of Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics[0],
which was super helpful back when I was in college. Any connection?

[0] [http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm](http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm)

~~~
dang
Since the account has since been renamed, I detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22877193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22877193).

------
the_cat_kittles
its now a side gig instead of my main focus. i left because i hated selling
ownership of my mind. also because the products i worked on were all stupid.
absolutely no regrets, that industry brings out the worst in people. i do
recycling and music now, and do random occasional software gigs when im
running out of money. i keep following this website because its occasionally
interesting, but also to kind of marvel at the bullshit and hypocracy. its not
entirely healthy

------
lidHanteyk
I keep getting laid off after criticizing upper management. I don't see any
reason to regret my choices; they made their choices, too. I'm only here to
share links, to show people how they are wrong, and to follow the Prime
Directive.

~~~
kyuudou
>I keep getting laid off after criticizing upper management.

OK nice it's not just me!

------
VLM
This is going to turn into a debate about the definition of the tech industry.

For example, are you in tech if your employer has been around for 20 years and
your employee number is five digits? If the business model has nothing to do
with technology, or are technology companies like microprocessor manufacturers
inherently disqualified because their business model is technological as
opposed to financialization? Can you only be in "tech" if you live in SV? Or
is it just voting for Democrats that makes one a tech worker as opposed to a
typical engineer?

