Ask HN: How to get out of Tech and still make a decent living?

plus you get to fly planes which is cool

Can't believe I let anyone talk me into coding for a living.

It's relatively easy to make over $100k as an owner of a small business.

It's an order of magnitude more difficult to find a company that will pay you a software engineers salary without a decade or so of experience in that field and associated education.

Tired of 10-person startups? Move to a bigger company.

Tired by the constant churn in front-end libraries? Move down the stack and work on server software.

If you have 15 years experience doing software engineering, you're half-way to the same sort of a position. Find some other field you're interested in and learn up on their jargon, or take your most recent gig and dive deep into whatever industry it is you're developing software for. Whether you call yourself "biz-dev" or "project manager" or just "consultant", there is a market for people who can effectively bridge the world of software engineering with the world of...everything else.

At least it could throw a smile on your face. My friend is a Engineer (controlling trains and jazz) who quit after 40 years to work in a greenhouse for 1/10th the pay. He doesn't live as well, and driving a used beater but he smiles now and enjoys facing the day. Took him a few years to slowly dial down his costs and ingrained habits though.

Consider as a method of last resort?

https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/

I bring up /r/Entrepreneur because its about starting a business, not simply a tech business that you'd get insight for on Hacker News. I bring up /r/financialindependence because it'll help you reduce your burn rate and increase your savings.

Getting your burn rate down is critical; The less money you need, the more options you have for your future. The easiest dollar to make is the one you didn't need to spend in the first place.

I mean I realize everyone is different but still. Being the inexperienced programmer I am right now I imagine myself happily coding until I am 50 (lol ask me in 15 years if I feel the same way)

True ! But I wonder is that criteria for all the tech companies ? I know its a must do criteria big companies like Amazon and Google.

Running your own business or getting into startups as a founder is an option but you need to learn toms of new stuff, so it wont be easy either. Most developers I know who went this path realized after few months that another life isn't much easier and reverted to cushy dev jobs with free lunch and all the perks you could imagine. That's the real problem, it is so easy and tempting to get a well paid dev job. Why try hard if you get free crack around the corner?

I still recommend to venture something new but make sure you have sufficient financial resources and strong willpower to stay on track and not fall back to your current profession. You will learn a lot and tremendously improve your people skills.

It took me 15 years to realize he was right. I now work 4 hours a day as a .NET consultant and then spend the rest of day doing whatever I want. I am fulfilled, relaxed, healthy and respected.

Before abandoning what many believe to be a highly desirable profession, just cut back on your hours and revisit your feelings after a few months.

Lastly do not underestimate how smart and competitive people are in other industries. It can take many years before you build the skills and reputation where you can command $100k+. I'd argue it is 10X harder to for a small business owner to net $100k than it is to net $50k.

The down side is that patents are evil.

> And no respect for experience, unless you demonstrate on a whiteboard with your implementation of a sorted bubble tree list.

I will be a dissenter here: I have interviewed people with 20 years of experience, and who have shipped products, who had gross misunderstanding about the tech stacks they are using -- to the point of taking multiple (2x - 10x) times of both implementation and resources than a reasonable solution -- just reasonable, not compared to an "optimized" (for resources) or "quick and dirty throwaway" (for time) solution. And most of the times, these people were oblivious to their (lack) of knowledge or understanding.

Your post reminded me of a specific interview, someone with 20 years of experience, who's answer to a question (essentially, a database join, which could have been done inside the select but wasn't), which was an O(n^3). Would have worked reasonably well even on an n=1000 table, but our table had n=10,000,000, and this was specified in the requirements. After grilling him a bit about runtime estimates (to which his basic answer "who cares? computers are fast enough nowadays"), he did acknowledge that as written it would take forever, but then added "But it doesn't matter, the compiler will optimize this anyway to the best possible O(n) solution, and it will be fast". This was about a C loop, in 2005.

I thanked they guy and declined his job application. I am sure his takeaway was that I was a snotty employer who only wants sorted bubble tree lists and arcane academic stuff, and that I couldn't appreciate him shipping products for 20 years. But had I taken him on our team, I am quite sure it would have been a failure: At that place, we had a successful fire-and-almost-forget shipping culture, which required doing back-of-the-envelope runtime estimates (among other things) to make sure things actually satisfy requirements -- and his attitude did not fit.

Another similar "20 year experience" story from a friend of mine who worked on a system running a moderately sized financial exchange: In small scale tests everything worked perfectly well, but once real load testing started, it was clear that it can sustain less than 10% of the existing load. (This was a 2nd-generation system, which was to take over existing trading). All measurements pointed to hard drives being the culprit, and a $50,000 SSD (whopping 10GB capacity, IIRC - this was 2002) was bought, and was able to just get the existing load working, with very little room for increased capacity.

At this point, my friend was assigned to review that the solution was properly implemented, and he discovered to his horror, that one of the 20-year-experience authors was unable to figure out how to do a "sprintf()" with unknown-in-advance result size, so he instead created a temporary file, used "fprintf" into it, allocated the memory according to the resulting size, read the data, and deleted the file. Changing this to an snprintf-and-if-failed-reallocate-buffer-and-retry scheme sped the system up some 20x (compared to the SSD!), and made the SSD redundant. The original guy's response when shown the solution was IIRC, basically a dismissive "oh, yeah - I guess I should have known about snprintf, it wasn't there when I learned C, of course the SSD was the right solution given the constraints".

I'm not saying experience is useless,...

Else, just be honest and see what you really like. A friend of a friend lives somewhere on the African coast and deals in shells. Locals sell them to him, he sells them on to traders abroad. He surely doesn't make 100k, but the change of location and lifestyle also means he doesn't need to.

So: think out of the box. Just make it a new life.

On a 30-year forward looking basis, we appear to be fucked, though - the only 50-year old software guys I know are either self employed, or have been working at the same place for 20 years. Even "stable" employees who only switch jobs every 5 years have problem finding new jobs when they are older.

If you know of something else you'd rather be doing, and you are able to support yourself[0], and have a reasonable 10 year horizon, by all means do. But if there's nothing you are passionate about, then in all likelihood you would be just as burned and make less just trying to run an alternative method of income.

That said, I highly recommend reading Tim Ferris' "4 hour work week" book. Do not treat it as gospel, but do follow the math - it will give you a good idea (and possibly some inspiration) of where you need to be and possibly some steps on the way to get there.

[0] but, be honest with yourself - if you make less, will you still be happy enough outside of work? Many people aren't as happy once they find out what they actually have to give up. Just give the difference to charity for a couple of months to see how well you manage.

I felt the same for few years. It takes getting used to

> "How to successfully get out of tech?"

Probably not get out of it, but move away from this role. Delegate, delegate and delegate. If consulting, take a huge pay cut for sometime. It is harder in the beginning, especially with that much experience and/or being an expert. But it is easier to "earn time" and probably respect by that way.

People, and mostly experts, sometimes say "I don't want to get into management". They like what they do and I can totally understand why. However, when they do not delegate and not teach a team how to do great things - they also end up doing a huge disservice to the industry. As a result, we have so many idiotic management guys who just shouldn't exist in the industry

Optionally, Banking and Finance is one industry where you might be able to get in and may be grow easily because of your tech experience. But you will definitely feel burned out and might be working 16-18 hours a day including weekends. After a few years you just know some things - like writing a for loop. You have to keep learning and exploring, but the basic framework doesn't change.

Medical school - It takes a lot of time to just learn and then you will be working for 12-15 hours. And the life you live isn't really independent as you might think. Docs make a really good living. You do have to learn new stuff, but its not like learning a new living organism every year (compare to language/frameworks). And experience is valued.

Law - same thing, good lawyers have to work a lot. And they make a huge living, 100K might be peanuts. Experience is valued.

In University, I made an initial attempt to get out of the industry as I already lost my passion for it, so I majored in Statistics, Finance, Management Science, and did Computer Engineering as a safety. I had to pay for school somehow, so I also worked proper software engineering jobs while in school. Once I graduated, my father passed away a few days after and I was stuck knowing I'd never get any financial support, so I continued in the industry, always wanting to move out at some point. The familial responsibility, stress, company loyalty, etc. prevented me from ever getting out.

I've been checking all the job ads every few weeks, for years to find an alternative career. And of course I mean "all" types of jobs, not just tangential tech jobs. Currently taking some time off to recover from burnout by tired of dipping into my savings and ready to go back to work for various reasons. It's just sad because on a mental and emotional level, returning to a programming job depresses the hell out of me and I am not sure what else there is for me approaching 40. I worked on my own startup a bit and it was going well, but I struggled to find a reputable and competent partner, and the thought of doing it on my own and not pulling in a regular income for another year seems too much for now, so at the very least I need to work on my project on the side until something changes.

I've come to the point where I really hate computers, but I feel at this age it gets harder and harder to do something different. Sometimes I would rather just do something more simple, productive, and real. I worked in many different parts of the industry already and I've touched just about every major language there is, worked for startups, consulting, you name it. I've done sales engineering, team lead, project management, etc., but usually my dev skills would take the forefront and regardless of my job description because of necessity - lack of staff (ex: startups/wearing many hats), mistakes of others, being the most senior person skills/experience wise, and so on.

Programming only feels hard at this point because of awful colleagues, unreasonable deadlines/circumstances, and technical debt usually created by others. Just about every company's product bores me and most I wonder who needs what they make and why, and I get tired of the typical dysfunction and ridiculous "culture" be it brogrammers or overly enthusiastic corporate nonsense. I try to swallow my pride and be professional about it all, but I find myself secretly hating everyone and everything at most workplaces. I'm tired of working tons of unpaid overtime for silly reasons and likewise I don't want to work somewhere where the job/company is a joke.

I'd love to just do something "normal." I can't envision working in tech at 60 or being able to retire early either for various reasons. I can empathize because it's tough, especially when you get used to a salary and lifestyle. Lived overseas and had a much simpler life for a bit, but in the end it gets to be the same grind on a different scale, so I suppose it's more about the job than the pay. In the US though it's harder to make ends meet if your pay is very low, so I'm looking for something in-between at least.

Thought about teaching, but they make it very hard for many reasons to break into when you're older and I'm not sure I feel like grabbing a master's in education just to slash my salary dramatically. Private schools are an option of course, but much less stable in terms of long-term prospects, just seen too many friend...