Ask HN: Have you ever considered leaving tech because you didn’t feel fulfilled?
Hi all - I’ve been thinking about this lately. In tech we generally have the ability to find “cushy” jobs. However, sometimes it seems like other industries might be more fulfilling, even if the hours are longer and the pay is less. Have you ever left tech to pursue something like this? If so how did it go? If not why not?
94 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadTough to beat income earned by doing something with near zero chance of morbidity/mortality and bodily harm, the option to work from home, much higher demand in a much bigger market reducing volatility of at least a certain level of income, low personal liabilities, and vast opportunities for upward movement.
"Carpentry" is "I built a garage/house/cabin".
The first one is where people gravitate, because there are no regulations on cabinet making or woodturning. If you move to carpentry, you need to know what you're doing and build to code.
But he’s a business - decades of experience and contacts and happy referring customers, a lot of money invested in equipment, and big upfront investment in materials for each job.
The old adage over here goes "If you find a reliable electrician/plumber/handyman, hold on to them and take care of them. You can always find a new partner, but a reliable construction person is a rare find."
There are a ton of different "tech" jobs, even when just staying within software development.
You can go from writing code for the ICs in industrial machinery to controlling said machinery with OPC-UA to doing different kinds of process software for industrial use. They're all mostly 9-5 jobs with mediocre pay, but looooong careers.
I myself spent a bit over half a decade developing software for smart metering, both the meters themselves and the software that reads them. No matter how old a meter was, the person who did the software was still working there and I could just walk to their office for the inside scoop on how to wrangle it.
The pace is completely different from startups and (mobile) gaming "tech" jobs.
I'm pretty sure your current employer will love it if you go to them and say "I want to work longer hours and be paid less" if the cushiness is what's bothering you specifically =)
Need to switch lanes both vertically and horizontally.
At the end of the day, if you have a pretty easy going role that pays well enough you can always take the big pay and fill your time with hobbies and what not that do bring you joy and fulfillment.
My friends outside tech often talk about the satisfaction and relief they feel after completing a big project, and the relatively peaceful lull between such projects, and it just sounds so nice. Doesn't matter whether it's a big event they planned, a tour they went on, or a structure they welded. When something is done it's done. They get to move on personally and professionally.
It used to feel like a job change would provide that sense of momentum, but even that's disappearing now that every product (at least from my designer's perspective) feels more or less identical these days.
But consider that on that idyllic countryside farm, you need to wake up at 5 to feed the cows on a fine summer day. Also on that stormy day when you have to wade through half a food of mud to the barn * . And also when the snow is up to your waist * .
Another solution is using that income from your cushy tech job to get some fulfilling hobbies?
* I have waded through half a foot of mud and waist high snow, but recreationally. That was fun, but it's a different thing when you have to do it every day because you must.
For those who haven't seen it, welcome to the lucky 10,000: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HdnDXsqiPYo
It's amazing how few people think of this when they look at the idyllic landscape and dream.
source: I live on a horse farm.
So cut out unwholesome bad things and replace them with good, love, kindness and beauty.
People find solace in God and meditation.
machining seems to be similar but i wonder if it's just more expensive.
In other words, I think you can have it both ways—fulfilling job while utilizing the technical skillset you've built up over years of professional life.
That being said, if you want to leave by all means go for it. One of the benefits of cushy jobs is that you can try something else for a while and come back if it doesn't suite you.
I had my lowest sense of fulfillment working for contracting companies where my work was as likely shelved due to whole programs being cancelled and I'm just one of many projects. No matter what I did, it did not feel like I had an impact in the world. I also felt like I had little agency to change things, after a while. Months of wasted effort, weekends in the office, etc. go up in smoke.
I considered ditching software development because it was fun, but brought me no sense of accomplishment. I looked at opening a store, going back to school to get a Masters in Tax Accounting (I used to be an accountant), or even law school. My sense of accomplishment came from actually doing side projects. It took me 10 or 15 years to connect those dots.
For the last 5 years I've been working for a cloud/product company where I do feel my work directly impacts people. And that is fulfilling. I've watched the result of my efforts unblock numerous lines of revenue. I wasn't some kind of sole hero, but part of a team. But my contribution had a real, positive impact. The difference is my work actually had an impact.
I currently program in bare metal C - a language I've known for the better part of 30 years. I live in an environment no more sophisticated than Visual Studio Code, CMake, and C. It is enjoyable. More than when I worked on cutting edge frameworks with all the 'best' tools. So it's obviously not the technology - it's the job.
I could probably find that same sense of fulfillment doing any one of a dozen things. It's just that I'm probably undiagnosed something or other and I'm pathologically obsessed about all things related to computers. So probably a good alignment between my interest and my job. What I've learned is that I think I could go dig ditches, and as long as it had an impact, I would have a sense of accomplishment.
Getting a peek into another field makes you quickly appreciate how good we have it and I readjusted to try to focus on what I really love doing in this field.
It turns out, I like teaching and helping people work together more effectively so I've gotten into consulting over the last couple of years. Really enjoying it so far too. I get to work with a wide variety of people, look into how companies are operating to diagnose pain points, areas of inefficiency between teams, bottlenecks and help to solve them. I help with DMARC deployments because so many companies still haven't rolled that out properly yet. I assist dev teams with fixing application and database performance issues too. If asked I also teach official training courses on Gitlab or Scaled Agile Framework.
Essentially, I help with the areas where I have a deep amount of experience and try to make sure people at the company know how to make sure the problems don't come back long term. For somebody like me who deep dives into everything before moving onto the next problem, it's nice to be able to share with more people.
I get the most enjoyment from helping to improve the management structure for developers though. In many cases it's very unbalanced.
Two things happened around 2012- the "startups" became "tech giants" and started competing with each other for talent with real money or RSUs, not just options that may pan out one day in the future. And tbh the work became easier- its hard to really understate how important the ability to just "stack overflow" a problem is, and the modern stacks developed to a point where it was really hard to make a case to roll your own libs instead of just pulling one off the shelf. As an example, I used to do C/C++, and until boost came along and started getting adoption in the mid 2000s, each time I changed jobs, I had to learn about a whole new "stl" that each company had built and all its quirks and fumble around for at least a month or two while I figured out how to do basic things like string manipulation Their Way. Web went from straight DOM manipulation and fighting with IE6, to toolkits and later frameworks that smoothed over all of these issues and let you focus on building apps, not UI.
Even without having worked for a tech giant, I am very grateful for them lifting all tech salaries, and I get to live in a very nice comfortable house that is almost paid off. I am glad I stuck it out- I was actually starting to study to become an actuary because I was so fed up with being treated like a peon around 2011 by people whose job I could easily do, but wouldn't have the slightest idea on how to do mine.
I spent two years working in civic tech, and I've known others who have left big tech jobs for non-profits.
Every bike industry vet I've talked to feels about bikes the way I feel about software. Broken industry, yada yada. Anything can wear you down.
The new de-facto is to have an over politicsed and heavily dishonest employer.
My work is also seen as a quick commodity to turn around, thanks to Amazon's hire-to-fire schemes
I love programming but working as a software engineer is terrible. I'm becoming a small shop owner asap
I'd love to be working/owning a bakery/coffeeshop/bookstore. Then I remember my salary as a level of my effort and what it affords me and my family and how much time I can spend with me kids.
And then I also remember that anything I like to do for fun now that I'd decide to turn into a job would likely become NOT fun as soon as it's a job.
Best thing that ever happened to me, was being forced into early retirement, by reaching the doddering old age of 55.
I now write the software I want, and it has been working well for the last five years.
Easy example - used to work in finance. Some folks looked at the job as "shit I don't care about but do for money" - others looked at the same exact job and recognized that their work was having meaningful impact on bringing stability to the markets and helping retirees having cumulatively billions more dollars to spend in retirement than they would otherwise.
Also, if you're involved in charitable work or have a family, it's very easy to feel fulfilled because the high income from your work enables you to very meaningfully support those things.
Not to mention working with great people, having access to a ton of opportunity, etc.
On the flip side, if you don't have family/community/causes you care about, and you aren't able to "see" the meaning that's present in the work you're doing, then chances are switching jobs or industries isn't going to help.
Early in my life I was very into fashion and so I opened a store. Fashion was fun and interesting to me. The fashion industry was less so.
Next I tried food. Making and consuming food was fun. The restaurant industry, again, was less so.
Today I'm a software engineer. I always wrote code as a hobby (started when was about 11). I love technology and software. Again however, the technology industry leaves me unfulfilled.
I have no plans to leave tech now though. My life is very different. I'm 37. I have a wife and a child. I have other hobbies that I like a lot and so my career in the tech industry is a means to an end. The end being financial support for my family and hobbies. I don't mean to say that I get to gratification from my work. I do really love working on some of the technical problems I encounter at work and I really like the people on my team. Overall it's a positive experience if I can put out of my mind the larger system that I'm in and how I feel about that.