Ask HN: Has anyone started over outside of tech?
Some days I think that I just want to basically check out of technology on a day to day basis and either develop a skill I have or learn a new one and work maybe part or full-time doing something totally different. Something totally unrelated to sitting in front of a computer.
Thanks to tech I have a lot of savings. Not enough to retire on early, though maybe starting to be fairly close, so I feel like I could do something like this in the next few years fairly safely, and I wouldn't feel as much the loss of income if I didn't have the savings.
Has anyone here done this and have a story to share, either positive or negative? What did you switch to? How did it work out?
462 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 373 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3134322
The coffeeshop fallacy (2011)
It‘s easy to get blinded by how incredibly privileged the tech bubble is and have had a better experience so far just trying to find a great non-toxic spot in there. YMMV, good luck!
Whilst I wouldn’t be seen dead working in a place like that, y’all really don’t know how good you’ve got it.
I don't love working in tech the way I used to but I do still love cashing those paychecks! You can do what you love sure... or you can make the money you want. Almost nobody can do both.
As for me - I know theres bullshit every where you go and all jobs have sucky parts and I prefer this devil because I in fact do get paid enough to put up with this shit.
How about compartmentalizing your job and being happy after putting in 8h of work? Also, reading HN kinda bums me out on tech too at times. The Instagram Effect where you feel like everyone besides you is doing something cooler than fixing bugs in the CRUD application your company sells.
I was 8 when I started on a PcJr with BASIC.
I'm now in my 40s writing everything from Angular to C# APIs to database stored procedures.
Honestly, I've had enough and already suffered through one massive burnout that almost cost me my career.
I've been looking at what else I can do ... but I have no idea. And that scares me.
I can't see myself doing this in my 60s! And I'm not really the management type.
> "To take coffee shops as an example, an unending supply of idealistic wannabe cafe owners enters the sector every year, operates at a loss for a few years, and exits. The result is that even under normal business conditions, without swarming locust consumers, this is a loss-making business with an extinction rate of around 90% at the 5 year point in the US. Starbucks has the scale to be profitable and resilient. Locust coffee drinkers happily drink the excellent, loss-making coffee from small, local Jeffersonian coffee shops and callously retreat to Starbucks or DIY homebrew if the prices go up. Starbucks survives, coffee drinking grasshoppers survive, small coffee shops go in and out of business."
("Locust coffee drinkers" is analogy not insult).
[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/
I’m sure many a barista fantasy has been crushed the first time having to deal with an unruly or argumentative customer, clean diarrhea off the bathroom walls, etc. Yeah, you have less to worry about once your shift is over, but your shift might really suck.
In our culture it sounds cringe/like bragging to make these kinds of comparisons punching down (to which I retort that the “back to blue collar” fantasy started it) but at this point in my life I don’t think I’ll ever have to put up with crap like that for money in the future, and I don’t plan to. Why would I do that?? We get paid several multiples just to tell computers to send little packets of data formatted just so from here to there.
All you need to do to be happy is what you’d be doing at your barista job anyway - stop giving a crap about your job after regular working hours, and stop trying to find an existential purpose in repetitive, draining tasks. Once you can do that, you reap all the benefits of higher pay with less bullshit
for me, it's writing the dragon-as-protagonist fantasy novel I wish someone had already written.
There's a creative side (the world is whatever I say, mwahaha) but if you introduce the discipline to say 'my story should be publishable if i decide to go that route' then the analytic side comes up because there are relatively defined criteria a given story needs to contain in order to be publishable (total length, sequencing of action / reaction units, building scenes & sequels, viewpoint rules, description curtailments, etc.)
So - what is something that is not coding, but has a creative & analytic side to it that you could do as a side hobby? Woodworking is definitely that, writing a book is that, some people even seem to do side-gigs as their hobby, I'm sure it's even possible to make a video game hobby or a tabletop RPG hobby into those two pieces as well.
Just don't make your hobby 'I stare at the TV' level. 'I stare at the TV then blog about it' would even work.
How about something like woodworking?
there's also an egalitarian community in "builders" and you'll find all sorts of friends who just-so-happen to also have interest/skills in this stuff.
I'm a fairly terrible student and 8 years of school wasn't gonna happen. I can't stand blood/body parts. Even if I got through school I don't think I could stomach a clinical position.
And if you're taking out loans to go to school, you may have no choice but to continue even if you find out it's not for you. I know someone who's halfway through med school and clearly hates everything about it, but is past the point of no return financially. If she doesn't finish and become a working doctor, she'll never have the income to pay back her debt of several hundred thousand dollars at 7% interest.
Now, starting down the MD in your late 40s? Early 50s? Yeah, probably not.
You still have time, just not much.
If anyone has attempted this I would love to talk.
I have heard some people talk about leaving for woodworking and stuff like that, but most people in my circle who get burnt out just stop doing government contracts and get regular jobs when it gets bad. Or go on vacation, have kids, etc.
That being said, yeah, I had friends who did it as teens. They hated it, fast food was a huge step up as far as a job for teens.
Alternatively, I set a 20 min daily timer for chrome on my phone, seems to help a lot.
Would you kindly provide some examples? Would this be jobs like welding? I just never heard this term.
One avenue might be to start doing IT work with and for a local electrician, and expand from there. If you're comfortable with computers, they could offer you as the low-voltage side of things.
The starting salaries always stop me though. How can I reset the salary clock 10 years?
Maybe if I had started out at 20 on this route I could do what my father did: carpet cleaning and supported two sons and a homemaker on his one truck operation. We were solid middle class. All the needs met.
It's amazing what quality hard work, calling people back, and time can do.
Better get back writing my self evaluation...
But seriously, it is a hard job. You learn quickly that just because you understand something doesn’t mean you can explain it to someone.
Depending on the district you end up in, it's not for the feint of heart.
Teaching is not easy and a lot of tech work is much less stressful than it
The pay will likely be much higher than teaching elsewhere (though I still took a 30k cut). Some bootcamps are more legit than others, so just do your research first
What subject are you teaching? Mine will be physics, if all goes well.
As a complete side note, I think it would have been easier to learn programming if I had started with some lower-level CS, not high-level programming. Some concepts behind even high-level programming don't make a lot of sense to a newbie unless they understand what the limitations of a machine are, and why they inherently exist.
I was the only of my mother's children to attend her employer's appreciation event after she died [family did not have a funeral]. It meant so much to see how her community appreciated and respected and missed her. My siblings, her fellow children, did not want to witness this for some reason ["a waste of time"] but it's among the most beautiful things I've witnessed.
To those gathered hundred+ friends of my mother, I loudly thanked them for attending and sharing the spirit of her beautiful life; I told them calmly and proudly that "this is a celebration of 'how you should live your life,' to have left such an impact upon so many wonderful people."
Top 5 life moments/memories. RIP.
This is why I love mentoring new hires and interns.
I know a few teachers who quit or went private (for less money) because of problems in the system. The bureaucracy can be oppressive and conflict with your morals. Safety and mistreatment can also be a real concern in some areas. The good news here is that most of the kids you'd be dealing with would be taking programming as an elective, so they should actually give a damn.
https://soundcloud.com/obie
Did you had much music teaching as a kid? How was your path?
It might ironically be easier to start a company. At least you know half of the stuff (tech); and the other half you have to learn from scratch. But knowing one half is a bit like being talented when you learn the other half - it gives you a head start over all the MBAs.
Are there other fields where that is possible?
Do you frequent any online communities of professionals, or is it just you, your spouse, and your mentors?
Beyond wanting to learn alternative approaches myself, I help moderate a local trading group. We are always looking for presenters in our monthly meetings.
we are in no way compensated by anyone. it was an honest answer to the question.
Idk if you bought a course from them or what or why you are convinced that trading Options, at home as a non professional trader is somehow NOT day trading.
>Selling premium allows you to pick your duration,probability of profit and value at risk. This is NOT day trading which is financial sugar.
So you have non zero probability of profit which you are almost certainly miscalculating and some value at risk. Aka you are not guaranteed to make money and if the market does something unexpected you will in fact lose it. You seem to THINK you are more sophisticated or safer than the average Robinhood options trader but you really aren't...
YOU are mistaken.
Our approach is to pick a underlying which has an attractive premium for our risk tolerance. To do so we normally look for something whose price is > $50, has high liquidity and has a implied volatility which is attractive to us. We also consider the historical volatility trend for 20 10 5 days and compare it to the 30d implied vol to get a feel for it's cheapness. THEN we look at the 45 day option and SELL premium against that. We tend to look for a probability of profit of 70 -80% and that defines the premium.
In short it's NOT day trading, it's NOT a magic formula and it's NOT a scam. Should anyone wish to listen to ACTUAL serious traders working everyday to help retail investors then look at tastylive.com. Again, I am NOT being paid for this. I just am answering the OP's question regarding what we did post 5 startups to keep us busy. Our approach allows us to risk 25 % of our capital ( just in case it goes wrong we don't lose everything) we get about 10 - 30% return on 100% of our capex. we use the kelly criterion to define our thinking regarding when to get out when we get it wrong. We mostly use naked puts but in the current environment we consider back ratios or spreads. Does ANY of this sound like day trading or some magic formula. I don't really care about your opinion but I wanted to ensure that anyone reading this thread could have something to reality check against other than your "comments"
Are you using OptionNet Explorer or OptionVue, or just your own software using the math you learned from your CBOE friend?
Interesting to hear about trying to use the Kelly criterion. I've always thought of it for bet sizing, which is tough since you never know your true odds (unlike counting cards, for instance).
For my own trading, I am having moderate success with selling premium on index options. I find it tough to make a meaningful amount of money while keeping blow-up risk low.
No great surprise at all that people checkout and burnout, cause people are not machines.
I went to college and tried a year of grad school, and then ran off to become an electrician. This is a profitable career but is extremely tough on body; any position within the industry, it is still physical labor. Now, after fifteen years of sacrificing myself "for the big bucks," I am left wondering whether I will be able to fit into a work environment that isn't construction [knowing that I must make this transition].
It is paralyzing fear, and removing this debilitation is hard when people are literally throwing bonkers money at anybody even claiming to be a skilled tradesman, right now — my body is done! The money is good! Whatdo?!
I'm currently "taking time off" and re-exploring a childhood love of computers... learning python, bought a new computer for first time in over a decade... trying to love this all!
And now with all the AI coding and copywriting... UGHHHHH. The timeline, it's just brilliant and perhaps I'll just retire and enjoy a new AI existence =P
So I'm attempting to reconcile the reality of modern, corporate software development with the way I derive satisfaction/meaning from my career. Boiled down, my naivete about our relationship with work, which is undoubtedly encouraged and exploited by society, has started to wane, and now I'm trying to uncouple how I get meaning/satisfaction from how I get money.
New years resolutions aren't for me but this year I tried to start loosely viewing things in my life like investments, specifically in terms of ROI. It's more of a reminder of how to think than a spreadsheet. I imagine myself as having an 'energy' budget. Sometimes I spend some energy and I get some back; other times I get nothing in return. As far as my career goes, I need to spend X to get my pay check, which eventually converts to energy. Sometimes I spend X+Y, hoping I get something more, like recognition/education/satisfaction. Sometimes that Y is engaging in a debate in peer review. Sometimes it's trying to anticipate one's manager or "showing initiative". The important thing is to track Y and if there's no return, mark that as a bad investment to be avoided in future. I burned out a couple of years ago because I was spending Y like mad with zero regard for the ROI, or at least with the vague expectation there would be some ROI one day.
Obviously this is not novel, or even a good analogy ("all models wrong; some useful"), but this framing is a (potentially) temporary way to adjust my thinking and behaviour from the brainwashed, single-minded, career-focused, please-notice-me-ceo-daddy track I started out in after school/uni.
An error message from a server while in the car going on a small vacation triggered the change. I had enough. So on the spot I thought of my options and decided on becoming a trucker.
My first aim was to do long haul but I never went that way. I got hired to do local LTL deliveries/pick ups and I loved it. For me it's hard to beat driving a truck when it's nice outside. Winter can be a bitch but you learn manage.
Constantly going in and out of the truck got me and keeps me in shape. I lost 100lbs and feel much better than the fat slob I used to be, tied to the keyboard. It also help that I bike to work (not in winter though).
Took a real pay cut but I would never go back. I don't think I can anyway. I started programming again a couple of years ago on personal projects and I love it. I realize that my skills are greatly diminished but it's still fun to find solutions to problems, fix the damn bugs lol, and be proud of the final product.
That way you can ease into it, the other option is to go for one of those "we pay to train" places, but that involves more upfront commitment.
Finding a job as a newbie was not easy at the time (because of the insurance they were saying) so I went the agency route and they found me work right away. Worked there for 2 years then found a job closer to home. Been doing that for about 15 years already.
It is amazing how much of a difference physical movement on a daily basis will do.
But I'd wager the barista gets thanked more often, and their customers like them more.
It sucks. People suck, you get yelled at, insulted, demeaned, shit pay, long hours.
Tech work is the cushiest job ever. It takes almost no effort to get into, you get paid insanely well, and skills are always in demand.
What is there to complain about?
The notion that someone would leave the tech world for a job in the service industry because it comes with more respect is absolutely wild to me. That's so far away from my personal experience I honestly can't fit it into my mental model of the world.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, or maybe your experience is actually super different from mine. Either way I'd be very interested in an elaboration.
There are definitely tourist-heavy parts of the US where this is absolutely true.
it seems like everyone in this thread saying "tech workers get no respect" actually just work for shit companies...
Perhaps OP meant as a trend over time? That has truth to it if you compare going back to the early 90s (my frame of reference).
In the 90s programming was not that well-paid, but was a very respected role in the companies I and my circle of programmer friends inhabited. A programmer/sysadmin was a wizard and treated as such. It was a vastly more fun industry to be in even if salaries were just regular white-collar professional level.
Slowly in the 00s after the dot com crash that seems to have vanished even as salaries started to climb. An in the 2010s programming became a low-level job where all the decision making power was removed from programmers and handed over to PMs. Now programmers are seens as replaceable worker units to be micromanaged to death via agile and daily status reports. In other words, not respected professionals anymore. The insane salaries kind of make up for the loss of respect, but not fully.
For the first couple decades of my career I always felt this was the best field of work ever, and it was. These days though, as I look at my high school peers who went into medicine, law, accounting I have to wonder. They all get ever more respected in their fields as they gain more experience, very much not the case in software anymore.
view.cogs.com
Windows are not ventilation. Ventilation must be measured so mechanical ventilation is required. Guaranteed mechanical ventilation ensures a certain quality of life.
Sprinkler system is required for a building made out of brick and has no furnace or gas appliances. The reasoning is egress. The Sprinkler is the worst part because I installed a mechanical thing that could flood to help in case there is fire.
Vertical lift to connect 2 hallways with a 4' height difference. This maybe Massachusetts specific but... When I was shopping for the vertical lift if I lived 15 west in New York State or a mile north in Vermont. I could purchased a used unit on ebay for under $7,000 and wheeled it into place. Massachusetts requirements ended costing $40,000 and every 2 years around $2,000 for inspections. All units need to accommodate modifications for ADA compliance. Meaning that don't need to be equipped but they must able to be retrofitted.
Do your research nothing can be considered logical or straight forward. Everything sounds crazy but it is a responsibility to provide shelter to others and most things are valid if costly.
https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0Y5oqs3qnakFd
The building has a fiber line and 5 static IPs. Almost net zero and proof that air-sourced heat pumps work in New England even if the rooms have 44% glazing on 1 wall.
Here is there effort https://www.acorntoarabella.com
It's amazing the difference it makes in my daily well being - as you say, interacting with new people and working with your hands is very much more satisfying at the end of the day.
Getting a delayed passenger to their destination is a much more tangible problem, then coding for some ill-defined business need.
Still doing tech, but I have a much better outlook and productivity now.
*The reason I mentioned hourly and yearly is that I'm wondering if a pedicab driver can put in 8 hour days like a cook or dev.
The downside was that I lost money doing it (transport costs and no pay) and some of the tasks were mundane and / or physically uncomfortable (e.g. cleaning waterbowls on a cold rainy January day). But overall I loved it, partly because the birds and environment were so appealing, but also because compared with my old life, when I went home at the end of the day, I had no keep-you-awake-at-night responsibilities to worry about. I was also really pleased to have progressed in a new 'career' where my old status and technical skills counted for nothing, and I had to earn trust from the much younger bird team by pitching in and doing physical stuff. This was for me the best thing.
Countrary to the popular opinion, I believe people tend to underestimate how much money they really need, until they (or their family) need medical care.
https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...
> Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)
This is a solved problem. SawStop will reduce the injury from amputation to somewhere between laceration and a pinch.
> a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in Cleveland won by six runs (meaning “Cleveland's baseball team”)
(in this case, "circular saws" representing the whole class of dangerous power tools)
Still waiting for that World Series win.
Pun intended? :)
Interestingly, as I recall, nearly as many people are injured each year from power tools as are injured in vehicular collisions (in the US) and way more people drive than use power tools.
There is a solution, yes, but the problem is not solved.
As a hobbyist in a small shop, I bought it as my "best saw i'll need for a very long time".
The $200 saws are pieces of garbage that anyone who pursues the hobby for more than like a few months will rapidly discover the flaws of. Best bet is middle-road to get like a dewalt for $400 or so but even that has flaws compared to the sawstop.
1) Saw Stop holds a number of patents that legally prevented anyone else from adding the same tech to their saws. Most of the patents didn’t expire until 2021, but a few are still effective until 2024. We will probably see other manufacturers add similar features in 2025 as a result.
2) SawStop built its reputation on being a premium brand in addition to being safer. So the quality of components, materials, and build is a lot higher than what you get in even a mid grade dewalt saw.
I still wouldn’t buy one at their exorbitant prices, but hopefully the “accidentally removing fingers” problem will be better solved in a few years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964
How am I doing now? Still good, still grateful to be married to somebody who gets good health insurance through their job. Still need to update my website a bit (is that work ever really done?). Still working on the mix of building stuff and rustling up new business. Please feel free to reach out if you have a furniture need or a furniture windmill to tilt at (email in profile). I do sculptural light pieces too.
I doubt that I am alone in that.
https://youtu.be/E0uRr_5zTQg
Follow what makes you happy. You don't get a second life. How long are you going to be dead.
Since HN has a lot of Bay Area folks, I feel that I should mention that The Krenov School[0] is but a short drive up the coast from you lot. I haven't been, but the student work I see from there on Instagram is a source of inspiration to me.
[0] https://thekrenovschool.org/
Our goal is definitely that my contribution to our household economy grows to a more equal role, but she works an professional job and has been at it for a while and moved up over time.
(I'm working my way through the Anarchist Design book and thinking about getting started on the stick chairs).
Regarding stick chairs, I put one together from an accumulation of scrap pieces recently (hey, this could be a leg some day! throws it in the stick chair pile). Putting one together out of random pieces and letting the pieces you have "inform" the design is about as close as it gets to the sheer hackery joy of banging together some wild one-liner (if I use awk this way and pipe it to sort it'll do what I want) in the shell and hitting enter.
It's like, there's no way this could possibly work, and then you're sitting in it marveling at the fact that it only wobbles a bit. And then you level the feet (or fix your quoting), and damn if it doesn't do just what you want it to!
It's also a cool opportunity to make some of your own tools. Jennie Alexander has a great article on making your own tapered reamer[0] (which does sort of require a lathe), and Tim Manney has one on using your reamer to make a tapered tenon cutter[1].
[0] https://www.greenwoodworking.org/steel-saw-tapered-reamer-pl... Dunno what's up with the certificate error, but the site is legit. You don't have to get picky about the compass saw. I did this out of one I picked up at my local large home improvement store.
[1] http://timmanneychairmaker.blogspot.com/2015/06/use-your-rea...
If you don't mind, can you share a little about what the pay really is like? And how do you go about finding gigs? What are typical gigs like? i.e. do you build stuff and then try to find buyers, or do you find the buyer first and do heavy customizations? Do you use your own plans/designs or do you use others? How high was your skill level when you went full time? What would you recommend for someone who is largely self-taught and therefore has blind spots with some things?